Squee is down so that swoon can go up, and man does this drama do it right. Our lovely leads get closer this week, even as our hero realizes how far he’ll have to trek to reach his biggest fan. I was already prepared to follow these two actors anywhere on their own, but when they’re together I find them meltingly magnificent.
EPISODES 3-4
“If you were in another time, I’d jump over everything to come see you.” This drama is balancing epic dialogue and themes against sweet and breezy storytelling in a way that’s very hard to pull off — and it’s succeeding in the most satisfying way.
At the core, we’ve got a story about a fan and an idol, but this week, we dive into the differences between fan love and real love. That’s a heavy topic to take on, but Lovely Runner braids it into the plot so effortlessly that there’s nothing heavy-handed about it. And with the writer of True Beauty at the helm, I wouldn’t expect less.
Let’s start with Sun-jae’s confession. Much of the movement this week comes from Sun-jae trying to get up the nerve to tell Sol that he likes her. I mean, to be clear, his actions are speaking volumes — she’s the first person he looks up at when he wins the gold at his swim competition, and that’s before he gives her his jacket on their walk home. (Gah!) But, if he doesn’t spit out the words, our heroine is just not going to read the signs.
On top of that, Sun-jae gets this line of advice from his friend: “Liking you as a man isn’t the same as being your fan.” Here’s that theme I was talking about. It’s the first indication we get that Sun-jae is starting to understand the true distance that exists between him and Sol. She keeps saying she’s devoted to him — as a fan (his “swim” fan, that is) — but he has a crush on the girl next door. This becomes the tender center of the conflict as Sun-jae tries to be seen as a regular guy underneath his gleam.
His first shot at saying, “I like you,” goes up in flames when they visit a photo booth and Sol tries to live out her dreams of cutesy pics with her bias. Sun-jae is just a teen boy at this point, with no idol training, and he’s not so into making hearts with his hands. But, when the camera snaps, he does it for her (and they may be making half hearts, but my whole heart stopped when he did this). He’s ready to confess, but she cuts him off — because she’s more concerned with the images the machine is spitting out than the moment they’re living together.
Each time he tries to tell her, Sol finds a way to accidentally intercede. There’s a tremendous scene (with falling flower petals, lol), where their like for each other is so strong — a.k.a. the anxiety is so high! — they totally botch everything with miscommunication.
Sun-jae says he doesn’t want her to be his fan anymore. This is the lead in to the fact that he wants to be her boyfriend. But Sol freaks out at the idea of not being by his side as a fan, and offers to be friends instead. It’s the only way she can think of to stay near him — but he takes it as a rejection. (And can we please just talk about how real the emotional uncertainty is here?)
When he finally succeeds, Sol is drunk. She’s unintentionally slurped up some home brew from Sun-jae’s dad and stumbled onto her idol while he’s alone by the pool one night. Wobbly and flirtatious, she keeps getting closer to him until the moment she falls back and he catches her around the waist. Upright, she puts her hand on his cheek (like she’s about to kiss him) and he decides the timing is right.
He tells her he likes her and she responds: “Keep smiling like this. I’ll be by your side. When you’re struggling, I won’t let you feel alone. I won’t let you think dark thoughts. I’ll stay by your side your whole life.” To Sun-jae it sound like a love confession and he plants his lips on hers immediately.
The next day our lovestruck hero is ready to see his newly kissed crush again, but Sol is hungover and remembers neither the confession nor the lip lock. (There is an audio recording of it, however, that I expect will pop up at some opportune moment.) As Sun-jae tries to approach Sol on the way to school, Tae-sung gets to her first. Tae-sung asks her to date — right in front of Sun-jae — and she says yes!
There are two moments of shock. First, Sun-jae has heartbreak written all over him as the optimism drains from his face. Second, Sol wakes up in 2024 again — in the exact spot she was in when she went back in time. Sun-jae’s death is still on the news. And it looks like nothing has changed.
How can we make sense of this? Let’s get down to the time travel rules. We know that Sol can’t talk, or even write, about the future. This fact makes her despondent, thinking that fate may be firmly settled with no way to change it. Still, she wonders, if she can’t change it, why did she go back in time?
She gets a couple of clues, leading her in two different directions. First, Sun-jae does indeed reinjure his shoulder irreparably while swimming. It doesn’t happen in the exact way it did in the original timeline, so Sol thinks that fate is correcting itself and making the same outcomes occur.
But then, she’s able to stop a fire at her house from getting out of control by rushing home before it happens. She revises history so that her MOM (Jung Young-joo) doesn’t have any nasty burn scars on her hand like she did when we met her in 2024.
When Sol gets back to 2024, she remembers everything she did in the new 2008 timeline and she starts to put the pieces together. For example, the watch — which is what’s controlling her time travel — now reads 2:00. When she went back in time, it read 3:00. She figures out that it’s counting down her opportunities to change the future (three strikes and she’s out).
Also, one of the photos that she and Sun-jae took at the photo booth is the picture that appeared on Sun-jae’s table at the end of Episode 2 (and Sol has the other two pics stashed away at home). Now our heroine has conclusive proof that she can change the future.
While there’s still some mystery surrounding Sun-jae’s death, Sol learns that she was the last person he spoke to. And we see how torn up Sun-jae was about seeing her that night after the concert — and the fact that she didn’t remember him.
While she’s in 2024, she gets a call from BAEK IN-HYUK (Lee Seung-hyub), who is Sun-jae’s high school best friend. In-hyuk is a musician who will go on to be a member of Eclipse with Sun-jae, but it seems they have a falling out by 2024. When In-hyuk calls Sol, he tells her that Sun-jae always wanted to apologize to her. About what? She doesn’t know and neither do we.
Realizing she needs to get back to the past ASAP to prevent Sun-jae’s death, Sol learns that at midnight she can make the watch send her back in time. But when she arrives, she also sees that in her absence, her 19-year-old self has been causing havoc.
Basically, it’s like there are two Sols. One is the high school student who is supposed to be living in 2008. And the other is the Adult Sol who is in her 19-year-old body. Adult Sol has all the knowledge from past and future, but Young Sol only knows what she knew at 19. So, when Adult Sol returned to 2024, her younger self regained control of her body, with huge gaps in her memory from when Adult Sol was steering the wheel. Luckily, there’s an icon on the screen to show us when Young Sol is the one making the (bad) decisions.
Adult Sol learns that in the 10 days she’s been gone, her younger self has started dating Tae-sung (ah, so that explains why she said yes to him). And she’s called Sun-jae a creep for talking to her (since Young Sol has no memory of their interactions).
So, let’s talk about Tae-sung. There is so much to keep up with in this drama that I had no chance to give him his due last week. Tae-sung is a bad boy who rides a motorcycle and gets chased by girls that he ignores, but he’s exceptionally swoony in his own way. Now that he and Sol are dating, he bandages up her knee when she falls and puts her hand over his heart to show he likes her. He’s teasing — and even though I know where my allegiances lie with Sun-jae, it’s working.
The irony is that Tae-sung never would have looked twice at Sol if her grumpier older self hadn’t appeared and given him an attitude. But now he’s confused about how one minute she has heart eyes for him and the next she’s acting like a brash noonim who’s trying to take back her confession and reject him. There’s tons of chemistry here, and in another drama, these two would be the leads. (Full disclosure: True Beauty is the one and only drama that ever gave me second lead syndrome. I guess this writer has a knack for it.)
Now that Sol is back in 2008, she doubles down on her efforts to save Sun-jae, and this time, she determines she has to stop him from becoming an idol. When he gets a business card from an entertainment company who’s scouting, she sneaks her way into his room while he’s not there and rips up the card.
Of course, then she falls asleep on his floor and he finds her there. This leads to a breathtaking scene where he aims a fan at her against the summer heat and delicately removes a few strands of hair from covering her face. When she finally wakes up, she still can’t leave because his DAD (Kim Won-hae) is downstairs, and so, they talk.
Sun-jae realizes that Sol doesn’t remember his confession that night at the pool. He’s been mad at her for how she acted afterward, but now sees that she has no idea how he feels about her. The tension is so high something is about to crack, and it turns out to be Sun-jae. He can’t take it that she’s in his room anymore (he likes her too much). So, he carries her outside in a blanket, where they have their second big miscommunication.
He tells her he can’t be friends and he doesn’t need to be consoled — nobody asked her to take care of him. “I feel like you can see through my despair,” he yells. “It’s embarrassing and uncomfortable.” She’s desperate to stay by his side somehow, but if she can’t be a fan and she can’t be his friend, what else can she do? She’s crying, and he says that she can’t do what she wants for him, and so, she should just leave him alone. He’s pushing her away because he wants her close so badly, and the whole interaction feels unbearably real to me.
We end with more revelations. Since the beginning, there’s been a question about who saved Sol’s life when she had the accident that paralyzed her. It was hinted that it was Sun-jae, but now we see that it was. When Sol falls asleep on the bus and finds herself in a deserted area near a reservoir, Sun-jae takes a taxi to look for her. As she’s arguing with an aggressive drunk guy, she falls back into the water and Sun-jae arrives in time to dive in and save her.
While it’s happening, Sol is remembering. She sees Sun-jae running to her and clasping ahold of her under water, and then, on land, she remembers fully what happened after her accident. She was in the hospital, screaming at the person who saved her life that they shouldn’t have. Not if she was going to end up like she did. We see Sun-jae in the hallway at the hospital, hearing her, and crying. On the shore, Sol thinks: “Was it my memory that I lost? Or was it you?” She sobs, they hug, and I have no idea how we’re going to make it to next Monday.
There is so much happening in this drama. It makes sense that water is the recurring image given all that’s going on under the surface. Just thinking about this theme of idols and fans and how it’s playing out in their interactions is enough to write pages about. Sol’s “confession” that Sun-jae will never be alone is exactly what makes the idol gig so lonely: admirers are everywhere but no one gets close to the real person underneath.
We’re seeing shades of this in the drama when Sun-jae thinks back on all those heart fluttery things that Sol drunkenly said by the poolside — and he feels sadness about them. His depression seems to be manifesting already, and ironically, it’s related to Sol’s attempts to make him not depressed. What he wants is for her to see him. And she doesn’t yet.
In addition to the amazing water scenes, this director is doing something otherworldly in capturing their hands. Almost every time they’re together, they touch. Sun-jae has his hand at the small of her back or on her forearms. Sol has her hand on his shoulder or his face. The way he wraps her waist to pull her up from the water. The way she grips his back on the shore. Both the hand movements and the camera movements are so delicate, and the shots hold for so long, that the tension is sky high and I keep forgetting to breathe.
And lastly, on pacing, I was not expecting it to unfold so quickly, but I’m loving that it is. We already saw a kiss, our heroine already recovered her memory (which I thought would drag out for a long while), and we’ve got even more questions to answer now than we did last week. Add to that the burgeoning themes and believable anxieties, and I can’t wait to see what surprises are in store for this beautifully written (and directed) story.