"It's Okay, That's Love" Episode 11

Lot of talk about marriage this episode, and I have to admit, there's times I'm impressed at the new creative methods this drama keeps coming up with to agitate me. Secular discussion of the abstract concept of marriage tends to be a pretty lousy discussion prompt to begin with, but it's particularly annoying here given that neither of our main characters have any idea what a healthy marriage actually looks like. We just get a bunch of empty philosophizing, and even that's practically ignored by the cliffhanger.

Presumably this would be a lot more tolerable if I found these characters sympathetic or even particularly intelligent, but really, the drama's just tiresome on this point. Jae-yeol and Hae-soo seem to spend a lot more time talking about relationships than they do actually having a relationship. Granted, I'm no expert, but it seems to me like this would be a great way to kill the romance rather than kindle it. Analysis ruins everything. I'm a critic. I would know.

Other parts of the storyline aren't much more inspiring. Well, I suppose the parts where we go over how crazy Jae-yeol is are all right. Although mostly this just seems to provoke a sense of foreboding- that and the man's ominous coughing. "It's Okay, That's Love" appears to be moving in the general direction of tragedy here. Given how unimpressed I am by the humor I can't say this foreshadowing fills me with a lot of confidence.

And then we get into more revelations about the so-called murder and, well, I'm not even sure what to say to that. Is every single character in the drama completely incompetent? How do mistakes like this even happen? How is this only becoming a revelation right now? I hesitate to second-guess a legal system I admittedly only know little about, but this is like dictator tries to railroad his personal enemies levels of blatant manipulation here, and according to the script, this all somehow managed to happen by accident.

The drama's cracking. I can think of no direction these storyline developments could possibly go that isn't just really, really dumb. Even the psychiatric cases this time don't inspire a whole lot of confidence. That's the kind of trauma we're dealing with? That level of serious, shocking stuff, with no apparent parallel to anything else that's going on in the actual storyline? What is "It's Okay, That's Love" even trying to do here?

Review by William Schwartz

"It's Okay, That's Love" is directed byKim Kyoo-tae, written byNoh Hee-kyeongand featuresJo In-Seong,Kong Hyo-jin,Seong Dong-ilandLee Gwang-soo.