The Light in Your Eyes: Episode 1

by mary

Is it possible to be cocky and poignant at the same time? Because that’s how I feel about this show. I’m still gobsmacked at how The Light in Your Eyes had such confidence in the story it wanted to tell that it didn’t mind confusing some of us if it meant staying true to its heroine’s story. Which gives last week’s episodes a lot of impact, polishing an already good show. And though magic watches aren’t real, there’s no rule that says you can’t start a show late. Especially a show like this one.

(Note: this review covers the events of episodes 1-10. Please hold on to your spoilers and episodes 11-12 feels until the follow-up post later this week. Thanks!)

MEET THE YOUNG HYE-JA

The show throws us a twist right from the start when KIM HYE-JA (played by Kim Hye-ja, heh) walks in on a young man’s “48-hour sleep challenge” broadcast. Hye-ja notices that the webcam is streaming and the bored audience is now making comments about her. She sits down and chats with them until someone asks, “How old are you, Grandma?” to which Hye-ja matter-of-factly replies, “Me? I’m 25 years old.”

The channel erupts in laughter and virtual candies (convertible to cash) at her humor, but in a much younger voiceover, Hye-ja insists that she really is 25.

Young Hye-ja (played by Han Ji-min) continues that she has a magic watch that can turn back time. She found it half-buried in the sand when she was a little girl and discovered its powers by accident. Being a kid, she used those powers without much thought. Like sleeping a bit longer in the mornings before school or restarting exams to get higher scores.

Later, she noticed her watch has a catch: when she rewinds the time, her biological clock stays the same. So every time she pulls back the clock she becomes a little bit older than everyone else. By the time she’s 10, she’s used the watch so much that her puzzled and worried family has to keep whipping out her birth certificate to prove her actual age to others. Hye-ja decides to minimize the damage by not using the watch anymore.

When we next catch up with 25-years young Hye-ja, she’s in the middle of her Nth attempt to become a news anchor. It’s been her dream since high school but the dream seems fuelled more by heart than actual skills. After a series of failed interviews, she’s started to lose even the heart part of it and stopped submitting applications while she stays at home and “prepares” some more.

Hye-ja’s family lives in a rundown neighborhood marked for redevelopment. Mom (Lee Jung-eun) runs a hair salon where the water pressure is none, the boiler keeps breaking down, and the regulars are a trio of grannies who pay for perms in vegetables. Still, Mom rarely complains about her lot. She only gets mad when faced with nonsense. Too bad her children are full of it, so she’s pretty much mad all the time.

Dad (Ahn Nae-sang) drives a dilapidated cab and is the sweet-but-silent type of husband. He dotes on his children, especially Hye-ja. It’s not uncommon for the father-daughter pair to sneak out to a small udon place to drink and talk about life and escape Mom’s wrath.

Hye-ja’s sliiightly younger-looking older brother YEONG-SOO (brilliant casting of Sohn Ho-joon) makes up the rest of the family. He’s a struggling VJ who’s too lame to be funny and too unskilled to finish any of his viewer’s challenges. His only goal in life is to eat samgyupsal–a useless dream that always brings out Mom’s infamous wrath, to the point that Yeong-soo once sealed off his whole room to grill pork in secret and ended up almost dying from asphyxiation.

Though the whole neighborhood assumed that Yeong-soo tried to commit suicide, Hye-ja and her friends know that Oppa is really just that stupid. A fact that is doubly-insulting for friend HYUN-JOO (Kim Ga-eun) who used to be head over heels for Yeong-soo. After that deeply-regretted phase of romanticism, Hyun-joo is now an overly practical girl who doesn’t have any dream to chase. She helps out in her family’s small Chinese restaurant–a job that sparks shenanigans the whole series between her and her food-obsessed first love Yeong-soo.

The last friend of the trio is SANG-EUN (Song Sang-eun), a girl who’s been 10 years in idol training. Despite her agency renewing her contract, it’s obvious they gave up on her when she describes the new terms: “I can use the practice rooms whenever I want, sing whatever I want, do whatever I want… as long as I don’t tell anyone which agency I’m from.”