Hello readers, and welcome to Split Screen 3.0! I know you’ve been waiting with baited breath for the big reveal of our next k-drama feature, and I’m pleased to announce that alongside My Hero Academia season five (our first time watching a current season! EDITOR EMMA: this aged poorly? I guess season 6 hasn’t aired yet, so we’ll count it as a win), we’ll be watching Netflix Original Crash Landing on You!
This show checked all of our boxes: a strange premise, a streaming service we actually subscribe to, and something very different from either of the show’s we’ve watched before. This one’s kicking off with a bang, so grab your paraglider, brace for extreme weather, and press play!
(New to Split Screen? This is a great time to jump in! You can catch up on the past four seasons of My Hero Academia and our watch-throughs of Boys Over Flowers and Coffee Prince here!)
Crash Landing on You Episode 1 (up to minute 37)
M: The third era of Split Screen begins!
E: Oh man, I’ll have to update the cover image template so it’s Split Screen 3 now.
M: Split Screen: 3 Fast 3 Furious
E: I don’t think that would fit very well, although this week’s episodes were both fast and furious.
M: Crash Landing on You has already lived up to the name.
E: She did literally crash land on him. And he didn’t even fall over.
M: It’s a new show, so it’s going to take me a few weeks to learn the names. Let me look it up for our two leads really quick.
E: All I care about is Purchasing Manager.
M: The purchasing manager was suspiciously youthful and not blatantly coded as unattractive.
E: He made funny drawings.
This says “please let me go home” which is a big mood
M: Our two apparent leads are Yoon Se-ri and Captain Ri.
E: That’s too similar.
M: His first name is not especially similar, but I don’t think we’ve learned that on the show yet. So the Ri-ri power couple it is.
E: We open our show with Se-ri, and she’s just the worst. I mean this in a mainly positive way, but she’s awful.
M: If she were a man, she would be praised for her business acumen.
E: She is not honestly that dissimilar from some of our rich male romantic leads in previous shows? Maybe a little more flamboyant.
M: Yeah, she’s a little too serious about her business and successful to be compared to Yi-jung from Boys Over Flowers or even Han-gyul from Coffee Prince, but she’s too self-absorbed…although all the rich boys were self-absorbed. Maybe she’s a little too flighty and impulsive to be a pure Jun-pyo type. Although he was flighty and impulsive! I’ll put my finger on this eventually.
E: Jun-pyo’s pretty self-absorbed, but I think she’s a little more vocal about it? Like, she’s very happy with herself, and she would like you to know it.
M: I think the big difference from our other rich male romantic leads is that she definitely has her family under her thumb, as opposed to all our high school boys, who were in the opposite situation. I guess Han-gyul was thirty, but he was still basically a high-schooler.
E: She does seem relatively estranged from them all though, even if her dad seemingly likes her.
M: I’m a little disappointed it doesn’t seem like the family is going to be around, because there were Arrested Development vibes there that could have really gone somewhere.
Narrator Voice: No one was happy to see Se-ri
E: We should get to this later, but I do really wonder where the show is going to take place? Like, it can’t all be in North Korea, right? They can’t have fun dates in North Korea.
M: Maybe he’ll defect after all.
E: Maybe it’ll be like a mid season finale thing, and then he has to acclimate to life in South Korea for the second half.
M: There’ll be another freak accident.
E: Captain Ri is clearly not cut out for military life anyway.
M: He has too much fire!
E: He steps on too many mines.
M: We’ve gotten ahead of a very important plot point, so let’s rewind a bit. Mines? North Korea? I thought this was a fun show about a businesswoman running her family business at the same time as her extreme sporting goods company!
E: Oh!? What’s that!? A freak act of God!?
M: They say when pigs fly…
E: She dodged a literal pig in that random tornado. I looked it up- Korea doesn’t get very many tornados. Because it’s hilly. So it’s literally God coming down to her, saying “you will marry this North Korean man, so help me.”
M: What if he is a spy after all? Like he really is South Korean?
E: A beautiful spy? A beautiful secret agent?
M: She is going to regret telling him he’s attractive.
E: There’s absolutely no way that she gets away, so yeah, I think that’s a given.
M: I’m surprised they let her be the paraglider test subject.
Just a spontaneous twister, you know
E: It’s like a publicity stunt, right? Also, as if any of her staff has any power over her.
M: I guess they were busy negotiating the non-blurred out earrings in the tabloid.
E: That was a great little character introduction. Very memorable, very telling.
M: You were so concerned about why they were paragliding so close to the border, not even knowing it didn’t matter.
E: I don’t even know how close to the border they are now! I assumed there was gonna be like a thunderstorm and she’d get a little off course? But no, just a tornado. She could have been completely in the South.
M: Seoul, Google tells me, is only 35 miles from the DMZ. The DMZ: The Demilitarized Zone. That was my little vocab lesson.
E: I did know it was pretty close. Yes though, our new game- we think that the Korean text that shows up on screen sometimes is defining vocabulary words, but the Netflix subtitles do not translate them. So we must guess.
M: Overall, the production value is much higher than our previous two shows. Or at least very flashy.
E: “How many camera shots?” “Yes.” It creates a bit of a paparazzi effect, if I’m generous and saying it’s for an artistic reason.
M: They eased up once she was stuck in the North Korean tree.
E: Yeah, so, just to state it clearly. This is a show about a South Korean business woman being blown by a tornado, while paragliding, into North Korea. And assumedly falling in love. In case you didn’t get it yet.
M: I’m enjoying that Se-ri already has a very clear personality. The leads on all three of these Split Screen shows have that spastic thing going on, but hers is definitely tinged with more of the BS artist successful businesswoman kind of vibe. She keeps talking until she finds something that works.
E: She has a pretty clear character arc mapped out for her too. Nothing like a vacation in North Korea to humble you I guess.
M: Nothing like watching the man who sort of rescued you from a tree get blown to bits by a landmine.
There’s nothing like a good meet cute in a romance
E: I assume he did actually step on a mine? I was kinda thinking there would be a joke like he stepped on a crackling bit of bark or something, but I think it was a mine.
M: NPR tells me that there really are hundreds of thousands of landmines in the DMZ. I’m learning so much!
E: People like to leave landmines places, unexploded. I know Vietnam has a lot too.
M: This is why he should not have allowed her to run away. Se-ri will be dead in just a few minutes. She really should be dead already. From the freak tornado.
E: From a pig to the face.
M: I realize it’s only the first half of the first episode, so this isn’t saying much, but this portion was refreshingly focused. One story arc. A ridiculous one, but just one.
E: I bet we could go back to the beginning of Boys Over Flowers and Coffee Prince, and it would be similar.
M: I’m less certain about Coffee Prince than Boys Over Flowers. And Boys Over Flowers made the show seem very different than it was!
E: Still time for this show to fake us out. Like that fake owl.
M: New segment: Emma’s Wildlife Watch!
E: Birds? Fake. Owl? Fake. Deer? Probably real.
M: Okay, Romance Tracker time. It’s early, but what are your thoughts on our apparent main couple?
E: I want Purchasing Manager to be happy. Let him go home. That’s a theme for these episodes.
M: The banter was appealing. I mean, he could have killed her at any moment. But that’s at the heart of all good banter.
E: He was very friendly and nice for a man who could have freely shot her whenever he so desired.
M: Could he have? Wouldn’t that have been bad?
E: That’s a good point. He definitely should have uppercutted her to the head and knocked out, like immediately.
They did make him out to be a bit of an action star
M: You’re right, blunt force trauma in this situation would not be surprising or suspicious.
E: Anyway, seems fine for now- we don’t know a super lot about Captain Ri at the moment. Other than, he can do a sick spinning jump kick! Oh man, how did I almost forget about that!
M: Let’s hope he’s only committed moderate human rights violations in his past, much like our other two romantic leads.
E: Yeah, he can’t really do too much worse than Jun-pyo, truly.
My Hero Academia S5E1: “All Hands on Deck! Class 1-A!”
M: The baby heroes are back, baby!
E: They are back and the same.
M: It shouldn’t have surprised me that this episode was very boring.
E: I had fun! On the spectrum of opening episodes, not counting Season One, I had the most fun with this one.
M: The season one opener, to my memory, still somehow consisted of roughly 40% flashbacks.
E: Flashbacks we hadn’t seen before though. In-universe flashbacks. Also this only had like a minute of flashback. It was just reintroducing us to the 1-A characters for the children in the audience who don’t remember their names.
M: How would this help you to remember their names? Present Mic screamed all of their names at you for a second, and then they were gone.
E: It shows on the screen. It’s auditory. And it demonstrates them using their powers in the story as they are reintroduced. That’s called reinforcement.
M: I get it, I just think that these kinds of recap episodes are outdated. I realize this wasn’t so much recap as “here’s the characters again,” but still.
E: There are a lot of children in the audience who may not have watched the show since it aired last. Which was like a year ago.
Also – great computer wallpapers for your favorite character
M: My Hero Academia is for ADULTS.
E: Sure. You’re right.
M: Mirio’s peach joke last season? ADULTS ONLY.
E: I seriously did find this an amusing return, however. I like seeing silly antics. I am a simple woman.
M: It was charming! I just prefer my antics to be chilling in dorms-based, not “Froppy wraps her tongue around a third-year” based.
E: Mirio fall off building. Me laugh.
M: Why are they letting him do this? He is in danger.
E: He’s worked out a lot, I’m sure he could swim to safety if he really needed to. But Eri’s napping, and he’s got nothing else to do but be sad about his Quirk, so maybe it’s a needed distraction
M: But what will Eri do if her emotional support high-schooler isn’t there when she wakes up?
E: The shot of them, like, studying? at the end of the OP is cute.
M: Big Assassination Classroom vibes. Like when Nagisa was teaching the little kids. Prediction: Mirio will become an assassin.
E: Speaking of, Aizawa has apparently abandoned Eri to Mirio and adopted a different, beefy son. Or was it bulky?
M: Are you talking about my comment about Todoroki or…?
E: I was talking about that one line from the last time we saw Shinso where they were like “wow he’s beefy” or something
M: Okay, I wasn’t sure if that was a joke about me thinking young Shoto looked a little husky in his costume.
E: Aizawa could adopt Shoto too.
M: I hate that his first name is his hero name. When Iida called him Shoto? I had a visceral reaction to that.
E: Just sudden first name basis with everyone. Better than Bakugo. “Hey, uh, Undecided!”
M: Everyone knows to call him Lord Explosion Murder.
E: “Prepare to be murdered!”
M: The episode was worth it for the shot of Bakugo on a convertible, an electric convertible apparently, riding in.
Look at this boy. Committing heroic crime.
E: Where did he get that?
M: That’s what I was just about to say!
E: Do they just have working cars where anyone can get them? Or did he steal a teacher’s car?
M: Do any of these kids have their driver’s license?
E: I don’t think they’re old enough!
M: Oh the lawsuits, they are piling up.
E: Poor Kaminari.
M: Poor Kota.
E: I like his funny beak face.
M: The shorts. Come on. It’s like he’s trying to be a sidekick forever.
E: It’s distinctive! Memorable!
M: His bare legs, yes.
E: Anyway, our training sessions ends with Amajiki’s death and new hairdos for all of 1-A. As it should be.
M: On the plus side, fried squid for dinner!
E: Oh noooooo.
M: Addressing the one story element beyond the no doubt permanent hair changes for Class 1-A: let the record show I said that Hawks was sus before he took a meeting with Dabi.
E: Do you think he’s really sus though? Or is it like a double play? Or is it like a double double play?
M: Or is he…a beautiful spy?
I think it is funny how small he is here
E: Well, either way, he’s clearly that.
M: See, I was sure he was going to be a traitor, but now that the show has revealed in episode one of the season that he’s meeting with Dabi? I think he’s probably not actually a traitor.
E: He’s very hard to read, but remembering from last season, I at least think his admiration of Endeavor is real. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
M: That in itself is probably a red flag.
E: We do also see the start of what happened after Endeavor’s big fight. Dabi brought his discordant violins to the party.
M: Choose violins not violence, kids who need this dumb recap.
E: The way he says “This is our first meeting, right? Right?” felt a little obvious to me.
M: Does Endeavor know Dabi too? Oh.
E: I’m pretty sure Dabi’s related to him somehow. Like. Pretty sure.
M: No. More. Endeavor. Son. Storylines.
E: We just want Shoto and his journey to recovery from his YouTube addiction.
M: Literally I don’t want to know that in addition to being a terrible father, Endeavor was stepping out on his wife.
E: Maybe it was pre-marriage. I don’t know how old Dabi is, but he’s older than Shoto certainly.
Watch out Shoto, this is what happens when you watch too much YouTube
M: He has three kids who are older than Shoto already, right?
E: Yeah, we’ve only met two of them in the show at this point, I think, but I remember there’s three total.
M: I just don’t want to meet the kid Endeavor conceived…I guess he wouldn’t have gone to college. Conceived like, at UA, since he went right into being a hero after that.
E: I hate this storyline idea I made up in my head, but maybe Dabi came out so wrong, with his very powerful fire quirk- I’m assuming he’s burned himself from his own Quirk although maybe it’s from something else- and Endeavor was like “can’t do that again, better get into eugenics.”
M: Maybe he’s more like a Frankenstein’s monster. Like Endeavor sewed him together somehow.
E: I would be down for mad scientist!Endeavor. That’s a twisty backstory.
M: In the end, Dabi kills his entire family! If only Endeavor had taught him how to read.
E: Damn. All these villains need is some reading, riting, and rithmitic.
M: Does anyone on this show know how to read?
E: Present Mic teaches English!
M: I think your mad scientist!Endeavor idea falls apart because there is no way he learned enough science at UA to be a scientist.
E: Any last thoughts on the episode? We have to come up with something to replace Caffeine Watch.
M: Well, let’s do Lawsuit Watch while we brainstorm. There is almost too much to go over this week. I don’t know where to begin.
E: Are there lawsuits involved with crossing the Korean border?
M: No idea. Her company is certainly in trouble though.
E: Sue the weather service.
M: One of the other paragliders literally threatened to sue. Her brother is being sued for punching a dude’s teeth out!
E: High number of real lawsuits on CLOY.
M: Meanwhile, at UA, YOU CAN’T USE STUDENTS AS VILLAINS. OR AS RESCUE DUMMIES. WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE POWERS.
E: Driving a car without a license.
M: You can’t get sued for that, but Nezu should get sued for providing the vehicle.
E: Kaminari is just sent to jail for carjacking.
M: I’ll declare it a draw. Okay, new idea for the other category: Realism Watch! What do you think, which show was more realistic this week?
E: Oh man. I feel like it’s gotta go to My Hero because there was no god-sent tornado.
Similar amounts of carnage though (EDITOR EMMA: TIL that these kinds of gags have their roots in blackface, and I feel like that’s relevant to call out when it happens)
M: Yeah, I’m with you on that. MHA was pretty coherent with its internal logic this time. CLOY seemingly takes place in the real world…or does it?
E: Even if it doesn’t, like the tornado just sweeps it. Oho.
M: Ohohoho.
E: What are we doing for predictions now? I can’t use knowing emojis anymore!
M: I mean, do you want to make some predictions?
E: Maybe we each do like two now? Instead of you doing all of them?
M: That leaves me very little space for serious predictions, but that’s okay.
E: We’ll try this for this week and feel it out. You first.
M: Okay, prediction one: it’s hard to make serious plot predictions at this point about UA, so I’ll stick to Endeavor and Hawks for now. Endeavor has permanently hurt himself in some way. Not like All-Might, but not unlike All-Might.
E: 
This is just the Endeavor emoji now.
Okay, Emma’s prediction one: Endeavor has lost his eye. He grows out his hair and takes up the knife. He buys a nightclub. And some cool shoes. His eyepatch has a flaming dragon on it.
M: 
Okay, second prediction. I can’t believe you took the Yakuza one. Bakugo finally picks a name for himself this season, but the name is “Deku Sux.”
E: 
Final prediction: While Mirio was busy pretending to drown, Eri emerged from wherever they’re keeping her, and stole one of Kota’s bunnies. Now she is his lifelong enemy. It’s his show now. Him and his shorts.
M: 
–
Emma here! It’s finally arrived! Split Screen 3! Will we actually finally manage to catch up before MHA Season 6. No, I don’t think so, just making that prediction now.
Next time! MHA’s season gets started in earnest, and Crash Landing on You continues to go wild. Look forward to it!