Doom At Your Service (2021) Review

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.

Doom lies in the area of dramas I enjoy, less comedy and more romance and melodrama and found the drama enjoyable because of it. It had large breaks from the comedy, and it tended to not go as far as others. I suspect that this was also the problem with the drama for most. Because the secondary storyline was the ‘romcom’ story of the drama, and paired with the lead actors previous works, a lot of people came into this drama thinking it would be more comedy than it was. It’s largely a melodrama, a lot of parts tended to be bleak and dark and didn’t try to constantly be bright or happy until the jump back to the humans of the story. It’s actually part of a greater problem I’ve personally have run into with other dramas. A lot of people label dramas with romance and any level of comedy as romcoms. The lack of no popular genre tag in Asian dramas for the inbetween of romcoms and melos adds disjointedness when you come in thinking this was one or the other. While the main story line not being a true romcom didn’t bother me (in fact, I enjoyed it much more than if the main lead lived in the romcom parts) I can see how it would be a turn off, and nothing kills a drama faster than the wrong audience viewing it. I also suspect that this wasn’t as jarring for me because I watched it as a binge and not week-to-week, not having to wait long to figure out what was happening with the plot.

I generally like both Park Bo Young and Seo In Guk as actors. They are good actors and can handle leads well. I thought they played off each other really well and were good at focusing on the tension in various parts of the drama. I did find a lot of - at least the first half - of the drama and the couple’s dynamic a bit hard to watch. It lives in a tricky spot, where at it’s core it is an enemies to lovers where the enemy is an actual threat, one that is constantly talking about killing her and showing the power dynamic imbalance on how he could and would. It’s hard to get into a love story when you have that, and despite it being a supernatural and non-realistic take it still left an air of weirdness when they got close. I do think the drama did a fairly good job towards the later half of showing his character development and reminding the audience that he was essentially a dangerous non-human being that can’t be viewed as a human transforming, but felt the drama didn’t handle it well in the first couple of episodes.

One of the aspects of the drama that I was most surprised about, and heard next to no one talk about was the cinematography and set design. I think it’s executed really well and a lot of the shots were interesting and different. The director and crew used a lot of angles to portray the emotions and intent of the scene, well more than I had expected from the drama. It being a supernatural fantasy it also allowed them to set up fantastical shots. Showing Sa Ram’s world as black and white, only colored when Dong Kyung comes closer was gorgeous and added to the fantastical love story. Sa Ram’s bedroom melding into Dong Kyung’s bedroom was a fun set pick. A lot of the time the sets and shots were meshed together to bridge the fantasy/god world and what was going on in the real world and the drastic difference between the two was interesting visually.

All-in-all I thought the drama was an entertaining one, accomplishing what it personally set out to do, and am glad that I finally hit play.

Listen to my episode with The K-BAE now:

Doom At Your Service is currently streaming on Viki.

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