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Pierce Conran

This article contains major spoilers.
2/5 stars
Lead cast: Kim Hye-ja, Son Suk-ku, Han Ji-min, Lee Jung-sun
Latest Nielsen rating: 8.35 per cent
Deeply rooted in melodrama, Korean TV shows like to present broad worlds populated with a characters who, despite their apparent differences, will eventually discover a connection.
Leave any two K-drama protagonists on screen together long enough, and chances are they will fall in love or realise that they are related to one another.


This gives rise to many soap-opera-style reveals and family reunions. These unearthed secrets serve the purpose of making their stories more intimate, but they also make them feel smaller. The recently concluded Heavenly Ever After takes this to dizzying extremes.
Family dramas can get away with this, but high-concept series – such as science fiction stories or dystopias – can struggle with it. Where does that leave this afterlife fantasy drama?
Following the octogenarian Kim Hye-ja (Mother) as she enters heaven, where she is reunited with her husband, who has chosen to live there as a much younger version of himself (played by Son Suk-ku of A Killer Paradox), this is a deeply sentimental show that uses the malleable rules of a world of its own making to engineer a limitless supply of melodramatic catharsis.
For a good two-thirds of its run, the show does not give us much narrative to chew on.

Instead, it is content with doling out vignettes about abandoned puppies in heaven in between scenes of Hae-sook (Kim), Nak-joon (Son) and their erstwhile house guests Som-i (Han Ji-min, Love Scout) and Lee Young-ae (Lee Jung-eun, Parasite) getting into minor misadventures.
It does not take much for K-drama characters to wind up under the same roof, but Heavenly Ever After seems so confident that viewers expect this that it does not bother explaining how Som-i and Young-ae came to share Hae-sook and Nak-joon’s home until the final two episodes.
Hae-sook bumps into Young-ae, her adopted daughter and right hand in her loan sharking business on Earth, during a brief visit to hell. Young-ae spends three months in heaven with Hae-sook and Nak-joon before waking from a coma on Earth. During that time she meets her father, a vile drunk who abused her and sold her to Hae-sook when she was a child.
This man was in hell, but he has been brought to heaven and given the ability to feel paternal love as a form of punishment.

The director of the Heaven Support Centre (Cheon Ho-jin, My Liberation Notes) then drops a bombshell on Young-ae – in a previous life, she and her father were a married couple.
Anyone who has seen the indie darling Past Lives will remember the Korean concept of inyeon, which explains how relationships between people extend over multiple past lives.
Inyeon is introduced about halfway into Heavenly Ever After, when Hae-sook learns that she was once the mother-in-law of her mother-in-law and treated her just as poorly as she was treated.
The inyeon ties come thick and fast after that as the circle tightens around the protagonists like a melodramatic noose.
Before Young-ae leaves, it is revealed that she was Hae-sook’s birth mother, and the previous incarnation of Young-ae’s father was Hae-sook’s father.
That leaves Som-i, who finally starts to retrieve fragments of her memories, including flashes of a son who met with a poor end.

Nak-joon has been hiding from everyone that he has known Som-i’s identity all along. She is Hae-sook, or rather she is a manifestation of deeply buried traumatic memories.
Hae-sook and Nak-joon had a young boy, who Hae-sook lost sight of in a market one afternoon. He was snatched by adoption dealers and died shortly afterwards. Hae-sook was so traumatised by these events that she managed to erase all memory of having had a child – until now.
Even if we can accept this, how can we be expected to believe that Hae-sook does not recognise Som-i as the younger version of herself? How about Young-ae, who lived with Hae-sook for decades?

This is coupled with the revelation that the kooky pastor (Ryu Deok-hwan, Nobody Knows) that Hae-sook has been hanging out with and cooking for all season is in fact her son.
These entanglements achieve plenty of surprise but have precious little meaning. Heavenly Ever After enjoys picking and choosing beliefs from Christianity and Buddhism and threading them together with some treacly but hollow moralising.
The show ends with Nak-joon and Hae-sook choosing to be reincarnated, only for Nak-joon to say that, after giving her a hard time during their previous 21 lives together, he is not going to go with her this time.
Instead, he waits for her and finally appears at her deathbed just as she ends her next life surrounded by family.
Heavenly Ever After is streaming on Netflix.


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Kim Hye-ja plays a character who goes to heaven and meets a younger version of her husband. Things quickly turn sentimental, then confusing


Kim Hye-ja plays a character who goes to heaven and meets a younger version of her husband. Things quickly turn sentimental, then confusing.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Kim Hye-ja plays a character who goes to heaven and meets a younger version of her husband. Things quickly turn sentimental, then confusing

Kim Hye-ja plays a character who goes to heaven and meets a younger version of her husband. Things quickly turn sentimental, then confusing