Ask: I know there’s no such thing as a perfect drama (well, maybe there is, depending on one’s taste). That said, out of all the plot holes in TotNT, what bothered you the most? What was the one thing you really couldn’t ignore in the storyline?
Hmm this is an interesting one. I feel like my objectivity is being tested here. First off, your question assumes that there was a plot hole big enough that I really couldn’t ignore it, and also that there were many. To be honest, though, I’m not entirely sure I agree. I’ll start by saying this:
Was TotNT a perfect drama? Definitely not. I’d probably have to agree with you that there’s no such thing. But, was I (possibly overly) emotionally invested in the story and characters? Absolutely. So that tells me that – for me personally at least – there wasn’t a plot hole that I felt was big enough that it undermined or detracted from the central premise or characters.
That being said, I think the biggest plot hole for me centered around Ji Ah’s parents. They returned Gulliver’s Travels-style after 21 years, un-aged, to find their daughter had grown up in their absence, and they’re not only perfectly well adjusted, they don’t think to question the supernatural nature of that experience? I don’t think so. If Ji Ah was going to read her coworkers in on everything, I don’t understand why she couldn’t do the same for her parents. Not to mention, they’ve been legally declared dead, and even if they wanted to appeal that fact, they’re 21 years younger than they should be according to their birth records. What kind of lives are they going to be able to lead? It’s not as if they can spend their lives stuck at home, having limited contact with other people and only leaving the house when strictly necessary. Oh wait. (Hello, 2020)
On the other hand, from a narrative perspective, Ji Ah not getting her parents back would have been even more problematic. Their return was the driving motivation and source of conflict for her character at the start of the show, and it was also, later on, something Yeon promised to help her achieve. So to not get them back would have undermined both of our leads. Starting around episode 6 or 7, though, I half-anticipated that Ji Ah would get her parents back from within the ggwari (I actually called that one), only to have them expire because of supernatural Reasons. Why? Because not having them in the picture would be the narratively easy (read: lazy) choice. So I was glad that the show didn’t go the lazy route, but disappointed that they left that plot thread hanging. As far as plot holes go though, it wasn’t so egregious that some additional explanation or scenes couldn’t have resolved it, and it was peripheral enough to the central conflict by that point (Ji Ah and Yeon’s battle with Imoogi), that I was able to just move on.
Other things I might point to that don’t quite constitute plot holes but that niggled at me include: how and why Imoogi (or part of him) came to be sealed on Eohwa Island in the 1950s; why Rang had an eunhye debt to Sajang when he wasn’t actually mortally wounded (is it a perception thing?); the manner and timing of Yeon and Rang’s ‘reincarnations’; how exactly Yeon came to reclaim his powers 6 years later.
But these are all things that might still be resolved/explained. They just weren’t explained within the course of the series. I think the term ‘plot hole’ often gets over- or misused to describe anything viewers find unsatisfactory, but in order for something to be an out-and-out plot hole, it has to either somehow fundamentally undermine the central conflict/premise (like the eagles in LotR), or be unexplainable through any feat of twisted logic (like the ending of Healer (2014), which I still love anyway).
With that in mind, on the whole, I thought the show was admirably plotted. There were certainly plot points that I might have written differently or have liked to be fleshed out more, but that’s not the same thing as being a plot hole. As a rule, the larger the scale of the story, the larger the scale of the potential plot hole. It’s much easier for a story to be tightly plotted when it operates in the small-scale everyday. TotNT was working on a cosmic, gods-and-monsters, karmic good vs. karmic evil scale, and that’s about as big as it gets.
Conversely, I found myself impressed with the writer’s attention to detail on more than one occasion. Everything foreshadowed followed through to its promised conclusion, and the groundwork for all of the major twists had been subtly and cunningly laid out earlier in the series. The lead characters also managed to grow while still retaining character continuity, which is rarer than you might think. The one thing I’m still not over is Rang’s death, which I think could have easily gone another way, but I understand what the writer was doing there even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
Finally, there are a few ‘unanswered questions’ like the ones I listed above that I’ve seen people complain about that actually have been answered, either within the show and they just somehow missed it, or outside the show but just not in English (ex. in the backstory collections tvN published, actor interviews, etc.). I’ve done my best to make those available, but obviously, you’d have to care enough to seek them out, and I understand that not everyone does.
As usual, this was probably more of an answer than you were looking for, but if you follow me, you’re hopefully used to that by now.
Answered on tumblr here.