Praise be to public libraries, the training schools of Socialism! Mine has been getting in too many Korean TV dramas, old and new, for me to keep up with.
Lee Young-shin (Gong Hyo-jin), a single mother, lives with her eight-year-old daughter Spring (Suh Shin-ae) and her senile grandfather (Shin Goo) on Pureun Island. She works at a variety of jobs to support them, raises fruit that she hopes to sell on the Internet, and hides the fact that Spring has HIV/AIDS, which she contracted from a blood transfusion a couple of years before. Fearing the hostility Koreans feel for people with HIV, she keeps the nature of Spring's illness even from her, while drilling her strictly in how to deal with injuries so as not to put anyone else at risk.
Youngshin dreams about Choi Seok-hyeon (Shin Sung-rok), a handsome and popular young man she knew in high school, who went to the mainland to study and has become quite successful, acquiring a classy fiancee on the way. Seok-hyeon's mother looks down on Young-shin, Spring, and just about everyone else on the island, but Seok-hyeon seems to feel an obscure guilty connection to Youngshin, and is kind to her even when his mother is behaving obnoxiously. It soon becomes obvious that Seok-hyeon and Youngshin have a shared past of some sort.
Jang Hyuk, in his first TV role since he completed his military service, plays Doctor Ki-suh, a highly competent but personally intolerable surgeon. Ki-suh is probably the most dislikeable character who's not supposed to be a villain that I've encountered in TV dramas yet: he's a totally self-obsessed control freak, with no apparent empathy for anyone. His career suffered slightly when his father - also a doctor - had to give up his practice in a malpractice scandal, but that doesn't seem enough to explain his unsympathetic behavior.
Ki-suh's fiancee, Cha Ji-min, is also a doctor, working in a rural clinic. When Ki-suh learns that she has pancreatic cancer, he drives to her clinic to abuse her verbally and physically until she agrees to let him operate on her, even though she knows it's hopeless. He takes her illness as a personal affront to himself, rather than consider her suffering. (Korean women should really be taught martial arts; a quick chop to Ki-suh's neck would have eased Ji-min's remaining days enormously.)
Ji-min has a guilty secret of her own: it was she who accidentally gave Spring the infected transfusion that gave her AIDS. When even Ki-suh has to admit that Ji-min is dying, they travel together to Pureun Island so Ji-min can try to find Spring and apologize to her. She fails, but just before she dies Ji-min makes Ki-suh promise to carry out this mission for her. After she dies, Ki-suh sits outside the temple where her funeral is taking place. He won't go in because he's a Christian, which he demonstrates by being hateful to a young monk. The monk, who's about 10, responds by quoting Ecclesiastes at him, and blesses him in the name of the Buddha.
It turns out that Seok-hyeon is working for Ki-Suh's tycoon mother. When Ki-suh loses his job at the hospital for beating up the abusive and adulterous husband of a dying patient, President Kang sends him with Seok-hyeon to Pureun to survey its potential for redevelopment as a resort. Ki-suh boards with Young-shin and her family, unaware that the little girl is the one Ji-min charged him to seek out. Hiding his secret identity as a big-time doctor from Seoul, Ki-suh soon establishes himself as a mysterious Superdoctor who saves people that the bumbling local doctor can't.
Soon both Ki-suh and Seok-hyeon notice something odd about Spring, how she refuses help when she gets a bloody nose, and the secret of her infection becomes harder and harder to keep. What will happen if the islanders learn that Spring has HIV? Ki-suh, drawn to Young-shin, can't bring himself to give her Ji-min's message. Seok-hyeon, also drawn to Young-shin, has to contend with his mother's dislike for her and Spring, and wonders about another pressing question: who was Spring's father?
As usual with Korean TV dramas, Thank You has too many characters and subplots to summarize in a short review, but the outline above will give you an idea of what's going on. I'm of at least two minds about it, and wouldn't rank Thank You with my favorite dramas. The cast are all good, except possibly for Jang Hyuk, who I haven't seen before. Here he has a very limited range of facial expressions: he looks mean, he looks stupid, that's about it. He generally wears beard stubble on his chin, to signify that he's sophisticated and troubled. Too much of the series is taken up with Ki-suh's tantrums, and he hasn't changed much by the end; I'm not sure any actor could have done much with the role.
Gong Hyo-jin is warm, solid, and likeable as Youngshin; Shin Sung-rok is handsome but a bit dull as Seok-hyeon. Seo Shin-ae is appealing as Spring, though she's forced to be the typical smart-aleck kid. She's the focus of the story, after all, which is meant to inform and raise conciousness about HIV/AIDS among Koreans. Unfortunately that concern often gets lost amid the soap opera, especially since the adults feel that they must lie to Spring about her condition and prospects, even after she learns about her condition and needs them to tell her the truth. Dishonesty isn't the best metaphor for AIDS education in Korea.
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