Welcome to my Saturday blog post, where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching, whether at the beginning, middle, or end. Whatever I want, because I’m petty that way.
This week, I recapped episodes 9-10 of Cinderella Closet. We get the standard cheese-y Jdrama date (aquarium!) and almost, but not quite, happily ever after.
I also recapped episodes 9-10 of My Romance Scammer. Tim is now resorting to handing Pai buckets of booze in a park to try to earn his love.
What did I watch this week? Everything I’m watching is ending in the next few weeks, so I slipped a shorter series into my drama-watching time:
Never Forget Your Enemy – ยังไงก็ใช่นาย – 2026
Recently aired Amnesia-and-Secrets BL with 8 episodes.
A man wakes up in the hospital and discovers he’s lost all memory of the last 10 years, and his long-term relationship with a contentious friend.
This is a fever dream of a show. I’m not sure whether the intention was to mirror the disorientation of our Amnesiac Lead, but it was hard to tell what had happened and what was happening.
Ultimately, the biggest problem was that too much had happened
And nothing was happening.
In his last memories, our Amnesiac Lead is very angry with his childhood friend after an accident ruins his tennis career.
When he wakes up in the hospital, he has a new life with his childhood friend, in a big home with happy couple pictures on the wall. Stuck in the anger of the past, he needs to navigate his present life while trying to remember how he got there.
But his memories come back to him in a confusing, out-of-order jumble, and sometimes are hard to tell from the present.
Meanwhile, he works at a coffee shop and has spicy dreams (more on that later) about Childhood Friend, whom he doesn’t currently feel spicy about. He decides to work at the coffee shop he used to go to, where the creepy other worker is creepily friendly.
That’s kinda it for the present.
But Childhood Friend is holding onto secrets. Secrets about events that happened in the past. A lot of them. An overwhelming amount when packed into the short runtime of this drama.
While all these past events can give the illusion that something is happening, the truth is, the story is 95% a guy remembering bad things that happened to him.
And the end doesn’t feel like it has a strong climax. Things just kind of resolve themselves.
But I liked the flawed, devoted couple at the center of it all
This is definitely a Do-Not-Try-This-At-Home kind of love story. Childhood Friend is devoted to his friend, a la Secret Lover. And while at first it seems like Amnesiac Lead doesn’t share this devotion, as time goes on, it becomes apparent he just shows it differently.
With the universe seemingly out to destroy their relationship, it was frustrating at times to see the lengths they were willing to go to help it. They often dealt with their problems by making more problems.
Yet, despite that frustration, there was something compelling about how these actions always came from a desperate love for one another and a desire to either protect or hold onto each other.
Plus, this is apparently a Thai production. The language, the location, and the actors are all Korean. But you’ll notice that the native title is in Thai, because most everything else about the production is Thai.
This is important because Thai BL dramas are (not always but nearly) more explicitly sexy than Korean BL dramas. While this one is no My Stubborn (the triple-X-standard for explicit sex scenes), it has steamy moments.
While a drama’s spiciness rarely factors into my feelings about it, in this case, I think it helped this show sell the connection between our leads. Amnesiac Lead may not remember his romantic relationship with Childhood Friend, but his body sure did.
I have a lot of vivid dreams, and I like hearing about people’s weird dreams
So this kind of strange, vague, compelling, confusing drama isn’t that frustrating an experience.
On the other hand, if you are looking for something straightforward, with a plot, and a love story with a love story arc, this would likely frustrate you.
And it’s not a rewatch for me. But as I was watching it, I was entertained enough to want to keep pressing play on the next episode the whole way through.
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