Doom At Your Service (어느 날 우리 집 현관으로 멸망이 들어왔다)
A review of the Korean drama Doom At Your Service (어느 날 우리 집 현관으로 멸망이 들어왔다).
I got really, really excited when I first saw the premise of this drama. And then it was hook, line, and sinker when I saw that Seo In-guk was in it. I quite like Seo as an actor because the dramas he has been so far tend to be up my alley taste-wise, and with this premise, I thought that it would be quite good.
The music in this drama is actually quite good! It isn’t as good as the other drama I watched lately, the one titled Beyond Evil, but it was still pretty up there. I found myself humming along quite a few times and I don’t usually do that with drama OSTs.
Fair warning for this drama about sad things: this isn’t a spoiler because we open the drama with it, but our main character is literally dying of brain cancer throughout the show. It’s kind of just this thing that’s brought up again like “oh, remember you’re dying?” and is used to thrust the plot forward and make the heartstrings thrum. All in all, you’ll kind of forget she’s dying too.
Content / Story
Our main character in this drama is Tak Dong-kyung, a writer and web editor who has just been told that she has three months to live. She has an aggressive form of brain cancer and the doctor isn’t too hopeful about her chances to live, so he tells her to basically enjoy the time she has left.
Dong-kyung is an orphan and only has her aunt, who lives abroad, and her younger brother who essentially is a bum when we meet him.
After a really crappy day at work, where she found out her boyfriend actually has a pregnant wife, her boss yells at her, and then there’s a pervet she has to chase through the streets. Drunk and alone, she wishes on a shooting star that the world be doomed like her.
Then comes Seo In-guk’s character, whose name I honestly cannot remember except for her calling him Saram (person). He is a divine creature, and wherever he goes, doom seems to follow him.
Perhaps that’s why Dong-kyung’s life isn’t the greatest, since he is quite literally a bad luck charm following her around. And, because this is a romance drama, Dong-kyung has to fall in love with the personification of doom. But there’s a catch: she’s dying, remember?
To be quite frank, I don’t know why the subplot involving the one writer and her boss and his roommate really exists. It felt like added melodrama that could’ve been an entire K-drama of its own. Two rich roommates, the writer is the one guy’s ex-girlfriend, and the other guy is her boss and there’s a budding romance between them.
Literally sounds like an offshoot of that 2013 drama, The Heirs, but better than Heirs actually was.
I genuinely thought they were just brothers for a hot minute, not roommates, and felt very dumb after looking it up and finding out they were just roommates. This subplot also just seems like a side show to the main one, and felt out of place at times when transitioning between the two.
Something I find myself dwelling upon though is this archetype in Korean dramas in which the girl comes from nothing and gets whisked away by this fantastical dude who’s either doing one of the following: rescuing her, is rich, is immortal, is rich and immortal, and is meant to take away the pain of a tortured soul.
Said tortured soul is usually an orphan, such as our main character. I found that insane and unrealistic that she could make a living as a writer, but, hey, maybe writers just live better in South Korea. In the United States we’re not paid that much. Editorial work absolutely isn’t known for treating its writers very well.
After awhile though the plot really began to drag because nothing was really happening. It was pretty mundane and I, as a viewer, got pretty bored watching it.
I actually had to take a two week break from watching it since I was so bored, and I wasn’t particularly motivated to keep watching it. But, hey, I was eleven episodes in and I knew I needed to camp out for the remaining five and so I did! Was it painful? A bit.
Overall Thoughts
I liked this drama! It definitely wasn’t one of the best dramas I’ve seen, but it was pretty good compared to some other ones I’ve watched recently.
It’s got some quality cinematic shots scattered throughout it and a pretty good OST, but I wish we dropped the second romance subplot and actually utilized the on-screen chemistry between the two leads.
We don’t get a lot of really good moments between them in my opinion, which makes this drama fall more on the lackluster side than anything.
It’s still pretty decent and I liked it, but the lull that I hit with the drama made it particularly harder to watch, especially since nothing was happening. Just a lot of people talking, some tears, maybe the cancer gets brought up again and everyone gets sad.
