Hold on tight because there’s a high chance you’ll be thrown overboard this episode. And please cling to your hats (and tools) as well because people (and stuff) keep getting lost.
Seeing the man she’d sworn never to cross paths with again in her yacht, Anna’s first instinct is to stalk off.
“Dog thief!” Chul-soo yells at her and she screeches to a stop, does an about turn, and wobbles over to teach the name-calling bum a lesson — when she slips and lands in his arm in a perfect romantic-but-not-romantic dip.
To make things more awkward than they already are, Chul-soo gets distracted by Anna’s boobs, one of which has a prominent mole on it. Anna’s alarmed. It doesn’t help that a sudden movement of the yacht causes Chul-soo’s face to be smothered in her bosom.
Horrified, Anna starts pummeling him. But not before one cotton ball tucked in one of her toes floats to the ground like a dream.
So they wrestle around — AGAIN! She kicks him as he tries to escape. She grabs his plunger (lol the literal one) — AGAIN! — and demands that he explain his presence on her yacht. She suspects he’s stalking her and calls him a pervert. He counters that he’s here to change the showerhead and wouldn’t stay on the yacht even if he were forced to.
Now it’s Chul-soo’s turn to grow hostile. He advances towards her, angry, and demands the $3oo she owes him.
Anna refuses to pay him saying she no longer wants the shower-head changed and stalks off to the deck. He follows her and asks her to cough up $400 to make up for his lost time and effort.
He towers over her as she backs up against the deck rail. He grows more and more angry and vents out all the pent up rage he’s had against her since they first met. “Are you playing games with me?” He suspects she might have pranked him into changing the shower-head just to rile him up.
“You’re bored with life, aren’t you?” Chul-soo tries to sum up her existence. “You have all the time and money in the world, yet you have no one by your side except that sorry cat… You’re so lonely you could die, right?”
There does seem to be some truth in Chul-soo’s hurtful words and Anna does not like it. She screams at him to get off the yacht. When he doesn’t budge, she’s about to stalk off when he says: “That’s not how you’re supposed to live your life, you pathetic, bitter wench!”
This tips her over the edge. She turns around with her mad tigress face on and walks back to where Chul-soo’s standing and shoves him off the yacht!! Overbooooarddddd!!
She orders the yacht to move leaving Chul-soo shocked and oh so angry in the sea. Oh, but she’s not done just quite yet. She sees his tool-bag and prepares to throw it back to its owner.
Aw, now he changes tune. Gone is the righteous fury and he’s genuinely alarmed. He begs her not to throw the bag. He even says he’s sorry! But she’s deaf to his pleas and plop the bag goes into the sea. “I’ll kill you one of these days!” he shouts. “I doubt I’ll ever meet you again!” she retorts.
Billy’s resort staff decides to host a farewell party for him. It’s the general consensus that this brief Anna-less interlude is the perfect time for a party. What better way to set the mood than for Billy to sing? And what better song for a man so thoroughly henpecked to croon than ‘My Way’? I did it myyyyy wayyyyy…
Little do they know that Anna’s already back! And not in a good mood. Anna’s dramatic entry in the party hall stops the song. Silence falls as the crowd parts to make room for her. Billy cowers as she asks if this is what he was supposed to be ‘busy’ about. But, surprisingly, she allows the party to continue!
Conversations resume. Champagne flows. Maids gossip. Billy gives a heartfelt farewell speech as two of the maids decide to lace Anna’s champagne with laxative to pay her back for all the grief Anna put them through.
Anna accepts the champagne glass but is quick to sense something off. She orders the maid to taste the champagne. The maid panics and crashes to the floor with the tray. Again, the party screeches to a halt. Billy’s had enough. He’s hurt and angry Anna made a mess of the going away party.
When Anna tries to explain her suspicions, Billy thinks she’s trying to justify creating the ugly scene and drinks the laced champagne in her stead. Anna insists that she couldn’t care less about the rest of the world, but wants Billy to know that she had reasons to doubt the maid.
Billy’s at the end of his ropes. He simply walks off and the rest of the staff follows. Anna’s left alone in the huge ballroom. Accused by one and all to be the party-pooper, but her instincts about the maid was spot-on!
Back in his suite, Billy nurses some scotch and vows he’s had enough when Anna marches in with the laced glass saying she was right. Now it’s Billy’s turn to be mean: “You pooped the party… made baseless accusations … made me look bad… What more do you have to say?”
Anna’s taken aback by his vehemence. He accuses her of being the kind of person who enjoys torturing others. “Leave me alone already!” he shouts. Billy’s about to walk off when Anna shouts: “Don’t go!”
Those two words are supposed to be a desperate plea but come out as an angry command. Frustrated, she throws the champagne glass in her hand which then shatters Solomon the Fish’s bowl. Naaaaaaaaaaaaww!! Solomon flops about on the table-top. Billy can’t believe what just happened.
Billy picks up the gaspy Solomon -– why don’t you run to the toilet and put Solomon in water, ugh, you paralysed man -– who dies on his palm. He puts Solomon back on the table and clenches his fists in resolve.
Billy asks for a divorce. You sense that this is something he’s thought about but never dared to voice. Anna shows no remorse and continues to cling to her commands: “I told you not to go!” Billy’s not listening. He rants about not having had a second of happiness with Anna.
He grows really angry and years of frustration pour out: “I’d like to live as a human for once. Let’s divorce!” Her response? A royal, emphatic “No!” She softens her tone to add: “You’ve been my only family since I was 12. Since you are my family… I’ll forgive you this once.” Saying he can’t divorce her unless she’s dead, she stalks off.
Billy can’t worry about his plight for long, as the laxatives start working big time. Poor guy will spend his immediate future going to and coming out from the bathroom.
Meanwhile, Chul-soo has cooked up a foolhardy plan to snorkel-dive to retrieve his lost tools!! Duk-goo wisely tries to stop his bro from what is certainly a risky and foolish plan, when a woman in a sundress drops by for a chat.
This is Yoo-kyung. The sun sets prettily in the background as Chul-soo and Yoo-kyung sit down for a chat. It’s more of an awkward conversation with odd silent pauses. Yoo-kyung seems to know all about Chul-soo and his situation. She even knows the kids by name.
Chul-soo is polite and stiff with her as he listens to her talk of going to the US with her soon-to-be-hubby who has a Ph.D. She says she’s back in the village to tie things up before she leaves. She asks to meet Chul-soo and the kids for one last get-together. Chul-soo realises his cellphone’s dead from the recent sea-dunk. So Yoo-kyung writes down her number on Chul-soo’s palm as Duk-goo looks on.
On their way back home, Duk-goo and Chul-soo talk about Yoo-kyung. Duk-goo wonders if things would have turned out differently were Chul-soo not burdened with his dead brother’s 3 kids.
Chul-soo doesn’t want to speculate on what-ifs and the two men part ways with Chul-soo ordering Duk-goo to come to work early because he still wants to dive in search of his tools! Duk-goo mutters that he doesn’t like how Yoo-kyung’s reappearance has dug up painful memories for Chul-soo.
Chul-soo comes back to a vee..ery messy house. Cartoon blares out from the TV while toys, clothes, and dishes lie everywhere. The youngest kid is fast asleep on the sofa while the 2nd boy watches TV and the 3rd is doing his homework. And the sink’s overloaded with dirty dishes. This house must be Cockroach Heaven.
But chaos and unhygienic practices seem to be the house rules, and Chul-soo asks if the kids ate dinner. They reply that they had ramyun and he doesn’t bat an eye. He promises he will hire a housekeeper ajumma soon.
He then gently carries the asleep kid up to the second floor and tucks in the kids for the night. Then he lingers in the room for a bit looking at his dead brother and sis-in-law’s pic and then looks at his palm where Yoo-kyung scribbled her phone number.
He slowly rubs the number off. Aww, he may be a crude penny-pincher but something about him is … noble. Maybe it’s because he sacrificed his bachelorhood to be a parent surrogate for the kids.
Anna’s mood is also down. She’s back on the deck of her yacht as it sails the night aimlessly. She’s angry and hurt by Billy’s words. She finishes off an entire bottle of scotch and vents her anger at her wedding ring — her Billy substitute. She throws the ring which rolls up to the edge of the deck. When Sec Gong calls to check on her, she throws the phone out into the sea.
Back at the hotel, Billy is getting weaker and weaker with the repeated bouts of laxative-induced diarrhea. Hehehehe. He despairs that even his hope of leaving Anna one day got crushed today when she vowed that only death would part them.
By now, Anna’s roaring drunk. She orders the offending ring to come back to her. When the ring refuses to comply, she wobbles her way to it in her high heels. The ring rolls down the deck and she follows on unstable legs. With one jolt of the sea waves, she gets thrown off the deck. She stops her fall by managing to hold on to the deck railing. She tries to climb her way back on to the deck, but only manages to get her shoes off.
And soon, for the second time in this episode, a human falls off the deck into the sea. Ovvvverboaaaarddd!!
SPLASH! Anna desperately surfaces and cries for help as the yacht deafly drifts off. I love this sequence where the music suddenly picks up, Anna slowly sinks to the bottom, while her husband ponders these words: “I’ll never escape Anna… unless she dies.” And Chul-soo tends to his wounds and vows to kill Anna for all the grief she’s caused him.
One man vows to kill while the other wishes she were dead, and how ironic that the lady in question is slowly drowning.
But Anna’s made up of far sterner stuff than appearances would have us believe. As she sinks to her almost certain death, thoughts of Billy plundering her wealth rile her.
The image of him gloating over her money and jewelry is enough to make her mad enough to propel herself to the surface and start swimming. No one’s going to reap rewards from her death, dammit. And so she swims. Love it!
By the next morning, there’s a full blown search for the missing Anna. Helicopters comb the sea while police interview the hubby. Billy’s reality is far removed from Anna’s suspicious fantasies. Far from gloating at her demise, Billy is too dehydrated and weak from the diarrhea to muster up any kind of emotion resembling joy.
Rather, he can’t believe she’s dead. The abandoned wedding ring on deck makes him think Anna may have committed suicide just to spite him and make him regret he was mean to her. Somewhere in his paranoid fears you sense that he’s really worried she’s missing and possibly dead.
An ambulance tears through town carrying an unconscious Chul-soo and a distressed Duk-goo. Thankfully, Chul-soo coughs up seawater and the medics find his pockets filled with his recovered tools!! Hahahhaha. This guy!
And Chul-soo has something to say: “The axe…was… too… heavy… glurglurblurb.” hehehheheh. I love it!
Later, in the ER, Chul-soo’s still mad at Anna. He thinks back to the four times she almost killed him: 1) The shovel slam on the rainy night. 2) The car window head-trap. 3) The time when she shoved him off her yacht and into the sea. 4) And, today, when he almost drowned trying to recover his tools.
That’s not counting all the money she owes him: $300 for the rainy night shoveling. $500 for the showerhead fiasco. And there’s the cost of his dead cellphone. And there’s that speeding ticket. Aaand the hospital bill. That makes a grand total of $1300. Of course Chul-soo’s spitting mad at this. He’s so mad he starts chewing the hospital pillows. Heheheh.
A fellow ER patient on a bed beside Chul-soo’s orders him to cut the whining. The woman sounds a lot like Anna. Chul-soo perks up and when he hears the unmistakable koraji hagunoon, he draws back the curtain separating the beds to find a bedraggled Anna. He gloats!
Anna is still Anna – haughty and displeased with the world and letting it be amply known. But she seems to have lost her memory because she fails to recognise Chul-soo. He thinks she’s playing around but soon realises she really has no memory of him.
Chul-soo and Duk-goo then run away from the ER when the nurse tries to dump Anna on him. Chul-soo’s really tickled that the formerly heartless, charisma-less girl is now memory-less. “God exists!” Chul-soo’s convinced.
In an awesome series of events, Billy gets dragged to the same ER by a concerned Sec Gong because Billy’s grown really weak and dehydration.
Duk-goo worries if they should have helped Anna, and points out that the woman being looked after in the hospital is in no way near getting any form of heavenly justice. This switches on another of Chul-soo’s money-schemy light bulbs. How about he trap Anna into being his housekeeper for a month for FREE? She does owe him the $1300.
So back to the ER he goes to put on an act of loverly concern as he engulfs a stunned Anna into a bear hug. So Billy does not see Anna’s face but does overhear Jang Chul-soo’s name being mentioned when he passes them on his way out of the ER.
When Anna refuses to believe she dated him, Chul-soo lies that her name is Sang-shil which translates to “loss”. He internally gloats that the name’s fitting for someone devoid of heart, charm, and now memory. Anna still refuses to believe him.
She demands evidence that he really knows her. Chul-soo’s 3 nephews and Duk-goo’s mom arrive just then and they all recognise Anna.
Still not fully convinced, Anna demands he prove that she was his girlfriend. Sneaky Chul-soo whispers into the nurse’s ear about there being a mole on her right breast which the nurse relays to Anna. She checks inside her hospital shirt and… yep, a mole there is!
Meanwhile, Billy finds Chul-soo’s plumbing business card inside the car and the double coincidence of hearing the name just now and finding the card in Anna’s car makes him suspicious. He calls up Chul-soo’s number but the phone’s dead so no one picks up. Still, Billy feels something’s off but can’t dwell on it because he has to go to the toilet one more time before they leave.
Finally, memory-less Anna, whom I’ll be calling Sang-shil henceforth, decides to leave with Chul-soo and gang. She’s not happy with the ajumma clothes Duk-goo’s mother lent her, but the others seem to think it’s all hilarious.
She’s also not happy with the ride — a pickup and not a sedan — and that she has to ride on the back with the wind playing havoc on her hair. There’s a moment when she’s trying to hoist herself up on the pickup, Billy passes a glance in her direction but he does not recognise her. Ee!
It’s extra ironic that Billy’s car tails the pickup for a long while and there Anna is right in front of him but he fails to see it. Meanwhile, Chul-soo, seeing Anna trying to tame her windblown hair, is kind to her for the first time ever! He takes off his shirt which she uses to cover her head.
Sec Gong reports that the police will be ending the search for Anna. Billy can’t believe Anna’s dead and it’s extra strange to see that she’s right there in front of his eyes but the vehicles soon part ways and Anna’s life as Sang-shil begins.
Chul-soo welcomes his ‘jagiya’ home and Sang-shil tells him to quit calling her his darling as it creeps her out.
He mutters that it gives him more incentive to keep calling her that. Even the children chime in: “Jagiyaaaa… jagiyaaa.”
Once in the house, Sang-shil’s shocked at the sight. Dirty clothes litter the floor. The sink’s flooded with caked dishes. The toilet’s no better. “This can’t be right,” she mutters to self.
She looks at herself in the mirror and is shocked by her own reflection. Even though she’s Sang-shil, there’s still Anna in her. Her instincts try to show her the way, but, sadly, she has no memory to validate her hunch.
I find it hilarious (and unsurprising) that Chul-soo has a poster of a dollar bill above his bed. He calls a meeting with the kid gang and explains how the ajumma’s unwell and how she will be with them for the next month. So I guess he’ll let her go once she’s paid what she owes him? Is there nobility in there somewhere in this mercenary scheme?
The kids ask if the ajumma is really his girlfriend and Chul-soo goes: “Kids, adults often run into situations they can’t explain…” Ha! I’ll say. He then explains how the ajumma will now cook, clean, and do their laundry. And I wonder if Anna has any of those skill sets. Hee.
Lunchtime involves gathering the tablecloth into a bunch and dumping the morning’s dishes into the almost full sink. Then the tablecloth’s put back on the table with aplomb. Lunch special for today? Mandoo-ramyun! Chul-soo then orders Sang-shil to make the ramyun. She’s still recovering from the latest attack to her Hygiene Violations Pingmeter, so Chul-soo deigns to cook in her stead.
As Chul-soo picks up a dirty pot from the sink and throws away the crusted flakes and fills the pot with water, Anna gags and mutters she could not have lived in this pigsty.
Weak from all the hygiene assaults, she leans on a sofa arm to find her palm stuck to a wad of chewed gum. Then a cockroach comes out which makes her screaaaaam as the kids rally about trying to kill the roach.
Finally, the littlest of the boys slams the roach smackdab on Anna’s butt and she faints. Hehe.
Billy’s still talking to his wedding picture. He says this was not how he’d wanted to part from Anna. We then get a flashback to their wedding day!! How many years back was this? They had promised to be “happy until the day we die”.
Anna, being Anna, had then grilled Billy what he’d do if she were to die first. He’d assured her that she’d be the only one for him. She’d then morbidly promised to “come get him” even when she’s dead. Cue to his smiling the “Yelp!” smile that their wedding pic has captured for eternity. This memory spooks Billy so much he’s even scared of Princess the Cat.
Back at Chulsoo-landia, Sang-shil’s having a hard time not retching as the boys dig into their ramyun and mandoo in mannerless abandon. Mandoos are chomped on with glee and eggs savoured by hands.
Chul-soo watches Sang-shil gag and chalks it up to her not being hungry. It probably does not occur to him that she finds his house filthy beyond belief. Hours after the kids have been put to bed, Anna still sits on the chair she was in during lunchtime.
She then demands to be shown the bedroom so she can rest. She walks into his bedroom, but Chul-soo beats her to the bed. She asks where she’s supposed to sleep. He blatantly hints at their “very intimate relationship”. He wouldn’t take advantage of a memory-less woman, surely?
Sexy saxophone croons as Chul-soo advances towards a wary Sang-shil with come-hither eyes. He backs her up to the wall and hands her the pillow and suggests they keep separate quarters for now seeing as she’s not herself.
So Sang-shil finds herself on the living room sofa with the pillow clutched for company. She gingerly throws off the dirty clothes and lumpy cushion and dusts the pillow to get ready for bed. She hopes this is a nightmare she wakes up from tomorrow but the definite growl from her hungry tummy is too real.
Annnd it’s raining again! Chul-soo wakes up in the middle of the night and jumps out of his skin to find Sang-shil zoned out on the floor with her head on the sofa and empty cans of beer everywhere. hehehe. I love the horror-touches so much!
She explains she drank the beer to quelch her hunger as there’s nothing in this house she can eat. He offers to make her some ramyun but she says she’s full.
She persists that things don’t make sense. She says she can’t believe she used to live this way. Did she really have no house, family, or money? Will she have to live the rest of her life here?
She slaps him on the head just to confirm this is real and rushes out into the rain.
Thunder claps as Sang-shil rages at the universe. She screams: “WHY AM I THE WAY I AM?”
Billy has Anna screaming in his nightmare as well. He wakes up disoriented and scared and trudges to the kitchen to drink some water. He imagines a Dead Drowned Anna staring at him beside the fridge! Heeee.
Billy and his Shakespearean guilt! Love it. Just as he pours himself a cup of water, he hears the Drip Drip of Dead Anna hanging from the ceiling accusing him in her Anna way: “I drowned and you’re drinking water?” Ha! Awesome. When he tries to run away, Ghost of Drowned Anna drags him to wherever because she did promise to come “get him”. Ha. Billy wakes up from his nightmare within a nightmare to find his leg trapped under the sofa cushion.
It’s a beautiful morning and Yu-kyung rides her way prettily to Chul-soo’s house laden with a flower bouquet.
Sang-shil, on the other hand, is busy sleeping on the sofa when Chul-soo comes to rudely wake her up by nudging her with his feet.
When Sang-shil doesn’t budge, Chul-soo lifts her up and dumps her into the tub of water in the courtyard!! Ahhahaha. This can’t end well. “That should take care of your hangover. Did it take care of your memory loss too?”
Pissed at the gloating remorseless man, Sang-shil aims a bar of soap right at his face and it lands! Bam! She then chases him with around the courtyard ready to beat the daylights out of him with a pail, when she slips on the bar of soap and…
… whoops! We have our second romantic-but-not-romantic-dip of the day. It’s illegal for two people to look so good in ajumma pants and country bumpkin wear.
Thoughts:
I think I love this show! My memories of it aren’t as sharp as that for My Girl, but as I recap it I’m so delighted by all the little touches and am gleeful of things yet to come and it makes me happy. Keep in mind that this is the start of a Hong sisters’ drama and things can easily go downhill in the second half. But isn’t the setup for the show excellent? We have polar opposite leads at war and then we have amnesia and cohabitation hijinks to tangle things up. I love it!
I also keep being reminded of Arang, strangely. Though the two shows are poles apart both have heroines who have amnesia and both the heroines haunt their men as ‘ghosts’ -– though the ghost here is entirely in Billy’s head. Amnesia is treated with so much derision by viewers because so often it’s used to stall the story flow or to buy time by preventing the characters from making certain decisions, but sometimes it can be used to evoke poignant character beats. And sometimes, like here, it allows a character a new lease on life.
The Anna we saw in ep 1 was almost heartless and it looked like she seemed to have fun treating people bad. But this episode, before the amnesia, we got hints that she is lonely and sometimes does have cause to be an asshat. Maybe it’s the years she’s spent as the heiress to a huge fortune that she does not trust people and doesn’t know how to treat them well. She says Billy has been the only family she has since she was 12, and she seemed to genuinely want Billy to not think ill of her.
Yet Anna is so maladjusted. She wants Billy to be with her forever but can’t see she makes him miserable. She wants to beg him to not leave her, yet she throws a temper tantrum to make her point and kills his beloved fish in the process. Does she apologise? NO. Instead, she warns that he’ll never get rid of her.
With this amnesia twist, Anna gets to live a new life as Sang-shil. We can see clearly how her base personality is intact. She is still Anna, so the amnesia doesn’t leave a sour taste in the mouth as an attempt to make her more ‘likable’. Instead, it feels like a way to explore Anna as Sang-shil and see how she views her life living on the other side of the money divide. Plus, isn’t her new name Sang-shil so apt yet sad and a bit cruel?
Unlike so many of the Hongs’ second leads, I find Billy a truly fascinating (and entertaining) character. Maybe it’s because the drama’s a reworking of an existing movie, but the move to make Anna already married to Billy when she loses her memory makes Billy’s stake in the story far more interesting and credible. Often, the Hong sisters’ second leads make you shout, “Agh! Get over it!” when they persist on not letting go of their clutches on their love interests. They then take their unnatural obsession to criminal levels and play the actively villainous antagonists that are hard to relate to. I’m all for villainy, but let there be a method to your madness.
But Billy is different. He’s this pathetic, bumbling, self-doubting man who evokes equal part sympathy and laughter and that endears him to me. He might have married Anna for money, but he is not cold hearted. Even when he tries to be, he’s the kind to not be able to pull it off. Extra credit must go to how the actor plays him and how his paranoid fantasies have played out. Love the touch of horror!
Then there’s Chul-soo. Incorrigible, money-grubby Chul-soo who risks his life for his tools. He is at once ridiculous yet you see he’s a kind guy in how he gives up his young ways to be saddled with the 3 nephews he’s trying hard to father. With Yoo-kyung in the scene, you sense that he could have had a life with her but she was not ready to be tied down with 3 boys not her own. Yoo-kyung seems to be ambitious and ready to move out of the small sea-side town. We’ll have to see how her arc plays out. Now with Sang-shil added to the gang, I can’t wait for the cohab hijinks!
There’s this strange thing with the show: I really enjoy it as I’m recapping it which makes me think I love it but then there are so many parts of it I don’t remember. But that makes the show fresh!
P.S. RIP Solomon.
©dramababble 2015
This entry was posted by Maybee in 2015.
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