Playful, funny, a full of adorable band members, our drama is off and running with a Back to the Future-esque story that’s impossible to put down. As our guitar-loving hero begins to navigate the past, father and son get off on the wrong foot, giving us lighthearted fun smacked right up against heartfelt moments. I know it’s early, but I’m already expecting this to nudge itself onto my list of favorite time-slip dramas.
EPISODES 3-4
My adoration for this drama boils down to its vibe. It’s got tons of personality and it knows itself well. It’s a little wacky, somewhat quirky, at times sentimental, but it never strays from its overarching tone that’s geared to make us feel good whether it’s a comedic moment or a serious one. With that kind of vision, I can’t not love it — even when it doesn’t make total sense.
We start with Yi-chan’s perspective this week and see that when Dad was young, he was a bit of a slacker, a little dweeby, hilariously funny, and one heck of an optimist. What catches Eun-gyeol’s attention of course is that his father also had a big fat crush on someone who is not Eun-gyeol’s mom. In the words of our time-traveling hero: “I have so many questions, Dad!”
Last week, we saw Yi-chan approach his crush, Se-kyung, and announce he’s in a band now — feel free to swoon. This week, we see Se-kyung is far from interested but says she’ll be his girlfriend the minute he meets three conditions: it has to be a newly minted band (no piggybacking on a successful group). Yi-chan has to play an instrument (solos expected). And she gets to choose the song he plays (it’s 1995, so, Nirvana).
With unmerited fervor he accepts the challenge. Now, he just needs to drum up some bandmates. The group’s name is no problem since he’s already got that picked out: Fake First Love Memory Makers — because he’ll be every girl’s first love from now on (hilarious).
His first move is to recruit the school band, which already has three musicians and just needs a guitarist. But since Yi-chan has only learned the first few cords of one song, they kick him out until he can come back with a real guitar player.
And this is the leadup to the meeting between Yi-chan and Eun-gyeol that we closed with last week. No, it’s not because Eun-gyeol is a genius guitar player — it’s because there’s a total mix-up.
Yi-chan and his friend, OH MA-JOO (Ahn Do-kyu), set out to lure a promising young guitarist named Yoon Dong-jin to Seoul. Yi-chan lives at a boarding house, run by his grandmother (Go Du-shim), and he offers Dong-jin free room and board as a trade for joining their band. Dong-jin is all in, and so, he agrees to meet them on the very street corner where Eun-gyeol is about to land when he steps back through time. And that’s how Yi-chan meets Eun-gyeol and mistakes him for Dong-jin.
The kicker to this story is that we already know that by 2024 Yoon Dong-jin is super-duper famous and known as “the godfather of Korean rock.” We also know he trained with a guy called Oh Ma-joo. So, by meeting Eun-gyeol, rather than Dong-jin, the boys might already be changing the future (just my guess considering there was an allusion to the butterfly effect before this scene).
But what happens in the future isn’t the point right now. Instead, we get a laugh-out-loud funny meeting between father and son, where Eun-gyeol pretends to be Yoon Dong-jin — it’s easy since he’s a celebrity and Eun-gyeol can spout off facts about him to “verify” his identity. The funniest part of the whole meeting scene is that the drama uses the sound effects from Back to the Future, giving a meta nod to its own comedy. (I found this genius, even if it gets tired the third or fourth time they do it later.)
But after all the shenanigans, posing as Dong-jin doesn’t last long because the other bandmates know he’s not the right guy. So, Yi-chan is back to square one and refuses to believe Eun-gyeol can play the guitar. The two have a building animosity because both feel betrayed: Eun-gyeol lied about being Yoon Dong-jin, and Yi-chan started a band for a girl that’s not mom!
While the two boys sort out their feelings, a couple of things happen. First, Eun-gyeol realizes he has no idea how to get back to 2024. He receives a cryptic call at a payphone from the guy who bought his guitar last week at that mystical music shop (the one that appeared out of nowhere and he didn’t think it was at all weird). But the music guy (Jung Sang-hoon) is no help, telling Eun-gyeol to figure out for himself why he’s been sent back through time (which also gives us no info on the time-travel rules of this universe).
The second thing that happens is we finally get a proper introduction to Mom, also known as YOON CHUNG-AH (played by Shin Eun-soo in the 1995 timeline). We learn she’s a talented artist, born deaf, and that she already likes Yi-chan before he even knows who she is. The two have been acquainted in passing (he saved her from a stack of books that was about to fall on her), but while she developed a crush, he didn’t even remember her.
The two meet for real when she’s bullied and locked in a school storage room and he hides in the same room while being chased for sneaking into her school (he snuck in to see Se-kyung). Yi-chan doesn’t realize Chung-ah can’t hear or speak and covers her mouth so he won’t get caught if she screams. Her eyes light up and by the time they break out of the room, holding hands as they run, she is so clearly in love.
While it looks like Chung-ah’s backstory will be unfolding slowly as we go on, we learn a lot about Se-kyung this week. We already knew she’s from a rich family and is a mega-talented cellist. What we didn’t know is that she’s adopted and she learned to play cello like a pro so that her adopted mother would want to keep her. She narrates that she was a replacement (a gift from husband to wife) after her parents’ biological daughter died.
When Eun-gyeol runs into Se-kyung in the past, he recognizes her as the “ahjumma” who gave him the guitar in 2024 — who’s also Harabeoji’s daughter. When he asks her about her dad, she’s furious, not only because he’s calling her ahjumma, but because her dad is a physics professor, not a guitar teacher. (We get some hints that Harabeoji is her biological father.)
One really nice element is that Se-kyung is not a jerk. She wants these annoying high school boys to leave her alone, but she befriends Chung-ah, who’s otherwise a loner. When Se-kyung learns her family is moving to the U.S. soon, Chung-ah is the only one she tells. But this becomes an issue later when Se-kyung gifts Chung-ah a concert ticket, hoping to go together, and Chung-ah secretly gives the ticket to Yi-chan (saying it’s from Se-kyung). She does it because she knows Yi-chan likes Se-kyung and will be sad when she moves away.
As Eun-gyeol tries to wrangle his father into studying and going to class, Yi-chan breaks free to go to the concert. There, Se-kyung screams that she never invited him and he promised to stay away from her until he had a band (the whole point of her challenge is that he’ll leave her alone, since she doesn’t believe he can do it). But Eun-gyeol steps in, saying they already formed a band, and next thing we know he and Yi-chan are on stage performing.
Eun-gyeol is on guitar while Yi-chan does vocals and they’re great together. The crowd goes crazy and Eun-gyeol tells us that he’s living out a dream: Dad isn’t mute. Not only can he sing, he can hear his son playing guitar too. Afterward, they’re both so happy that it looks like they’re about to become friends.
As they walk, Yi-chan is almost hit by a car and Eun-gyeol pushes him out of harm’s way. This whole time he’s been trying to understand why his father never told him that he wasn’t born deaf and then he remembers that Dad had a giant scar on the back of one shoulder. He reaches over and checks Yi-chan for the scar. It’s not there yet. Guessing that the scar and the hearing loss are related, Eun-gyeol has a look on his face that makes me think he’s going to try changing the future.
What fun this drama is! I love all the little references to the future that make Eun-gyeol a fish out of water — like the huge stack of cash in his pocket that he can’t use because it hasn’t started being printed yet (or the time he cuts the line for the payphone because the “wi-fi’s not working” lol). His constant exasperation is half the reason I want to keep coming back. The other half is Yi-chan’s hilarity (Choi Hyun-wook is just so incredibly funny).
But the drama also has its heartfelt side, and Eun-gyeol’s realizations this week about how little he knows about his parents are just signs of all the growing up he’s going to do in front of our faces. The scene at the boarding house, when Eun-gyeol sees Yi-chan’s grandma (his own great-grandmother who died when he was a child) and cries thinking back on her, is a great example of how the drama moves from comedy to sincerity without missing a beat. We learn that Grandma checked regularly to see if he reacted to sound as a baby, and passed away “in peace” only after he started speaking (on behalf of his family). Gah, add to that the high-energy music we’re sure to be in for and this 90s drama is a keeper.