This review may contain spoilers
Can finally check it off my list, Mission Accomplished!
For Goblin fans, no need to read the review below.
I tried watching Goblin back when it was the latest hit, but dropped it midway, and never looked back. But since then the internet world has been raving non-stop and making it out to be the greatest K-drama of all time, but only when my scant memory of the reasons why I dropped it at ep12 faded, was I able to give it another go, more than anything just to check the rite of passage that is this drama off my list. Unfortunately as I expected, completing it felt like a mission, nothing more.
I will start with the positives:
This drama boasts awesome cinematography, Great Production and Overall good performances by all. It can be watched at any time in the future and I believe in terms of production quality it will never feel old. As for Kim Go Eun, having enjoyed her later works and appreciated her great performance, although I was annoyed at the beginning by her over-the-top childish behavior, I cannot be sure if that was her own acting that was to blame. The more the story progressed that more I could feel her acting improve midway through the drama and resemble her performance in later works.
Now moving to the negatives, after having managed to push myself past all the blasphemous storylines, I will try to mention some of the main things that annoyed me with this drama.
1- Drama Length: Whoever decided to produce a drama with 16 episodes each running an average of 1 hour 15~20 minutes made a mistake. Even the writers of an epic Sageuk drama with a complicated saga for a story would still choose to extend the episode count keeping the running time of each episode at a normal length. And honestly speaking, the story here by no means required such a long running time, yes it had its lore and it had two romantic couples with a story each worthy of a separate drama, but I feel the drama could have easily fit into 12 or 14 episodes with normal 1 hour runtime, there were a lot of unnecessary scenes or needlessly long shots of people brooding that could have been edited out of cut short, half way through the drama I was watching with 1.25 or 1.5 playback speed for crying out loud. The ironic thing with such a long-run is that for me their romance somehow felt it was never given enough time to properly mature, because she was so young, overly immature and trusting to cohabitate with two fantastical being, and he was so oddly head-over-heels with a 19 year old just by suspecting she was his destined bride.
2- The Comedy: I generally love mix genre dramas, and the comedic parts I believe were needed in this drama to keep things from feeling too heavy or angsty, but sometimes said comedic parts were so over the top and full of eye-roll and cringe-inducing moments, also the characters were acting so unbelievably immature and childlike for their fantastically long age span. I mean I can understand that he lived for 900+ years and had zero romantic involvement but still that doesn't mean that he acts like a mid-school boy going through his first crush, and the grim reaper would sometimes be acting like a 12 year old and other times be all wise and know-it-all. Sometimes the shift mid scene between heavy angst or thriller to comedy was made nicely, but sometimes the shift was too sudden and extreme it felt like being struck in the face with a bucket of icy cold water.
3- The Romance: I know it is an unpopular opinion, but I thought the romance between the main couple felt off from start to finish.
Even if as a viewer we are able to look past the age gap between a mortal human and a 900+ year-old goblin, it was totally unnecessary to choose to make said human a high-school girl, they could have easily made her an adult since the beginning with the exact same circumstances (he having saved her life as an unborn child thus having created his own bride), so even if she was in her twenties and his physical appearance was mid-40s it would have been less icky to watch. And then we would have been spared from watching a high-schooler acting all clingy blurting out “I love you” to a middle age ajusshi she barely even knew, just cause she sees in him her card-out of a difficult life and having been told my numerous ghosts that she was the goblin-bride.
I always thought watching her act more like a 12 year old all giddy and childlike around him, and him giving her swoony eyes or patting her hair, that it all just felt rather predatory, and I believe the writers opted to tone down their romantic scenes early on in fear of giving off pedophilia-like vibes (there was this scene where they were playing in the arcade and he was all dressed up and she was in her school uniforms and as she was calling him ajusshi as usual, I just thought to myself how on earth any onlooker would not be rightfully thinking that he must be her sugar daddy). I wasn’t blaming her classmate who was spreading rumors that she was dating a middle-aged dude because factually speaking she was.
4- The ending (the most frustrating) ####MAJOR DETAILED SPOILER AHEAD###
So, he chose to perish in order to save her, good……He was finally free of his eternal punishment but still chose to remain in a limbo-like existence to keep a promise he made to her, fine……She has forgotten about him but still suffer from strong feelings of depression and bouts of melancholic emotions which she has no explanation for. Then thanks to her heartfelt wishes and their previous contract, we see that he has been given the opportunity to return to the living world once more, okeeeeeey (reluctantly accept the hard to swallow premise). Also bear in mind, he is still back as an undying Goblin in love with a mortal; in other words the main issue with the story is still unresolved. Then in order to sort out the issue with her being a missing soul who was never meant to be born, the writers chose to make her die an honorable death where she sacrificed herself to save others which I thought was very noble and heartfelt.
Now at this point I would say the writers had the opportunity to choose 1 of two options; make her return as a different un-dying entity such as an angel or whatever (may sound a bit laughable I know but bear with me), and then they both would have had their HEA living a human-like life with just the inconveniency of having to constantly move and change identity to hide their immortality.
If that was too much or too tragic from Ji-Eun-Tak’s perspective, then the second option would have been to have both of their “Lives” end in one way or the another and then to reincarnate in their exact same form and preferably have both of them be in the same age group this time around. If they thought writing a script where he was reborn as a human wouldn’t make sense, did anything else make much sense in this heavy-on-the-fantasy story to begin with? And why was it so simple to write it in that exact same way for the second lead couple and not the main lead couple? Considering the fact that a grim reaper; who is supposed to be a dead soul of a sinner, can get to finish his atonement term and cease to exist, then by the same rule shouldn’t Kim Shin who had been spared of his eternal punishment as a Goblin after having his sword removed be given the same chance?
Honestly just want to rant, but what was the writers insistence to keep him as an undying goblin right till the end, and even worse to have his bride be reincarnated and reunited with him while she is still a highschooler! Is there some reason why the writers were so fixated on keeping the starting point of their star-crossed romance between an almost 1-millennium-old undying being and a 19 year old mortal human?
The Bromance was nice and cute, but many times it was too corny for my taste, and still cannot salvage the show for me.
The OST, had some memorable tracks, but there were annoying instrumental tracks that sounded like old SAGA game BGM, and also a couple of tracks had corny English lyrics that tempted me always to fast forward the scenes they played in.
I tried watching Goblin back when it was the latest hit, but dropped it midway, and never looked back. But since then the internet world has been raving non-stop and making it out to be the greatest K-drama of all time, but only when my scant memory of the reasons why I dropped it at ep12 faded, was I able to give it another go, more than anything just to check the rite of passage that is this drama off my list. Unfortunately as I expected, completing it felt like a mission, nothing more.
I will start with the positives:
This drama boasts awesome cinematography, Great Production and Overall good performances by all. It can be watched at any time in the future and I believe in terms of production quality it will never feel old. As for Kim Go Eun, having enjoyed her later works and appreciated her great performance, although I was annoyed at the beginning by her over-the-top childish behavior, I cannot be sure if that was her own acting that was to blame. The more the story progressed that more I could feel her acting improve midway through the drama and resemble her performance in later works.
Now moving to the negatives, after having managed to push myself past all the blasphemous storylines, I will try to mention some of the main things that annoyed me with this drama.
1- Drama Length: Whoever decided to produce a drama with 16 episodes each running an average of 1 hour 15~20 minutes made a mistake. Even the writers of an epic Sageuk drama with a complicated saga for a story would still choose to extend the episode count keeping the running time of each episode at a normal length. And honestly speaking, the story here by no means required such a long running time, yes it had its lore and it had two romantic couples with a story each worthy of a separate drama, but I feel the drama could have easily fit into 12 or 14 episodes with normal 1 hour runtime, there were a lot of unnecessary scenes or needlessly long shots of people brooding that could have been edited out of cut short, half way through the drama I was watching with 1.25 or 1.5 playback speed for crying out loud. The ironic thing with such a long-run is that for me their romance somehow felt it was never given enough time to properly mature, because she was so young, overly immature and trusting to cohabitate with two fantastical being, and he was so oddly head-over-heels with a 19 year old just by suspecting she was his destined bride.
2- The Comedy: I generally love mix genre dramas, and the comedic parts I believe were needed in this drama to keep things from feeling too heavy or angsty, but sometimes said comedic parts were so over the top and full of eye-roll and cringe-inducing moments, also the characters were acting so unbelievably immature and childlike for their fantastically long age span. I mean I can understand that he lived for 900+ years and had zero romantic involvement but still that doesn't mean that he acts like a mid-school boy going through his first crush, and the grim reaper would sometimes be acting like a 12 year old and other times be all wise and know-it-all. Sometimes the shift mid scene between heavy angst or thriller to comedy was made nicely, but sometimes the shift was too sudden and extreme it felt like being struck in the face with a bucket of icy cold water.
3- The Romance: I know it is an unpopular opinion, but I thought the romance between the main couple felt off from start to finish.
Even if as a viewer we are able to look past the age gap between a mortal human and a 900+ year-old goblin, it was totally unnecessary to choose to make said human a high-school girl, they could have easily made her an adult since the beginning with the exact same circumstances (he having saved her life as an unborn child thus having created his own bride), so even if she was in her twenties and his physical appearance was mid-40s it would have been less icky to watch. And then we would have been spared from watching a high-schooler acting all clingy blurting out “I love you” to a middle age ajusshi she barely even knew, just cause she sees in him her card-out of a difficult life and having been told my numerous ghosts that she was the goblin-bride.
I always thought watching her act more like a 12 year old all giddy and childlike around him, and him giving her swoony eyes or patting her hair, that it all just felt rather predatory, and I believe the writers opted to tone down their romantic scenes early on in fear of giving off pedophilia-like vibes (there was this scene where they were playing in the arcade and he was all dressed up and she was in her school uniforms and as she was calling him ajusshi as usual, I just thought to myself how on earth any onlooker would not be rightfully thinking that he must be her sugar daddy). I wasn’t blaming her classmate who was spreading rumors that she was dating a middle-aged dude because factually speaking she was.
4- The ending (the most frustrating) ####MAJOR DETAILED SPOILER AHEAD###
So, he chose to perish in order to save her, good……He was finally free of his eternal punishment but still chose to remain in a limbo-like existence to keep a promise he made to her, fine……She has forgotten about him but still suffer from strong feelings of depression and bouts of melancholic emotions which she has no explanation for. Then thanks to her heartfelt wishes and their previous contract, we see that he has been given the opportunity to return to the living world once more, okeeeeeey (reluctantly accept the hard to swallow premise). Also bear in mind, he is still back as an undying Goblin in love with a mortal; in other words the main issue with the story is still unresolved. Then in order to sort out the issue with her being a missing soul who was never meant to be born, the writers chose to make her die an honorable death where she sacrificed herself to save others which I thought was very noble and heartfelt.
Now at this point I would say the writers had the opportunity to choose 1 of two options; make her return as a different un-dying entity such as an angel or whatever (may sound a bit laughable I know but bear with me), and then they both would have had their HEA living a human-like life with just the inconveniency of having to constantly move and change identity to hide their immortality.
If that was too much or too tragic from Ji-Eun-Tak’s perspective, then the second option would have been to have both of their “Lives” end in one way or the another and then to reincarnate in their exact same form and preferably have both of them be in the same age group this time around. If they thought writing a script where he was reborn as a human wouldn’t make sense, did anything else make much sense in this heavy-on-the-fantasy story to begin with? And why was it so simple to write it in that exact same way for the second lead couple and not the main lead couple? Considering the fact that a grim reaper; who is supposed to be a dead soul of a sinner, can get to finish his atonement term and cease to exist, then by the same rule shouldn’t Kim Shin who had been spared of his eternal punishment as a Goblin after having his sword removed be given the same chance?
Honestly just want to rant, but what was the writers insistence to keep him as an undying goblin right till the end, and even worse to have his bride be reincarnated and reunited with him while she is still a highschooler! Is there some reason why the writers were so fixated on keeping the starting point of their star-crossed romance between an almost 1-millennium-old undying being and a 19 year old mortal human?
The Bromance was nice and cute, but many times it was too corny for my taste, and still cannot salvage the show for me.
The OST, had some memorable tracks, but there were annoying instrumental tracks that sounded like old SAGA game BGM, and also a couple of tracks had corny English lyrics that tempted me always to fast forward the scenes they played in.
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