IRIS Special Ep by Karen

Kim Tae Hee’s good bye message at the end of the special episode.

Today’s post will be on IRIS’s special episode after the completion of the drama (aired on December 23, 2009 on KBS). The one-hour broadcast is filled with short commentaries from the cast and directors, unaired footage, NGs, and a hell of a lot of summary.

I feel the same way about this special episode, Kim So Yeon.

The commentary by the IRIS staff and cast was insightful in gaining a more personal opinion about their thoughts on drama. These were presented as a one-on-one interview in a room or filming the cast’s reaction after a scene has been filmed. The NGs and unaired footage were all very humorous as viewers were able to see the actors break their character’s mask. This brought more meaning and more depth and meaning into the scene in comparison to when the viewer first watched it. Something romantic like Seung Hee and Hyun Jun kissing in front of that Akita restaurant turned into something comedic with Hyun Jun’s side comment (see below).

When difficult scenes were being worked on, the narrator for the special episode made it a point how they didn’t feature any stunt doubles and how human these actors were. It allowed the viewers to grow even more sympathetic towards the actors, appreciate the amount of the difficulty the scene was and the efforts the actors put into it.

The special episode even mentioned how T.O.P from Big Bang was performing. It was pointed out how he was a new actor and he had to learn a lot from his senior actor, Lee Byung Hun. The special episode portrayed T.O.P as an actor who is learning which positioned his mistakes as something cute. This allowed for a new perspective of T.O.P for the viewers as this was something that they rarely see in him when he is working with Big Bang. Also, I think, it was to make up for the lack of T.O.P scenes in the drama anyway—one last go to appeal to his fans.

Despite all these observations, what really got to me was the amount of summary there was in ratio with the amount of commentary and NGs. There was not enough to keep this special episode totally intriguing. The narrator narrated the replayed scenes very overtly and barely bringing anything new about the scene. For example: when Baek San met up with Hyun Jun to give out his solo mission the narrator said that exact thing. I think that these entire replays of important scenes (yeah, not just a few seconds, it was entire scene and sometimes that lasted more than 5 minutes…) were shown because even though the drama is done, the viewer can re-experience those scenes again within an hours’ time without having to scavenge through all the 20 episodes of IRIS. The special episode wanted the viewers to go through those scenes and feel the emotions that they felt before all so that IRIS can leave an everlasting impressing on them.