Our translator and athlete face some hard truths about each other, but will that be enough to counter the magnetic pull that keeps bringing them into each other’s orbit? As Sun-kyum tries adjust to life after running, Mi-joo needs to decide if her very strong feelings for him can outweigh her fears about having someone like him in her life.
EPISODE 5 RECAP
It turns out Assemblyman Ki’s chief of staff is the one who tipped off Sun-kyum about the bribe, neglecting to mention that Mi-joo returned it, and painting her as a two-faced villain. Sun-kyum tells Mi-joo that he’s always been embarrassed by his father, but he wants to know why she took it—what if it left her at a disadvantage?
Mi-joo replies that she’s been getting paid off since she was young, precisely because she’s already in a position of weakness. She tells him to be disappointed in her, to hate and forget about her, but he doesn’t want to. Even if her words and consolations were all fake, they were meaningful to him.
Mi-joo says that will only make her miserable—she’s always accepted money easily, but for the first time, he made her feel guilty, like she could be a good person and she’s failing. She wants to go back to being strangers, but he refuses, holding her gun hostage, so she gives in resignedly and leaves. Both of them spend a lonely evening, she with sleeping pills and him with alcohol.
The next morning, Sun-kyum calls a baffled Young-il and tells him he drank last night, but couldn’t sleep in and ended up going for his usual early run. He called Young-il because he has no friends to talk to. Aw.
Meanwhile, Sun-kyum’s parents are on a performative repentance tour at their church. His mother Ji-woo runs into a fellow parishioner, Ms. Dong, and her daughter Ye-chan. Ms. Dong assures Ji-woo that things will be all right with Sun-kyum, but Ji-woo admits that she has a hard time getting close to her kids—being an actor is far easier than being a mom.
Sun-kyum takes an enormous pile of gifts to the kids he’s promised to coach. They’re excited to see him, but they ask him if he really hit someone, and why. He replies lightly that they shouldn’t ask why, and just think of him as a bad person.
They urge him to apologize and start over, but he muses that he’s unsure whether he’s at a starting line or a finish line right now—if this is the beginning or the end.
As expected, a teacher apologetically tells Sun-kyum that he won’t be able to mentor the track and field team anymore due to the scandal. He promises to continue to sponsor them financially under a different name. He says he’s fine with it, but his eyes are in full sad puppy mode as he drives away.
Lunch with her rich friend turns out to be an exercise in humiliation, as the woman manages to criticize Mi-joo for not getting married and look down on her for being poor and a foster child in the space of a couple of minutes. Ugh.
Mi-joo ducks out of the lunch early, finding some cigarettes planted in her bag by Mae-yi and isseriously tempted to smoke just one despite how hard it was to quit. Sun-kyum finds her asking a disapproving staff member for a light and says to follow him.
She shuts him down, politely but completely, but also asks why he told her to follow him earlier. He was going to lead her to a smoking area, he says, and she finally laughs and says she likes this aspect of his personality. “I thought you hated it,” he responds, and oh, he looks so quietly forlorn that I want to cry. She tells him she feels better now, and thanks him sincerely for not asking what’s wrong.
Young-hwa is surprised to find out that Ye-joon’s mother works for Dan-ah, and tags along when the friend needs to stop by there on an errand for his mom. Oh! His mom is Ms. Dong, Yook Ji-woo’s friend, and Ye-chan is the girl Young-hwa is tutoring. Ms. Dong introduces the two young men to Dan-ah, whose first question is about their age. HA.
Mi-joo points out that he’s been doing that, with his coaching and with his support for Woo-shik, comparing him to Jerry Maguire. Sun-kyum says that’s not really what agents do—they’re more like representatives for their players. The closest thing he has is Dan-ah, who scouted him, manages him and acts like a human shield to protect him. Mi-joo point out that he does all that too, but Sun-kyun says that he failed.
Mi-joo asks him why he doesn’t consider failure to be part of the process—even Jerry Maguire hit rock bottom before he succeeded. When Sun-kyum shows no sign of recognition, she even acts out a bit of the iconic “Show me the money” scene. Sun-kyum promises earnestly to look it up and watch it later.
When Sun-kyum protests having to find out this way, she calls him out for being considerate to everyone else, but not expecting that Woo-shik would want to do the same. “No one is born used to enduring pain,” she tells him. He doesn’t need to pretend to be okay.
She pulls him under shelter so he’s not getting rained on, and into a hug, patting him on the back. Mi-joo makes sure he knows what this is, and he confirms, “Comfort,” and leans into her.
COMMENTS
I’m jumping in on these recaps from Episode 5, so I want to first say that I am loving this drama to the nth degree, and that Shin Se-kyung and Im Shi-wan have completely stolen my heart! Sun-kyum is scooping out my innards and walking all over them with every quietly devastating declaration, and Mi-joo is deeply weird, capable but underemployed, and constantly frustrated by life in a way I find delightfully authentic. This episode takes the protagonists into a new stage in their relationship. If the first four episodes were about them meeting and falling for each other, even if they didn’t admit it out loud, the moment when Sun-kyum confronted Mi-joo about taking the bribe, that initial rosy glow around them shattered.
If they want to build a relationship now—and I think both do, even if in Mi-joo’s case it’s despite herself—they’ll need to start over with this new knowledge between them. I don’t believe either of them really had illusions about the other; one of the things I find so refreshing about their dynamic is how honest they’ve been from the beginning, even in situations where most people would find that much frankness uncomfortable. That’s why they clicked so quickly when they first met, because neither of them shies away from unpleasant truths, and for the first time they’ve met someone else who doesn’t get awkward in response to that bluntness. But now they’ve found a truth that directly affects their relationship—an ugly one.
I was confused at first when Mi-joo not only rejected Sun-kyun’s forgiveness, but left out the important fact that she returned the money. She only confessed that part to her best friend—but that conversation with Mae-yi was so enlightening. The obstacle that lies between them isn’t the fact that Mi-joo took the bribe, even temporarily, but as she explained to Sun-kyum, that she’s the kind of person whom society sees as being vulnerable to them.
Their class difference isn’t something that will be solved by an apology or explanation from Mi-joo, and I totally understand her frustration at feeling so deeply sympathetic towards someone so materially privileged that he has no concept of the difficulties she’s gone through. That hotel lunch must have brought all of that viscerally home for her—it’s no wonder that she cut off his attempts to be friendly. She likes him so much, and she really wants to never have to talk about any of this with him. And yet he is pitiable, and cluelessly earnest, and good, in a way that easily brings down her walls no matter how hard she tries to keep them up.
We see this class difference with Young-hwa and Dan-ah, as well. I’m not quite sure where that storyline is going given that he’s totally crushing on her and she’s into women, but I find Dan-ah herself fascinating in every scene. She does have that typical chaebol heir storyline, with a family whose high expectations and zero regard for her personal agency have twisted her personality, but there’s a lively yet melancholy sharpness to Dan-ah that makes her stand out. This drama is full of lonely people, not just the leads but Dan-ah, Ji-woo, even Eun-bi, who despite her bubbly manner avoids her family as much as Sun-kyum does.
In particular, Woo-shik’s interview underscored how alone he was, how unable to reach out for help, but that having one person acknowledge and stand up for him was enough. It puts the ugly cycle of bullying and abuse we see with Woo-shik and Sun-kyum into context as something that doesn’t just happen between people, but a systemic problem that has to be tackled at the roots. Sun-kyum understands that, which is why he’s so committed to coaching kids, and was so devastated when he was fired. And I loved how Mi-joo brought the whole thing full circle by pointing that the system is the people in it, so Sun-kyum’s individual efforts were absolutely meaningful. Such a smart reminder of the truth that institutional and personal injustice are two edges of the same poisonous knife.
That hug at the end was really lovely, but I was even more moved by Mi-joo’s unwillingness to let Sun-kyum continue to ignore his pain for the sake of others’ feelings. He’s been conditioned to do that by a lifetime of his father’s abuse and his mother’s neglect, and it’s painful to witness. Watching him hear for the first time that he doesn’t have to just endure being hurt, that he has a right to show his pain and seek comfort, made my my heart hurt. Sun-kyum is a deeply considerate person, but his matter-of-fact manner causes most people to think that he doesn’t have feelings, so they lash out at him without guilt. Mi-joo truly sees him though. Maybe it’s because she’s a little bit the same—she tries to put up an unruffled front, but we saw how anxiously she kept checking for the article to be published, and poured her heart into translating it as quickly as she could. I’m so glad she insists on making him confront his own self-sacrifice. It’s such an important step for Sun-kyum to finally break free of living someone else’s life, and claim his own.
