Hi, I’m here to talk about my criticism for episode 16 of 2521. If you loved the last episode, that’s great! You’re beautiful and precious and I love you. Please feel free to scroll on.
I am not here to bash the creators of the show. Everyone from the actors to the staff to the writers did an amazing job. Clearly everyone involved but a lot of love and attention into the show and it shows. I wholeheartedly respect all of them, including and especially the writers. The first fifteen episodes were remarkable television.
I am also going to keep in mind the initial vision of the show. The show’s creators told us directly that the intended message of the show is that our youth is a uniquely bright, beautiful, and passionate time in our life that we will never have again; it will not last forever, but we should celebrate that we got to experience it.
With that said, here are some of my thoughts:
Min-chae and Ballet (and Matrilineal Conflict)
Minchae, her struggle with ballet, and her relationship with her mom, Heedo, is how the story was introduced and framed. From episode 1, we see that Minchae quits impulsively because she feels like there is no point in pursuing ballet if she can’t reach the same heights her mother did. She begins to read Heedo’s diary, initially curious about her mom’s past relationships, but that’s a fake-out. “That kid” is Yurim, her mother’s (former) best friend and personification of all of her fencing dreams.
Within the first few episodes, Minchae admits Heedo’s perseverance and dedication surprised her most out of everything. Heedo put her heart and soul into fencing even though no one else understood or appreciated her efforts. This re-contextualizes and humanizes her mother.
In episode 7, we see Heedo explain that progress isn’t a linear line, but comes in steps - that it’s important to continue your efforts even when you feel like you aren’t improving. The scene then transitions back to Heedo’s journey to her victory in the 1999 Asian Games as well as her relationship with her father. Heedo’s father gave that advice to Heedo, and Heedo gave that advice to her daughter. It’s something a younger person would never know - it’s something that we need an older, wiser person to remind us.
Jumping to episode 12, we see Yeji choose to quit fencing. It’s a wonderful one-episode character arc that only 2521 can pull off. It provided Minchae with a counterbalance to Heedo’s story. While Heedo’s passion drove her to struggle through every hardship and obstacle, Yeji was no longer internally nourished by fencing and decided to step away, despite it basically being the only life she ever knew. Both were the best decisions for each individual. The crucial lesson for us and Minchae, however, was that to pursue each path wholeheartedly, and not to be swayed by momentary setbacks - to live you life using your whole heart.
In that same episode, we see Seungwan refusing to compromise to a broken system at great personal cost. In episode 1, Minchae states something to the effect that adults don’t believe her when kids say they don’t have a dream and ballet was to give “the appearance of doing something.” I did not interpret this as insecurity about living in her mother’s shadow. The show deliberately drew parallels to the IMF crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic - two major events that amplified preexisting inequalities. Both events are completely derailed the youths of millions of teenagers and 20-somethings. I think that Minchae’s cynical-beyond-her-years perspective is shared by a lot of millenials and gen Z, many of whom see no point in passion or dreams in an increasingly unstable future.
In addition, throughout the series, Heedo’s issues with Jaekyung mirrored Minchae’s issues with Heedo. Two generations of complicated, loving mother-daughter pairs who have a hard time getting through to one another. In episode 7, when Jaekyung reports on the scandal at the 1999 Asian Games, Minchae is able to see Jaekyung’s side and provide empathy to her, when Heedo couldn’t, because she had enough distance from the situation. But Jaekyung was eventually able to open up to Heedo and bare her soul, which closed the distance between the two of them. Meanwhile, while Heedo has done her best to be an available and emotionally present mother, Minchae has a difficult time relating to her. When Minchae is able to get a window into Heedo’s own youth, she is likewise able to finally her see her mother as a whole person. For both Heedo and Minchae, they had difficulty fully appreciating their mothers as people, not just parents.
For Heedo, a key moment for that is being able to move on from past trauma. At the end of episode 10, Minchae and the audience are surprised to see that adult Heedo does not recall the beach trip at all. But by end of episode 11, we see that Heedo and her mother moved past the years of pain they had inflicted on each other, to the point that Heedo was holding hands with her mother and telling her that we needed to live a long life together. Forgetting is painful, but necessary. Like Heedo needed to forget her previous losses to keep moving as a fencer, she needed to forgive and forget the pain elsewhere to have a better relationship.
So by the end of episode 12, it felt like everything was in place for a talk between Minchae and Heedo in 2021. The themes were well developed, but there should have been a moment sometime between the end of episode 12 to episode 16, in which all these elements are synthesized and provide appropriate closure to the framing device. We have a moment in which Minchae and Heedo reach mutual understanding. Mother and daughter understand each other, and therefore better understand themselves. It would not have to be a long scene, but it should be something more than Minchae offhandedly telling her mother she was not going to quit ballet in the final few minutes of episode 16. This is definitely Heedo’s story, but key elements of Heedo’s story were her passion and fixing her relationship with her mother. Bringing it back to Minchae would and resolving those few same issues with Minchae would have reinforced that it was Heedo’s story with the audience. Furthermore, it would have justified the framing device more thoroughly.
Instead, the rest of 2521 after episode 12 is about Heedo and Yijin’s romantic relationship. The few times we see Minchae, she is absorbed in their relationship and what happened next. And these episodes truly do not have anything to do with Minchae and her relationship with Heedo. Minchae has not shown any concern or fears about friendship or romance. If Minchae had also been shown to be foregoing personal relationships because she didn’t see the value if it was going to last, or if she was in the middle of a fight with a friend, or if she was afraid to talk to her crush, then they might have been relevant.
This shifts the focus from Heedo to Heedo AND Yijin. Our attention is split between characters. So it is supposed to be Heedo’s story, but it doesn’t feel like only Heedo’s story anymore.
Resolution to Character Arcs (or lack thereof)
It’s a blessing and a curse that 2521 gave us such complex, fully realized characters. It elevated the show and drew in the audience closer, but also left an abundance of character arcs that needed to be fulfilled.
We probably received the most closure with Yurim. She was able to escape the pressure of being a perfect Olympian, take care of her parents, and financially secure her future. While not outright stated, she was suffocating and able to get out. Coach Yang went from being a high school coach to a national coach back to being a high school coach.
We also received quite a bit of superficial closure on Jiwoong as well, who gets the perfect job for himself and his dream girl. Seungwan, however, was personally disappointing. We see her in a random producing job in entertainment and are teased a romance with Yijin’s brother, as a callback to episode 10. However, Seungwan’s character truly touched the audience, with both her inescapable feeling of melancholy (depression) and her sense of justice. The Seungwan the audience saw in episode 16 was basically the same one we started with - bored and adrift. Worse, it did not feel like the show was making a statement with this. It didn’t feel like Seungwan had mellowed with age or had learned to bend to the system, which would have been character progression. The character arc had gone nowhere. And worst of all, Seungwan and Jiwoong’s bond was one of the strongest in the entire show - we did not get a single moment between the two of them. We did not see if they drifted apart or if they were closer than ever - they simply did not address it.
The biggest misstep, by a long mile, was how Yijin’s character was treated. Yijin, who we followed from episode 1. Yijin, who made a promise to never be happy again in episode 2 and slowly came back to life over the course of the show. Yijin, who we saw try to tackle his burdens on his own until episode 14, when it broke him down like nothing else ever has, and then made a promise to not do that again. Yijin, who at the end of the episode 15, was completely broken, hollowed out, and looked like he would never be happy again.
I hate making a clinical diagnosis on a TV character, but Yijin appeared to be suffering from PTSD and depression. This wasn’t the “times” changing - this was an acute shock to the system after experiencing hell on earth. This experience might have irrevocably changed Yijin, to the point that he could not be with Heedo again. That can happen - but as the audience, we never got to see how he was able to recover from the trauma. Yijin might have been at peace by 2009, but the audience never got to see that path - was he able to find peace through his career? Through reuniting with his family? Through another person? The audience will never know. Instead, we are left with a card from a grateful witness and a short, minute-length scene with his parents. The most profound emotional moments that Yijin has is when he’s saying goodbye to Heedo. We see him backslide from his development at the beginning of episode 15 and get no resolution.
The implications of this scene cast Heedo in an unfortunate light. Heedo had won a gold medal, was not having issues with her fencing, had a career that brought her great personal fulfillment, a mended relationship with her mother, and a strong social support system. Of course Heedo should not have stayed in a relationship that made her unhappy - there is absolutely nothing to justify that at all. But Yijin was undergoing an acute crisis and Heedo, as chipped away as she was by the distance, was simply not. In any functional relationship, there are times when one person has to lean on another more. The audience had been trained to expect Yijin and Heedo to do everything they possibly could for each other to provide support. Heedo’s support wasn’t reaching her best friend when he was suffering like he never suffered before in his life? Then the Heedo the audience knows, the Heedo that stopped at nothing to pursue her fencing dreams in episode 1, who ran around in the middle of the night in hopeless pursuit of Yijin’s father, who ranted out her own confusing feelings to the object of her affections in episode 9, would have tried supporting him in a different way. As 2521 has proven to us, forgetting can be a gift and you can move past your pain to a brighter future. The Heedo the audience knew would have tried far harder because Yjin wasn’t just her boyfriend, but her best friend. And if after both of them truly trying and failing, it would have aligned with the previous characterization established.
In a sense, it makes sense. The writers had left themselves 2 episodes to explain how they broke up. An acute crisis would have explained how their relationship irrevocably changed and driven them apart. There was no time to draw out the break up or to follow up on Yijin in a way that was satisfying. But personally, 2521 was a show that paid loving attention to its characters and relationships. To leave such gaps, with such important characters, feels like a misstep.
There were truly some incredible moments in episode 16. Yijin and Heedo running to find each other to make sure they didn’t say goodbye in such a harsh way and Heedo finally getting to read Yijin’s goodbye were profoundly, beautifully heartbreaking. The post-credits scene in which a security prompt asks Yijin who his first love was and fifteen years later he promptly typed Heedo’s name cuts me so deeply.
Writing endings are incredibly difficult. Most of the show was magnificent and I am sincerely grateful to its creators for the amazing work they put in. It’s because I was really moved and really cared that I feel compelled to explain why I think the show’s conclusion was not able to achieve the same highs as other parts of the show. I don’t mean to complain that I didn’t get what I wanted or that I felt owed something by the show. I hope I was just able to put into words how and why I think that there was some was disappointment about episode 16.
Thank you again to 2521. To the actors, the staff, the writers, the fans. It didn’t last forever, but it was worth having.
