if you enjoy watching well-written dramas, with well-plotted stories, full of well rounded characters with motivations that make sense, and a love story that makes you believe in love etc, this drama is not for you.

story

if you’ve ever watched a mystery, you will have seen the conspiracy board. there will be a character sticking photos and articles onto a board and then linking all of them with a red string, showing how they’re all connected in one way or another. this drama is that concept on crack.

every single thing that happens in this drama must be related to something else that happened. even if it’s small, insignificant things. they have to be connected to something else, otherwise there’s no point in having these things happen, apparently.

if a character is listening to a song, it’s because that song used to be their crush’s favourite song during their childhood.

if a character is regretful of saving a person and wants to tell another character that saving people leads to consequences, it has to be because he was the one who saved the pilot who would later on bring down the plane from the first episode.

if a character (crazy dog) is telling a character (grim reaper 444) that he’s in love with a girl (haram) and that’s why he acts like that, it’s because that character (crazy dog) was told that he was in love with a girl (clara) twenty years ago and he’s quoting the guy who originally told him that (haram’s father).

it’s needlessly complicated. this drama tries to make you think that it’s intricate and very very clever when really it’s a shitty plot riddled with plot holes that the writer tried to cover up by shoving more plot into the plot holes because we all know that’s what fixes plot holes right??

speaking of needlessly complicated, the plot.

or more accurately, an endless list of plot holes in this drama:

1 – if grim reapers are named based on the date that they die, when did grim reaper 444 die? the 44th of april?? also, to add onto this: what about people who died on the same day? for example, all the kids who died in the mujin time mart collapse. would they all be named the same? how would that work, in grim reaper human resources?

2 – also, what was that whole thing with ‘generations’ of grim reapers? they threw it in there to compare grim reaper 444 to haram’s father and then never bothered to explain it or bring it up again.

3 – grim reaper 444 was able to stop a speeding car with his bare hands but he kept getting beaten up by normal human beings? was it because the plot required him to get his ass beat at that specific point in the plot or was there a reason for it?

4 – so wang youngchun was ‘crazy’ but not crazy enough to be incapable of stabbing someone in specific parts on their body to prolong their suffering and prevent them from dying too quickly?

5 – how did haram never see the grim reaper shadow inside of her dad, who did not wear all black like grim reaper 444? she even said that the first time she saw a shadow inside someone was when she saw it inside that student.

6 – how could haram’s father even have a shadow, when he was not a human being, he was a grim reaper inside of a dead human? how did a grim reaper get assigned to his death when he was a) already dead and b) not a human, but a grim reaper?

7 – why was haram’s father not able to see the grim reaper who was assigned to him? since grim reapers can see each other (see: grim reaper 444 being able to see grim reaper 007 and grim reaper 416 throughout the entire series, other examples of grim reapers seeing each other while they were following people who were assigned to die), why did haram’s father need haram to touch the grim reaper in order to tell him how he would die, instead of just.. asking the grim reaper who was assigned to him?

8 – why did grim reaper 444 not question how he wasn’t able to get out of his body because he was in his own body? at the start of the series, grim reaper 444 himself says that there are two types of grim reapers, the ones who were ‘born’ grim reapers, and the humans who killed themselves, and so must work as grim reapers as a punishment. grim reaper 444 thought that he was born as a grim reaper, so why did he not even mention that?

9 – the kid that they replaced joon with was missing a hand. how did no one notice that a car accident victim was missing a hand, and more importantly: that the hand was nowhere near his body. how did the doctor manage to convince the cops that there was no need for an autopsy when the kid was literally missing a fucking hand.

10 – if grim reaper 444’s existence was erased, how did he still exist at the end of the series?

11 – why did haram never find out that there was a grim reaper in moogang’s body? why did haram never find out that the grim reaper in moogang’s body is literally joon, her first love? why did the writer think that was unnecessary lol.


characters

if you’re into fully realised characters who learn and grow as the series progresses, black is not the drama for you. character development is virtually nonexistent. character motivations are thrown in as an afterthought and not given that much importance after that. most of the characters don’t even have any motivations, and the ones that do have such a flimsy motivation that disappears when something else is put in front of them.

grim reaper 444 aka ‘black’ (male lead) is a selfish, arrogant piece of shit from start to finish. the audience is somehow supposed to find his indifference and arrogance charming, even though the other characters around him are just as annoyed by him and his actions as the audience is. i’ll give this to the writer: his motivations are set up at the start of the show (kind of, since we’re only introduced to the actual main character at the end of episode 1, after the fake main character dies). but alas, he seemingly forgets about his all-important mission and diverts from it around three episodes after we’re told about it, and he doesn’t remember it until near the end of the series.

kang haram (female lead) is tolerable, because at least she’s a good person and she tries to help even strangers when she finds out they’re in danger. go ara does a very good job portraying her, but she’s not given much to work with. the character starts out well enough, but there’s not enough substance there to really say that she’s got any specific motivations. first, she wants to find the guy who killed her father, then she finds out that the guy died, then she finds out that the guy’s not really dead, then the guy actually dies. she has no active role to play in any of this. she just finds out information and just.. goes with it. the most active she’s been is when she’s trying to save people. and even then, she’s not actively doing anything to participate in her own story, she’s just taken along for the ride for someone else’s story.

also, the main characters had to be told that they love each other (since when) and literally the episode after that, they were told that they not only loved each other but that they were "madly in love" which again: since when. see more of my comments about their relationship in the ‘important issues’ section.

oh mansoo (second male lead) is consistent in that he’s not developed much. at least his crush on the female lead is developed more than the male lead’s supposed crush lmao. he’s a sweet character and even if a little dumb, he treats the female lead much better than the male lead and for that i can cut him some slack. at one point we literally are led to believe that he assaulted a woman, and i don’t really know why that was even added to the plot, especially since we’re supposed to like this guy, right.

yoon soowan aka kim sunyoung (second female lead) is one of the few characters who is consistent in her motivations and her actions, and even she’s taken along for the ride half of the time because the writer clearly doesn't care about this girl and how much trauma she went through. she gets kidnapped early on in the series, literally no one notices, not even her closest acquaintances, and then the kidnapper decides that she’s more useful if she’s not being held captive, so he just.. lets her go and orders her to do certain things here and there, and threatens to hurt han moogang if she tells anyone about how she was kidnapped. the kidnapper could have just blackmailed her to get her to do what he wanted from the beginning instead of kidnapping her, but i guess kidnapping was a bold new idea that the writer had just thought up and they just.. went with it.

na gwanggyun (aka ‘crazy dog’) is one of the smartest characters on the show, only because he actually... does his job. he actually follows up on the crimes and investigates. it seems obvious, but i can’t take anything for granted on this show. he also has anger issues allegedly, but they’re only shown during situations when he mentions his anger issues, or during situations where people are likely to get angry even if they don’t have anger issues. it’s weird, and it was probably added to the script because the writer didn’t think she was going to develop his character more, so she just decided to give him that.

also i don't know what this writer's issue is with mothers or mother figures, but she probably needs to talk it out with a professional and not write dramas in which every single mother or mother figure in this drama is the worst person ever, and everything bad that happens is always because of the mothers.

the other characters are just there. nothing much to say about them since they are whatever the plot wants them to be at that moment in time. even characters that were shown to be clever are then dumbed down so that the plot can carry on without so much as anyone asking what the hell is happening. a character is introduced as “the guy who goes to the bathroom a lot” so that we can get a shot of him in the bathroom whenever the grim reaper comes out of one of the stalls. it’s a good joke, but it’s overplayed.


technicalities

the editing in this show is all over the place. it’s so confusing. an example is a scene where a character is moving around during the daytime, and then in another scene they’re in another location at night, and then the third scene is another character, during the day from the first scene. there’s no transition scenes, and there’s no sense of time passing. there’s no consistency other than the editing being consistently bad.

this isn’t exactly the fault of the editing team, since they had to film what was in the script and edit it into the episode, but there are many scenes that are just.. there for seemingly no reason, and then seven episodes later you find out why they were there. for example, there’s a scene of a married couple that we see early on that we only find out the context for about thirteen episodes later.


important issues
(trigger warning: abuse, rape)

grim reaper 444 treated haram terribly from the start of the drama to the very end of it, but we’re expected to believe that he cares for her? he treated her like a nuisance, a necessary evil, an annoying stalker, a woman whose property he could simply go through without asking, and all the while she’s not sure whether he likes her or just tolerates her because he needs her for his pet project.

at one point near the end, grim reaper 444 literally tells her something that almost causes her to stab her eyes out, and in order to explain that, he takes her to his doctor and gets the doctor to tell her that because of the bullet lodged in his skull, he sometimes has ‘aggressive outbursts’. so he excuses himself from any future abusive behaviour because of his medical condition.

the tonal shifts in this show are fucking insane. at one point, the characters are re-enacting a rape scene that happened between an adult and a teenage girl, and in order to do that, they turn it into a joke. they have a grown man crossdressing as a teenage girl and as if that isn't enough, they forcibly hold this grown man down and wax his legs, in order to make him ‘look more like a girl’ (as if that matters when they're recording on a vhs tape and the video is supposed to look 20 years old). but it's funny haha!! this is bookended by scenes in which people are treating this rape seriously.



tl;dr a drama being unpredictable and having lots of plottwists doesn't mean that it is good. honestly i just wanted this drama to end