So, i finally finished a K-drama last year, in the very last month at that. And guess what? It was Twinkling Watermelon.
Based on the cast, plot, or poster alone*, i wouldn’t have given this drama a go. The leads aren’t on my favorite actors list (although i loved Seol In-ah in Business Proposal; she seems to get better with every project. Meanwhile, Ryeo-un and Choi Hyun-wook are on my radar due to their respective lookalikes). Fantasy is my cup of tea, but oldies aren’t. I’ve grown out of teen dramas too, especially now that they often go too dark/toxic.
Clicking on this drama on whim turned out to be a worthwhile impulse.
(*At this point, i can’t no longer tell which dramas will click with me. Stories-wise, there’s hardly anything that truly piques my curiosity now. Certain names or faces can’t sustain my interest till the end. Even my go-to genres have stopped working. Everything hinges on the execution, i guess?)
Twinkling has an interesting setting/start: CODA (child of D/deaf adult), which in this drama refers to the only hearing member in a family, Ha Eun-gyeol (Jeong Hyeon-jun, later by Ryeo-un). He bridges the hand talkers and the hearing world, voices the former’s sign language, and filters out the latter’s (inadvertent) derogation.
Despite the disability, The Has are a happy family full of cheerful people. And despite being the youngest, Eun-gyeol is older brother Eun-ho’s (Kim Ji-woo, later by Bong Jae-hyun) guardian, Mom’s (Seo Young-hee) pride, and Dad’s (Choi Won-young) trophy kid. Little Eun-gyeol wasn’t burdened by the extra responsibilities, but the almost-adult version is by his parents’ expectations of him to get into medical school, while he wants to pursue music instead. He’s kept his interest a secret as he doesn’t think his family can appreciate something they can’t hear. Moreover, he still feels guilty that his spending time with Viva’s Grandpa (Cheon Ho-jin, who taught him how to play guitar) ended up jeopardizing Hyung and Dad in house fire.
His fear is true after all; Dad flips out upon discovering him performing in a nightclub. And he himself isn’t happy with Dad’s misconceptions of him there that he blurts out something he doesn’t mean. Regretting it, he decides to give up on his dream, but then, the moon splits into two, La Vida Music store pops up before him, and the owner Master (Jung Sang-hoon) pays a good price for his vintage guitar.
When he exits the store, he steps out into a busy street in 1995 and runs into Ha Yi-chan (Choi Hyun-wook) — alongside his buddy Oh Ma-joo (Ahn Do-kyu) — who is his 18-year-old father, who not only can speak but also is the frontman of his school band.
After overcoming the shock of time-slipping and encountering his teenage dad, Eun-gyeol is determined to prevent the accident that took away Yi-chan’s hearing, and in turn, to have him cross path with Yoon Chung-ah (Shin Eun-soo) sooner. Originally, they would meet in a sign language class after the fact, which might not happen if Eun-gyeol manages to salvage Yi-chan’s hearing, therefore obliterating his own existence.
The second mission is trickier to accomplish since he knows next-to-nothing about his mother’s family and because Yi-chan is currently head over heels crushing on Choi Se-gyeong (Seol In-ah), the cellist goddess from the other school. Little did he know that she was friends with Chung-ah, and that his future parents had already met without his hand. Besides, Yi-chan’s puppy love shouldn’t be worrying; that’s just a phase since he would end up marrying Chung-ah anyway. The fret is understandable when the aloof girl who should’ve moved to the US for good returns to Korea and becomes a lot friendlier and shows positive interest in the blithe boy.
I personally didn’t think much of the 180. Se-gyeong has been living in the shadow of her adoptive parents’ late child, it isn’t odd for her to break free. I thought that was her true self. And was surprised to learn that she was an impostor. That the returning Se-gyeong is actually her future daughter, On Eun-yoo. Who looks identical to her mom and takes advantage of the latter’s emigration to stay in her house and live as her.
That explains the memory slips and personality change. That also made me question the trivial things: how come she knew where/how to get the house key from, the water and electricity was still running after it’s vacated, she knew who/which one Yi-chan was, and most importantly, how her plan of reuniting her mom with her first love was gonna play out. Even if she manages to woo any of the band members, it would be Eun-yoo who marries in Korea, not Se-gyeong. And she would still be born. I don’t get her logic.
Anyway, we have two time-travelers in this universe with polar opposite missions: one as a matchmaker, the other as a matchbreaker.
[Ending discussion ahead]
They aren’t aware of each other’s identities until the last third of the show although we were in the loop about Eun-yoo’s secret in the first third — before we got weirded out by the 28-year age gap love-line. Heh. Despite their respective parental issues and self-imposed goals in 1995, Twinkling focuses mainly on Eun-gyeol (and Yi-chan). He attempts to change his father’s future by tutoring him so he can go to college, teaching him guitar so his youth will shine, and aforementioned, preventing THE accident. After spotting and learning about Chung-ah at-home situations, he strives to break her shackles by teaching her sign language and eventually to rescue her from her oppressive stepfamily.
…or so i thought. The stepmother (Kim Joo-ryung) is just a live-in tutor who acts like the household’s madam, and somehow has her little family registered under The Yoons. I don’t get why the father (Kim Tae-woo) would do that, or worse, let her reign for 12 years without getting any results from his only child’s speech.
Meanwhile, Eun-yoo has a cello trauma, anxiety attacks, and a growing antipathy toward her divorced parents, but those conditions are hardly touched upon. Unlike Eun-gyeol who gets to spend some time with his 18-year-old parents and his great-grandma (Go Doo-shim), has fun playing guitar and making music with his father and the Watermelon Sugar boys, witnesses the hardships they face, and realizes that they’ll manage to overcome those and become vivacious adults and caring parents, Eun-yoo doesn’t have the same privilege. She never picks up cello again; neither is she related to anyone in 1995. Except for her biological grandfather (Park Ho-san), whom she doesn’t know existed until the last few episodes. Which does little to better understand her mother. Her realizing that Mom’s first love was actually Dad won’t do much either, i think? As in prevent the divorce or Dad’s remarriage, which already happened before her time-slip, since she’ll confirm it after returning to the present. Unless the doppelgangers’ brief encounter and her sudden preach inspired Se-gyeong to reconnect with her biological father, which would somehow create ripple effects on other aspects of her life. Though whether or not that was the case is unknown, as the ending shows, again, only Eun-gyeol’s side of the new present.
Even then, the denouement isn’t satisfying. Yi-chan’s accident was the bigger plot-point — alongside his journey of assembling his band and practicing for the festival — that Eun-gyeol seemed to be sent back in time for that. And after THREE scares, i thought he finally did it… and then boom, the fourth incident hit us in the face. I found the third round unnecessary as it could’ve been used on other subplots. That some things are bound to happen is totally fine with me; what isn’t, is that now, it happens ‘due to’ Eun-gyeol. What a way to add another guilt to his shoulder, Show! Not to mention squeezing out my tears, as if the hide-and-seek ‘game’ wasn’t bad enough.
Okay, maybe keeping Yi-chan’s hearing might be too drastic a change, and yet the new 2023 still looks foreign, with The Has being hotshots and all. I actually looked forward to the boy patching things up with his father, only to be robbed of it since the disagreement never existed in the new timeline — wherein Eun-gyeol has an easier time doing music and world-touring with Spine9 given the support from MJ (Ma-joo) Entertainment and Jinsung Group. The fateful accident happening in the finale also skips through the aftermath, including the moment Chung-ah found out about Yi-chan’s condition and their eventual reunion, ‘cuz her dad supposedly sent her to the US for good. Another questionable bit is no one’s realizing that Yi-chan’s second son has the same name as and looks very much like their high-school band’s buddy, whereas Eun-gyeol’s memory stays in the original timeline that he has to look everything up to keep up with what’s happening in his ‘upgraded’ life as the Yoon’s grandson.
Scratchy ending aside, Twinkling is one of those rare drama cases that truly got better and better as the story progressed. If most K-dramas would lose me around episode 6, it started to truly hook me by then.
After the groundwork was laid, it bore me with the bullying and unfair treatment the coda and his family received; Eun-gyeol’s underground gigs and Yi-chan’s early infatuation phase didn’t enthuse me either that i wished we’d get to the main plot faster. My interest picked up once Yi-chan became acquainted with Chung-ah as i could feel the chemistry. His crush on Se-gyeong lasted longer than expected, though. He was still into her until deal day (his ad-hoc-band’s performance at the school festival) despite being conscious of the deaf-mute girl after her confession somewhere along the line, that his change of heart felt sudden. Especially since he seemingly gave up upon noticing her eyes on Eun-gyeol. However, his interactions with Chung-ah had been soft from the start and their scenes were pretty organic that his growing feelings weren’t obvious… until he dedicated the last song to her, was sad to not see her in the audience, and was upset that none of the bandmates realized it. His flipbook confession was sweet (if not for a dozen reiterations after Love Actually) but i was more touched by his sign language serenade, or by his making a rotating chalkboard to ease the communication between Grandma and her.
In that sense, the attraction between the time travelers was probably more random. Their dynamics might fall under enemies-to-lovers, but the “it moment” leading up to the countryside kiss wasn’t clear. However, given that they’re 18 plus the bonding started afterward, i’ll give it a pass. What keeps bugging me is the bit about Eun-yoo being the only girlfriend Eun-ho refused to let go. It was mentioned/flashed back a few times, but Eun-gyeol never asked her about it, that it was left hanging till the end.
Although most of the story was set in the 90s, it wasn’t big on nostalgia but on the people living in the era of pagers and fax machines — so we don’t need to know the culture or references to follow it. The conflicts, struggles, and aspirations were still relevant. The opinions/advices weren’t preachy. It didn’t play a tragic card either (kind parents and grandparents weren’t killed off), which i appreciate.
And although the main characters were senior highschoolers, the emphasis was hardly on classroom stuff (studying, exams, college applications, etc) that i feel like they should’ve been written as freshmen instead. The fantasy element added a paradoxical twist to some plot points: Eun-gyeol taught Yi-chan guitar and Chung-ah sign language in 1995, whereas he learned strumming from Viva’s Grandpa and signing from his mom in 2000s. I wonder if he’d still stop by Grandpa’s store in the new timeline; he probably wouldn’t be bullied as a rich kid, would he?
Music and sign language may be two complete opposites, but here, they coexisted harmoniously and beautifully. I’d almost always skip any karaoke scenes in dramas, but here, the singing and songs were enjoyable. The OSTs were great! The acting was nice, too, with Choi Hyun-wook being the star of the show and Seol In-ah the ball of energy. Shin Eun-soo did a good job acting with face and gestures. Ryeo-un’s was exaggerated sometimes yet a big improvement from his 18 Again days.
All in all, Twinkling Watermelon is easily the most engaging, heartwarming, and wholesome youth/school drama in recent years.
_
Rating: 4/5
Director: Son Jung-hyun
Screenwriter: Jin Soo-wan
Production: tvN, 2023
Cast: Ryeo-un, Choi Hyun-wook, Seol In-ah, Shin Eun-soo, Go Doo-shim, Choi Won-young, Seo Young-hee, Bong Jae-hyun, Ahn Do-kyu, Kim Tae-woo, Kim Joo-ryung, Jung Sang-hoon, Park Ho-san
Genre: Youth Romance, Friendship, Family, Fantasy, K-drama (16 Episodes)
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