The Psychologist (2021)

Strong Start But Then Became A Downhill Runaway Train

This series had a ton of potential. A show about a psychologist counseling patients with various problems and in depth look at just how each session progressed. Her own life and the life of her friends, family, and romantic interest as well the antagonist were all very strongly introduced. Each main plot and subplot were going well until about episode 29, around that time this smooth moving train lost its conductor and started to go downhill at top speed.

The subplots started to obscure the main plot, the characters behavior didn't align with what they had previously done and many useless characters were brought in without a proper explanation to cause trouble only to completely vanish later in the same way they appeared. Or scenes that were shown in opening and closing credits, never actually happened. The guess is that after the first review and cut in episodes, the editing was done extremely poorly.

The main antagonist aka el creepo or YJH was forgiven or given a slap on the wrist judgment for really horrendous things. His character development was a constant tug of war between evil and some version of good. Though he was hell bent on revenge, it seemed his revenge was aimed at the wrong people and totally misguided by his adoptive father who was the real criminal in the entire plot.

The mega scandal promised in the synopsis that would evoke HD's sleep walking problem; didn't and wasn't that huge. It was also left for the final 11 episodes to sort out. HD's father was thrown into the mix and neither that relationship nor problem was solved in the end. Many of these main plots were left hanging. I'm all for a cliffhanger as I've written my share of them, but you need to tie some of the loose ends up and leave just one hanging to really grab the audience, not 36 of them. Which could speak to a season 2 but considering how poorly written and executed the second half of the drama was, do people really want to see season 2? And will season 2 have the same cast because a whole new cast would make this a disaster. Plus c-ent has a tendency to do sequels up to 5 years after the fact and at that point everyone has lost interest.

Lilli's change in men was like a whiplash, because from rich, snotty, and "cute", in a span of one full episode she fell for an average Joe cop. It was as if, the writers really had no time to develop Lilli's evolution as a woman and wrote the polar opposite of what she fell for before like an epiphany of sorts and hoped the viewers wouldn't notice.

Instead of properly closing out this series, the writers threw in another couple for HD to help cure in 2 episodes. And the ending went from el creepo crying over his mom after she tried to kill herself, to an ambulance, to suddenly out of nowhere a monologue of HD talking about her work and the patients she's helped. The last episode honestly looked like it belonged to a completely different show. There were so many inconsistencies and inaccuracies, towards the end that I'm sure I missed explaining a lot here.

I commend all of the actors on their terrific acting but only that and the OSTs were what remained of a really great and strong show at the beginning. I was very much looking forward to this series and I'm really disappointed. Would I recommend? Depends. It certainly has its strong beginning, but a very weak and inconsistent second half and ending. Judge for yourselves if you choose to.

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The Good . . .. The Bad . . . . . . & . . . . . .The Ugly

In the first half of this drama, I can honestly say, it was as good as it could. It had an impressive pace, story, & acting. And of course, the best part (in my opinion) was the side story - stories that could be seen as an average CSI case but from a psychological standpoint. They had different patients with everyday normal issues with He Dun, the “profiler”, being able to assess them in a manner that could help them overcome or at least live with those issues. Of course, it was interesting to see and enjoyable. The characters that were included were also terrific, but my favorite was undeniably Qian Kaiyi. He added laughter and amusement into the show that was needed due to some stories being darker than others. I felt he was a great balancing element for the show where people didn’t just see the heartbreak, sorrow, and hatred from those individual cases. And I also got really used to those ugly Hawaiian shirts he tends to wear (lol). All the actors in this drama delivered a great performance and I can’t genuinely say any one person did a bad job in portraying their role. Yang Zi & Jing Boran both did great jobs as the leads.

Enter THE BAD. This started around episode 25ish. To be honest, I knew the great storyline and pacing I had been permitted to in the first half was not going to continue and there would be some decline, which is on par with most tv shows. But I wasn’t expecting THIS. The script writers touched more on the main story and sort of pushed the side stories to the literal side. If I said the main story was underwhelming it would be placing it mildly. I thought there would be more excitement and more shock factor going into it, but it fell short - now I can admit that due to the story being so great at the beginning that my expectations were a lot higher hence I expected more. But what they wrote just wasn’t IT. The ruse that the 2nd main antagonist used to defeat the Professor was just not what I imagined. It felt like the entire scandal used to take him down could have easily been resolved if the police just did a thorough investigation. It took Lilli (He Dun’s best friend) a day to find out that the accuser was in debt - hence a motive that could be the reason for her accusation. Any logical person could have used that to blow the case wide open but it never came up once - now I can take it has a huge plot hole and let it go but the entire thing was just a lot of he said she said allegations that felt ridiculous and not something a brilliant mastermind would take years to plan. Frankly, it felt more like they made it up on the go and just hoped that it would work out in the end. I expected more from the villain due to him being built him up to be this smart instigator that was behind the scenes, but his plans can be deemed obvious to say it bluntly.

The Ugly. The last 9 episodes were probably the most aggravating. As each episode was released it clearly started to seem like they had no intention of answering any of the questions that the audience had since the beginning of the series. They shoved in other new elements to cover up drama time so it wouldn’t be too obvious that they were unwilling to give answers. They added new characters, a new romance, and to top it off a new side story mixed in with the main in the last 3 episodes. The pacing started looking off and they added more questions about the antagonist’s behavior and what his actual plans were. The entire thing just started looking messy and really didn’t seem to make any sense pacing wise. It does seem that there might be a 2nd season but even if that is the case, I felt there should have been some answers to ALL those questions they had accumulated throughout the drama. Some of the questions being He Dun’s family dynamics, the radio station, Lilli’s new romance, He Dun’s & Kaiyi’s relationship, Jiahui’s whole mess of a family dynamic and his mom (I feel the mom is a category in it of herself with how many questions we have on her), the 2 new female psychologists and what is their role in this whole thing, etc. To be honest, I feel they could have answered all the questions up to the 2 new female psychologists that they added in, and it would have been a smoother transition to a 2nd season – because we don’t need a million questions for us to be hanging on a cliff. A simple “who is she?” would have sufficed. But those are just my opinions garnered by the expectations I had from a great start.

Overall, I would recommend this drama just for the first half because it was terrific and the acting was on point as for the latter half, I would just say not to have such high hopes - like I did. The drama had great potential because the story was something different from what I tend to see in c-dramas but it just wasn’t executed properly enough through to the end.

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