Face Me: Episodes 1-2 (First Impressions)

by DaebakGrits

Dramaland is full of oddball buddy-cop partnerships, but our latest K-drama takes the cake with its pairing of a spunky police detective and a stoic — wait for it — plastic surgeon. Our story stretched so hard to make this team-up happen that it practically earned its yoga instructor certification, but despite the unlikeliness of this pairing, our detective and plastic surgeon might be more compatible than their professions would initially indicate.

Editor’s note: This is an opening review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
 
EPISODES 1-2

I’m not quite sure who the target audience is for Face Me, but I’ll be straight with you, Beanies: it’s not me. From the very beginning, I found something extremely off-putting about this K-drama, which simultaneously shines a spotlight on the intrinsic vanity and capitalism at the forefront of plastic surgery while also reminding the audience that not everyone gets plastic surgery to follow the latest beauty trends. I don’t feel particularly biased one way or the other when it comes to plastic surgery, but somehow the opening surgical scene managed to make me feel more squeamish than the excessive violence depicted in The Judge from Hell. I wasn’t able to bounce back from that feeling, and I think that’s partly due to the fact that (so far, at least) the humanitarianism the drama is trying to illustrate is born from violence.

It also doesn’t help matters that I wasn’t able to connect with our main character, CHA JUNG-WOO (Lee Min-ki), a former emergency doctor who switched careers and became a plastic surgeon because — spoiler alert — he has a past trauma (but more on that later). It’s a classic case of “he wasn’t always this way,” but by the time we meet him, he’s already become a tremendously successful plastic surgeon — and a man of few words and facial expressions. His motivations are intentionally ambiguous, but slowly over the course of the premiere episodes we realize that his monotone delivery and cold, stone-like exterior don’t extend to his heart. He’s a good guy, but his good guy intentions are only seen in hindsight.

I know Lee Min-ki has a reputation for playing stoic characters, but in my opinion, he takes his typecasting a bit too far this go around. Jung-woo is not simply coldly indifferent — he’s robotic — and, sadly, there’s no self-referential humor to indirectly soften his character’s edges while we slowly figure out what makes him tick. Instead, any humor to be found in this drama comes from our detective LEE MIN-HYUNG (Han Ji-hyun), but — so far, at least — she’s a solo act. She’s the Penn Jillette to Jung-woo’s (even less emotive) Teller.

When our plastic surgeon and detective officially meet, it’s because a woman who’d had a consultation with Jung-woo is attacked by her stalker after her appointment. Jung-woo had turned her away, refusing to alter her face because he’d sensed that her request to “look like a completely different person” stemmed from reasons (her desire to escape her stalker) he could not fix with plastic surgery. Although rejecting her request for plastic surgery seems like the morally right thing to have done, it’s less admirable that he also hesitates to perform an emergency surgery on her after her face is slashed by her stalker. The attack occurred in his clinic’s parking garage, and as one of the first on the scene and a double-board certified surgeon, one would think performing the emergency to repair her face would be a given. But our hero initially refuses to get involved because of his past trauma, and his boss, KIM SUK-HOON (Jeon Bae-soo), practically forces him into the operating room.

While the woman recovers from her surgery, her stalker claims he cut her in self-defense. Min-hyung is assigned to the case, and it’s up to her to figure out who’s telling the truth — although it’s apparent from the beginning she’s not buying the stalker’s story. She interviews Jung-woo as a witness, and her first interaction with Jung-woo is not the clash of personalities one would expect from such an oddball pairing. Instead, their meeting is more like a polite head nod between the passing of strangers. But, to be fair, this does add an element of realism to this oddball pairing because, at this point, they aren’t buddy cop and consultant yet. So it makes sense that they’d be mostly indifferent to one another — well, Jung-woo is indifferent. Min-hyung’s curiosity, however, is definitely piqued.

Min-hyung has a very inquisitive mind, which makes her a successful detective, but what I like the most about her character is that she doesn’t jump the gun. She keeps everything close to the vest until she has enough evidence to solidly back up her hunches. In this particular case, though, her extra sleuthing to prove that the stalker had purchased a tracking device was just the final nail in this guy’s coffin because she catches him in the act of kidnapping his victim.

Jung-woo happens to be driving by the scene of the kidnapping, so Min-hyung hops in his vehicle and tells him to follow the stalker’s car. Jung-woo has little to no outward reaction to his involuntary participation in the high-speed chase, and if it wasn’t for the close-up camera angle of his foot putting pedal to the metal, you wouldn’t know he felt any sense of urgency. Min-hyung might as well be pursuing the stalker in a self-piloting Uber.

After the stalker is apprehended, we finally flashback to events that made Jung-woo transform from a jovial emergency doctor to a closed-off plastic surgeon — and its… a lot. The day Jung-woo and his fiancée are wedding dress and suit shopping, a car accident occurs outside the boutique. He rushes to save the injured driver, and because the driver is bleeding profusely, Jung-woo (understandably) bails on the wedding planning to accompany the driver to the hospital. After turning the patient to the doctors on call, Jung-woo receives a phone call from his fiancée, and something is wrong — like she’s bleeding out from an injury somewhere wrong. Panicked, Jung-woo rushes outside to find a taxi, but he fails to look both ways before crossing the street and — BAM! — Truck of Doom.

Yeah, our hero went through a lot and in such a short span of time, so it’s understandable that Jung-woo would undergo a massive personality change. But… did anyone else find this backstory dump kind of lazy? Not only did the writers pick the most chaotic jumble of traumatic tropes, but they dropped them on us before the audience could get a feel for Jung-woo’s character. It’s like they knew they were serving up a bland protagonist, but instead of finding subtle ways to slowly bring out his personality, they dropped a water balloon on us and tried to force us to feel sympathy. But you know what I feel instead? Bemusement — because this guy has the worst luck, and it seems misfortune continues to follow him.

After his involvement with his patient’s rescue, Jung-woo is publicly praised for his heroism and dedication to his patients, but he goes from media darling to pariah in less than 24 hours. You see, the woman with the stalker wasn’t the only potential patient that Jung-woo turned away from his clinic. The second case was a father wishing to have his daughter’s burn scar fixed, but Jung-woo refused on the grounds that such a surgery was reconstructive — not cosmetic. Plus, the father was obviously lying that the daughter was burned from hot shower water because, it turns out, he was the cause of his daughter’s scared face.

After causing a scene at the clinic, the father seemingly unalives himself — if the note found in his pocket is to be believed. Said note also points to Jung-woo as the cause of his suicide, and when the contents of the note are leaked, Jung-woo becomes everyone’s least favorite plastic surgeon. Robot Jung-woo could care less, of course, but Seok-hoon is not pleased by the negative publicity or that Jung-woo has been pulled from a major partnership with a global resort company. So, in order to combat the negative publicity, Seok-hoon forces Jung-woo to do some pro bono work for the police department, providing free plastic surgery to the victims of violent crimes.

The supposed suicide case is put on hold, though, when Min-hyung and her partner are sent to investigate a reported sexual assault case. Supposedly, a male employee at a PC cafe followed a female customer into the women’s restroom, and the woman fought him off with a knife she kept in her purse. The cafe employee received a nasty gash along his face, and as part of Jung-woo’s partnership with the police department, he’s tasked with repairing the injury.

While the cafe employee is in his care, Jung-woo realizes his patient is transgendered and identifies as a woman. The pieces begin to fall into place. Cafe Employee didn’t follow the female customer into the restroom. Instead, she was patiently waiting outside for her turn when the customer’s aggressively violent boyfriend pushed her inside and cut her face because he was still upset that Cafe Employee accidentally ruined his game.

Min-hyung and her partner are able to arrest the true perpetrator thanks to two key pieces of evidence. The first is the blood spatter on the boyfriend’s shoes, which proves he was present when Cafe Employee was slashed. And secondly, Jung-woo deduces, based on the angle of cut, that the person wielding the knife was taller than the female customer.

After wrapping up the PC cafe case, our detectives resume their investigation into the death of the burn patient’s father, which doesn’t appear to be a suicide after all. Min-hyung senses something odd with the case from the beginning. Why would a man planning to kill himself after being rejected by one plastic surgery get his suit dry cleaned? Why would a man who is desperate to have his daughter’s scar removed in order to alleviate his own guilt, kill himself before attending his appointment with the burn scar specialist marked on his calendar? Why would he blame Jung-woo for his death in his suicide letter when Jung-woo wasn’t the first plastic surgeon to deny his daughter the surgery?

The motivation to kill himself wasn’t there, and Min-hyung’s suspicions gain traction when a neighbor comes forward to report she saw a strange man walking the hall the night of the (now confirmed) murder. But once Min-hyung realizes she’s got a murder on her hands, she comes to another startling conclusion: Jung-woo’s name was included in the fake suicide note because the killer is targeting him. Cue: Jung-woo being followed by a figure in black, who turns on his headlights and revs his engine when Jung-woo steps out into the middle of the street. (First a Truck of Doom and now the Sedan of Doom? The writers behind this drama really are sadists!)

Overall, I don’t think I enjoyed this premiere because I was expecting a comedy similar to Flex x Cop. Given the absurd team-up between a cop and a plastic surgeon, it’s understandable how I would come to that conclusion, but Face Me is an otherwise extremely serious K-drama. Personally, I struggled with the tonal imbalance between the show’s quirky premise and the solemness of the featured cases, which were uncomfortably realistic and potentially triggering for victims of sexual violence or hate crimes. I don’t mind the seriousness of the topics at hand, and I even applaud the representation of the transgendered character. But, in a lot of ways, I feel that this drama is doing these topics a disservice by packaging them along with so many tropes.

It also didn’t sit right with me that, so far, this drama has established a pattern where the victims are the initial suspects, and Jung-woo, the reluctant hero, steps forward as their advocate who helps prove their innocence with his medical expertise. It’s like the victims’ traumas are being exploited to show that Jung-woo is “nice but misunderstood” — which would be fine if he hadn’t also demonstrated he can be a callous dick to those very same victims. (Or are we just going to forgive and forget that he initially refused to provide treatment to the woman injured by her stalker?) That being said, this is a pattern I can easily see breaking next week with more cases, but as far as first impressions go, it was a miss for me.

 
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