ORANGE MARMALADE - EPISODE 11

"I really needed a shower. You wouldn't have any soap on you?"

So, as the series draws to a close, a number of pivotal events occur:

Shi Hoo, knowing full well what he's doing, embraces Ma Ri just to demoralize Jae Min. The next day, the kids brag that they told their parents that they go to school with a vampire, and now the parents want a meeting with the school admins. Jae Min goes to bat for Ma Ri, and that mollifies them. He even shoves their desks together in the classroom and says he'll take full responsibility. The next morning, Jae Min pairs off with Ma Ri, Shi Hoo grabs Ah Ra, and the two couples decide to play hookey separately.�

Later, Jae Min's mom calls him away for therapy, and the doctor suggests picking up guitar again as a way to help him regain his memory. Eventually, the music producer meets with the kids to talk about signing Orange Marmalade, as long as they ditch Ma Ri (it's hard to debut vampires successfully). Jae Min refuses and rallies the band behind him. Later, following a hallucination about showering in blood, Jae Min meets with Ma Ri and pushes her away, tells her to keep away from him and even to change schools.�

Not long after, at the bus stop, Shi Hoo tells him what he doesn't want to hear: she likes him, and that's why she's endured all this. It's a new day, and Ma Ri packs up and leaves the school. Our hero goes to the band room and begins to play guitar. This triggers memories, and he chases after Ma Ri. He digs by the tree he's been having hallucinations about and unearths the ribbon that he buried by her grave during the saeguk sequence. He realizes that all this time, they were meant to be together...


No matter what the cost, Jae Min was determined to win the Hallway Marathon

Once again, we come back to the "I like you/get away from me" pattern Jae Min is so famous for. He keeps doing that again and again, like the seesaw in their local park. One minute he's up, the next he's down. And it doesn't seem too swayed by social constraints. It doesn't seem like he's wised up in the modern era until the end of the episode. Which is sad. As much as he annoyed me in the Joseon era, at least he was getting better. Here he just comes off as wooden, perhaps because of his memory loss. His reactions are a bit confusing:�"You're a vampire. I need to protect you. I hate you, so don't be around me."

This drama suffers from the same flaws that it started out with -- it's a bit bland in the modern day. There's not much action to move it forward, instead we have a hot-and-cold running romance that seems a bit tepid for having existed in a previous life. And the romance seems a bit uncertain, as well. I really can't stress enough that I liked the Joseon Era a lot better. The saeguk sequences were better-characterized, and the bromance between Shi Hoo and Jae Min was priceless. This is not to disparage the actors -- they do a pretty good job in their roles and can be charming when the need arises. But that need rarely happens, and so we have a lot of reaction and not so much proactivity.


A tense moment passes between them as they realize that they really don't know how to seesaw...

I do like the secondary love line with Shi Hoo and Ah Ra. I had been waiting for that for the whole series. He's too good a character to be left alone to brood, so I was hoping they'd do something with that. He can be engaging and even a bit dark with Ah Ra, and she is a wonderful foil for him, keeping pace with his wit, insisting that he get a job at the store when he just wants to shock the shopkeeper with his vampire pranks. Shi Hoo deserves a girl that can match him tit for tat, and the writers gave him one. For the first time in the whole series, I find myself liking Ah Ra.�


"X-1, this is your mission, should you choose to accept it. This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds..."

Hopefully they'll be resolving the dangling plot threads. The band's resurrection was a bit too easy here, so maybe we'll see some more fleshing out. There needs to be some kind of denouement, to let us know that what we watched in the Joseon Era has some connection to what we're seeing onscreen now. We've got the hallucinations, and the epiphany. Maybe a little more to let us know why it was there. As a whole, the series is watchable, but the transitions from one thing to the next are by turns jarring or overlong. A bit more care with the editing could give this drama more stability. But, we've got more more episode to go! I'm excited to see how this all turns out!

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