"Am I the Family Safe?" Fantastic Opens With a Dying Writer Billed for Her Relatives' Crises

"What am I, your family's safe?" Lee So-hye, the writer at the center of the drama Fantastic, snaps at her relatives, who keep asking her for money even after she learns she has only six months left to live. The early episodes set the glamour of fame against the harsh realities and tangled relationships behind it.

A diagnosis, then the invoices

Lee So-hye goes to a hospital while working on a script and is told that breast cancer has metastasized and she has six months. Even then she worries more about the script deadline due the next day than about the end of her life, and tries to keep up a calm front. What awaits her is not comfort but her family's relentless financial demands.

Her older brother calls to ask for an urgent loan because the lease deposit on his place outside Seoul has gone up. Her older sister presses her for a large settlement payment tied to her brother-in-law's accident and the auction of their house. Lee So-hye vents her pent-up anger at relatives who treat her only as a source of cash. When her sister visits on her birthday, even the side dishes she brings become a flashpoint. Lee So-hye points out that they are cheap ones made with fish cake. She says she puts plenty of money for side dishes into the living expenses she gives her sister, and asks why there is fish cake instead of meat. The protest shows that the family conflict goes beyond feelings and comes from an economic scarcity tied to survival, and it underlines her isolation.

Lee So-hye also reaches back to old ties. She phones her friend Baek Seol, with whom she had lost contact for more than ten years, and looks for her childhood friend Mi-seon. The drama portrays this as a search for her only breathing space in an isolated reality. Yet the friends cannot offer full comfort because of their own circumstances. Elsewhere, Lee So-hye, called Korea's best writer, meets again at a press conference with Ryu Hae-seong, an actor who has become a Korean Wave star. Their relationship wavers between respect and enmity.

Wealth that has quietly run out

The drama cuts between outward splendor and the desperate lack behind it. Some characters appear to keep up a lavish life with a cook at home, but their conversation reveals that their past fortune has shrunk to roughly the price of one bottle of wine. A remark that a bottle costing 29 million won equals the price of a car symbolizes the gap between past wealth and present poverty.

Another character is a daughter-in-law stripped of her rights under her in-laws' strict control and pressed not to "tarnish the family's face." The portrayal cuts sharply into patriarchal authoritarianism in Korean society and the individual sacrifice it demands. Her mother-in-law brings up nursing-home fees, controls even small expenses and forces her to act in ways that preserve the family's dignity.

Affairs, masks and a crash

Seol-ri sees her husband's affair, tries to leave the parking lot and ends up in a chase with him. In the process she accidentally rams Ryu Hae-seong's car and heads to the emergency room. There her friends dismiss her situation as a "business mistake," or even act as though she were the one causing trouble, distorting reality. Seol-i, who learns of her husband's infidelity, suffers between a husband trying to cover it up and people around her who put on a hypocritical show, treating the affair as a "business mistake" to save social face. She suppresses her anger because she does not want to look ugly in front of her friends, but eventually lashes out at her husband, calling him "human garbage."

The attitudes of those involved form an extreme contrast. People who witnessed the affair urge her to "shake it off like adults" and behave like perpetrators. This suggests that Seol-ri's situation is not simple domestic discord but violence close to an assault on her dignity. In one scene, the person who caused the trouble turns the tables, demanding an apology and threatening "you're a scary person," which reveals psychopathic traits. Seol-ri pushes back, saying she has "no talent for putting on a mask and a show," and rejects the hypocritical relationships. The friends she meets at the hospital seem to console one another, yet they lament their own lots or quietly flaunt other people's misfortunes, which completes the picture of the characters' psychological desolation. The drama's central mood is the different forms of deprivation and pain each of them carries.

Source: DRAMA Voyage (YouTube)