Our penultimate week is here, and with it, our past and present storylines — and characters — converge at the center of the story. Scratch that, the characters are the center of the story, and it’s truly heartwarming to see the drama pull them all together again. But all the while, the investigation comes closer to home, and the time to solve it is running out.
EPISODES 9-10
I’ll try to hold back the standing ovation I’m ready to give this drama until next week when we have to say goodbye, but goshdarnit it’s been such a beautifully woven story with a gentleness I really love.
We open up this week with Mi-ran’s shocking appearance/admission at the gym, and a no-holds-barred conversation takes place between the three of them. Well, Baek-du mostly stands there gawking (he didn’t know, like we did, that Mi-ran already knew Yoo-kyung was Doo-shik and a cop), and the girls talk. We hear Mi-ran’s side of the story, which goes right to the heart to say the least, but doesn’t give terribly much by way of clues.
What we do learn is that Choi Chil-seung wanted to tell the truth to Mi-ran once and for all, but was stopped from doing so by a non-stop caller on his phone. They were supposed to meet later for her to find out who was responsible for her father’s death — and it’s a person who lives in town — but that’s the night he dies, and Mi-ran learns nothing more.
However, what Mi-ran didn’t learn in facts she received in evidence. That giant black bag is full of gazillions of won, as well as the match-rigging ledgers that will spell game over for the whole thing. Mi-sook tells her team they can do the rest of their investigating from Seoul now that they have the ledgers, but Yoo-kyung wants to stick around Geosan. It’s clear she wants to dig even deeper than Choi Chil-seung’s death and back into the past issue with her father, and this brings us to an important thematic moment of the week: loss.
Mi-ran, of course, lost her father at a young age. Yoo-kyung lost her precious childhood — and we learn this week how much that really meant to her. And as for Baek-du? Well, he knows he lost something too, but when Yoo-kyung confronts him on not being able to understand deep loss, he can only sputter — and then try to figure out what precious thing he knows he once lost.
It’s adorable and so Baek-du-y that he knows, but he doesn’t know. Like we learned about him early on, he’s so instinctual — living in his own world so deeply — that others around him think he’s too dumb to get stuff, or underestimate him. Anyway, our boy finally finds his words (and feelings) when he learns that Yoo-kyung has ten days left before heading back to Seoul. He tells her: you’re what I lost. *Gah!*
The heart-piercing earnestness that is Jang Dong-yoon’s performance here as Baek-du is enough to sell this scene a hundred times over, but the childhood flashbacks continue to inform so much of the emotion here too. There’s so much nostalgia and innocence in the childhood sequences that we can’t help but feel the preciousness of that time for the characters as well.
Well, from there it’s a short road to Baek-du’s romantic confession (“I like you, I really and truly like you”), and it’s even more special because it’s about Yoo-kyung as a whole person. He said when Yoo-kyung first returned that he and Doo-shik were soulmates, and this confession is truly that: one between soulmates.
However, there’s some gossip brewing in the alleys of Geosan, which started when a town ajusshi saw Baek-du and Yoo-kyung chatting at the bus depot a few episodes back. Once he tells his wife it’s all over, and the gossip train goes from a local freight train to a runaway shinkansen. Pretty soon everyone is shaming and blaming Baek-du behind his back for his “affair” with “a married woman.” Everyone in Baek-du’s family (and Hyun-wook as well) can tell that something is off, but it takes a while for the gossip to spill down to his mom. This eventually leads to a back-alley confrontation between Baek-du, and well, everyone else.
Like this drama has done so well from the start, it balances so much humor with the more deep and serious storylines, and this presumed affair is also handled in the same way. When it finally culminates, Baek-du’s heart for Doo-shik so many years ago comes out, and he single-handedly calls out the entire town for how they believed gossip so much it became their truth. He berates them for the past, and how they let Doo-shik’s family go, and this pivotal moment signals a shift in the town gossip. Now, rather than focused on a presumed affair, it’s all about what really happened with Doo-shik and her father all those years ago. Everyone felt bad, but buried their guilt over time; now, thanks to Baek-du, it all comes to the surface again.