Durian’s Affair: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by missvictrix

The makjang time-slip Durian’s Affair is here, and it’s 10/10 on the intrigue scale, and not nearly as untidy as I expected? But, with two disparate timelines soon intersecting, and characters overlapping in both, there’s surely a lot of room for drama to come.

Editor’s note: This is an Episode 1 review only. For a place to chat about the drama as it airs, visit the Drama Hangout!
 
EPISODE 1

For reasons I can’t explain even to myself, Durian’s Affair has piqued my interest from the start — perhaps because it’s been a dull year in dramas, the thought of an imaginative and slightly lunatic drama deeply appeals to me. However, the first episode of Durian’s Affair isn’t actually that off the walls, and focuses most on setting the stage for our characters in both timelines — in the space of a single day, too. It’s time well-spent, because there are a lot of characters and relationship setups to process, and then by the time you think you understand how the main characters relate to each other, there are a few surprise love declarations and time-slipping to add that wild card element.

As the drama opens, we meet one of our heroines — BAEK DO-YI (Choi Myung-gil) — on the eve of her opulent 70th birthday extravaganza. Her new wrinkle-free face has just been unveiled with aplomb by her surgeon, while simultaneously, her three dapper sons arrive in pomp and circumstance. They smile at her genuinely, and seemingly adore her, but she’s kept eerily off-camera. They tease her for looking like their sister not their mother, and then it’s off to the party.

The party is largely to a) establish the extraordinary wealth of this chaebol family, and b) to start telling us about these characters and how they interact with each other. As mentioned previously, the sons are doting — they gather around their mother like butterflies around a flower: they are DAN CHI-GAM (Kim Min-joon), DAN CHI-KANG (Jeon No-min), DAN CHI-JUNG (Ji Young-san). The first two are married with wives present, the third is about to announce his intention to marry, with girlfriend also in attendance and free for kissing in the corridor.

While we are learning who is who, the drama makes the interesting choice to cut between the present-day party and a Joseon setting. And, it’s not done in a graceful way at all — rather than thematic, it feels like we are seeing the same night play out jaggedly in two different timelines.

The past timeline is full of familiar faces. Ever the matriarch, Do-yi of the past has essentially the same setup in Joseon. This storyline is a little hard to unpack, because we are entering into a family that is already fraught with tension, and we only have the dialogue to give us context. But, what it looks like is Do-yi is none too happy with her daughter-in-law DU RI-AN (Park Joo-mi), even though she’s just birthed an heir. A man from Ri-an’s father’s house arrives to check on her, and from Do-yi’s displeasure — and the unstated but longing looks between Ri-an and this man — we can assume they are in love, and Ri-an was married off to someone else for political reasons.

The clincher is that this man she loves is actually — in the present timeline — Do-yi’s most faithful son Chi-gam. So, in the present they adore each other as mother and son, but in the past, she actually poisons his food while he’s on premises, getting rid of the threat he poses to her family, I suppose (it’s vague). As for Ri-an’s husband, it’s the same man who is Chi-jung in the present. He seems ill and awful; Ri-an seems like a caged bird.

Back to the present, when the party concludes, the family retires to a palatial parlor to chat. Here, Chi-jung announces his intention to marry, and we get a lot of tidbits that will likely be useful later about how the three brothers feel regarding first loves, marriage, etc.

But the real drama of the night is that Chi-kang’s wife is positively insolent towards the family (and she’s been in the family for a good twenty years and has the family’s only grown grandson). Again, this is a situation that we enter in medias res, so we have to believe all the characters that this daughter-in-law JANG SE-MI (Yoon Hae-young) has been awful to the mother/mother-in-law they all adore.

We’re not sure why the secret comes out that particular night, but it’s certainly fated, because there’s rumors of the lunar eclipse happening. And sure enough, as the night continues, we see the eclipse growing.

Then, the truth behind Se-mi behavior comes out as she suddenly confesses the absolute thinkable to the room: she is in love with her mother-in-law.

It’s a heck of an operatic scene to write, and I have to give it to our screenwriter here — she’s crafted an incredibly dialogue-heavy scene with multiple characters interfacing as they all react to this news with different levels of shock and confusion. The confession does not go over well, and beyond the implications for Se-mi’s own family, the general consensus is a flabbergasted “…uhh but we’re family!” Do-yi is most upset, of course, as she can’t exactly understand why the woman who’s lived as her daughter-in-law for a good two decades is suddenly surprising her with this unbelievable statement. Se-mi, however, is insistent in her affection. No one knows quite what to do with this family brouhaha, and they eventually all scurry off to bed hoping it’ll blow over in the morning. But it’s a looooong night.

Though Chi-gam and his wife LEE EUN-SUNG (Han Da-gam) have promised to stay the night, an emergency phone call has Eun-sung scurrying back to their home. But first — in an excellently weird tongue-in-cheek moment — she and her chauffeur are terrified out of their minds when two soaking wet women in white hanbok underclothes (looking very much like ghosts) are standing in front of their car.

Going back in time (literally and figuratively) for a moment, what happened in our Joseon storyline was Ri-an watching a young girl grab a lantern and run like mad off the property. Ri-an grabs a lantern and follows her — fearing she’s going to commit suicide — and sure enough the girl’s path brings her to the Cliff of Doom. Important to note, the mysterious eclipse is underway at this point in Joseon as well, and there’s also a rock in the ornamental pond of our present-day mansion that keeps glowing ominously. Suddenly, and without much explanation, both women turn up in said pond. Meaning: they aren’t in Joseon anymore.

The two women are as terrified as Eun-sung and her driver are and they pass out. Eun-sung, thinking of the family’s reputation if there is some foul play at work, winds up bringing the unconscious women to her home where they sleep it off in bed. When her husband Chi-gam comes home, they don’t know what to talk about first — her sister-in-law’s confession, or the two women in hanbok in one of their bedrooms lol. Everyone assumes they were filming a sageuk somewhere, and they expect to get the full story in the morning.

When the morning arrives, Ri-an wakes up in this totally strange place and wanders out, only to come face to face with Chi-gam… the man who she (ostensibly) adored and who’s just been murdered by her mother-in-law. And so, this is where all the crazy multi-timeline entanglements begin. And… I kind of dug it?

I tried to go into the drama without expecting too much, but since screenwriter Im Sung-han’s reputation proceeds her (and I never made it very far with her other dramas), I was bracing for impact. And although all the crazy I expected was there, I actually found the characters interesting, the exposition pretty solid, and the implications of the time-slip to be really fun, what with the main relationship conflicts already in plain sight. (While the Ri-an/Chi-gam story seems clear, I’m not sure where the drama will go with Se-mi’s arc, or her son, who seems to belong to Ri-an, instead, in the past timeline.)

If anything is for certain, it’s that this first episode must be taken with a grain of salt, since makjang is known to go off the rails — quite purposefully — in favor of thrills and high drama. While it remains to be seen if things will stay (mostly) solid, for a first episode, I’d say the story is there. You know, if you like time-slips about fated love, chaebol brothers, and troubled family affairs with a side of poison.

 
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