The Story:

We first meet twenty-five year old Kim Hye Ja (Han Ji Min) when she is beginning a career as a radio announcer, but unsure if she wants to continue in the profession. She still lives at home to save money. Her busy, chatty mother (Lee Jung Eun) runs her own hair salon, and her quiet father (Ahn Nae Sang) is a security guard who walks with a limp. (We are to learn later he had a bottom part of his leg amputated after a car accident as a child and walks with the help of a wooden prosthesis). Since childhood Hye Ja has had a testy, somewhat comical relationship with her computer addict brother Kim Young Soo (Son Ho Jun), who rarely leaves his room, preferring to make a pittance of money on the computer running chat schemes on various topics. Their parents seem to have long ago given up on him, and focus all their hopes and dreams on Hye Ja and her success.

Hye Ja has two best girlfriends she hangs out with on her off time, Lee Hyun Joo (Kim Ga Eun from Because This Is My First Life) and Yoon Sang Eun (Song Sang Eun, from Catch The Ghost, with the highest pitched, anime girl voice I've ever heard!). Hye Ja has a not so secret crush on a handsome young man who lives in her neighborhood, who also dreams of becoming an announcer but who has no experience in the field, named Lee Joon Ha (Nam Joo Hyuk). He seems a bit jealous of her success. He ends up working in a senior center but he doesn't much care for it, and even starts up a surreptitious, nefarious side business there, privately selling drugs and supplements to the seniors with Alzheimer's, and then taking the money and not delivering the goods, figuring the old people will just forget what they ordered and he can pocket the money. Although Hye Ja puts out feelers that she likes him, and tries to encourage him to live a better, cleaner life, he seems depressed most of the time. (Small wonder, he has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Verrazano Bridge!).

When Hye Ja had been a young girl she had found a mysterious watch on the beach and kept it in her possession for all the years since childhood ended. Then suddenly one day the watch displays magical powers and she discovers to her horror that its time shifting magic had turned her into an old woman in her seventies (actress Kim Hye Ja, yes I know, with the same name as the character!).

Eventually her family believes that it is her and try to shelter her, and then her girl friends accept her new persona as well. Inside her old body she is still twenty-five, she has the brain and heart of someone much younger, but on the outside she is old.

She starts volunteering in the same senior center that the boy she still cares for is working at, and discovers unpleasant things about him for the first time. Will her love for him be able to help get him on the straight and narrow path, or is he doomed to destroy himself with the dark side of his nature? He does not recognize her when she's old, and when they have confrontations he insults her. She tries not to show that she is bothered by his reactions but she clearly is. (So many times I wanted somebody to throttle that kid, and eventually it happens, when thugs knock him to the ground and bloody him up. I can't say I felt too sorry for him, he needed it!).

A few brief times young Hye Ja is able to escape being old and return to her twenty-five year old self, but then someone steals the watch at a time when she is old again and she finds she can't go back to her younger self.

At this point the drama takes some poignant twists and turns into the pasts of all the family members, as well as certain seniors living at the senior center, and we learn some shocking things about them which made them the complex people that they are in adulthood, and as they approach their senior years too. I won't reveal all those mysteries to you: you really need to watch and discover them all on your own.

In many ways the last two episodes are the best episodes of the entire drama, and then there's that unbelievable scene in episode twelve; you'll know which one I mean when you see it. I burst into tears.

Don't miss Radiant. Enjoy, and learn from it. 

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