ReviewK-drama review: High Class – mystery drama starring Parasite actress Cho Yeo-jeong abandons all logic in tedious finale

This article contains spoilers. 1.5/5 stars The dead come back to life repeatedly in High Class – but who knew reanimation could be such a drag? After raiding the narratives of better recent Korean films and dramas, scriptwriters for this high-society tale at last tried to come up with some original storylines in its closing weeks. A pity, then, that they were built on a ramshackle foundation of logical fallacies. Dramas such as SKY Castle, Mine and The Penthouse are not without their own leaps in narrative logic, but their inconsistencies are tempered by the clear goals and desires of their characters – mothers who will do anything to provide for their children. As with these prior shows, the main characters of High Class are almost all well-to-do mothers who pulled strings or overcame challenges to get their children into, and keep them in, the illustrious HSC International School on South Korea’s Jeju Island. Yet after the first few episodes the children largely faded into the background, and the show’s concerns shifted towards investigating long-winded mysteries whose outcomes could be spotted a mile away. High Class midseason recap: high-society tale apes better K-dramas What is it that these characters actually want? Nam Ji-sun (Kim Ji-soo) was presented early on as the queen bee of the PTA board, parading around the school grounds with her chattering flock of sycophantic hangers-on. Over time, her influence waned and she no longer posed a major threat to Song Yeo-wool (Cho Yeo-jeong), the lead protagonist, yet she maintained her sizeable screen time. Rather than ally with a former enemy for a joint cause, as Yeo-wool and Hwang Na-yoon (Park Se-jin) ultimately do, she engages in pointless scheming and morosely drinks a lot of wine. Beyond having little impact on the story, her motivations are also dreadfully thin. She has little to no interaction with her teenage son until he gets arrested for possessing marijuana later in the season, nor her plastic-surgeon husband until he accidentally kills a patient – don’t even get me started on why we are forced to witness several of this peripheral character’s waking visions of his pretty dead patient. Cha Do-young (Gong Hyun-joo), Ji-sun’s main hanger-on, is a top actress taking a break from her career as she raises her son and engages in an affair with a famous chef, while her husband engages in his own secret life of gambling and affairs. Do-young is vain and naive, and her life comes crashing down around her when her husband’s creditors come knocking. Compared to Ji-sun, she’s easy to understand as a character, but, even more than the queen bee she latches onto, her story becomes completely divorced from the main narrative of the show. She has no role to play in Yeo-wool’s mystery but continues to occupy screen time. Back to the main storyline and, despite showing us the face of the intruder in Yeo-wool’s house – confirming without a doubt that it was her husband An Ji-yong (Kim Nam-hee), returned from the dead – High Class maintained for several more episodes the pretence that the identity of the person living inside her home’s Parasite-style bunker was a mystery. 9 new Korean dramas to look out for in November 2021 In an effort to breathe some life into its flagging narrative, the show turned into a full-blown soap opera at the close of episode 12. Na-yoon sits outside a cafe waiting for Ji-yong – who was married to her in Hong Kong – and is mowed down by a van in a shoddily executed sequence. After falling into a coma, she comes back to life in hospital in the following episode, only for Ji-yong to appear in her room and shut off her life support to finish her off once and for all – except that he hasn’t. Na-yoon returns again two episodes later. It’s revealed that Yeo-wool planned all this, but the show makes no attempt to illustrate how. During the final episode, High Class regales us with a theme park hand-off, a speedboat getaway and more secret alliances, but they amount to little more than posturing. Ji-yong is a one-dimensional character who is simply after a big payday. His very elaborate plans are littered with holes and his eventual downfall, which does not come at the hands of Yeo-wool or Na-yoon, offers no sense of catharsis. It merely provides us with relief, signalling that the end of this plodding journey was finally within sight. In its rush to replicate the successful formulas of other series, High Class never really made its mind up about what it wanted to be. It was an education drama that forgot about its children, it was a prestige drama that resorted to soap opera theatrics, and it was a mystery with its secrets out in the open, plain for all to see. Like the waves crashing against its volcanic island backdrop, the show briefly drew our attention before receding and disappearing from our minds. High Class is streaming on Viu.