Five Stars

I can't in good conscience let the only review of this episode be a negative one. I really loved this episode, like all the other episodes so far. This show is so special. I have noticed that kdramas tend to lean towards the melodramatic and the over-the-top. This show has all those melodramatic plotlines but it isn't melodramatic. For me, this episode was special because everyone finds out and the way that the show took time to show these people digest the news was amazing. It was so slow and perfect. I understand that slow is not to everyone's taste but if you like lingering on human interactions and really emotionally realistic and mature pacing, this show does that so well.
Also, I just love friends loving each other through hardships.

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This review will contain spoilers of the last episode.

I'm going to talk about spoilers so read the rest of this at your own risk. Warning....Last warning!.The last episode of Snowdrop is a perfect representation of the whole drama in every imaginable aspect. The production value is still very high. The technical aspects are done professionally and efficiently. The acting is good all around and everyone has done the best of their abilities to communicate the characters' emotions. And just like the rest of the show, the last episode suffers from fragmented narratives, messy stories that interrupt each other, and an overall chaotic atmosphere. In the interest of delivering a unified story, one must speak of how the show has proven itself incapable of maintaining a continuous and consistent tone throughout its run; something that is most clear in episode 16. After 15 episodes, the show finally drops its attempt to deliver dark humor in any simple or sophisticated manner and instead focuses on delivering as many conclusions as possible while also having its ideological thesis statement and a romantically tragic finale. Obviously, the runtime is still incapable of efficiently holding all that within itself and as a result, the episode feels erratic and overstuffed with content; lowering its emotional impact. Like most shows, Snowdrop also ends with a dramatic time skip. All key characters are shown in their happy epilogues except for Young Ro who has no choice but to look sad about a barely-there romance. While this inexplicable resolved conclusion works for certain shows (I liked it in Happiness), here it did not work very well. For one thing, Snowdrop is an ensemble show more than anything else and it repeatedly forced viewers to consume absurd amounts of complicated and entangled backstories that ultimately put characters in tragic positions that mere shots of them in their happily ever afters couldn't possibly satisfy. It lowers the impact of the entire narrative, no matter how sloppy it was up to that point, when loose ends are not so much wrapped up as glossed over. The dormitory that was exploded and trashed is suddenly okay and running again (who would trust sending their daughters there anymore?!) Boon ok's vengeful anger is suddenly gone (good for her but also how?!), Kang Moo and Han Ah's treason is seemingly totally forgotten and they are allowed to go live their happy lives (?)(did they quit the ANSP? Did Kang Moo cry when he heard Sooho died? Are they married? What happened to the journalist? How were they allowed to live?) These were all serious plotlines that were simply dropped through the convenient use of time skip. While solving those would have taken an entire other season and therefore impossible, given the fact that the show was already committed to its tragic conclusion, it would've been nice if other characters had also had realistic and somber endings that showed some lasting effects from all that happened in the plot before. For one thing, no one seemed particularly traumatized after the hostage situation, thinking specifically about Book Uk, Ms. Pi, and Young Ro. None of the characters seem permanently changed or moved and that's very underwhelming. The fact that the entire plot of the show is nullified and made irrelevant by the end is honestly the biggest insult the show manages to land.

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Spoiler

I wanna know how the mother knew which one was his apartment?
I'm not shocked that the mother turned out to be completely unhinged. I knew her deal when she first blamed her daughter that it was her fault her boyfriend cheated on her and it was because she wasn't good enough and then told her to forgive him and get back together because he was rich and from a respectful family and she doesn't have time or the ability to do better! So using traditional beliefs and guilt-tripping people and manipulating them and disregarding her 35-year-old daughter's autonomy totally checks out. This episode was slow but that's to be expected. The honeymoon phase is over and now that they are out of their bubble, the real challenged of being together are bound to break them.

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Torture your evil mother by repeatedly calling her "Mother!"

Not totally liking how the plot is developing. The show is so compact and they really only started to develop the romance after the halfway mark had passed and then it was one drama after another. They don't even give the characters some space to breathe. I think they should have had one or two episodes that things just worked out. Jokes aside, this turn to make Wang So evil is sudden, jarring, and unearned. The show tried to show time and time again that he was actually not a bad person but then to stay true to the source material, they are ruining his character development. I think there was a smarter way to go about this and I'm honestly a bit disappointed.

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