Disney+ K-drama midseason recap: The Impossible Heir – Kim Jae-wook, Lee Jun-young struggle with weak script

This article contains spoilers.

Lead cast: Kim Jae-wook, Lee Jun-young, Hong Su-zu

The Korean title of the drama The Impossible Heir is “Royal Roader”, a term coined in the Korean gaming world which references a player who won the Korean StarCraft League the first time they entered the competition.

There is no gaming whatsoever in this show and if the intention of using a gaming term was to seduce younger viewers, that tactic appears to have backfired. Audiences, young and old alike, have been baffled as to what has been happening in this mess of a series, let alone how that bizarre title applies to it.

After briefly being at loggerheads, the pair’s macho personalities sync and they pair up to achieve a common goal. The plan is for Tae-oh to help In-ha rise to the top of his father’s company, ahead of his nasty siblings, the legitimate heirs of the Kangoh Group.

The Impossible Heir: Lee Jae-wook, Lee Jun-young in dreary buddy K-drama

Although we are not privy to the details of this plan, we follow Tae-oh and In-ha through their college years and then into adulthood, when both of them are working for the Kangoh Group.

Thanks to his smarts and determination, Tae-oh moves quickly up the ranks, and before long he gains the confidence of Chairman Kang Joong-mo (Choi Jin-ho), becoming his personal secretary.

Years later, Hye-won and In-ha get engaged, a turn of events that does not sit well with Tae-oh. Just before the wedding, Tae-oh finally breaks out of his shell and kisses Hye-won. Unfortunately for him, someone is nearby taking snaps of the stolen kiss on behalf of Kang In-ju (Han Sang-jin), the eldest son in the Kangoh family.

In-ju uses the pictures to thwart Tae-oh’s swift rise within the company, forcing him to fall to his knees and join him in a debauched night of drinking and drug taking.

When Tae-oh opens his bleary eyes the next morning, we have caught up with the flash forward that opened the series. He is covered in blood and two corpses lie beside him: In-ju and the woman who joined them the night before.

Tae-oh is arrested for the murders and, after losing his case, is sentenced to the death penalty. Although the sentence still exists, executions have been de facto abolished in South Korea, with the last one having been carried out in 1997. Death sentences are essentially life imprisonment without parole, although they are rare now – only three death sentences have been handed out since 2011.

Since he was pumped full of drugs, Tae-oh cannot remember what happened, but he knows that he did not commit the crime. But nothing can prepare him for the revelation of who is responsible for his incarceration. Tae-oh’s investigations eventually lead him to none other than In-ha.

After spending half the series as one of its protagonists, In-ha suddenly becomes its main antagonist. He even strangles Hye-won in their bathtub for good measure.

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In-ha’s reversal hardly counts as a surprise, as we never knew anything about him to begin with. Not only is it not a shock, we are hard-pressed to care at all.

When succinctly outlined, this story does not seem particularly complex, but the show manages to complicate everything with messy plotting and, most egregiously of all, utterly atrocious character work.

From the beginning of The Impossible Heir, a bevy of handsome actors have stalked around stiffly, breathing feeble life into wafer-thin, cardboard characters.

Most feeble of all has been Hye-won, a wisp of a character whose motivations and desires are practically non-existent. It would be a difficult role for anyone to play, and Hong, in her first leading role, struggles to add any contours to the character.

We are now two-thirds of the way through the show and we still have little to show for it. We were never clued in on the boys’ plan, and we still do not know who these characters are. Given the incoherent behaviour we have witnessed so far, it begs the question: do the makers of the show even care?

Perhaps “Railroaded” would have been a better title for this series, because that is what the experience of watching The Impossible Heir has felt like so far.

The Impossible Heir is streaming on Disney+.