Thankfully, it’s a less of a boring week in The Impossible Heir in this set of episodes, but that doesn’t make what’s happening any more scrutable. The show turns up the ~drama~ this week, but for shame, none of it has much sticking power because we still don’t see inside our heroes enough for it to work the way it ought to. Instead, we have lots of dramatic things happen that we watch from outside. I haven’t felt this emotionally isolated from a K-drama in a long time.
Picking up where we left off, In-ha is now in position as Official Kangoh Group Heir #3, and our team is about through their master plan, right? In-ha wanted to get into the family and he’s doing a bang-up job of knowing he only has to be his father’s dog (his words). Hye-won wanted to marry into the Kang family, and she and In-ha’s recent engagement has been accepted by the chairman. And as for Tae-oh, he’s still in the right-hand man power seat. What else is left? Is it game over? If it’s not, what’s their end game? (Asking for a friend.)
In the meantime, the mess that Sung-joo caused last week was swiftly dealt with, and he’s been all but exiled (like his scheming mother who left for “the villa”) — and I don’t just mean from Chairman Kang’s good graces. I mean from the actual drama, too. Where Sung-joo’s arc seems to fizzle out, In-joo continues to be a PITA, and is involved in some big trouble, which we’ll get to later.
But first, the bigger theme of what the drama is really trying to do: start pitting our two heroes against each other. Gone, gone forever is the brief glimpse of their early friendship dynamic. Now they just glare at each other over expensive alcohol and rehearse their next move.
That being said, In-ha gets an official “test” from his father, which has to do with a high-profile business negotiation trying to sell one of the Kangoh companies. And this is one of the first times we see antagonism between In-ha and Tae-oh. In-ha seems to reach a tipping point where he can’t trust in Tae-oh’s long game. Instead, he uses a cheap trick to pull off the sale to his advantage. It works, and In-ha isn’t faulted for it much, but it’s the first time (ever?) that In-ha has blatantly gone around Tae-oh to get something done. And methinks that has set a precedent. (As a plot device it’s boring, but it works. And really, the fun here is seeing Tae-oh having to repress his inner fury.)
Now that In-ha is having one-on-ones with his father (and getting schooled in business, wine, and proper chaebol conduct), he seems to be relying on Tae-oh less and less. But could the mounting tension also be over Hye-won? In-ha finally proposes to her and she accepts (it’s utterly emotionless, just like their entire romance has been). Nevertheless, In-ha texts Tae-oh excitedly with the news, but poor Tae-oh is out for a night run to some extremely moody music, brooding over losing his woman for good.
This scene is the perfect example of a juxtaposition that would work beautifully, and rip your heart by the feels, if the drama was doing what it was supposed to and, you know, making us feel things. As it is, I feel nothing, and I’m shocked over the lack of romantic chemistry in this entire love triangle when both Lee Jae-wook and Lee Jun-young have been such chemistry magnets in the past. Indeed, the entire love triangle is ripe for a harvest of deep-seated competition between our leads, the question of who really started the “game” first, and if In-ha is really out-playing Tae-oh with the Hye-won card, but our drama is having trouble pulling this off effectively. Still, the seeds are there. If you squint, you can see them.
The relationship between Tae-oh and Hye-won doesn’t seem to have changed at all over the past decade or so, which makes this week’s sudden fixation with the unresolved “tension” between them a little hard to buy. Apparently that oh-so-brief exchange when they were college students — the wrist grab and the decision to ignore their attraction — has been haunting both of them ever since. But this doesn’t come to the surface until Tae-oh’s life is in the balance.
One night after meeting In-ha in a basketball court, In-ha leaves and Tae-oh sticks around on his own for a few minutes. Yes, watching him shoot hoops in a dress shirt was my favorite scene this week. Alas, it does not end well, and he’s ruthlessly bludgeoned and left to bleed out in the street. But not before failing to reach for his phone, which is calling Hye-won, and he passes out thinking about how much he misses her. (This, unfortunately, is another example of a scene that could have been so powerful, if only we had actual Plot Evidence of Tae-oh having something to miss).
Tae-oh survives the attack — barely — and it jumpstarts a lot of plot points. First, it’s used as the way to break the resolve between Tae-oh and Hye-won. He touches her hand on two occasions (in the melty way that only Lee Jae-wook is capable of), and not only does Hee-joo know, but In-ha secretly sees as well (*Uh ohs*). Second, the assault is promptly covered up by In-ha and Chairman Kang for PR reasons, but we’re led to believe there’s some fishiness around. Third, it sparks Tae-oh’s own investigation of who the heck tried to kill him.
Thanks to Tae-oh’s North Korean-Italian-basement-hacker pal, he learns that In-joo’s right-hand mand was behind the assault, and he confronts him on it while looking very good in a leather jacket. But is it a warning from In-joo, or is something else going on? There’s a rumor that it was In-ha’s doing, and we do see him visiting the crime scene later like a real creepo. Either way, both Tae-oh and Hye-won find themselves on the Rooftop of Consolation, and this is where their Deeply Repressed Feelings of Longing come out. And I have to give it to Lee Jae-wook — the script might not have sold this romance adequately, but his eyes certainly do. He asks Hye-won only for “this moment” and then kisses her passionately. Too bad the Rooftop of Consolation has long been spied on by In-joo’s henchman, and pictures of the incriminating kiss have been captured.
With no time to linger, we jump into In-ha and Hye-won’s wedding, which everyone seems pretty okay with — well, except steely-eyed Tae-oh, and feisty sis Hee-joo. She’s previously warned her brother that, “[Hye-won] doesn’t love you, she only loves herself” and to that I say: well spotted!
But it all hits the fan at the wedding. The bride gets on the elevator with In-joo only to be greeted with photos of her kissing Tae-oh. *Shock and horror* And then, when we reconnect with Tae-oh, he’s waking up on the floor of a hotel suite covered in blood with an ice pick in his hand, and a very dead In-joo and wife (?) also in the suite. This is a gruesome circle back to the opening scene of the drama, and it also marks our episode ending, and our drama’s midpoint. Phew.
Well, here’s my hot take on The Impossible Heir as it stands now: if this were a 2005-era melodrama (as the opening titles suggest), this drama would have been 20 better-scripted episodes, and it would have been easily able to pull off all the deep relational twists it’s going for. It would make for a slower paced and less flashy story, but I’d gladly trade both those things for one that can bear its own weight.
Melos of the past did this with aplomb, because those dramas were deeply invested in the characters’ backstories before bringing everything full circle. That means we would spend several episodes with our characters in their youth — not barely thirty minutes, like this drama afforded them. No one wants to get behind this messy love triangle and forbidden kiss storyline more than I do, but in order for it to be believable, it needs to be bolstered by more than the brief three-minute scene we had back in Episode 2. It’s this lack of grounding that makes the drama’s love story — and most of the major plot beats — feel so flat when they should be anything but.