It’s an action-packed finale driven by our two lead women who are ready to take their fates into their own hands. With so many secrets and lies floating around, it’s not easy to know who to trust. Both our protagonists make risky moves in a desperate attempt to rewrite their stories and protect what’s dear to them.
EPISODES 7-8
After finding those photos on Yoon-beom’s phone, Sang-eun had the good sense to contact Joo-ran rather than Jae-ho. Poised as ever, Joo-ran serves her tea and hands her $200,000 with the promise of $300,000 more when the job is complete; Sang-eun just needs to murder Jae-ho like she did her own husband. Damn, Joo-ran went straight for the nuclear option.
The exchange really highlights the dynamic between the two women. What’s an empowering move for Joo-ran – taking control and deciding the fate of her family – is a disempowering one for Sang-eun who is exploited due to her poverty into doing someone else’s dirty work. But Sang-eun desperately needs the money and understands what it’s like to have a dangerous husband, so she agrees to the job.
They (or Sang-eun, rather) hash out a detailed, multi-step plan for the murder that relies on sleeping pills and feigning a suicide. Once Joo-ran makes up her mind, they waste no time putting their plan into action. On D-day, Joo-ran feeds Jae-ho a sleeping-pill-laced smoothie and lets Sang-eun inside.
Everything is going too smoothly, so I keep waiting for something to go wrong or for a double-cross. And then it happens. The supposedly asleep Jae-ho creeps up behind Sang-eun and takes her down with a syringe while Joo-ran watches in silence. (Joo-ran better have something up her sleeve because if she’s genuinely protecting Jae-ho, I’m done with her.)
Backing up, we see Joo-ran went to Jae-ho about the incriminating photo and Sang-eun’s blackmail. But she wasn’t completely honest and frames it as if she still believes Jae-ho’s lie that Seung-jae is the culprit. When Jae-ho implies they’ll have to get rid of Sang-eun, he’s surprised that Joo-ran agrees, but she argues she’ll do anything for Seung-jae.
In the present, Joo-ran is clearly playing her own game here. When Sang-eun wakes, Joo-ran slips Sang-eun a scalpel while telling Jae-ho that Sang-eun is still unconscious. Then, she reveals that she knows Jae-ho killed Soo-min. After Jae-ho once again pins the murder on Seung-jae, Joo-ran demands he apologize for blaming it on their son who saw everything. He finally cops to it and says he was afraid she’d leave him if he admitted to murder, but he knew she’d forgive Seung-jae. Wow, he actually seems to feel sorry for himself.
Jae-ho leans down to check on Sang-eun and gets sliced across the face with his own scalpel. He then viciously beats her until Joo-ran can’t take it anymore and screams at him to stop. To get his attention, she slices her own wrist, telling him he needs to turn himself in and leave their family. That’s when Jae-ho’s loving husband façade fully falls away, and he hits her hard across the face. He taunts she’s nothing without him and doesn’t know how to fend for herself. Joo-ran stabs him and tries to run, but he catches up to her and begins choking her.
Luckily, Hae-soo is outside and sees Sang-eun through the window. She calls the cops when Sang-eun musters up the strength to throw a vase through the glass door. While Jae-ho is distracted by the commotion, Joo-ran takes the opportunity to push him down the stairs, killing him in the same manner he claimed Seung-jae killed Soo-min. Despite their various injuries, both Joo-ran and Sang-eun survive relatively unscathed. Well, physically, at least.
So what exactly was Joo-ran’s plan? Joo-ran never states it outright, but Sang-eun’s guess is as good as any. She surmises Joo-ran was attempting to have Sang-eun and Jae-ho both take each other out, eliminating two problems at once and leaving her in the clear. While it’s possible she planned it that way from the start, there was a hesitancy about her in the lead-up to the event that suggested she did seriously consider their murder plan.
Flashbacks this week give us more insight into Joo-ran and how she ended up so self-doubting and repressed. Her mother was always hard on her daughters, demanding and controlling. She made Joo-ran feel small by always telling her she was nothing without a husband to take care of her. At Young-ran’s (Joo-ran’s sister) funeral, she outright blamed Joo-ran for Young-ran’s death, an accusation that has haunted Joo-ran ever since. (Young-ran was staying at Joo-ran’s place when she died.)
Joo-ran already felt useless thanks to her mom, and then Jae-ho swooped in and stoked that insecurity under the guise of loving concern. It’s no wonder she learned to be helpless and couldn’t trust herself.
Sang-eun too has her own mom issues, but unlike Joo-ran’s mom, Sang-eun’s mom did seem to be trying her best. On a lucid day, Sang-eun confronts her mom about pretending not to see the abuse and pampering Yoon-beom. Her mom thought if she made him food and treated him well, maybe he’d stop beating Sang-eun. She can’t stand seeing Sang-eun in any more pain and tells her to live for herself now. Her troublesome brother and sister-in-law are no longer her concern – from now on, pretend she has no family. All her mom asks for is a picture of the baby once it’s born.
With that, Sang-eun is freed from one burden. Then, Joo-ran frees her from another. After killing Jae-ho, Joo-ran regales the cop with her shocking story, leaving him more speechless with each twist. She does Sang-eun a solid and claims Jae-ho killed Yoon-beom, painting Sang-eun as a heroic justice-seeker who was at their house that day trying to get Jae-ho to admit the truth. Since the death is officially ruled a homicide, Sang-eun gets the insurance money and is cleared of suspicion. Joo-ran, on the other hand, admits to killing Jae-ho and even plotting to kill Sang-eun, so she goes to trial.
In the final scenes, we see that Sang-eun had her baby and now has enough money to even donate to charity. Seeing her so bright and happy is a jarring but welcome sight. Meanwhile, Joo-ran is happily living with Seung-jae, is still friends with Hae-soo, and seems on better terms with her mom. (If she went to prison, it wasn’t for very long.) Although she and Sang-eun don’t appear to be in contact anymore, they’re forever connected by their secret and the life-changing impact they’ve had on each other.
I didn’t expect this happy of an ending for both women given the drama’s darker tone, but I like that it didn’t have a depressing end. Both Joo-ran and Sang-eun broke free of their cages, learning to take control of their lives and fight for their survival. Sure, it took a bit of murder, but they got there in the end. (JK, not advocating murder.) I found both women’s journeys compelling and appreciated how, despite their vast differences, they shared an understanding as women who’d been told they were worthless and kept in their supposed place. They each had to learn to respect themselves and decide to demand better in the face of a world that wasn’t going to protect them.
I also liked the way the drama highlighted how their social and monetary capital influenced their situations. While Joo-ran didn’t have it easy and endured abuse of her own, Sang-eun had to deal with the effects of poverty on top of her extreme abuse. Joo-ran could say she and Sang-eun were the same, and maybe even believe it, yet still throw money at her when she wanted to use her, knowing she couldn’t afford to refuse. Even after killing her husband, Joo-ran got to return to her lavish life soon after with little consequence; I somehow doubt Sang-eun would’ve fared anywhere near as well had she gone to trial.
Although Hae-soo wasn’t as much of a focus, I really liked the addition of her character. Like Joo-ran and Sang-eun, she had been trapped in a narrative of others’ making, as well as her own anxieties. Hae-soo didn’t kill her husband like others claimed but instead went into a state of shock when he died suddenly of a heart attack. She then lived with his corpse for a month without leaving the house (yikes). Also like Joo-ran, it was her fear of incompetence and being alone that trapped her inside. All three women experienced hardship and trauma, and they were subsequently penalized for and trapped by it. For a while, they let everyone else tell them who and what they were.
I went into this drama expecting a more traditional mystery/thriller, but I instead got an artsy character study about women pushed to the brink. While I’m not a fan of artsy for the sake of being artsy, here the artistic style was integrated well and enhanced the storytelling. It set the tone, signaled shifts, and highlighted important elements in creative ways. This isn’t a drama with particularly likeable characters or a fast-paced plot, but it told a tight, interesting story about self-worth and the lies we tell each other and ourselves out of fear.