One of the things we notice about K-dramas, especially romantic ones, is that the writers of these series are always finding interesting ways to get into the story of the show’s protagonist or main couple. In a new Netflix K-drama, a teenager’s dreams of becoming a K-pop diva are interrupted by 15 years as a castaway on a remote island.
Opening Shot: A shot of Chunsam Island. We then see two girls running through the halls of their school.
The Gist: Seo Mok-ha (Lee Re) and her friend Moon Young-ju (Kim Yoon-seol) are running to find a battery for her dead flip phone (it’s 2007). One of their classmates, Jung Ki-ho (Moon Woo-jin) has one, but wants to be paid for it. Mok-ha begs and cries and Ki-ho relents; she gets the call she’s waiting for, from a radio station that picks a lucky fan to sing with K-pop star Yoon Ran-joo (Kim Hyo-jin). She gets to talk to her idol but Ki-ho grabs the phone and hangs up before Mok-ha gets a chance to sing.
Ki-ho has a reason to ask for money; he even offers rides on his bike for 1,000 won. He lives with his father, police officer Jeong Bong-wan (Lee Seung-joon), who beats him on a regular basis. Ki-ho is saving up money to escape his father and the island.
Hearing that Ki-ho has a digital video camera, Mok-ha nervously approaches him with some money; she wants him to shoot and edit a video of her singing one of Ran-joo’s songs for a fan video contest. The prize is a contract with her agent and the chance to work with her in Seoul.
As he’s shooting the video, Ki-ho tells Mok-ha that he doesn’t hear any conflict or angst in her voice. What he doesn’t know is that they have something in common: Mok-ha’s father Seo Jeong-ho (Lee Yoo-joon), a local fishmonger, gets violent with her when he’s drunk, which is often. As he goes to deliver her a flash drive with the completed video, he sees police, including his father, at the fish store after she called them in during an incident. His father convinces her father that this is just “eighth-grader syndrome” and forces Mok-ha to apologize.
After this point, Mok-ha doesn’t want to enter the contest, but Ki-ho sends the video in for her, giving his cell number as the contact. When he gets the call from Ran-joo’s manager that Mok-has has won, he runs to tell her, but she tells the manager that there’s no way she can get to Seoul. Ki-ho tells her that the next time her father gets violent, to run to his house, no matter what time it is. He has a plan.
The plan comes to fruition pretty quickly, and both of them find themselves on a ferry boat to start the long journey to a new life in Seoul. But Jeong-ho gets wind that his daughter is on that boat, and Ki-ho gives all of his money and material to Mok-ha to keep her father off the boat. His valiant effort fails, though, and Mok-ha finds the only way out is to jump overboard. She washes up on a remote island, and starts to figure out how to survive.
Fifteen years later, a now-adult Mok-ha (Park Eun-bin) has made a life for herself on that island, and learned to survive in numerous ways. But that is soon about to change.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take a romantic K-drama, like Destined With You, and combine it with the Tom Hanks film Cast Away, and you get Castaway Diva.
Our Take: The first episode of Castaway Diva is an intimidatingly-long 80 minutes, but the show has so much set up story to tell that the episode moves along at a good pace, keeping viewers involved in Mok-ha’s fate.
Writers Park Hye-ryun and Eun Yeo go to some pretty dark places in the first episode, depicting both Mok-ha and Ki-ho as victims of violent single fathers. Do we get a lot of background on why both of these men have resorted to hitting their kids? No, but we do get some insight into how that kind of abuse was seen in a place like Chunsam Island not all that long ago. That part of the story not only informs both teens’ strong desire to leave the island but also informed our reaction when it seemed that Mok-ha looks like she got out of her father’s clutches.
Mok-ha hasn’t yet returned to Seoul when the first episode ends, but we know she’ll be in the city by the start of Episode 2, and she still has dreams of becoming a K-pop star. It seems that Ran-joo’s fortunes have changed, especially after she singed her right hand man as her agent. What we wonder is how much of Mok-ha’s years on her own will affect how she lives and pursues her career back in civilization. We’re also not quite sure where Ki-ho fits in, or if he’s just someone that helped her start her journey. But what we do hope is that her fifteen years on that island informs the rest of the series, instead of just being a unique way into a not-so-unique story.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Mok-ha sees the drone and has no idea what it is.
Sleeper Star: Moon Woo-jin does a nice job as Ki-ho, who is pretty stoic in the face of his abuse, but gets emotional when it comes to making sure Mok-ha gets to follow her dreams.
Most Pilot-y Line: We see that after 15 years, Mok-ha has created a hut out of wood and various found junk, and has an ingenious way to collect rainwater for drinking and gardening. We almost wanted to see a whole series built around how Mok-ha managed to survive for so long, but it looks like we’re not going to get that.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Castaway Diva sets up its story in an intriguing and dramatic way. We just hope that elements of that setup continue as the story moves along.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.