The day Tak Dong-Kyung is diagnosed with a brain tumor is also the day she accepts her fate, deciding not to have the biopsy surgery that would help determine the type and advise on the best therapy. Without it, she has 3 months left to live.
Dong-Kyung decides to hide her illness from her aunt and younger brother as well as from her colleagues at the web novel company she works for, as editor. She keeps it from her best friend, Na Ji Na, who's also a writer under the same company.
One night, Dong-Kyung gets drunk out of anger at her unfair situation and yells that she wishes the world to end. Soon after, a charming young man shows at her door, introducing himself as Myul Mang (Doom in Korean). He's responsible for everything that dies and gets destroyed and he heard her request.
Myul Mang despises the world, the people living in it, and he was waiting for someone to wish it to be over.
Dong-Kyung claims she wasn't serious about it, but Myul Mang can read inside her and knows she was and offers her a deal: he'll make sure she'll feel no pain for what times she has left to live and she'll have to wish for the world to end by the end of the 3 months. Either that or the person she loved the most will die.
Dong-Kyung refuses at first, but she'll be almost forced to accept it when she experiences how painful the tumor can be.
So she comes up with a plan: she'll fall in love with Myul Mang, so the person who's going to die is doom itself.
My Opinion👍
"Doom at Your Service" is a very good fantasy drama, so detailed and full of good characters that I decided to put only the lead protagonist's story in the review above and to go through the parallel ones here.
● Deity and Destiny
Myul Mang clearly hates being the one bringing doom and doesn't miss any chance he has to voice it out to the deity who created him.
She's in the form of a young girl, who's confined in a hospital room due to heart disease but, if at first she can come across as detached and cold, soon the reasons for the comments and action become much more understandable.
The relationship between the deity and Myul Mang is complicated and tense most of the time, but I liked how it developed throughout the series and personally, I got a better understanding as to why the deity acted the way she did.
● Love Triangle
As much as Dong-Kyung and Myul Mang's story is compelling and engaging (and full of 'please, let them be happy together already' moments), I found myself waiting for the scenes of the always present love triangle.
Dong-Kyung's best friend Na Ji Na is a strong woman, but not when it comes to her love life: she still thinks about her high school love, Lee Hyun Kyu, who broke up with her to go study abroad. When the two finally met at a class reunion, the atmosphere gets really awkward because they never put a 'proper' end to their relationship.
But they're not high schoolers anymore and Cha Joo Ik entered Ji Na's life: he's a senior editor for the web novel company she signed with and, even if he's abruptly honest when she talks, he cares deeply about her, on both a personal and professional level.
He's honest with his feelings and doesn't even try to hide them and, at the same time, he's not pushy over Ji Na to choose him over Hyun Kyu.
● Family's Love
At first, I thought Dong-Kyung's decision not to undergo the biopsy surgery was a foolish decision: yes, she has been told that the procedure was dangerous and even if she did it, it would have prolonged her life by 1 year and yet, if I were in her shoes, I'd have tried everything in order to survive.
But that's exactly it!
She has no wish to merely survive so she kind of accepts the fact that her time is limited and spends it as nothing changed.
Things slightly start to change when her family and Ji Na find out about her illness and run by her side (her aunt travels all the way from Canada with her husband for this) and that slowly starts to shake Dong-Kyung out her numbness.
In my mind this will be remembered as the 'coat' drama, as the protagonists wore basically just those as jackets and I loved them all! We get to witness seriously a brilliant styling!
And the scenographies were something else, I was blown away by how beautiful they were!!!
The casting is also spot-on; everyone fits their own characters so well, it almost looks like they were created just for them.
The soundtrack completes the overall "life's hard /fate is cruel, but there's still a glimpse of hope if you look for it" kind of mood with slow and sad ballad songs.
Final thoughts? One of the best dramas of the first half of the year, for sure!
Rating: 4½/5
Ph: hancinema.net
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