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Unforgotten Night thai drama review
Completed
Unforgotten Night
31 people found this review helpful
by jpny01 Finger Heart Award1
Sep 8, 2022
12 of 12 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 7.0
Story 3.0
Acting/Cast 4.0
Music 4.0
Rewatch Value 5.0

Glorious Disaster

You might notice that I have the story a 3 and the acting a 4, yet an overall score of 7. I have a true story to relate to help explain. In high school, my chemistry teacher was a PE teacher who I'm guessing was filling in for someone who died or something. One day the subject was potassium. He was trying to get a small piece of it to react with water, but dropped a big chunk of it, caught it with his bare hand, realized what he had done, and thew it into the sink, where it exploded, blew a hole in the ceiling, and set off all the fire spinklers, which of course caused a huge amount of damage and forced the evacuation of the entire school.

So that's a "1" in "story", a "1" in "acting", but a 10 in ultimate result. This is similar. It's a total catastrophe, but I haven't cackled with laughter like that in a while.

If you're worried about a lot of graphic BDSM, you can stop worrying about that right now. The BDSM is what you would expect a junior high school girl to imagine - a very, very sheltered junior high school girl.

The story is about Kim, a young man who ends up having a one-nighter with a gangster who immediately falls in love with him. The casting is disastrous, with the young and baby-faced Yoon playing the most unconvincing crime lord since... well, ever. In the finale he says he's 36 years old, which made me spit up the food I was eating. He has the most ridiculous tatoo I've ever seen. I think it might have been CGI, or maybe somone spray-painted his back over a stencil of a tiger or something.

Kamol is domineering and horrendously overprotective, locking Kim up in his house and not allowing him to do anything unsupervised. Except play with his pet tiger. You are not misreading that. He's not allowed to pee unaccompanied, but frolic with a tiger, no problem. Not that the tiger is in any state to frolic. The thing is stoned out of its mind - in its head it may be flying through pink clouds with castles atop them inhabited by penguins in Ayutthaya attire, but its body on earth won't be doing much of anything. It does't even react to, or appear to have any awareness of, its head being stroked.

If you are sensitive about water being wasted, you might want to avoid this series, or take a beta blocker first. People take baths wrong. Most people, I think, would fill the tub and then turn the water off - but here, the water is left running throughout the entire bath. I'm not sure where all the water is going - I guess the drain is open. People also turn on the sink for no apparent reason and then have long conversations while the water is running. I'm from California, and I can't sleep if I can hear water intermittently dripping somewhere, so my entire attention was focused on the water and controlling an incipient panic attack during scenes like that. Also, and this seems particularly odd in an Asian drama, people are fine with climbing across beds with shoes on. Not slipper shoes, sandals, even Birkenstocks, but dress shoes they've been walking around in all day.

Managing a criminal empire apparently entails sitting at an implausibly and unncessarily large desk and holding out your hand (without looking) to accept folders from subordinates coming in and out and then glancing at things before signing them. I have a job that entails a lot of paperwork, and I haven't seen an actual physical document in a decade. I don't even have my computer hooked up to a printer. I guess crimelords have never heard of Adobe or Docusign.

The plot is so ridiculous and random that it's better to just go on the ride and stop trying to understand why anyone does anything, because trying to make sense of it will only make you feel sad inside.

People have bodyguards. They should really save their money, because the bodyguard labor pool seems not to have attracted the best and brightest. I don't think there's even one single incidence of successful bodyguarding in the entire series. Besides letting your charge enter a tiger cage alone, guards who have been ordered to defend people with their lives are very easy for villains to convince to go get something out the car, allowing kidnappings right out of your walled mansion.

Speaking of bodyguards, there is a scene I really, really appreciated that gave us some insight at what bodyguards do while off-duty. If you see a scene where guards are discussing who should go shower first, prepare yourself.

The music is awful in the best way. Whenever someone grabs someone's wrist, there's an instrumental flourish more appropriate to someone impaling an opponent with a lightsaber than a gentle wrist grab, and any very slighly elevated moment of drama or activity inevitably leads to the ridiculously overwrought piano theme being fired up.

The leads have no chemistry, and Kim is so withholding that a crimelord Dom is reduced to meekly asking permission to administer a peck on the cheek and is usually admonished for being some sort of demented pervert for even asking. Kamol is the worst dom ever. Strangely, the chief bodyguard, who you will probably not notice at first but by the end will be panting over (especially after his sleeveless striped shirt at the resort) has really intense chemistry with the maid's underage son. Pretty much everyone in the audience was only suffering through this travesty of a series for them, even though we all knew nothing would happen between a 30-something and a high school kid.

I'm not sure I can recommend this - if you're looking for something serious, or are excited at the prospect of actual BDSM in a BL, this will not make you happy. If you appreciate it when something is so bad that it's unintenionally hillarious, this is worth your time.
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