REVIEW: Let's Eat 3
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Re-watch value: 1 out of 5 stars
Synopsis
*partially taken from Dramafever*
Goo Dae Young (Yoon Doo Joon from Let’s Eat) is back! This time, the world’s hungriest bachelor has hit a slump in his 30s. After years of twists, turns, and failures in romance, he just wants to relax and reminisce about his college days, back when life was better. Lee Ji Woo (Baek Jin Hee from Missing Nine) was Goo Dae Young’s classmate in college. They share fond memories together of the good old days, as well as a love of food. When Goo Dae Young reunites with Lee Ji Woo, he has a chance to turn his life around. The only way to do so, of course, is over a delicious meal. But, as always, it doesn’t take long for his love life to become a recipe for disaster. Let’s Eat 3 is the third season of the 2013 series, Let’s Eat.
Rambling
*beware of spoilers*
I was exceptionally skeptical about this third season of what I know to be a charming show. It's rare for K-drama to continue a show with multiple seasons. The workaround is that the cast is a revolving door. (Consider the School series or the Reply series.) With Let's Eat, the M-O is this: Goo Dae-young meets girl, Goo Dae-young spends about 16 episodes falling in love with said girl and eating...a lot. Let's Eat 3 did not deviate from the pattern, and that was its downfall.
I'm genuinely upset that the writers decided to kill off season 2's female lead Baek Soo-ji. I could forgive them ending Dae-young's relationship with the older Lee Soo-kyung from season 1, since the age gap didn't seem like a recipe for lasting success, but literally having Soo-ji tragically die in a bus crash? Get outta here with that, man. Rude. Why is the only constant in this show Dae-young? The female leads are so great, but it just feels like the writers simply pluck them out of the picture and insert a new girl every season. There was no reason we couldn't have a season 3 with Soo-ji still alive.
As a result, our resident Mr. Foodie spends the bulk of the show in mourning. It's been two years since the accident, and he's still wearing their couple rings.
Enter Lee Ji-woo. The one that got away.
I feel like the show runners must have found success in season 2's formula, with a schoolmate from Dae-young's past showing up to be a major player. The flashbacks in season 2 were the precursor to this season's lengthy segments that take place in the mid-2000s, when Dae-young was going to college for mechanical engineering. Before he was passionate about food.
I found these flashbacks fascinating and irresistible compared to the melodramatic present-day bits. The hilarious moments between Dae-young's ragtag bunch of horny friends, the all-out fights between Ji-woo and her stepsister Seo-yeon, the painful one-sided crush Ji-woo had on Dae-young, and his belated realization that he likes her as more than a friend—I was living for it. It was an absolute letdown to be jerked back into the present with our jaded, boring foodies and their sad eyes.
I enjoyed the fact that Byung-sam was a secret heir and how the boys made him pay for everything after his silver spoon background was revealed. I enjoyed how Sung-joo was good with the ladies but was somehow in a long-term relationship with an older woman. The friends were such a bright, important part of both our main leads' lives, and yet we don't get any updates on them in the present. I loathed the fact that we got a haphazard wedding for Sung-joo and never saw the other two dudes, although they are certainly mentioned by Ji-woo, who laments that she wants to know what they're up to. This definitely should have happened.
I hated Seo-yeon for being the BIGGEST TEASE that ever walked the Earth. She jealously wanted and held onto Ji-woo's mother's attention, which was pitiful and malicious at the same time. What I hated more than college Seo-yeon was how the writers chose to handle her present day. She escapes to Korea after getting all her money stolen by her business partner. An angry client enlists a cousin, Sun Woo-sun, to help track her down to settle the score. Woo-sun ends up falling for the older Seo-yeon, secretly paying off her debt to his cousin, and then keeping Seo-yeon as his personal secretary under pretenses of her working off the debt. Seo-yeon's time as the CEO of her own business (which we only hear about) seemed totally ludicrous and the romance was far-fetched. Their relationship ended up being the one that gave the show its only source of skinship and kissing.
So let me put this another way: Dae-young and Ji-woo never kiss. (Save for a couple kisses that Ji-woo daydreams about)
After a series of unfortunate circumstances make him enlist early to his army service, Dae-young almost tells Ji-woo how he feels but decides to wait until he's out of the army. He didn't want to make her wait for him, and consequently, because of a handy voiceover, we know that Ji-woo didn't want to say to his face that she would be willing to wait for him. Yada-yada-yada, Dae-young misses the chance to hang out with Ji-woo on his one free day during his army service because Seo-yeon's father passed away and the girls were in Busan.
Our now 34-year-old leads don't seal the deal either. After Ji-woo gets unceremoniously dumped on the side of the road when Dae-young realizes he's missing his "wedding" ring, Ji-woo finally confesses that he's her first love and that she's still struggling with her unrequited feelings. Dae-young doesn't outright reject her but asks her to wait for him, possibly for a long time, as he's just trying to get his new business off the ground and he presumably needs more time to sort out his own feelings. What the hell? She's just told him that she's loved him for 14 years, and he wants her to wait longer?
With just 14 episodes in the season, our finale is a closing shot of our foursome (the show's two "couples") eating (of course) and one says, "That's a wrap"—a pun because they're in the midst of eating a fish wrap—and I literally said out loud "Oh, fuck you."
All in all, the show ended and the relationships were unresolved. There's only so many times I can watch Yoon Do-joon eat and not have déjà vu, my goodness. The premise of the show was cute until they decided every woman in Dae-young's life is replaceable.
Are you a Let's Eat fan? What did you think of Season 3? Tell me in the comments below!
UPDATE: After scrolling Reddit for all of 3 minutes, I found out that Yoon Doo-joon, who is already 30 years old, was called to enlist about a month ago, so Let's Eat 3 had to cut episodes down to 14 instead of the usual 16. Super ironic, because he had to enlist in the drama and in real life. It's sad that they didn't have the chance to wrap things up nicely in the drama, but unfortunately, I don't think two episodes would have made much of a difference. At least Beanie the dog lived. They teased that death and thank God they didn't follow through.
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