Love, loss, and a whole new life befall our time-traveling heroine as she makes a final attempt at getting the future right. But as she sidelines our hero in order to save him, she’s learning that some fates just can’t be evaded — especially when your counterpart is hellbent on making them happen.
EPISODES 13-14
We start a little further back in the story than where we left off last week — meaning we’re forced to have our hearts ripped out again by seeing Sun-jae cry. To make up for it, we skip back a few days into the past and see Sol’s birthday, when she and Sun-jae went to an amusement park to celebrate. If cuteness could be sold on a stick, this is what it would like. There’s handholding, corndog sharing, and Ferris wheel riding — complete with a candled cake.
Sun-jae gives Sol a necklace as a gift, clasps it around her neck, and thanks her for being born. She tells him that the person who saved her and made her want to live again was him, and she’s nothing but grateful for it. It’s the sweetest, happy-tears-filled moment I can imagine, which is why it hurts so much when we cut to Sun-jae crying on that train again. But now, he’s decided to hop off and take action, going in search of his Sol-mate.
Meanwhile, our heroine is so desperate to save everyone, she clicks out lies like a Pez dispenser. Not only has she misled Sun-jae into believing she slipped back through time, she fibs to her mom about how safe she is in that small town. Mom wants her back in Seoul stat, but Sol wants to wait it out for the killer. Through a series of newly gained memories, she knows when and where she’ll be abducted — and decides to follow the path that will lead her to that moment.
Luckily, Tae-sung’s detective dad is forever on her side, and he and another officer trail Sol as she makes her way into the danger zone. Just at the second she’s supposed to be nabbed, she stands still and waits, but it’s a security guard that approaches (and we see the killer watch from a distance). The guard is there because Sun-jae called saying she needed protection.
Sol realizes that Sun-jae figured out her plan and is back in town to save her. She leaps off to locate him just as we see Sun-jae stumble onto the killer and start to chase him. Sol runs to the woods — the same spot where she had a vision of Sun-jae coming to rescue her — and as soon as she arrives, Sun-jae is stabbed in the stomach. The police are right behind her to apprehend the crazy cabbie with the shiv, but it’s too late.
Beside the woods, Sun-jae is standing at a cliff’s edge and his ominous line from last week repeats in voiceover: “There are choices you make even though you know the consequences, because you like it.” Then he falls off the cliff and into the water (in a new version of falling off the balcony and into the hotel pool). Sol screams and sobs over the deadly brink — and then we’re in 2024 again.
Before we find out the aftermath, we see Sol going about her life in the present “as if nothing has happened.” She tells us that “several seasons have passed” and we see her working as a PD at her film production company. To lighten the mood after what we just witnessed, the drama turns comic, as Sol negotiates with a drunk and persnickety male lead who refuses to do kiss scenes (Kim Min-ki, in a True Beauty cast cameo).
Their argument turns hostile and lands Sol at the police station (yet again), but this time she bumps into Tae-sung! (There’s no cure for Chronic Sun-jae Loss, but Tae-sung is a decent balm in my book.) He’s behind bars, but it’s just a goofy setup — he’s actually a cop. And once Sol is allowed to leave the station, he takes her for dinner and drinks (where he serves her tofu like she just got out of prison, lol).
The flirty vibe between these two is ever present (well, at least on his side), and when Sol gets too trashed to walk, Tae-sung piggybacks her in the direction of home. But when it starts snowing, Sol thinks about Sun-jae — and all their pretty moments together — and begins sobbing on a bench, saying that she misses Sun-jae. Tae-sung doesn’t know what to do, so he just tries to shield her head from the falling snowflakes. (I love him.)
The next day, Sol finds herself at a movie awards ceremony (for work, sort of), and when she trips on some stairs and begins to fall, Sun-jae is the one who catches her. What?! As we might have guessed, he’s alive and well, thanks to Sol changing the past yet again. This time, he has no idea who she is.
We learn that after he died at the cliff, his watch became a time machine, as it always does when he dies. He’s still wearing the watch when they pull him from the water and Sol sees it activate. She decides that the best solution is to make it so they never meet at all. And when she hits the watch’s button (though it’s not midnight), she travels back in time to high school again.
It’s the day when she and Sun-jae first met in the rain in front of her house. This time, instead of running up to him with an umbrella, she turns around and walks away. They never meet that day, and her family moves to a new house, so they never meet as neighbors either. Sun-jae lives but doesn’t know Sol exists, and now she’s the one with the broken heart.
And now that they’ve finally met, our leads get off on the wrong foot. Sun-jae mistakes Sol for a thief since she’s just sneakily snatched a letter from her boss’s purse (she drunkenly wrote a resignation letter that now she wants to rescind). He’s suspicious and dismissive and it’s the first time we’ve seen these expressions on Byun Woo-seok’s face since this drama began. It’s a total turnaround (and pretty impressive to watch).
Sol runs away but it’s not long before they’re thrown together again when Sun-jae receives a copy of Sol’s script. She’s written a romance movie based on their love story, about a man who meets a tragic end and a woman who goes back in time to save him. The script, as it turns out, is exactly the drama we’ve all been watching. And the ending Sol has written is the point we’ve arrived at now — she severs the link with him and thinks everything is in cosmic order because she gets to see him shine (no matter how much she suffers).
Sun-jae devours the script and, by the end, is crying so much that it’s like his subconscious is remembering that all this really happened to him. In fact, afterward, he starts having dreams and visions of the past timelines when they were together. All this makes him super keen to be in the movie — except, Sol says, no way.
Sun-jae, superstar that he is, is not used to being rejected. And Sol lays it on thick when she turns him down for the role. His pride is so hurt that he goes a little batty in trying to convince her to change her mind (like, he’ll work for free), but she’s relentless in her refusals. Still, the more he follows her around trying to be accepted, the more he starts to like her, and the more familiar she seems to him.
Finally, he goes behind her back and tells her boss that he wants to do the movie. The boss is ecstatic to have him attached to the project, and so, Sol quits the company. Cutting him out of her life was too hard, she can’t be around him now. “I know I shouldn’t feel this way,” she says. “But I want to keep seeing him now that I’ve met him a few times.”
But fate has other plans for these two. When Sol goes to the amusement park where she and Sun-jae rode the Ferris wheel on her birthday, Sun-jae happens to be there shooting a commercial. She gets into a Ferris wheel car, and he hops in right behind her. He remembers this scene from her script, he tells her, and it’s clear he’s trying to understand why he feels this pull to her. “Given how many times we’re running into each other, isn’t the universe basically pushing us toward each other?”
Sun-jae mentions that her script has a sad ending: the man loses his memories of the woman he loved, and then, life just goes on. Sol counters that it’s a happy ending for the woman because she saved the man. But Sun-jae doesn’t buy it. The woman lost love. Can she still be happy after that?
He tells her that he really wants to be in the movie and Sol opens up, “You might die. What if I tell you that getting mixed up with me might kill you?” The Ferris wheel starts to jerk and malfunction and Sun-jae catches Sol in an embrace in the corner. “At this rate, you and I might end up dead here together,” he tells her. Sol thinks to herself, “Our fate was just going around in circles like this Ferris wheel.” And I think: we have two episodes left to change that damn ending.
Everything about this is beautiful. The story is just so well woven. Yes, there are time travel issues. And yes, it would help a lot to have a proper motive for the killer. But the love story is epic. The initial episodes set up the potential for how grand a romance this could be and it has lived up to every bit of its promise. Deeply felt emotion. Heavy, universal themes. And a storytelling penchant for switching between sad and sweet at the exact right second. For a show about time, it’s got its timing down pat.
I will save the analysis and accolades for the finale, but one thing I really loved from these episodes is the question of what makes a sad ending. The quintessential happy ending is that the leads end up together. But, faced with her options, Sol doesn’t see a way for that to happen, and so, she’s choosing the happier of two alternatives. If they live out their love and Sun-jae dies, Sol will end up heartbroken and alone. And if she keeps the timeline as it is now, where they’re not together at all, she’s also heartbroken and alone — but at least he’s alive. Which is the greater tragedy?
As much as I understand Sol’s logic (and I feel for her), I find myself on Sun-jae’s side. Maybe they can find a way to undo their fate and maybe they can’t. But if you know for certain that you’re headed to a painful place, what’s the point of suffering so much on the road to getting there? I’ll root for a classic happy ending until the cows come home. But in lieu of that, I vote for all the happiness that these two can conjure along the way.