Twinkling Watermelon: Impressions from eps 1-6

Paroma
Nov 3, 2023
4 min read

My very first thought after the first episode was that this drama has a lot happening in it. Most of it heartwarming, but some of it a bit scattershot.

It took the show three episodes to really settle into the beats it wants to cover. After that, I had bought the ticket and was already on the ride.

Twinkling Watermelon is at its core a story about children suppressing their inner-most desires to please their parents. It's about not really knowing how your parents became the people they are because you have always seen them as grown ups with their identities wrapped around you. It's a story about praying that your parents love you for who you are and not who they want you to be.

Oh and it's also about time-traveling back to the 90s to join a high school rock band with your teenage dad. ✨

And oh my goodness, Choi Hyun-Wook playing the eighteen year old version of dad has won the year. Ha Yi-chan's from a background where pursuing higher education means being a financial burden on his old grandmother, so he quietly decided to transition from school boy to working adult and let go of its other dreams.

Except he's also a teenage boy with a lot of heart and energy, and he's wise enough to understand that the last years of school are the only time he'll be allowed to fully be young. So, he doubles down on that joy and experience, even as his grandmother watches him with worry because he's growing up too quickly.

When you juxtapose this with his son's experience years later of being a hearing child of a deaf family, forced into early adulthood because he was expected to interpret adult words and concerns for his parents to the world, you get a sense of the weight behind this sweet magical story.

Twinkling definitely shines in its heartfelt moments.

Ryeoun playing Ha Eun-gyeol gets quite a few of these scenes in the first two episodes. He's a young boy with a love for music, who hides it from his parents because he's watched their suffering and doesn't want to break his father's dream of having a son get into medical school and a stable career.

While his parents never asked him to hide his real passions, they told him through many words of encouragement and praise that a conventional career is what they wanted for him.

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It's a fine line to show parents who are genuinely concerned and loving and responsible, but who also have an over-dependence on their hearing son and need him to also be the son who never worried them. The drama absolutely nails this with stellar performances from Choie Won-young and Seo Young-hee as the adult parents.

The adult Ha Yi-chan and Yoon Cheong-ah are happily married and love their children dearly, but there's a mystery about their past. Eun-gyeol grows up knowing very little about who these two were in their youth.

Once the magic hits, and we're back in the 90s, that mystery slowly begins to unravel. But the show takes it time with it.

By episode six, I'm fully immersed in the teenage drama of Ha Yi-chan's pursuit of the illusive Choi Se-kyeong, impeded by an appalled Ha Eun-gyeol who can't believe his dad ever liked a woman before his mom.

Seol In-ah (playing Se-kyeong) has a lot to convey here with her role and I can't go into it even a bit without spoiling things, but I love that her arc is technically independent of the boys and you could see that she's clearly the hero of her own story.

Shin Eun-soo as the teenage version of Mom is a scene stealer though. Young Yoon Cheong-ah has a lot going on under the water and none of it could ever be guessed at by her son as he knew her years later.

Some of my favourite scenes of the show are when Eun-gyeol connects with teenage Cheong-ah and begins to teach her sign language - a necessary tool of communication she was denied by her rich, heartless family - and something she wouldn't get to learn for several years yet in the original timeline.

You'll notice I barely mentioned anything about the semantics of time travel in this world and that's because it's not very important. It's a device casually cobbled together to give us scenes where Eun-gyeol easily falls into the role of the parent with his dad, and guides him in his studies and tries his darnedest to stop Yi-chan from chasing the wrong girl.

Or the scenes where we watch teenage Eun-soo push her rage and desperation behind a wall of dignified coldness and then we remember what a cheerful woman she is as a mother to Eun-gyeol someday.

There is much charm and earnestness in this drama, though some times, when the silliness overtakes, the story loses its footing for a while until it finds its way back to its heart again. I think it's worth giving Twinkling Watermelon the chance to tell its story at its own pace.