Daebak K-Rambles

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Re-watch value: 3 out of 5 stars

SYNOPSIS

*From MyDramaList*

The story follows a forensic examiner Ran Yan, as she investigates the truth around her mother’s suicide and solves murder cases one at a time. Ran Yan is an eighteen year old destitute noblewoman who grew up learning about autopsies and finding clues through corpses. She encounters a judicial official and an assassin by chance and finds true love through the course of searching for the truth.

RAMBLING

*beware of spoilers*

You can’t ignore the urge to watch some wuxia C-drama, so I dove right in to Miss Truth via Amazon Prime. I was pretty hooked by the synopsis. I’m here to tell you that I loved it. It was a much shorter watch than I anticipated, clocking in at just 36 episodes. I was so thankful for that!

Ran Yan, a female medical examiner, becomes the Watson to Xiao Song’s Sherlock. They were a perfect match professionally and, of course, romantically. There were a lot of murder cases where the duo teamed up, and in that respect, the show felt like Law & Order or CSI. They dove into some forensics, although nothing was gratuitous. My favorite cadaver was the bog body, and the writers did their research when it came to what those bodies look like and why. I loved the way the show explored the crimes, often throwing the duo into a black and white flashback where the murders were recreated Guy Ritchie style.

Ran Yan is certainly ahead of her time, constantly challenging gender norms and the patriarchy, but unlike other shows that try to do so in a contrived way, Miss Truth constructs a very believable baseline. Whenever she comes on the scene, all the guys scoff and question her skills because she’s a woman. She stays calm (it’s nothing new), and slaps them with a little historical precedence of other great women. I thought it was smart of the show runners and added so much to her character, furthering the notion that she’s one smart cookie.

I don’t know how, but the show managed to move at a breakneck pace. It was both frustrating and exciting to me. On the one hand, there was no fat to trim, the plot was constantly moving forward, I was never bored. On the other hand, loads of details, and specifically characters, were explained shallowly or explained too fast for my comprehension. For example, the exposition about Xiao Song’s previous two wives—their deaths, who they were affiliated with, and how they managed to marry into Xiao’s family—was super convoluted and too quick for me to make anything of it. It flew right over my head, and I settled on a basic “They were up to no good; they probably wanted the pearl.”

The show felt Western in that there were multiple episodes dealing with one crime and then a couple through lines, or overarching plot lines, that were advanced. There was the love triangle, which I’ll discuss in a second, and then there was the whole ~pearl~ situation.

At the beginning of the show, the emperor charged Xiao with finding the Marquis of Sui’s pearl before other nefarious parties do. The person who has the pearl can find the treasure of emperor Sui. Apparently, the Suis were from the previous ousted Tang Dynasty, so this has to do with the previous dynasty possibly rising up again. I didn’t particularly like anything having to do with the pearl because it felt like such a McGuffin. The show wrapped up the McGuffin lightning fast: Xiao and Ran Yan find it hidden within the Xiao manor (more like, they were in the manor’s hidden courtyard when they figured out it was inside the heirloom animal tooth necklace Xiao has had since childhood). Then they keep fighting against those principalities until they figure out a way (1) to expose the person at the top of the Huoqi alliance, and (2) simultaneously place the pearl back in the emperor’s hands to absolve the Xiao family of any wrongdoing. It was a lot.