Crash Landing on You vs Queen of Tears: the newer one fixed the ending fans still argue about
One writer made both of these dramas, and fans of the first have been arguing about its last ten minutes for six years.
Park Ji-eun wrote Crash Landing on You, which aired on tvN from December 2019 to February 2020 with Hyun Bin as North Korean officer Ri Jeong-hyeok and Son Ye-jin as South Korean heiress Yoon Se-ri. Its finale drew a 21.7% nationwide rating, a tvN record that stood for four years. The show that broke it was her next one, Queen of Tears, whose finale hit 24.85% in April 2024. Kim Soo-hyun plays a farmer's son and Kim Ji-won the chaebol heiress he married, three years into a marriage that's falling apart. On Netflix, it became the most-watched Korean series on the service, with 682.6 million hours viewed.
Spoilers for both finales from here on.
How Crash Landing on You ends
The border wins. After a prisoner exchange, Jeong-hyeok goes back to the North, and Se-ri spends the next year living on scheduled text messages he set up before he left. She then funds a music scholarship in Switzerland, betting that the former piano prodigy will turn up there someday. He does, and they find each other again on a paragliding trip.
The epilogue settles their arrangement: two weeks a year together at a cottage in Switzerland, and the rest of the year apart.
Why fans still argue about it
Two weeks a year is either the most honest ending a North-South romance could have, or a very scenic way of not choosing one. Both camps have a point:
- For it — the show never pretends the border isn't there, and two weeks in Switzerland is a lot more than either country would allow.
- Against it — after sixteen episodes of these two beating impossible odds, the finale hands them a long-distance relationship with a vacation schedule.
How Queen of Tears ends
This time, the illness is the obstacle, and it loses. Hae-in's brain tumor surgery succeeds, though she wakes up with gaps in her memory. Her obsessive childhood friend Eun-sung kidnaps her, Hyun-woo takes a bullet meant for her, and he survives that too. Once she remembers everything, including what drove them apart, they decide to try again.
Then the show does something Crash Landing on You never did. It skips ahead and shows the rest of their life: a daughter, decades together, and a 2074 epilogue in which a gray-haired Hyun-woo brings lavender to Hae-in's grave in Germany. She died at 84. The final scene reunites them in a lavender field.
Crash Landing on You rationed its couple to two weeks a year. Queen of Tears gave its couple fifty.
Fans had reason to worry before the finale. Earlier in the season, the show had flashed a tombstone for Hae-in dated 2034. The ending moved it forty years later.
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The new argument
Fixing one ending started another. Some viewers found the rescue in the last episode hard to buy, and the afterlife reunion drew its own complaints. TIME's Geoffrey Bunting was harder on it than most, writing that the series begins a "slow, inevitable, and disappointing crawl toward a cliched, happy ending."
Kim Ji-won, at least, saw the pressure coming. She said friends kept texting her before the finale aired, with messages like: "Is it going to be a happy ending or sad ending? Just tell me."
For the record: Hyun Bin and Son Ye-jin got married in March 2022, and their son was born that November.
Previously we wrote: Hotel Del Luna: do they end up together? The writers' answer has a loophole