When I was in my teens, my bedroom walls were full of posters of actors and singers that I liked. I would buy magazines like Bop and stack them in my closet and change the posters on my wall twice a year. I would also buy big posters at music stores and K-Mart. I was a fan of Menudo in the 80 and New Kids On The Block in the 90s. I had their albums, I even had the NKOTB bed spread. All this is to say that I can relate to being a fan. What I will never understand, though, is the obsessive and extreme fandom portraited in Korean drama. I don't know if things are like that for real, but if they are, it's scary. Actors and singers are people and they have a right to love and live their lives just like everyone else. The high rate of suicide in the Korean Entertainment business is so high, so much pressure. . . These fandoms don't really help. The fandom in this series - and in many others with idols in them - are so entitled and extreme in their need to know everything and have them stay single that at times is cringy. They are not healthy fans who enjoy these people's work, they are more toxic than anything else.
Maeng Se Na has been a fan of Gold Boys since before there even was a band. She had met Do Ra Ik when they were both teens and through his music, she was able to pull through during a dark time in her life. She bought all their merch, had her bedroom walls full of their posters and went to every concert and event she could go to. She is a successful lawyer now and so when the news announce that Kang Woo Seong is dead and that the suspect is Do Ra Ik, she decides to check for herself and ends up becoming his lawyer.
Do Ra Ik hasn't had an easy life. His mother extorts him for money. There are two fans who stalk him and even enter his home without permission. There is a reporter who is after him, the CEO of his label is not transparent and has been exploiting him since little. His ex-girlfriend broke his heart and the only person he holds on to, his closest friend, Kang Woo Seong, has just been murdered in his apartment. Now that he is the main suspect, everyone turn their backs on him and his only option is to rely on Se Na, his lawyer, and her assistant of sorts, Park Chung Jae.
Kwak Byung Gyun is the prosecutor assigned to this case, but this was not by chance. His father, a prosecutor political ambitions, did all he could to get his son to work on this case. Byung Gyun is pushed by his father to pin the murder on Do Ra Ik even if there is no real evidence that he is the murderer. His father had done the same years ago - imprisoned an innocent man who later killed himself in prison. The man whose daughter Byung Gyun had bullied at school and who now was defending Do Ra Ik.
This is a good series. It kept me engaged, but it has some loose ends that make me wonder if there will be a second part. If there won't be, then, maybe it needed to have more episodes or work the story a bit differently. Let me explain. There seems to be a connecting link between Do Ra Ik's case and Se Na's father's case. It is Hong Hye Joo's father who is behind the insistence of making these two people the murderers. Why? At the end of the series, we figure the answer to the why related to Do Ra Ik; but we don't know the reason behind Maeng's conviction. Se Na is able to reopen her father's case at the end of the series, but we don't see a resolution to this case. We don't see her father get justice and this was going to be a heavy fight because Kwak Byung Gyun's and Hong Hye Joo's fathers are not going to go down quietly. But we never find out. This was disappointing to me. I wanted this mystery solved as well.
