[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Girl Who Sees Smells" Episode 13

Writer Lee Hee-myeong appears to have remembered that the title of the drama is "The Girl Who Sees Smells", so we finally get some more smell-seeing. The whole sequence feels like a flashback to the earlier parts of the drama- we have Cho-rim proving that she has the abilities, and then she solves a simple mystery with them. Which is nice, I guess, except that then it's right back to the same old serial killer antics where the smell-seeing abilities aren't used even though by the end there is a really, really obvious use for them.

Advertisement

Maybe I'm being too hard on the drama. We get so little context from the cliffhanger that it's entirely possible the police aren't as totally incompetent as they seem, and there really is a larger plan here that will hopefully result in exposing Jae-hee's criminality without anyone else having to die. I'm worried about death less because I care about any of these characters as it is because I invariably get really, really mad every time this drama has Jae-hee succeed with a plan that should not have worked.

In this case his plan isn't quite as bad as usual because we actually get to see him persuade total strangers to do whatever he tells them. But even in context, it's hard to escape the feeling that everyone in "The Girl Who Sees Smells" is incredulously credulous to Jae-hee's suggestions. No one in this universe appears to be suspicious of anything under any circumstances. And they're also bizarrely well-behaved. I've taken homeless people to dinner before, and believe me, you can clean them up, but you can't make them shut up.

And even then Jae-hee's plan is only halfway thought through. As usual the gods of chance are on Jae-hee's side- if Jae-hee only has a thirty second window to make a kidnapping that requires absolutely no one be paying attention, then of course no one's going to be paying attention. The only saving grace is the plot twist which, as usual, has as good a chance to be stupid as it does to be clever.

Weirdly enough this episode is overall actually somewhat more tolerable than what "The Girl Who Sees Smells" has been putting out lately. I'm not sure whether it's because the writing's actually improving or whether I'm just used to the inherent weirdness of the writing style, where the success rate of plans and deductive reasoning depends mostly on how unnecessarily complicated they are. Like, seriously, where's the search warrant? Are those just really hard to get in Korea or what?

Review by William Schwartz

"The Girl Who Sees Smells" is directed by Baek Soo-chan, written by Lee Hee-myeong and features Park Yoo-chun, Shin Se-kyung, Namkoong Min, Yoon Jin-seo, Kim So-hyun, Choi Tae-joon, and more.

Watch on Viki