Spring of Youth: Episodes 1-2 (First Impressions)

by solstices

When a top star gets unceremoniously kicked out of his idol band, he winds up having to actually attend his college classes. There, not only does he meet someone who makes his heart flutter, but he also begins to trace the origin of the memories that color his dreams.

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

If you’re looking for a light campus romp that skates on the surface of its plot points and doesn’t take itself all that seriously, then this one’s for you. Otherwise, you might find yourself cringing at the corniness and scratching your head at the flighty characterizations. It has its funny moments, but you kind of have to switch off your brain along the way.

We start off with a day in the life of the young SA-GYE (Moon Woo-jin), an idol trainee fresh from the oven of lofty dreams and enthusiastic diligence. Alas, an unfortunate accident during dance practice leaves him blinded — and whoa there, I did not expect that much blood in a rom-com. But it doesn’t last long. In the first five minutes, Sa-gye loses his vision, undergoes a corneal transplant surgery, regains his sight once more, and returns to the stage all grown up (Ha Yoo-joon) with eyes that shine brighter than ever. This sets the tone for the rest of the show, which can be summed up as a speedrun through tonally discordant scenes that tick off a checklist of rom-com tropes from a decade ago.

In any case, top star Sa-gye is riding the wave of his success — but pride always comes before a fall. Drinking himself to oblivion over a bet at a concert afterparty, Sa-gye awakes the next morning to a headache ten times worse than any hangover. Apparently he gifted his dearest mentor and father figure CEO JO (Jo Han-chul) with a sucker punch to the face, and a video of CEO Jo’s embarrassing tumble is plastered all over social media. Sa-gye’s promotional activities are halted, and he’s made to actually attend college in the meantime. You know, at the campus he hasn’t once stepped foot in since he enrolled.

This incident sets the stage for two very opposite trajectories. Sa-gye struts around school like the spotlight is still on him, thoroughly embarrassing himself in front of his entire department with his utter lack of acting skills. See, his nationwide fame means Sa-gye is obliviously self-absorbed, basking in his fangirls’ attention with an innocently bright smile. Surely everyone loves him!

Meanwhile, CEO Jo spirals into paranoia, anxiously fretting over a secret he’s desperate to hide. Before Sa-gye punched him, he’d blurted out that he knows what CEO Jo did six years ago — “I was there,” declares Sa-gye, who has zero recollection of his drunken accusation. But it’s clearly linked to the vivid dreams that visit Sa-gye every night, and the way he jolts awake at 5:45 a.m. every single morning. Talk about an early bird — but it’s telling that CEO Jo snaps out of a nightmare at exactly the same time.

One rainy day on campus, Sa-gye hears the familiar melody that underscores his idyllic dreams. Following the tune to its source, he finds KIM BOM (Park Ji-hoo) and her music box necklace. Inexplicably, Sa-gye finds himself shedding a tear. “How do you know my song?” asks a perplexed Bom, for it was her first ever composition. But before they can clarify any further, they’re interrupted by Bom’s close friend-slash-oppa SEO TAE-YANG (Lee Seung-hyeop), whose longtime crush on her is plain as day. Sorry, Tae-yang, I think Sa-gye and Bom just fulfilled the school legend that a couple who meet by the art department bench on the first autumn rain are destined to fall in love.

Our leading lady Bom is an orphan who works part-time to buy back the piano her late mom once gave her, and she’s also a talented songwriter to boot. So skillful, in fact, that JO JI-NA (Han Yoo-eun) — CEO Jo’s daughter, and the other half of Jo & Jo Entertainment — purchases her songs for five times the market price. But CEO Jo wants Bom as far out of Sa-gye’s orbit as possible, for reasons that very obviously have something to do with the car crash that flashes through both his and Sa-gye’s minds.

Unfortunately for CEO Jo, our leads grow ever closer. Bom may have fled from Sa-gye’s enthusiastic questioning at first, but she soon starts to soften towards him. As it turns out, Bom’s fangirl cousin BAE GYU-RI (Seo Hye-won) once dragged her to Sa-gye’s concert, where his musical talent impressed her. And of course, the plushie that Sa-gye threw into the crowd landed right in Bom’s lap.

After CEO Jo goes full scorched earth and manufactures an assault controversy to push Sa-gye out of both his idol band and the college, Bom steps up to the plate. Not only does she stand her ground against CEO Jo’s pointed interrogations, but she also sings Sa-gye’s song in an impromptu busking session that magically changes the public opinion. One moment, they’re sneering at him and demanding he be expelled. The next, nearly three hundred students are signing up for Sa-gye’s band. They need just one more person to meet the dean’s quota, so that Sa-gye can remain in college.

Who else should make a grand entrance at the eleventh hour but Tae-yang, who basks in his heroic moment. See, Tae-yang may bristle at Sa-gye’s presence, but he’s a good egg beneath his prickly exterior. Having found out the supposed assault victims were faking their injuries, Tae-yang jumps ship to Sa-gye’s band — though it’s also an excuse to stay close to Bom. With that, we have our five-man band, since 295 signups ditched. It’s just our main trio, Gyu-ri (because she’ll follow wherever Sa-gye goes), and the drummer GONG JIN-GU (Kim Seon-min) from Tae-yang’s former band.

Cleaning their club room provides an opportunity for our leads to grow closer, and for Bom to fall into Sa-gye’s arms. Then while wandering the college neighborhood, Sa-gye begins to recognize a house that he’s seen in his dreams. There’s a flyer outside advertising a room for rent, and Sa-gye proclaims it must be fate — which, of course, leads him to Bom, since she’s renting out the room to repay the debt that her aunt (Cha Chung-hwa) incurred. Intrigued by the familiar house, Sa-gye decides he has to move in.

As for Tae-yang, it turns out he was pressured into med school by his domineering father. Tae-yang’s a sensitive soul whose hand starts trembling at the grisly sight of an anatomical dissection, but Father dearest smashes Tae-yang’s precious guitar since he deems music a worthless distraction. That’s the last straw for Tae-yang, who stalks out and deposits himself in Bom’s home. (Tae-yang is hilariously smug about this development.) Two renters means twice the income, and so Sa-gye finds himself begrudgingly sharing his room with his rival. Looks like cohabitation hijinks are on the horizon.

But to end off our premiere week, the show swings right back into dramatic territory. Realizing CEO Jo put a tail on him and Bom, Sa-gye challenges CEO Jo to yet another drinking bet. Sa-gye gets wasted, but doesn’t throw a punch this time. Instead, his inebriation spurs a flashback in the taxi home, and the next thing we know, he’s hugging Bom — and calling her by the childhood nickname that her mom gave her.

This show does best when it’s poking fun at itself and when it settles down to bask in its music — that guitar duel between Sa-gye and Tae-yang was such a highlight — but otherwise, it’s sprinting from scene to scene. There’s so much setup packed into the first two episodes because of the show’s zippy pace, breezing right along from plot point to plot point. Sometimes the editing is clever, and other times it’s just choppy. At least they aren’t dragging out a predictable plot? But the way the show skims over its narrative beats inevitably means there’s not much sense, and not much substance.

Each story beat seems to exist in its own little bubble, strung together via tenuous links and suspension of disbelief. Its exaggerated comedic tone (and tonal dissonance) somewhat reminds me of Bad Memory Eraser, except taken to a much further extreme, and that’s not a comparison you want to be inviting.

Pretty much all its characters are stereotypical caricatures — the vain yet earnest pop star, the innocent and hardworking Candy, the fawning and shrieking fangirl. The big bad CEO, the cardboard cutout villains, the pining second lead with an awful parent. Reduced to their tropes, these characters end up puppeted by the scenes that their roles demand, rather than acting like believable humans with coherent thought processes.

Admittedly, maybe I’m just not the right audience for this show? I came in expecting a hopeful and heartwarming tale of music and friendship, rather than the secondhand cringe of tropey comedy, and I like my characters with complexity to them. Bom displayed a shrewd mind and a steadfast spirit against the Jo’s, but that disappeared into thin air once the requisite rom-com beats had her all wide-eyed and flustered. Sa-gye is deeply passionate about music — this is the boy who insisted he could still perform even as his face was drenched in blood upon the hospital gurney — but his motivations are never quite delved into. I’d like this drama a lot more if it afforded its characters more nuance beyond their designated archetypes. Still, it is a low-stakes, fluffy watch, deliberately designed for laugh-out-loud gags and the giddy butterflies of a campus romance — so if that’s your cup of tea, I hope you enjoyed the show more than I did.

 
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