Queen of Divorce was just released two days ago, and I immediately had to download the first episode to start watching because the male and female leads are two of my favorite Korean drama actors of all time, and I knew I would be super sad if I didn’t watch it – I also knew I couldn’t wait until the last episode dropped so that I would binge-watch it all in one day.
Now that I’m done with the first episode, one thing I can tell you guys for sure is that it seems Lee Ji Ah is cursed to always pick super melodramatic dramas.
Her last drama before this one was Pandora: Beneath The Paradise, which aired last year and was simply amazing. But this wasn’t as amazing as Penthouse, which surprisingly managed to keep its viewers hooked until the end (I was so hooked!)
One thing I noticed about Queen of Divorce right off the bat is that at times it feels like a makjang and at other times it simply feels like a normal drama.
In this episode, we got to meet Kim Sa Ra (Lee Ji Ah) and her family members, which consists of her mother-in-law, her husband, and her child, although we haven’t seen her child yet.
She is a very sought-after high-class lawyer, while her husband is a typical rich boy who likes to cheat, and her mother-in-law hates everything about her. The crazy thing is that she always wants to get her mother-in-law’s approval and love, but the other woman is as resistant as she can be.
Meanwhile, her husband is a cheater because he has a longstanding relationship with a lover. One thing I just don’t understand is his feelings about his wife. He’s very much a mama’s boy because his mother controls everything in the house related to him, but it seems he also has feelings for his wife.
This is very confusing because there’s a scene where he’s with his mistress, and she calls him, and then he makes a remark about the way saying the word “wife” is a big turnoff to him. But soon, his mother tells him that she’s aware he loves his wife, but she won’t stand for him abandoning her, and he doesn’t object.
As I said, her mother-in-law hates her guts. And when she realizes that Sa Ra might just start spreading her wings soon, she decides to cut it off, and her best way to kick Jane out of the family is very unceremoniously and her weapon of choice is a divorce.
Sometime before the events in the drama start, it seems Sa Ra had borrowed her mother-in-law a personal seal for a transaction, and her mother went ahead and used the sale to stamp some divorce papers.
Do you remember my earlier comment about this feeling like a melodrama and still like an ordinary series? This is what I was talking about. It’s just a little unbelievable and very unrealistic, which is very on par with what goes on in Jo Ah’s previous melodramas.
Anyway, by the end of the episode, Sa Ra has been incarcerated after being framed by her mother-in-law and then abandoned by her husband. Her son is taken from her, her husband goes ahead to marry the daughter of a very wealthy family, and we don’t know what happens to her mother-in-law, but things are going just as she planned, so I imagine she would have been super happy wherever she was.
One thing that I personally liked that was explored in this episode was Sa Ra’s contrasting feelings about her job and her role in her firm and her personal beliefs.
She was told by her mother-in-law to take on a particular case, and in exchange, her mother-in-law agreed that she would become closer to her. While that case already looked impossible to Sa Ra, she was determined to win it just so that she could have a good relationship with her mother-in-law.
But then, while doing the case, she realized that her moral compass simply wouldn’t let her do as her mother-in-law said. But before she could even really make any step in that direction, she found out that her mother-in-law had lied to her, and after the promise to give her a major promotion at work had been given to her competitor, she was very disappointed and actually decided to not care about what they were doing any longer.
And if you’re probably wondering where our male lead, Dong Ki Joon (Kang Ki Young) comes into all of this, he is actually a prosecutor at this point, but I don’t know what will happen in the coming episodes (because the plot summary says he will end up working with her).
With the little encounter we saw in this episode, it seems he has a history with Sa Ra and I really can’t wait to find out because when they were together, the chemistry was off the charts.
One concern I do have after watching this first episode is that it felt like the screenwriter simply packed a whole lot of backstory into less than an hour and 30 minutes.
Right now, we’ve been told that the entire drama is 12 episodes, which is very short for a makjang, although we don’t know if there might be a second season. What I mean is that I’m worried that everything is going to seem very rushed, but I’m very eager to see how the story develops.
What do you think? Have you watched this drama? Do you think you’re going to watch it? Do any of the leads sound even the least bit interesting? Let me know in the comment section.
