AKA ‘When the Shit Hits the Fan’. In a classic sixteen-episode K-drama, the mean and modal episode for everything to go pear-shaped is number eleven. Because I’m a soppy sentimentalist, my watching experience of a fair few dramas has got stuck on Episode 11.
If a melodrama is not a roller-coaster ride for the emotions, then it’s not really a melodrama. So, typically, episodes eleven to fifteen will foreground the antagonists in the ascendent laying into the protagonists with merry abandon and doling out escalating suffering on a whole new level. Moon Embracing The Sun is 20 episodes so ‘darkest before dawn’ shifts to eps. 13 to 18 and kicks off with the gentle and ‘Queenly’ Han Ga-in as Yeon-woo getting arrested and horrifically tortured, before being branded a ‘lewd’ woman, shame walked in public (years before GOT) and condemned to the Joseon equivalent of community service: it gets worse from there. In Strong Girl Bong Soon, episodes 11 and 12 feint positive at first with Park Bo-young as Bong Soon getting loved up from a confession: often Darkest Before Dawn sees a big shift in the romance that can go in either direction. Meanwhile the woman-abusing serial kidnapper grabs Bong Soon’s best friend sending the heroine into panic mode, which is always dangerous if you’ve got superhuman strength. This sparks a chain of events that results in Bong Soon losing her powers and ending up strapped to a pack of C4 on a rooftop at the end of ep. 14.
It’s not always the desperation generating action that dominates, sometimes the emotional shifts in the darkest hour are the more devastating. My Ahjussi glides subtly into a ‘things coming to a head’ mode around ep. 11, starting with the wife confessing her infidelity to her husband and moving the temp through complete public unmasking, the death of her grandmother, going on the run and confrontation with her betrayal of her boss and its aftermath. The problem is, if you love the characters, it can be very hard to hold onto the fact that’s it’s all going to come right in the end. Of course, K-drama writers are as fond as anybody else of screwing you over with a bitter-sweet or even a tragic ending, although the consolation here is that the darker it gets, the more likely it is that all will eventually be well. My advice, make sure you watch episode 11 onwards with somebody else.