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Check Out the Event (Initial Thoughts)


It's been ages since my last K-drama, more than 3 months to be exact. But since 2021 is coming to a close, I felt it would be nice to maybe finish one more drama before the year is up. That decision has brought me to Check Out the Event, a 4-episode special that won the 2020 MBC Scenario Contest. Starring Girls' Day's Bang Min-ah (Beautiful Gong Shim, My Absolute Boyfriend) as female lead HA SONG-YI and Kwon Hwa-woon (Doctor John, Mouse) as male lead PARK DO-KYUM, this romance drama revolves around the sudden unexplained breakup between our leads and their journey to reconciliation. Without further ado, let's dive right in.

INITIAL THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS (SPOILER ALERT)

With only a quarter of a typical drama's runtime, this drama has no time to waste in getting things done so things move fast. The first episode sets up the general premise. 28-year-old Song-yi is a coordinator at a botanical garden and is in a loving relationship with Do-kyum, a singer-songwriter. However, her world comes crumbling down when Do-kyum suddenly breaks up with her, giving her the explanation that he can't write songs with her around. While a devastated Song-yi spends a few days going over to her now-ex's apartment to yell at him, she suddenly receives a call stating that she's won a couples trip to Jeju. Using this as an opportunity to win him back, our female lead attempts to convince Do-kyum to follow her on the trip. 

It should come as no surprise that he actually shows up and the pair are one of three couples on this trip. Their tour guide, second male lead SEO JI-GANG [Ahn Woo-yeon (Mad for Each Other, Young Lady and Gentleman)], is an essay writer currently experiencing a creative slump and he wants to use this trip to observe the couples for inspiration. As a couple days go by, Ji-gang notices that Song-yi and Do-kyum are clearly going through a rough point in their relationship but doesn't really act on it. Eventually, Song-yi sees Do-kyum acting all chummy with Jang Ru-ri (Lee Joo-myung), a female friend of his who our heroine once saw coming out of his apartment, and she storms off in a huff. This incident is also seen by Ji-gang, who likely comes to the conclusion that something's not right with this "couple". 

Near the end of the episode, a drunk Song-yi winds up in Ji-gang's hotel room, having presumably dozed off outside his door. As she tries to make her way back to her hotel room, she's caught by Do-kyum, who chases after her. When she tries to escape into Ji-gang's room, our male lead almost heads in after her but the episode ends just as he's stopped by Ji-gang in the nick of time. I think we can all tell where this is going from here but let's talk about this episode. 

It's super obvious that there's more to Song-yi and Do-kyum's breakup and the drama makes that very clear. Our male lead is still very much in love with Song-yi but the reason for the breakup is still unexplained. However, we do find out through Do-kyum and Ru-ri's conversation that the former has a "nemesis", and this will definitely become a plot point in time to come. In this sense, this drama follows a very typical K-drama trope of having characters go through a breakup because of unexplained reasons in one party's personal life. Another trope we're definitely going to get is the love triangle between Song-yi, Do-kyum and Ji-gang. Ji-gang is almost certainly starting to fall for Song-yi and honestly, the first episode does him a lot of favours in the love department, making him far more likeable than Do-kyum. I foresee myself having mad second lead syndrome at the end of this because I'm fairly confident that Song-yi will end up back with Do-kyum. 

Lastly, I also wanted to talk about the two other couples on the trip. The first is a young couple formed on fictional reality show Heart Catcher (which parodies real life Korean reality programmes like Love Catcher and Somebody) and from their interactions in this episode, I feel like this is one of those "scripted" reality TV couples. In fact, this is actually brought up by another character as the young pair argue over the smallest of things and the guy seems really nonchalant about everything. The second couple is a middle-aged one and my strongest impression of them is that clearly one of them is sick. They constantly show up late to group events and they packed a ton of medicine for the trip so I'm quite sure that someone in the couple has an illness (I'm leaning towards the wife). Anyway, we'll find out more in the last 3 episodes. 

Check Out the Event is going to be a quick watch, what with only 3 episodes left but I'm definitely intrigued to see where we go from here. The character interactions are pretty interesting thus far, with Song-yi's antics being absolutely hilarious so really looking forward to the rest of this drama. 

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