When he first arrives home from the hospital, Kang-ho doesn’t speak and refuses to eat anything.
After refusing countless meals he finally blurts out a solitary sentence: “You’ll doze off if you eat too much.”
The Good Bad Mother: rural Netflix K-drama stars The Glory’s Lee Do-hyun
Having already been shown a series of brief flashbacks we recognise this line. It’s what Young-soon used to tell her son when she pushed him to study as a child.
During those years he was never able to enjoy a full meal or a moment’s peace. One day, when he was caught watching a baseball game, Young-soon smashed their TV.
Kang-ho has been refusing to eat because of these traumatic memories. Young-soon breaks down, begs for forgiveness for the years of hardship she forced on him, and tells him it’s OK to eat.
Rooted in forgiveness and redemption, this is a suitably cathartic moment early in the series. And yet the show appears to forget its own lesson further into the story.
The various stages of Kang-ho’s physical progress are all big moments in the show, and always tied to some melodramatic form of emotional progress.
The biggest and most melodramatic of these occurs at the end of episode seven. Young-soon has been diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer and her livestock have been culled owing to a foot-and-mouth disease scare.
Fearing that Kang-ho will not be able to care for himself, she checks him into a care centre and returns home to put her affairs in order before stepping up onto a stool and slipping a noose over her head.
She kicks the chair away, but just at that moment Kang-ho returns, having escaped the care centre and rolled many kilometres to find his way home. He rolls up to her and, in a moment of blind panic, stands up for the first time since his accident to save his mother.
Young-soon’s suicidal ideation ebbs, but only because she sees hope in Kang-ho’s situation. With the same determination she showed when she wanted to shape him into a prosecutor, Young-soon becomes fixated on making Kang-ho walk again.
Following his life-saving upwards spurt, Kang-ho is once again unable to control his legs. In a fiery show of tough love, Young-soon rolls the wheelchair to the side of a lake and tosses the scared-out-of-his-wits Kang-ho into the water.
She does this again and again, in between physiotherapy sessions in hospital, and eventually a beaming Kang-ho takes his triumphant first steps.
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The Good Bad Mother earlier seemed to criticise “tiger mom” parenting, and this new chapter in Young-son and Kang-ho’s mother-son relationship is a head-scratcher.
Then again, characters in this show, good and bad, are seldom honest with each other. Ahn Eun-jin (Hospital Playlist) plays Lee Mi-joo, the sweet girl next door who was born on the same day as Kang-ho and later became his sweetheart, only for their relationship to abruptly come to an end.Mi-joo has two young children, Ye-jin (Ki So-yu) and Seo-jin (Park Da-on), who stay in the countryside with their grandmother Jung Gum-ja (Kang Mal-geum) while she runs a nail salon in Seoul. It turns out she has been lying to everyone around her, saying that she is living in America with her well-to-do husband.
Also keeping up airs is Mi-joo and Kang-ho’s childhood friend Bang Sam-sik (Yoo In-soo, All of Us Are Dead), a good-for-nothing who has just been released from jail. He’s pretending that he has reformed his ways and is away working on a fishing boat, when he’s actually waiting at a nearby countryside gambling hall.Mi-joo and Kang-ho discover each other’s deception when they see each other in their hometown while talking over the phone, as they pretend to be elsewhere.
Yet Mi-joo’s biggest lie concerns her children. She maintains to them, her mother and others that their father is in America, but it’s obvious that Ye-jin and Seo-jin must be Kang-ho’s children.
Of course Kang-ho didn’t know he had any children and he certainly doesn’t in his current condition. Kang-ho always plays with the siblings, since they’re the only people around him with a similar mental age. Knowing what’s coming adds a slightly uncomfortable dimension to these scenes.
Despite The Good Bad Mother’s saccharine disposition, inconsistent messaging and some grating minor characters, it’s no slog thanks to a bevy of engaging performances and the plot’s bouncy pacing.
The emotional crescendoes are frequently effective, although it’s perhaps best not to cogitate too much on their implications.
Episode eight ends with Young-soon discovering an SD card secretly left behind by Kang-ho before his accident.
With six episodes to go, his recovery and reconciliation with Mi-joo will surely dovetail with his revenge against presidential hopeful Oh Tae-soo (Jung Woong-in) and criminal boss Song Woo-byeok (Choi Moo-sung), the people responsible for this father’s death.
The Good Bad Mother is streaming on Netflix.
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