REVIEW: Revenge Note (Season 1)
Rating:3.999 out of 5 stars
Re-watch value:3 out of 5 stars
Synopsis
*partially taken from Dramafever*
Ho Goo Hee (Kim Hyang Ki from Private Eye) has spent her teen years getting picked on. When you say her full name, it sounds like the word for “loser,” HoGu. Her family is poor, so she also has to help out at their chicken shop. Plus, her boyfriend just broke up with her, and the famed “Zombie Club” bullies are not giving her space to breathe. The few kind faces Ho Goo Hee meets in school include Ji Hoon (Park Solomon from Lookout), the local nice guy who tries to help Goo Hee but isn’t much for words, and Jung Duk Hee (Kim Hwan Hee from Oh My Ghostess), a dorky fangirl who becomes Ho Goo Hee’s only friend. Ho Goo Hee also gets full support from her brother, Ho Goo Jun (Ji Gun Woo from Surprise U), and his best buddy, singer Cha Eun Woo (Cha Eun Woo from My ID Is Gangnam Beauty). One day, Ho Goo Hee discovers the seemingly magical “Revenge Note” app, which boasts the promise of delivering revenge to anyone whose name is entered into it. Sick of the bullying, she decides it’s time for a little payback. But it doesn’t take long for her sweet revenge to turn sour.
Rambling
*beware of spoilers*
Quick and easy, HOWEVER, this show had no business being so woke.
The premise is suitably simple for a mini series (and I’m talking super mini, each episode is like 30 minutes and there’s only 11 episodes total): Our little girl Goo-hee enters high school after a fallout with her best friend (now frenemy) and discovers some extreme bullying that bleeds into her home life. I mean, our little girl finds herself on the other end of a vicious coed high school gang (the Zombies, for crying out loud) that jumps her dad in the street, witchy teenage girls that exploit her goodwill and execute petty crimes against her, and stands toe to toe against a devilish prima donna heiress. Toss in a couple of sexual harassment scandals involving teachers, and that’s one hell of a tiny season!
Revenge Note covers a lot of *touchy* (pun intended) subjects. A pervy gym teacher has a reputation for touching his young pupils, looking up their skirts in a strategic stairwell, and watching porn while on school property! A fellow student gets sexually harassed and presumably assaulted by a male teacher with an impeccable reputation! All sorts of underage psychos—I mean, students—use the Internet culture and hive mind to their advantage, slandering other students, posting doctored photos, and writing malicious gossip and comments! One girl gets sent to a literal psych ward because she conjures up a fake relationship with an innocent male music teacher AND a psychosomatic pregnancy!
You can’t possibly exact revenge on all these outrageous crimes! By golly, yes, you can! Our little girl brings all her enemies down with the help of the mysterious app Revenge Note. The app would send her push notifications seemingly in response to her level of distress. It’s all too easy: enter the bastard’s name and revenge will be had! Her cheating ex-boyfriend gets a monstrous case of shit-in-your-pants diarrhea that goes viral. People get arrested. Justice is alive!
But the show never explains the logistics of her fairy godmother—or, because this is K-drama—her Daddy Long Legs. In fact, she spends a fair bit of time trying to guess who it could be. It had to have been someone close to her, but who...? You never find out, and I’m OK with that. Leave it a mystery. The master hacker and night-recording fiend can be left unnamed.
I think the show makes a comment on, or at least draws attention to, how useless adults and the police are when it comes to resolving and stopping school bullying. It was as if they didn't care, purposely turned a blind eye, or wanted to avoid scandal at all costs. The burden of justice was just too heavy for them. The same went for every sexual harassment / assault case against minors. Let me repeat: THESE ARE CHILDREN. The Revenge Note app did what the adults around Goo-hee could not. And that was a big deal to me.
On that note, it also showcased victim blaming. Every girl that feels threatened by another girl takes it out on her by blaming her for her troubles. It's her own fault that things turned out this way because ::insert patriarchal brainwashing here:: It can't be overstated that a lot of the drama was girl on girl. Women have to stick together and face these issues with unity. These kids are taught that the toxic male gaze is their fault, which is dead wrong. It's no wonder that the girls don't stand up for one another when things don't go their way or when who they perceive as their enemy has a chink in their armor. Smh.
Cha Eun-woo of Astro was a lovely addition. He’s beautiful, and he had so much charm and personality playing a fictional version of himself. The fiction being that he’s childhood friends with Goo-hee's older brother and basically family to Goo-hee at this point. Even so, he was a beacon of light in every scene he was in. When he gives a firm handshake to Ji-hoon, it was hilariously played out. Or when he runs out of the bathroom after choking on Goo-hee’s lingering number 2 smell, it was all so natural. He’s quite nearly a perfect specimen, so I couldn’t blame the frenzied scenes with Astro fans and Duk-hee’s nonsensical lifestyle. I can’t judge them too harshly, I mean, look at him! (I had a life-size cardboard cutout of Orlando Bloom as Legolas when I was a preteen, so...)
My one complaint has to do with the unresolved Cha Eun-woo romance storyline. He seemed to have a crush on Goo-hee since he was a child, but after witnessing a tender moment between Goo-hee and Ji-hoon on her birthday, he looks upset in his luxury SUV, turns to look at her wrapped birthday gift sitting shotgun, and then NOTHING ELSE. Did he just leave without ever giving her the present? Did he sit in his car staring into space all night? Did he teleport back to his house and forget he ever had a crush on Goo-hee? Would’ve preferred a concrete ending for that super cute B-line.
All in all, not a ton bad about this baby drama. It hits some sweet spots, and it’s got Cha Eun-woo for crying out loud!
Have some Revenge Note opinions of your own? Tell me in the comments below!
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