Doom At Your Service (2021) Review — wine and a kdrama

Doom At You Service had been on my list of dramas to watch this year, but by the time it came out I was just not feeling it nor did I have the time to watch it. I ended up being asked to record an episode with the K-BAE Podcast who have been recapping each episode of the drama. For the podcast I originally had decided to just watch the first episode and then skip to the episode that we were discussing (episode six). Their podcast is fairly loose, and that setup would have been fine for me to be able to participate, but when I started the watch one episode became two, then three…and by the time I recorded the episode I was half way through the series. Surprise, I liked the drama. I figured at that point I was already in the binge and ended up finishing the rest of the episodes the next day or so. Before coming into the series I had heard some mixed reviews from the people I knew that was watching it, and the general Twitter users I saw. Most of what I saw didn’t look favorable, so I was surprised when I started to watch it and found that I was enjoying it. The drama is by no means my favorite of the year, and I did find there to be faults, but it generally was a great watch. I had fun with the stories, I generally liked the characters, and found the overall watch to be a nice one. So much so that I decided that I should do a full review on the drama.

There are no major spoilers in this review, so if you haven’t watched it yet you should be fine reading this.

What I found most interesting with the drama and what I think pulled me in much more than I was expecting was the lack of a second male lead. The person closest in the second lead spot, Lee So Hyuk’s character, is not a love interest in a way. In fact, he’s barely a friend – he begrudgingly becomes a friend of Dong Kyung (Park Bo Young) and his story lies in the secondary plot between Hyun Gyu (Kang Tae Oh), and Ji Na (Shin Do Hyun). It’s an interesting device in the drama, as it is bulit like as a drama within a drama, and the usually tropes live inside of that secondary story line. Instead the main drama decides to focus the tension on the supernatural bits, and the general transformation of Sa Ram (Seo In Guk). The leads already have a lot of obstacles from the very beginning, and not having to drag them into a love triangle on top of that helped the story move along for me.

I saw that a lot of people found the Ji Na/JooIk/Hyun Gyu story line to be weird. I think the true hindrance of the story line wasn’t that it was written as a secondary story, it was that the the actors didn’t have that much chemistry between them. In fact the two male characters felt much more natural together and it felt off when pairing Ji Na with either of the two. I don’t think it was necessarily the fault of the actors, the main story line that they are given that pulls all three together didn’t work out as well as it could, and it didn’t mesh well with what was going on because of this and felt a little incomplete. These are characters that would normally not have much depth in favor of the main leads, and it’s felt in this.