'Good Bye Earth': Not All K-Dramas Slap
'We await the end to come.' Please, hurry.
You know you’re on shaky ground when you want everyone in “Good Bye Earth” to die grisly deaths, and, you want to see it to make up for 12 episodes of sleep-inducing torture.
When this dystopian k-drama came out, with Netflix fanfare, a day after “Weak Hero: Class 2,” I made a mental note to watch. I finally got around to it this past weekend. To say I was monumentally disappointed is an understatement.
I felt gypped and oddly stabby by not only the meandering time-hopping and grandiose, pretentious aspirations behind this series, but by the stupid characters who kept fixating on their boring, little, grime-y lives — as if the whole premise of the k-drama didn’t exist.
Look up, fools.
“Good Bye Earth” is based on Kotaro Isaka’s fantasy novel, “Shūmatsu no fūru [Doomsday Fool],” which should’ve been my first clue. I absolutely loathe the way Japanese artists try to emulate esoteric (vapid) French foreign films, where nothing ever happens and people act like vast, empty backdrop settings.
Without knowing if “Good Bye Earth” is a literal translation or not, this k-drama gives all those mindless foreign films — and one of the worst k-drama “hits,” “Sweet Home” — a run for the money in wasting viewers’ time.
I’m always in the mood for a dystopian TV show or movie, so I went in with high hopes. The cast, full of recognizable character actors, including that charming, cheerful nurse on “Hospital Playlist,” seemed stellar enough to promise more than empty, blank, staring faces.
Boy, was I wrong.
At one point, between yelling at her doe-eyed fiancé to go back to the U.S. without her and beating around the bush with the head priest who may have orchestrated this whole stealing from the poor and trafficking the children deal, I felt like slapping the person who is supposed to be the quiet heroine of this production.
“Omgg I really hate the way FL Se Kyung (Ahn Eun Jin) treats her boyfriend ML Yoon Sang (Yoo Ah In) !! LIKE !!! She was so sad when he wasn't around but now her man is back she literally showed no interest to him, just a little when he showed up at her door. I was just as frustrated as YoonSang through out the series. I know she's going through stuffs, but she did not talk to him at all, left him hanging every damn time and got agitated when Yoon Sang asked her question??? Also got angry when she found out about YoonSang getting offer to escape to US but girl you're the one that never wanted to sit down and talk like wth is that behavior” — Prestigious-Archer58, reddit
I tried to get into the various plot lines and time jumps, to no avail. I simply couldn’t keep up.
Immediately, we’re inundated with a child trafficking ring in a dramatic, brutal fashion — escaped convicts and military run-offs making away with middle school children. Ooh, good, they’re going to play this thread through to the end, maybe even give us a surprise twist at the end of the asteroid maybe narrowly missing the Korean peninsula, or better yet, the whole asteroid thing being fake news to enable the traffickers to get away with murder, uncovering some elite Elysian island conspiracy.
None of that happened. In fact, nothing happens at all.
The characters don’t even seem to care about anything but going through the motions of their existing lives, going to church, scrounging for ramyeon, playing soccer, sitting around in their shabby apartments reading a book and sipping tea. Doing what they always do.
The asteroid isn’t even a factor.
WTF?
By the time the end comes, you’re ready. For it to end violently.
The main female lead makes a huge deal of her fiancé stuck all the way in a San Francisco lab about to be attacked by who the hell knows…only to be waylaid by the child trafficking early on in the k-drama.
This consumes her every waking thought, to the point where she ignores and pushes away that same fiancé when he finds a way to make it back to her. You know that he went through a lot of trouble to be with her and talk her into going back with him for important scientific business that could save humankind from future disasters, aka, another red herring side plot.
She doesn’t seem to love him anymore, if she ever did. I get that she’s traumatized with guilt for not protecting most of her class (only three are left), but come on! I don’t know why she didn’t have room in her heart to include him in her mission at least, to actually kill the traffickers threatening her middle school class the right way.
But maybe she was hiding the fact that she never loved him and isn’t attracted to men anyway, but is totally into the gay Army friend that she showed more attention to.
I digress…
A child trafficking plot is fine, provided they do something with it, but they never did. They spent so much time dragging it out and burying it among other pointless plot lines that nobody cared who’s who anymore, or what they were doing.
Everyone on this godawful show is either over-acting, trying to be cute and wacky, or refusing to act at all, except for Se-kyung’s fiancé/husband Yun-sang and her gay Army commander best friend In-a (played by Kim Yoon-hye).
If they’d created the show around In-a, “Goodbye Earth” might’ve been saved.
It’s almost as if the director (Kim Jin-Min) knew viewers would be tuning out in droves and checked out himself way before the ending.
What ending?! He left the characters to fend for themselves about 10 days before the asteroid hit.
So, Se-kyung goes into the gambling den of traffickers to kill the men responsible, she gets shot dead, just as her fiancé (she actually tells a grandmother that being married wasn’t that great) Yun-sang rides a bike toward a large shipping container with, ostensibly a gun of his own, loaded with bullets from the Army commander, to kill whoever housed the children.
In the background, far far up in the night sky, the asteroid comes shooting toward him, end credits.
Yoo Ah-in as Yun-sang does the acting of a lifetime — save some moments where he looked like he was about to go ham on the kids — to drum up viewer interest and raise the stakes. Alas, he can’t get blood from a stone.
I’ve also heard the actor’s scenes might’ve been cut because of some real-life drug issues. I think that was short-sighted and a little puritanical. Cut the guy some slack and save the fucking Netflix series; it’s too late already.
There was so much to hate about “Good Bye Earth.”
Why were these characters obsessed with planting vegetables, raising chickens, and trafficking kids with a life-ending asteroid on the way?
What’s the fucking point of leaving behind video/photo/essay legacies?
They’re really trying to bring stinky gochujang on airplane flights out of Korea?
How did the last plane crash? Did the previous flight crash too?
Why didn’t that idiot Jin Se-kyung (Ahn Eun-jin) call out the head priest more during her half-assed, time-wasting confession?
Didn’t Father Baek Sang-hyeok do a lot more than steal the congregation’s money?
WTF was the nun Lee Chae-hwan trying to do? She behaved like a rude, looney-tune criminal.
Who was the person Se-kyung mentioned to the Father?
When an actual pedophile that nobody bothers punishing, Jeong Su-geun, jumps off a tall building to kill himself, I thought it was the assistant priest, they both look alike.
What’s the point of the little girl and her little brother? They didn’t do anything.
If it’s so dangerous for kids to run around loose, why are they running around loose?
Nobody seems to even notice there’s an ASTEROID ABOUT TO HIT KOREA. Typical k-drama bullshit. Make a huge deal about some supernatural disaster to grab views, then drop it altogether to focus on dreary, suicidal everyday life.
This show made me want to jump off a high building myself. Is this the best of humanity? This fatalistic horseshit trying to be deep?
Fix your goddamned subtitles. Even if you’re not Korean, you can tell the translation’s off. FYI, they never include “Mom” or “Dad” when characters address each other. It means more when someone says, “Mommy’s sorry,” than, “I’m sorry.”
If I know an asteroid is going to hit earth, I’m spending my remaining days with my family and friends, not going off somewhere to a bridge or camping, or going on a killing spree, leaving the kids you’re supposed to protect unattended, again, Se-kyung, you selfish fucking bitch. Why not stay with the kids, heavily armed, and wait for the bad guys to come through the door and pick them off one by one, “Vengeance Unlimited” style — with your so-called family and friends?
What a shit show.