Okay, binge television. You and I have had some good times. In college it was Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly. More recently, The Wire, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad. Hell, even Planet Earth. I don't feel weird about these shows.
This show... this show.
But now, binge television, you had to see fit to introduce me to Korean dramas? I mean, I normally binge on you because I don't know what's going to happen next. Suspense, twists, etc. But in this show, "Boys Over Flowers", I knew from the first episode I watched what the ending would be and yet I kept watching because I (embarrassingly) became way too emotionally invested in the well-being of the characters themselves. The show is about a hardworking, spunky commoner girl, Geum JanDi, who through a stroke of fortune ends up attending high school at the elite ShinHwa Academy. Of course, there are four rich, good-looking male heirs who attend there as well (the so-called "F4"). And yaddayadda Geum JanDi and the richest heir (Gu JunPyo) end up falling in love and whatnot. Of course, before they can live happily ever after, there's a whole bunch of setbacks, starting from the initial courtship to the alternate love interest to the break-up phase to the make-up phase and then, just when it seems like things are finally going to work out...
(the spoiler is really coming now - if you're at all interested in watching this show, I warned you. It is an amazing show, a terrible show, a rewarding show, a painful show, and way too guiltily addictive.)
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...there's a completely BS case of amnesia, where Gu JunPyo, after getting hit by a car, suddenly cannot remember Geum JanDi. What??? Dear Reader, maybe this isn't connecting with you, but you have to understand the situation I was in. It was 3 AM. My girlfriend and I hadn't moved since like 6 PM, one-more-episoding our way until we were committed to finishing, in her words, in order to "stop the pain". The end is in sight. Then the dude hits his head and selectively forgets the love of his life?!?!?
It was a bit too much for this neuroscientist to handle. You can forget *events*, but not people. The only way for JunPyo to completely forget JanDi was if he completely forgot like two years of his life. And there his friends were, trying to reenact specific events when they should have been like "Hey, do remember going to Macau? Do you remember going to the ski resort? Racing JiHoon on horseback? What was all that about?"
The name for this general phenomenon is lacunar amnesia. If you've blacked out from drinking too much, that episode is a lacuna (cool word). It's pretty straightforward - we record memories of events based on when and where they happened, via brain structures called hippocampi. If the recording is messed up, then you can lose the ability to recall that memory. But if there's another event involving the same person, you would still know who that person was. I mean, even if you lost all memories of events involving the person, I'd bet you'd still find them vaguely familiar, purely based on facial recognition.
So let this be a lesson to you future addictive television show writers - you can't just make a character entirely forget another. Especially not when some of your viewers are just dying for the damn couple to be happy already!
