This show is better than I wanted it to be. I’m not into twoo wuv shows in general, in particular ones whose main plot driver is terminal illness. So, I honestly have no idea why I started watching Doom at Your Service several months back: I suspect it was because I really liked Seo In-guk in Café Minamdang, in which he played a flamboyant narcissist with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. But I only made it about 6 episodes into DAYS, until the first Obstacle to Twoo Wuv reared its predictable head, before I put it on the back burner and went on to watch other things. However, when Solo Leveling Season 2 finished, I picked DAYS up again. I’ve given it some thought, and I think here’s why: because most of the plot twists and complications that I normally find annoying in rom-com-drams (rom-dram-coms?) turned out to be interesting in this show.
The setup is that Tak Dong-kyung (Park Bo-young), a beleaguered web-novel editor, becomes spectacularly more beleaguered in the space of a week as she 1. finds out her boyfriend is married, 2. gets assigned to manage the most disrespectful and highest maintenance writer in her agency’s stable, 3. gets fleeced by her loser younger brother for cash to pay off his debts, and 4. finds out she has an inoperable brain tumor that comes with a 3-month life expectancy and crushing headaches. Because of that last bit, she stumbles while crossing the street and is about to be hit by a truck when a mysterious stranger (Seo In-guk) stops time, introduces himself as Doom, and says he’ll save her if she’ll make a deal with him. Of course she does, and the deal with Doom is this: Doom can overhear everyone’s thoughts as part of his job (why? This isn’t entirely clear—see below), and he has heard Dong-kyung wish for the world to just end. As he himself is sick of bringing doom upon generation after generation of humans, he’s on board, so he tells Dong-kyung that if she will formally ask him to end the world sometime before she dies, he will make sure she lives the full 3 months she has left and stays pain-free during it; if she chickens out, he will kill the person she loves the most along with her. Of course she tries to back out of the deal, but the pain is so terrible she caves. An additional catch is that she has to essentially move in with Doom, via a clever inter-dimensional annexation of her tiny apartment onto his giant Doomy mansion, so that he can recharge the painkilling bracelet he has given her once a day. So, naturally, they fall in love, which neatly turns their deal into a catch-22: Doom now wants to die to save Dong-kyung (because if he’s gone so is her doom), and of course Dong-kyung doesn’t want either him or the world to disappear.
This all plays out much more compellingly than it sounds in abstract, partly because the two leads have excellent chemistry, and partly because their Faustian bargain fits into a genuinely interesting larger cosmology. Here, God is a teenage girl who is repeatedly born, poisoned by the sins of the world, and killed in order to save humanity, whom she gardens lovingly as an infinite field of flowers in heaven at the same time that she’s gradually dying in a hospital bed in our world. She turns out to have created Doom because she realized at some point that people could not grow, be happy, or truly love and value each other and the world without going through hardship and loss. Of course that’s a sh*tty job for anyone, particularly an immortal being, and so Doom harbors a fair amount of resentment toward his mother at the same time that he genuinely pities her for the eternal suffering she endures for the sake of humanity. At some point, Dong-kyung meets God, which results in the two of them making a private deal to save Doom, one which takes the story for an interesting loop. There’s a couple of side plots as well—one involving the politics in the web-publishing world, and one involving a love triangle among Dong-kyung’s best friend, the web novelist Na Ji-na, Dong-kyung’s boss, Cha Joo-ik, and Ji-na’s first love, Lee Hyun-gyu—who is also Joo-ik’s childhood friend and roommate.
Here’s what worked for me (SPOILERS from here on out):
- The chemistry between the leads. They move organically from resenting and fencing with each other in the beginning to compassion and vulnerability as the stakes of their deal become higher and higher. They’re both very funny as well, which makes the comic set pieces much less stupid than they could have been.
- I actually liked all the tricks Dong-kyung tried to get out of the Deal. While initially exasperating because they kept throwing monkey wrenches in the progress to Twoo Wuv, they all seemed pretty realistic on reflection. I, too, would probably come up with the cynical plot to make myself fall in love with Doom to trap him in his own bargain. When that worked a little too well, I would also then futilely try to run away and not love anyone in order to void the contract. And finally, I would probably take God’s deal to change the past slightly so that I never met Doom and the contract never happened. I liked that none of it worked in the end. The series stayed pretty consistent in its commitment to the idea of fate. The twist that ultimately genera the happy ending felt earned as a result of that commitment.
- The love triangle. Honestly I started watching DAYS again not because I wanted to know what was going to happen with the Deal with Doom, but because I wanted to watch Cha Joo-ik (Lee Soo-hyuk) some more. His deep voice and gravitas really carried his character, who’s has worked so long and so hard to hide his wealth from the people around him that he has lost the ability to ask for what he wants and needs. That’s a theme in the series: from Joo-ik to his roommate Hyun-gyu, who was so scared of disappointing Ji-na that he lost her, to Dong-kyung not being able to express her emotions in spite of working with novelists every day, to her brother being so afraid of failure that he won’t try anything, to Doom not feeling like he had the right to love or be loved because of his job. I really did like how all of these characters were eventually able to express themselves and self-actualize more fully by the end of the series. It was pretty cool when Hyun-gyu finally acknowledged that he didn’t deserve a relationship with Ji-na, and that he would never have a true friendship with Joo-ik, until he had grown up and become emotionally emancipated.
- The mood of the show. While a lot of it plays out in your typical light-wood Seoul office and café sets (and, of course, Jeju Island), Doom’s house is exactly as dramatic as you would imagine, and the recurring flower/mortality motif weaves its way in both dark and light modes through moonlit gardens, sunny fields, cherry-blossom-lined allees, and florist’s stands. The score is excellent as well—haunting and wistful.
What didn’t work for me/what I would change:
- The show’s pacing: I’m not the only one who noticed this—this is the primary critique you’ll see elsewhere online. Especially in the last 4-5 episodes, lots of cut scenes, running around, and redundant conversations stand in for actual plot development. I almost never say this, but this show could have used a few more side plots, a bit more intrigue. To wit: Doom basically stops dooming shortly after he gets involved with Dong-kyung. Keeping that thread going—with him perhaps chasing down a slippery bad guy who puts Dong-kyung at risk, or Dong-kyung witnessing his hard exterior crack as he shows compassion to dying elders or children—would have offered a more organic catalyst to their falling in love than them just feeling sorry for each other, which is how it came across (and was unconvincing given how selfish each of them started out).
- On that note, the ending was totally anticlimactic. It should have ended with Doom’s incarnation and skipped the whole silly denouement of them making kimchi with the fam, going grocery shopping together, etc. And the reunion scene should have been a LOT more emotional given what they’d both just been through—instead of him smirking at her on the bus and telling her she could use him as a handle [insert eyeroll emoji]
- On that note, the writing wasn’t great. The leads did a fabulous job with the lines they were given, but those were dumb more often than they should have been. For example, the repartee in the love triangle was sometimes fizzy and spot-on, as when Dong-kyung tells Joo-ik that he doesn’t need time, he needs courage; sometimes it fell flat, as when Joo-ik tells Ji-na they should go drink so she can make more “mistakes” (i.e., kiss him again). Ugh.
- Overall, the show would have benefited from taking its cue from Doom’s house and leaning into a darker tone. Kinda like Hotel de Luna (which they actually show Dong-kyung watching a clip of in the hospital). Doom is a pretty nasty guy, at least at the beginning. He’s a total misanthrope whose range runs from apathy to sadism. God is a Promethean figure who vomits blood and dies just to do it all over again. The writers shouldn’t have tried to put all that through a light filter. Dong-kyung’s dysfunctional relationships could have stood a bit more grit and bite to them as well—otherwise, her desire to end the entire world just seems to come out of nowhere. The show just seemed stubbornly determined to keep it light, which was a weird choice for a show built around cancer, mortality, punishment, and redemption.
- On that note…we could have used some more content and context for the cosmology. It was a weird mashup of Buddhism and Christianity, with just God and Doom and that’s it for the pantheon. There were a LOT of unanswered questions that bore on the plot: why do God and Doom both insist they can’t change people’s fates, but then they do? They vacillate between being wish-granting genies sometimes and shrug-that-looks-like-a-you-problem arbiters at other times, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Who defines the “sins” that God takes on herself? They hint that someone or something else actually created the world—who is that? And what do they think about the weird wig God is wearing?
- A minor note: it seems like the show gave Dong-kyung dead parents for no other reason than that practically every other k-drama has dead parents. It would have been much more interesting if her parents had been around and been annoying or awful; the rehabilitation of those relationships through Dong-kyung’s illness and newfound respect for life (or letting them go), would have been genuinely moving.
The Rookery 