Buckle up, Beanies, because there’s a lot going on with our sweet mobster and his lady this week. We’ve got romance, we’ve got action, we’ve got — *record scratch* — noble idiocy. While I certainly didn’t sign up for that last one, there’s still plenty of squees and laughs to go around, and our deerlings more than make up for the fact that our OTP is growing apart as steadily as they are moving towards one another.
EPISODES 7-8
Last week, when we left our OTP, I was feeling all sorts of conflicted because I was swooning over the perilous, life-threatening situation that had befallen them — you know, completely ignoring the fact that they were slowly turning into meat popsicles. But in my defense, Ji-hwan had wrapped his arms around Eun-ha and began huddling with her like a penguin. That’s, like, top tier romance, people! However, brace yourselves, Beanies, because just when I thought that moment couldn’t get any better, the writers went and dialed the cuteness up an extra notch.
You see, while our sweet mobster was using his body heat to keep Eun-ha warm, he was also distracting her from the cold by whispering sweet nothings random penguin facts in her ear that he picked up from the Nature Channel. Let’s be real here, with his arms wrapped around her like that, there’s no way she was thinking about penguins, but her thoughts — whatever they were — weren’t enough to keep her awake. So when our deerlings finally unlocked the freezer door, releasing a cloud of dry-ice smoke, Ji-hwan carried her out of there looking like the cover (frozen, blue lipped) model for a damn harlequin romance novel. (Y’all, the noises I made during the first ten minutes of Episode 7 could have summoned farm animals to my front yard.)
Eun-ha wakes up in the hospital, and given the position of the small sofa next to her bed, Ji-hwan has been waiting by her side for her to wake up. His present anxiousness combined with his actions in the freezer clue Eun-ha in on the fact that Ji-hwan treats her special, but she isn’t sure why. So she straight up asks him: “Why are you so nice to me?”
But before he can respond, his equally worried deerlings, who’ve been spying on the couple, fall through the hospital room door and absolutely ruin the moment. However… I’ve got to say, watching Ji-hwan scold the deerlings for their negligence and reckless match-making attempt was a whole different kind of moment — one that I found extremely attractive because you just know he was channeling all his fear and worries for Eun-ha into his (tightly reined) anger.
Although Eun-ha has known for some time that Ji-hwan is nicer than his reputation, stoicism, and wardrobe would imply, their shared time in the hospital provides additional evidence that she is someone important to him. He was especially thoughtful when writing up a list of items for Mi-ho to pack for Eun-ha’s stay in the hospital, and after Eun-ha’s brief visit to the children’s ward with Hyun-woo — who showed up unexpectedly out of concern for her “hemorrhoids” (a lie courtesy Mi-ho) — Eun-ha discovers that Ji-hwan fell asleep while waiting for her to return.
She marvels at his ability to sleep while in a seated position and traces the shape of his knitted brows. Here’s a man who’s so concerned about protecting those in his care that he can’t even relax while he’s sleeping. So when he wakes from his nap, Eun-ha insists he indulges in a little self-care and gets a vitamin IV pack. After all, she wasn’t the only one to nearly freeze to death.
The flirtations continue in frequency after Eun-ha leaves the hospital, beginning with Eun-ha’s prolonged bout of jealousy after she catches Ji-hwan and Ye-na is what looks like — but totally isn’t — a compromising position. When Ji-hwan returns home that night, Eun-ha is in a certifiable mood, and he bumbles through his explanation of what really happened because Eun-ha trips him up with her passive-aggressive interrogation methods. The poor man nearly chokes on his food when she asks him if he really has no dating experience — because, you know, he sure looked experienced holding Ye-na’s hand. (Cue: Eun-ha’s side-eye.)
After he eats, Ji-hwan helps Eun-ha with the dishes, but he goofs up and gets soap in Eun-ha’s eyes. Ji-hwan’s panic turns to stunned silence when Eun-ha opens her eyes and he gets caught in her gaze. They stare at each other, and although Ji-hwan looks a little panicked — as if he’s simultaneously worried he made her blind and afraid she’s going to scold him — Eun-ha’s doe-eyes are smitten. But, as always, the moment is interrupted by the trio of deerlings spying on them. I love the deerlings’ hilarious antics, but, man, their timing could really use some work.
Although Eun-ha is falling for Ji-hwan, she still hasn’t given up on finding her childhood friend — or destroying Ji-hwan’s lawn to try and locate the time capsule they buried there when they were friends. So imagine her surprise when she returns home (after another outing with Hyun-woo) to find Ji-hwan holding the time capsule. He claims he dug it up to protect his yard, but that is only a half-truth.
And what is Ji-hwan hiding from Eun-ha, you might ask? Well, we can all thank Hyun-woo for this particular plot reveal. You see, in between helping Eun-ha find her teaching mojo again, Hyun-woo has been secretly trying to track down Eun-ha’s childhood friend. He may not be the Hyun-woo she’s looking for, but he still wants to help her find him. So imagine his surprise when he’s looking through old real estate reports and sees a familiar name: Ji-hwan’s mother. Yeah, that’s right, folks, our sweet mobster’s name — before he was taken in by his gangster bio-dad and had it legally changed — was Joo Hyun-woo.
By this point in our story, this reveal should come as a shock to no one watching this drama. There were hints and too many tropey K-drama coincidences for him to not be Eun-ha’s childhood friend, but now that it’s official, I feel a new wave of sympathy for our reluctant mobster. He was forced to give up his dream of being a prosecutor because of his father’s criminal activities, and the smiling, carefree little boy who distracted and protected Eun-ha from her problems, developed an outer shell to shield himself from the world his father imposed on him.
Thankfully, Ji-hwan never truly lost sight of who he was at heart, and even though he didn’t become a prosecutor, he stood by his morals and gave the police an anonymous tip that led to his father’s arrest. Thus, Ji-hwan’s path was cleared for him to turn his father’s gang into an honorable and legitimate business, keeping his deerlings gainfully employed and on the right side of the law. Unfortunately, Yang-hee, the former right-hand man of Ji-hwan’s father, wasn’t pleased when Ji-hwan inherited his father’s position, so he and the rest of his newly formed Kitty Gang ambushed Ji-hwan at a hotel. And yup, you guessed it, that’s the incident Hyun-woo witnessed ten years ago that made him wrongfully believe Ji-hwan was a violent criminal.
Instead of revealing his identity to Eun-ha, though, Ji-hwan suggests to her that “there are memories better left buried” because “for some people, confronting the past is a difficult thing.” His words are a cautionary hint that he doesn’t want to be found, and given what we’ve learned about Ji-hwan’s history with the Bulldog Gang, he’s got several reasons for wanting to keep his past buried. For starters, he doesn’t want to think about the boy with hopes and dreams that never came to fruition. We also know he’s ashamed of his present identity, and he likely doesn’t want Eun-ha to be disappointed in who he’s become.
But, at the moment, his most pressing concern is probably keeping Eun-ha at arm’s length and safely away from his enemies — especially since he’s about to go ono the offensive against the Kitty Gang. You see, Ji-hwan and Il-young have finally confirmed that Former Drug Dealer didn’t run off under his own volition. Instead, he’s been held captive by the Kitty Gang to be used as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with their drug supplier, who wants Former Drug Dealer dead. Of course, this means Ji-hwan, who’s eternally loyal to those who remain loyal to him, must organize a rescue operation — and he intends to make it a solo operation. About that…
Ji-hwan’s deerlings — and Eun-ha — are not the type to just sit around while their friend is in danger, so they immediately mobilize into action once they realize their recklessly fearless leader is missing. Luckily, after the jjimjilbang incident, Ji-hwan had Eun-ha install a tracking app on her phone so he could come to her rescue if she was ever in danger (again), but the app is a two-way street that allows her to track his location, too. By the time the deerlings and Eun-ha arrive on the scene, though, Il-young has already driven Former Drug Dealer to safety and the police have arrived — thanks to an anonymous tip from Ji-hwan and Il-young — and arrested most of the Kitty Gang members… and Ji-hwan.
Hyun-woo finally has Ji-hwan where he wants him: on the other side of his interrogation table. But for a guy who has — up until this point — has been simmering in his own biases and hostility for the last eight episodes, he’s noticeably subdued. Methinks he’s slowly coming around to the possibility that — oh, I don’t know — maybe Ji-hwan isn’t that awful of a person after all. So what clued him into the fact that Ji-hwan is a big ol’ softie?
Well, for starters, from what Eun-ha told him that her childhood friend wanted to grow up to be a prosecutor, and given the fact that Ji-hwan didn’t live with his father until he was a teenager, logic would dictate that he didn’t grow up brainwashed into thinking the criminal life was the high life. Second, Hyun-woo has had a mole among Ji-hwan’s deerlings, the maknae, who has been going to bat for Ji-hwan’s character, stating that Ji-hwan would search just as hard for him if he’d been the one to go missing. And finally, the last piece of information that makes Hyun-woo reevaluate his opinion of Ji-hwan is the anonymous tip about the drug deal going down between the Kitty Gang and their supplier, which he correctly suspects came from Ji-hwan.
Although it’s unclear if Hyun-woo has completely reversed his opinion of Ji-hwan, the two men do agree on one thing: not telling Eun-ha that Ji-hwan is her childhood friend. Ugh, noble idiocy trope, here we come, and sure enough, after Ji-hwan has been released from jail, the first thing he does is push Eun-ha away. He answers her previous question (“Why are you so nice to me?”) with a big fat lie: I don’t like you and I’m only nice because you’re my tenant, “nothing more, nothing less.” Ouch!
Even if I don’t agree with Ji-hwan’s methods, this is one of the rare instances where I kind of understand the lie. Eun-ha has demonstrated several times that she will insert herself into dangerous situations to protect strangers (the waiter at the Kitty Gang’s night club) and people she cares about (Marketing Deerling). Not to mention, she just inadvertently gets herself into trouble. Unlike Ji-hwan, though, she’s more or less defenseless, and her charming way of diffusing tense situations isn’t going to protect her from Yang-hee, who’s still on the loose and showed a dangerous interest in Ji-hwan’s “woman.”
After Ji-hwan pushes Eun-ha away, she meets up with Hyun-woo, and she’s clutching the time capsule in her lap. Hyun-woo builds up to revealing something about her childhood friend, and whatever he tells her has her returning to Ji-hwan’s home and declaring that they should never see each other again. Oh, no! What did Hyun-woo tell Eun-ha that made her give up on trying to resolve things with Ji-hwan?
Considering Hyun-woo and Ji-hwan’s earlier, unspoken agreement that Eun-ha should not find out that Ji-hwan is her childhood friend, it’s possible that Hyun-woo lied and told Eun-ha that he was the Hyun-woo. As far as K-drama plotlines go, that one would check out, but if Eun-ha believed Hyun-woo was her childhood friend, would she really go cold turkey on Ji-hwan like that?
I’m honestly wondering if — maybe, just maybe — Hyun-woo told her the truth, and now Eun-ha is reverse-uno-carding Ji-hwan’s noble idiocy. You know, by leaving him she’s helping him avoid the painful confrontation of his childhood memories. I don’t see Eun-ha leaving him because she fears for her own safety, but if she thought she could save Ji-hwan somehow by giving him space? Yeah, she’d dip out. (Not that I support this logic.)
Noble idiocy aside, this week’s episodes amped up everything good about this K-drama: the romance, the humor, and even the dangerous gang violence element. Once again, our writers are showing us they know how to find a balance with all these genres while making our main and secondary characters shine.
And speaking of our secondary characters, our deerlings’ antics were laugh out loud funny this week, and they had several standout moments that deserve praise. From their constant spying on our OTP to their conception dream that turned out to be a bad omen, these guys are hilarious. But I especially loved the way they sided with Eun-ha after Ji-hwan pushed her away, and instigated passive-aggressive warfare on her behalf. Even the most crotchety of the bunch was coming to “the rat’s” defense! Love it!
Il-young, however, spent a good bit of his screen time performing his own side quests this week, and when he wasn’t gathering intel on the Kitty Gang, he was bumbling his way through his post-one-night-stand awkwardness with Mi-ho. He was very quick to call their night together a “mistake,” but methinks that isn’t how he really feels. Hard to say if he’s just avoiding romance to prioritize Ji-hwan, whom he feels indebted to (because he was off living a “normal” college life while Ji-hwan was getting beat up by the Kitty Gang), or if he — like Ji-hwan — lacks game and only said it was a mistake because he assumed that’s how Mi-ho felt. Either way, I enjoyed watching Mi-ho’s military father put Il-young through his paces — before dropping his stern facade and inviting Ji-hwan to stay for a meal. I really do enjoy a good pair of meddling, matchmaking parents.