K-Drama Rewind, Strong Girl Bong-soon: Park Hyung-sik and Park Bo-young's classic has heart, humour and extra filler

Strong Girl Bong-soon feels like a carefully prepared dish, made with love and precision, until extra ingredients get tossed in, simply because they were there on the kitchen counter and someone thought they might work. Still, you know your favourite parts: You’ll savour the potatoes and chicken, setting aside the peas and other vegetables, normally delicious, but out of place here, adding little to the flavour. You’ll enjoy the meal and keep coming back for more—only next time, you might ask, just a little hopefully, “Could we skip the extra filling?”

Nevertheless, the show, starring Park Hyung-sik and Park Bo-young is thoroughly bizarre, batty, and yet enjoyable.The plot focuses on Bo-young’s Bong-soon, a woman with superhuman strength. While nursing an unreciprocated crush for her childhood friend who is now a police officer, she finds herself at crossroads after being hired as a bodyguard for Min-hyuk (Hyung-sik), a games company CEO. A wonderfully dramatic man in whose blood confidence flows more than red, he is curious about her, and later falls head-over-heels. She slowly begins to return his feelings. Meanwhile, a serial killer lurks in the shadows, abducting innocent women and imprisoning them in his eerie, Bluebeard-like lair.

And so, begins a chaotic chase to find and arrest him. 

It seems simple, but the show is packed with a dizzying number of subplots, most of which fade from memory once it’s over. What lingers, or rather what fans still hold onto, is the heartwarming love story between Bong-soon and Min-hyuk. It swings from giggly and cutesy (Hyung-sik being the giggly one here) to genuinely nerve-wracking—especially in the scene where she’s trapped with a bomb, and he desperately tries to break down the door with bloodied hands. It’s one of the show’s most gripping moments, with both leads delivering performances that heighten the tension to near unbearable levels. Bong-soon begs him to leave, but he refuses, smiling faintly before collapsing behind the door. We’ve seen scenes like this countless times, but what makes it unforgettable is how raw and real their desperation feels. Life-threatening scenes aside, their love confessions are just as wholesome as they can be tense, another favourite being a rather heartbreaking one in the library, where Bong-soon is overcome by the need to be noble and sacrifice her relationship.  Perhaps, this is the reason why the show is considered one of the benchmarks of K-Drama romance, and why fans still share the clips of ‘Bong-bong and Min-min’ eight years down the line. 

The serial killer plot is actually well-written, and doesn’t seem phoned in just ‘to keep things interesting’, as what happened with Crash Course on Romance. There was no real motive for the killer as such, or a believable one, but perhaps it was better this way, instead of delving into another overly complicated plot that might not have led anywhere. He was bad for the sake of being bad and maybe, that’s enough. 

All in all, Strong Girl Bong-soon delivers a rush of sweetness, fun, and comfort—if you don’t mind fast-forwarding through 30 minutes of filler in each episode. Watch it for them, their antics, and of course, some heightened tension in the form of a murderer on the loose. 

Owing to the show’s success, the sequel ‘Strong Girl Nam-soon’  was announced, but lacked some of the verve and fun of the original. Still, Hyung-sik and Bo-young’s sharp entrance brought back a spark of the original’s chaos, if only for a moment.