It’s an episode that’s equal parts giddy, poignant, measuredly urgent, and funny. And guess who’s back?
“I like you. As crazy as it is to like you, I like you. There. I said it. Happy now?” Chul Soo asks. “PFFFFFt mere wor — ” Sang-shil’s taunt gets cut short when Chul Soo grabs her face and plants a kiss right on her lips.
They edited out the blinks this time around and this is a much better version. Love his hands framing her face and her standing on the tip of her toes.
Also love her dazed look as he moves away from her face. Love his hesitant, “Well, that’s the best I could do.” Aww, his face. Her face. Hahahha. They’re adorable.
She looks softly stunned if it is possible to look softly stunned! He’s slightly breathless and looks a bit scared. Hee. Love them. He then adorably trudges off and she stands there in an awkward daze. Ahhaha.
He looks back and shouts at her to be good while he’s gone. She doesn’t want him to leave, of course, but doesn’t know how to tell him that. Hehehe. So she hems and haws and comes up with a random, “Leave once we’re done with the week’s groceries.” Doofuses.
Chul Soo already guesses what she’s up to yet he plays along. Hhehe. Whatever item she starts to buy, he patiently points out how they bought it only a week back.
Chul Soo intently stares at her face, slightly leaning into her, and makes Sang-shil self-conscious. To distract herself, she grabs a bottle of dwenjang (? bean paste?) from a nearby shelf. He asks her to look at what she picked and says they don’t need it.
“Dwenjang!” she swears. Hehe. Her cart remains empty at the end of the jaunt, and she curses the crappy store.
Sang-shil then orders him to treat her to jajangmyun. She overhears a guy at the next table ordering a jajangmyun platter. She asks Chul Soo what’s that. He explains there are varieties of jajangmyun. Now she’s offended she was missing out on so much. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that? Wait… is this version the cheapest, you cheapskate!”
Chul Soo smiles and tells her she can try the other versions later. Ooh. “Are you saying I should stay with you forever and try different jajangmyun?” she coyly asks. “Why, you don’t want to?” he counters. Hehehe. They manage to talk the jajangmyun code-talk so well. “Well. I don’t know about you, but you know I love jajangmyun.” Right. We all do.
Once outside, while waiting to cross the road, Sang-shil asks if he’ll treat her to makgeulli next. “Don’t you want me to leave today?” Chul Soo asks. “Should I not go?” he teases. She perks up and says, “Can you not go?” But then he says he needs to.
When the Walk sign comes on, he grabs her hand out of the blue and they cross the street. Ahahhaha, the slow mo of feels~~ The love bugs are giddy in love. He comments on her cold hands and jokes about her cold heart. She counters that his warm hands should be fine to balance things out. AhHHem.
“Jang Chul Soo, you know I’m filthy rich! You hit the jackpot with me,” she says. “But what if I don’t get my memory or my money back?”
“What? Then I’ll have to put up with you without the hope of money?” he teases. “You can do eeet, Chul Soo,” she cheerleads. Heheh.
“It’ll all be okay once I get my memory back,” she says optimistically. As if to warn them all will not be okay, a jajangmyun delivery scooter rudely drives in between them forcing the two to let go of each other’s hands.
Finally, Chul Soo’s ready to leave. He offers to drop her home, but she says, “No, let’s separate here.” He does a double-take at that sentence as it could also mean “Let’s break up.” I think? “Bye!” she waves. “Buh buy it is then!” And he leaves. Do you feel the gentle breeze of sneaky Foreshadowing? “I forgot to tell him I like him. Oh well, when he comes back…” Sang-shil thinks.
All this time, our Yoo Kyung has had a million ants in her pretty pants dying to let Chul Soo oppa know that the woman he’s with is married. She finds Chul Soo’s office closed, and he doesn’t answer the phone until he gets inside his car. She tells him she needs to meet him urgently.
Yoo Kyung runs into Sang-shil while on her way to Chul Soo. “I have to tell oppa something important about you,” she tells Sang-shil.
“If it concerns me, tell it to me first,” orders Sang-shil.
“You… why are you so full of yourself when you don’t know a thing about who you are?” asks Yoo Kyung, barely masking her scorn.
“And you? Why are you still clinging to the past? Let it go,” advises Sang-shil in turn. Hahahah. Mutual character deconstruction. Great!
“You really don’t seem to know,” Yoo Kyung guesses. “You can’t have oppa because—” Sang-shil interrupts: “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll hang on to him till the end. So will Chul Soo.”
“You can say that because you don’t know who you are,” warns Yoo Kyung. “Right. I don’t. But I will. Once I get my memories back. That doesn’t mean what I have with Chul Soo will end.” Boom!
“Are you sure you’ll be able to hold on till the end?” Yoo-kyung goads. “Just what is it that you’re driving at?” Sang-shil’s irritated. “I just told you, there’s no end for us. That’s why I’m so certain.”
“Since you’re so sure, I guess it’s not my place to get in between you two, right?” Yoo Kyung retreats. “Flower Girl, I don’t want to run into you again,” says Sang-shil. Hehe. “I guess you feel the same way?”
Now Yoo Kyung changes tactics. “Hey… do you know Jo Anna? She’s a woman I know.” She leaves with: “You’ll soon meet her. That should be fun! Bye!” This throws off Sang-shil.
Yoo Kyung meets Chul Soo at his office. She decides not to actively do anything so she doesn’t tell Chul Soo what she found out. She guesses Billy will take Anna away soon. Smart cookie, Yoo Kyung. She is crafty in this subtle way.
Instead, she says she’s here to apologise for coming on too strong the day before. Then foreseeing Chul Soo’s imminent heartbreak, she says, “Should you ever have a hard time, lean on me.” A random aside: I love the phrase “ki dae”. It’s like you’re giving the other person permission to be vulnerable. Anyway, that’s how I see it.
An ode to Yoo Kyung: When it’s hot, Yoo Kyung wants it cold, when it’s cold, Yoo Kyung wants it hot. Oh, Yoo Kyung, why always wanting what is not?
Meanwhile, Billy hands over a briefcase full of money to Sec Gong and orders Gong to give it to Chul Soo. Billy plans to leave this town with Anna before Chul Soo returns. Later, he gives himself a pep talk: “Remain strong Billy!” Eheh. You weak-willed man.
So remember how mercenary teacher woman is now Duk Goo’s girlfriend? She visits Duk Goo’s farm hoping to count the 100 cows for real. So imagine her surprise when she finds there’s hardly 10 cows! Heheheh. Ms CashCow then faints when Duk Goo’s mom explains how they own only 2 of the 10 cows. And even among the 2, one will soon die. Ahahhah.
Kang-ja thinks it might snow today! She tells that to Billy who’s back in the village demanding Anna’s ring, which he lost at Chul Soo’s house the other day, and, which he thinks Kang-ja stole.
The conversation that follows is gold!
“If you tell me where the ring is, I’ll make sure it’ll snow,” Billy promises. “Ajussi, does that even make sense?” lectures Kang-ja. Ahhaha. “Do you take me for a fool?” she continues. Billy’s now confused. “Snow… ” Kang-ja explains, “only Duk Goo oppa can make it snow!” Bwahahhaha. And here we thought she was talking sense!
Billy pleads with Kang-ja to return the ring and Kang-ja does take out a flower ring and places it on Billy’s palm. “Ajussi, now that you have my ring, let it go. Don’t take unni away,” she advises in that uncanny way she has about by-the-way-ing the crux of what really matters.
“Unni really likes Chul Soo oppa. If you take her away, Chul Soo oppa will cry. Unni will cry too.” Ha! From the mouth of Kang-ja! Best succinct argument for divorce, ever? Love it! Every village needs an idiot to show the sane ones their errant ways.
Billy now stands in front of Chul Soo’s house watching Anna jump ropes with the kids. Sang-shil’s trying and failing to jump ropes until she succeeds and the children clap. Billy watches her with such a look of longing, regret, and wonder. He looks so sad and pathetic while he does so. Aw, Billy.
Sang-shil sees him and comes towards him to talk. “I think I left something here…” He could mean the ring, he could mean Anna. “My wife’s ring,” he explains and something about the way he said it makes me tear up.
“You seem to keep losing precious things. First your cat, and now the ring,” Sang-shil points out.
“That’s why I came looking for it,” he says again with that pitiful face. “Will you remember that I came here to get it back…” he pleads. This man just pulls at my pity strings. I may or may not have cried for Billy again. “I will. I’ll make sure to return it if I find it,” promises Sang-shil.
He then says, “You look very happy… and comfortable.” Tears. Dammit. He leaves but doubt gnaws at him. “What if I can’t make her as comfortable?” Yoo Kyung wonders why Billy’s dilly-dallying.
That night, with Chul Soo not at home, the kids are busy playing video games while Sang-shil goes about housekeeping. She orders the kids to clear the dinner table. Once they do, she gets ready to do the dishes. She notices a huge lidded pot and finds a stash of coins in it. She claims the loot but ends up dropping the coins all over the floor. The kids help her pick the coins up. She then notices Anna’s ring on the floor near the fridge.
She remembers Billy’s ring from the day before which had also seemed familiar to her. She nearly tries the ring on her finger but then changes her mind. She decides to return it the next day. She then puts the kids to bed, but not before expertly slamming a cockroach with a towel. How far somebody’s come to becoming a functional adult! Not that being able to smash a cockroach makes one an adult…
Sang-shil snuggles in her toasty bed and is soon asleep. Then a strange thing happens. Anna, who seems to have come out of Sang-shil’s subconscious, picks up the ring Sang-shil left at the dining table. This, and the following scene, made me tear up pretty bad.
Anna then sits on the table beside the sofa and watches Sang-shil. Arang, anyone?
“What are you doing here? It’s time to go back,” Anna tells Sang-shil. Sang-shil mutters in her sleep: “But it’s so warm here…”
“It’ll hurt more if you stay too long,” Anna warns as she caresses the wedding ring in her hand. “If you don’t want to get hurt, return to your old self. You’ve never cared about someone so much that you’d get hurt…”
Anna watches Sang-shil cry in her sleep.
A phone call from Chul Soo wakes up Sang-shil who suddenly feels down. “Jang Chul Soo, I’m afraid… What if I lose everything that I have now when I get my memory back?”
“Don’t worry. I promised to hang onto you. Even if you forget, I’ll remember for you.” Gah, who writes his lines, I wonder. Heh.
“Ok. You do that for me. Even if I go far away, find me, and tell me all about it. Ok?” She suddenly feels much better. Chul Soo has a knack for that.
“Make sure you don’t go too far though,” he warns. “It might be difficult for me to find you.”
“So what if it’s hard? That’s love,” she says. Look who’s talking! Ha! “Jang Chul Soo, saranghey!” Hee. I don’t think the Hongs have had their heroines say that spontaneously, mid-drama. Gumiho’s an adorable exception, of course.
At the other end of the line, Chul Soo’s quiet. She doesn’t wait for his response and cuts off. “I told him. I don’t care if I get hurt,” she says. “How dare she tell me over the phone!! I was caught off-guard, I couldn’t say a thing!” he complains. Hehehe. “That didn’t count!” He yells at the phone. Then he smiles. Aw. His expression mirrors mine.
The next day, Sang-shil shares her coin stash with the 3 kids. When she learns that the littlest one can’t count and labels every number a 100, she teaches him a curt but effective lesson.
She places 100 chocoballs, which the kid loves, in front of him. For every mistake the boy makes, Sang-shil gets to eat the chocolate. For every correct counting, the child earns one chocolate. In the end, the kid salvages 60 chocoballs, and learns to count to boot.
Sang-shil is so efficient at disciplining the kids. I wonder why she turned out such to be such a brat! Ehhehe. Until she met Chul Soo, that is. Now there’s one guy who can rein in Sang-shil’s idiosyncrasies.
So Chul Soo and Duk Goo are working non-stop in Busan. Sec Gong, who has been secretly spying on them, reports that Chul Soo might finish the work in 3 days! We know why Chul Soo’s eager to get home, kekeke, but he tells Duk Goo it’s because of the kids.
Earlier, Chul Soo had learned that Billy had pulled strings to get him hired for this job. That had aroused Chul Soo’s suspicion. Duk Goo and Chul Soo had also wondered if there might be someone behind Sang-shil’s plight.
Sec Gong’s spying hasn’t been that easy because Chul Soo doesn’t seem to take breaks. Harrassed, Sec Gong misplaces the money-laden briefcase which the local workers use as their lunch table. Gong snatches the briefcase and runs. The workers are riled.
It’s just Sec Gong’s luck that he runs into his noonim, Duk Goo’s mom, who’s there to force Duk Goo to get back with Ms CashCow. Why, god knows. Soon, Chul Soo and Duk Goo and the workers demand to know why Gong’s there.
Cornered, Gong meets with Chul Soo alone and gives him the load of cash provided Chul Soo agrees to stay in Busan for a few more days. This is ridiculous to Chul Soo and he refuses the money saying he’ll get to the bottom of this by meeting Billy himself. Chul Soo drives home, alone, while Gong warns Billy that their plan backfired.
Billy, having lost Anna’s real ring, has now ordered a replica. Oh, Billy, when will you see the light?
Sang-shil tries on Anna’s ring and gets a flashback to the first time when Billy put the ring on her finger. Sang-shil’s really disturbed why there’s Billy in her memories. “Maybe because I’ve been seeing him so often…” She dismisses the vision but now sees herself drunk on the deck of the yacht. She sees the ring roll down the deck just as it did the last time she asked Billy to see his ring.
“I felt the same way the last time I saw the ring,” she says. Kang-ja, who seems to be a regular at Chul Soo’s house these days, tells Sang-shil: “Don’t go to that ajussi, unni. I already gave that ajussi my ring, so you don’t need to.” But Sang-shil insists she needs to return this ring as it’s not hers.
Both Chul Soo and Sang-shil make their separate way to Billy. Dundun. Sang-shil reaches the resort before Chul Soo. She decides to leave the ring at the reception. Eeep! Since she’d gone unrecognized when she came here with the ajumma gang, it surprises me that the staff recognizes her!! Sang-shil feels uneasy as the hotel staff gathers around her, gaping. She walks out without leaving the ring.
Yoo Kyung learns about how the dead madame is in the lobby. She puts two and two together and rushes to stop Sang-shil from leaving. “I’ll take you home,” says Yoo Kyung as she leads a wary Sang-shil to Billy’s villa. “You should put an end to things today,” Yoo Kyung adds.
The two women stand in front of the villa. Sang-shil’s unsure and scared. Yoo Kyung’s smug. A maid screams on seeing Sang-shil and runs away. Yoo Kyung smirks. Ow. “Go in,” she tells Sang-shil. “This is where it ends.”
Sang-shil slowly approaches the house. She turns to look at Yoo Kyung once before going in. Since Billy bought this villa after Anna disappeared, the house most likely is completely new to Sang-shil. She looks around and sees Princess the Cat on the floor. She picks up the cat and walks around the house.
Predictably, the next thing that catches her attention is the big framed wedding picture of Billy and Anna. Yes! Truth time. She gets a flashback to her wedding day. This triggers another headache. She then remembers telling Billy how the three of them, Princess included, were a family. “Who… who am I?” she asks, distraught.
Aw, it’s like she’s a stranger to her own life. How there’s this disconnect, a dissociation between the fragments of her memory and what she feels. The memory puzzle pieces must be the facts of her life since her brain has stored those images, but she cannot validate them because she doesn’t have emotions attached to them. Oh, amnesia, what a mess you make of lives.
Billy, having just learned Anna’s at his villa, rushes in. Eep. “What’s going on?” she asks Billy. “What is this?” she repeats as if this were a staged mind-game. Billy walks up to her with an uncharacteristically resolute face. “Anna…” he calls her by her real name. “Anna,” he repeats. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“I don’t know you,” she shouts, starting to panic more. “You and I are family,” he says, unhelpfully.
Chul Soo arrives at the villa where Yoo Kyung tries to stop him from going in, but he rushes in, anyway. By now, Sang-shil and Billy are out on the deck. Billy tries to explain his actions: “I really thought you were dead. I found out you were alive much later.”
“If you’re my family, why didn’t you come for me?” she asks.
To save himself, Billy then lies: “You… you were with someone else. Because of him, I couldn’t bring you back. But, you know I could never leave you.” A worm called Billy has turned. “I wanted to find you,” he repeats.
She fingers the ring in her hand and he tells her that ring is hers. “Come back to me, Anna,” he cajoles.
Oh no! Chul Soo seems to have heard the entire conversation. He stands there with this sad face. Sang-shil’s distraught to see Chul Soo there.
“Chul Soo, Chul Soo… why are you here?” she asks. “You knew, too?” Oh no! I never thought they’d play it this way. That she’ll get paranoid and doubt Chul Soo too!
“This is all a lie, right? Who… who am I? WHAT’s going on??!” she gets increasingly agitated as she backs away from both the men and skirts the edge of the deck pool.
“It’s NOT a lie,” Billy tells her. “Trust me!!” Chul Soo remains silent. “I can’t trust anyone!” she shouts, almost at the edge of the pool. This is so well done.
SPLASH! Ahhhhh, full circle. Sang-shil drops into the pool, by accident; just as she fell into the sea on the night she lost her memory. It was water that took it away, and looks like it’s water who’ll give it back.
“Who am I?” Sang-shil thinks as she slowly sinks to the bottom. Her worried face suddenly looks certain as she opens her eyes, frowns, and thinks: “I’m Jo Anna!”
DUN DUN!
Anna’s back! Perfect!
Thoughts:
But does that mean Sang-shil’s gone? Need they be mutually exclusive? If they wipe out all her memories post-amnesia, I don’t know if I won’t *@%$#%$&^%. But we’ll pick, or more like hulk-smash, that nit when we find it.
This episode was so well done! I really have to commend the tonal consistency of this series. The Hong sisters’ dramas get pretty angsty in the second half, but this show has managed to work in all these threads of emotions so well. Take this ep as an example. We started all light and cute with Chul Soo and Sang-shil so giddy and adorable in love. But even that sweetness was tinged with foreshadowing and we could feel that the “Annyeong!” would mean goodbye for a while. Life, as the two have recently come to know it, was about to change.
Then we got all the nefarious forces working in the background with a heightened sense of urgency — what with Yoo Kyung learning the truth and with Billy and his newfound spine and briefcase of cash and his sending Chul Soo to Busan.
So I kind of expected Sang-shil to learn the truth from either of these two. I was betting on Yoo Kyung to be the news-bearer. That would have been predictable but it would get the balls rolling and get the job done. So I really LOVED how it was essentially Sang-shil herself who uncovered her own truth. She didn’t understand the truth. The truth freaked her out, but she did piece it together.
I also cannot really gnash my teeth at either Billy or Yoo Kyung. Billy’s been so pathetic. He’s al..most a sympathetic character to me. His recent desperation comes from a newfound knowledge that Anna is capable of being happy and he wants to try his hand at making her as happy. But Billy doesn’t realise that happiness is not something you force on someone. We’ll see if he’ll ever get to the point of accepting that he and Anna are wrong together. And Yoo Kyung’s just hoping that with Sang-shil turning out to be a married woman, she’ll get Chul Soo all to herself. She seemed to perversely enjoy the irony of Sang-shil’s situation, and that was not kind of her, but it’s the opportunity Yoo Kyung’s been waiting for to get Chul Soo back.
The most poignant thing this episode did was how it showed us Anna/Sang-shil’s fractured psyche. I loved that scene where Anna looks down on an asleep Sang-shil and they talk. I wonder if this was just something that was in the script or if this was something the PD and the Hong sisters collaborated on.
Because do you guys remember a similar scene in Arang?? I really loved that scene too! Here, though Anna is not a literal ghost, she’s been the metaphorical ghost of the show. We only meet her for the first 1 and a half episodes. We then meet her in Billy’s flashbacks and when she haunted Billy’s psyche. And, now, we meet her today as Sang-shil’s subconscious. Until she returned for real with a big splash at the end of the ep.
Remember what Anna told Sang-shil?
“You’ve never cared about someone so much that you’d get hurt…”
That’s the key to understanding Anna and her brittle existence. Having lost her parents so early in life, and then having lost her granny at 12, she didn’t have anyone who really cared for her until she met and married Billy. Everyone she’d cared about had eventually left her so she didn’t even allow herself to truly care for Billy because she didn’t want to be vulnerable again. That’s how she’s been trained hence the maladjusted life she lived. Though we could see how she couldn’t let Billy go, either. Their marriage was about such an odd sado-masochistic codependency.
With Billy and Anna, in the past, it was like she was desperately trying to hold on to a handful of sand — the more she clutched, the less she could hold on to. And, now, the reverse is true. The more Billy tries to hang on to Anna, the less Anna there is for him to hold.
Granted, not everyone who’s orphaned turns out to be like Anna, I bet, and I’d be the last one to argue that her character is life-like, but, like Dickens, the Hongs create these outrageous characters who are ‘caricaturish’, as some critics are wont to point out, but these characters feel strangely real. Ms. Havisham, anyone? If Ms. Havisham was thwarted love personified, then Anna is abandonment personified.
Anyway, I wonder where we’ll go from here. I don’t want Anna to have forgotten her bout as Sang-shil, because then what’s the friggin point? Since the dreaded time-skip hasn’t poked its head yet, I guess we’ll soon be seeing it. And I don’t really mind that, either.
Who can blame Anna for how she handles the return of her memory because I don’t know what it feels like to not KNOW who you are, who you’ve been, and then what to do with yourself when you find yourself again. I think, most of all, Anna will have to re-evaluate whom to trust. She needs to sort her life out and giving her time is the least people around her could do. Poor Chul Soo will be hit the hardest, though. Still, I hope the Angst hurts good. Show, I’m so close to stamping that Favourite seal on ya. Don’t let me down.
©dramababble 2015
This entry was posted by Maybee in 2015.
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