Our solo traveler continues her day trips as One Day Off takes a more philosophical turn in its second half. It’s as beautiful and strange as ever, with a conclusion that attempts to give it greater meaning, but somehow makes it feel a little smaller.
EPISODES 5-8
With questions about time and perception underlying these episodes, I’ll start by saying that I think this should have been a single drop so we could watch all eight installments at one time. The first four episodes had a bigger effect on me, but it’s hard to know if it’s only because I’ve had a week to build them up in my head.
Still, there is a possibility that the break was purposeful because we’re grappling with different themes this week. Where the initial four episodes felt like a meditation on society and our place within it, this last half feels like it’s expanded into questions of the universe — and maybe that’s why we begin in a planetarium.
Like last week, each episode continues to tell a unique story and vary its visual storytelling methods. First up is Episode 5, which is told backward. It jumps around in time using the device of a VHS tape that’s rewound and then fast forwarded (in all its warped glory) to arrive at pertinent moments. The gist is that Ha-kyung has randomly met a woman while waiting in line for a restaurant, and she turns out to be GU YOUNG-SOOK (Gil Hae-yeon) — a children’s book author that Ha-kyung loved while growing up. The two decide to spend the day together and wind up at the local planetarium looking up at the stars.
Young-sook is flattered that Ha-kyung knows who she is but says that times have changed and no one is interested in old work like hers anymore. She then tells Ha-kyung an idea for a new story about the end of humanity — it runs on a time loop, so every day is doomsday on repeat. The result is that no matter how much the protagonist tries to fight it, the world always comes to an end. It’s at this point that our episode starts playing with time, just like in Young-sook’s story.
If this sounds a little depressing then you’ve understood the tone for this week with its themes of aging, death, ghosts, and the meaning of it all. But in the drama’s defense, it’s not meant to be a downer. It’s attempting to give the audience mindful advice to face these realities by telling us to “surrender to the contingency of time” and look for meaning in the smallest nooks and crannies of our existence.
When Young-sook tells Ha-kyung about the bodily struggles of getting older, she notes that she was foolish to work so hard when she was younger, sacrificing her health for little pay. She doesn’t feel her work was worth it in the end. But Ha-kyung corrects her, saying that her life’s work was worth it because her books comforted Ha-kyung when she felt lonely and misunderstood. It seems to be a reminder that meaning and value can come from affecting even one person positively.
Episode 6 is maybe the strangest and most symbolic. It’s a rainy Saturday and Ha-kyung doesn’t travel far from home. She’s dealing with a crisis at work, where the parents of her students are all upset that the students have secretly organized online games, and they want the school to shut them down. Ha-kyung is torn between letting the students have their fun and following the school rules.
She wanders around (in what looks like a nightgown and rainboots) and ends up taking shelter from the downpour, aptly, at the Meteorological Museum. There she runs into a fellow teacher (Jo Hyun-chul) and they have a conversation about the difficulties of teaching, and how they can see the students’ perspectives more than the parents — maybe because they’re not parents themselves.
It’s not the first time this theme has come up about being stuck in a between space — not a child and not a grownup. And later on, in the final episode, Ha-kyung remarks that she’s aging but not growing up. It’s a comment about our always-failing mission to improve, instead of allowing the phases of life to just unfold, one after another, without wanting to become better each time. “It’s too hard to be grown up,” she says — which may sound like apathy, but I think Ha-kyung is making an active decision here, remaining staunchly in the middle.
Our next episode takes us to Jeju where we follow Ha-kyung on a bread tour. She’s obsessed with breads and has twelve bakeries on her planned list of stops. Her trip gets sidetracked, though, when a little girl comes into a shop and asks for “snail bread” and no one can figure out what she means. Ha-kyung ends up following the girl from bakery to bakery — looping back on the shops she’s already visited — to see where the girl goes.
It turns out that the girl is looking for a specific cake roll and it leads Ha-kyung to find a place with sweet-tasting breads that wasn’t on her original list (i.e., it’s okay to go where life leads you sometimes). She follows the girl home and learns the little tike was searching for her mother’s favorite bread, so the family could serve it at the anniversary of her mom’s death.
This episode is visually fascinating as it has documentary-style interviews interspliced with a story that feels like a fairy tale. Bakery owners talk to the camera, answering questions about their business and the history of bread in Korea, while Ha-kyung tries (and fails) to stay out of the little girl’s sight as she follows her around town. Oddly, the girl’s grandmother is doing exactly the same. The whole thing feels fantastical, right up to the point where we see the mom’s ghost walking toward the house for the celebration.
And that leads us to the final episode, which is all about a ghost. Ha-kyung travels to Gyeongju and we learn in flashback that she first visited the town on a school trip with her best friend LEE JIN-SOL (Shim Eun-kyung). Then, in their twenties, she and Jin-sol visited again. But after that, Jin-sol passed away. It was Jin-sol who loved taking trips, while Ha-kyung thought traveling was a hassle and hated hopping around to tourist sites.
This episode focuses a lot on reality versus perception as Ha-kyung wonders if time really starts to speed up as we get older or if it’s all in our heads. We see Jin-sol sit next to Ha-kyung on a bench, eat gimbap with her, and then embark on a wandering journey around Gyeongju where the two catch up. Is she really there? Or is it all in Ha-kyung’s head?
It’s not a mistake that their encounter is set in a place known for its burial mounds — the episode is ensnared in death. It’s partly about the death of Jin-sol, and partly about the pieces of Ha-kyung that died along with her. When Jin-sol jokingly says, “Park Ha-kyung halmeoni,” Ha-kyung is disturbed. She wanted to grow old with her friend, and now she won’t get to.
At the same time, it’s about death as a concept and a looming reality — and, ultimately, about how we can choose to spend our lives. Once Ha-kyung and Jin-sol say their goodbyes, we hear this inner monologue: “My time spent with Jin-sol made no difference. It wasn’t all that interesting or meaningful. All we did was shoot the breeze and loaf around. But that’s what made it fun.”
She goes on to say that “traveling” (which I’m guessing is a stand-in for living) is the same: it’s not altogether meaningful but there are moments of clarity, and that’s what makes it fun. “So, if you feel like disappearing, take yourself out somewhere. If you’re all alone, in a strange place, and you don’t feel brave enough, then make it last just one day. If you can walk, eat, and let your mind wander, you’ll be fine anywhere.”
That marks the end of our journey with Ha-kyung. And I wish it left me feeling more uplifted. Initially, I felt let down by the retroactive framing of the final episode and the decision to motivate Ha-kyung with a sad backstory. It seemed to take away from the grander idea that she travels around whimsically, while we’re left to guess whether it’s a state of madness or enlightenment that propels her — which is the premise that Episode 1 set up.
But the more I thought about it, the more I decided that she needed that inciting incident to make her confront death and therefore her life. While I do still think the backstory grounds the show more than I would have liked (I preferred it in the realm of ideas), I appreciate the spirit it’s trying to achieve by making this one woman’s journey. Ha-kyung isn’t a character who has given up on life and is trying to escape it — she’s one who’s decided to take action in spite of the seeming meaninglessness of it all.
Her actions are small, one-day trips that connect her with other people, however fleeting. Even when she feels like doing nothing, she goes out anyway. And we’ve seen that it’s not just about injecting meaning into her own life, but into the lives of those she encounters too. She makes an impact on the children’s book author, on the elderly couple she argued with in the bus station, and on her students — particularly Han Ye-ri’s character, who Ha-kyung encouraged to pursue art, not so she could become an artist, but because she loved making art. Again, it’s about the journey, and not about where you end up.
Overall, I loved this drama. And when I say that the final episode is my least favorite, it’s because of the incredibly high bar that all the other episodes set. Apart from the story and themes, the diverse, experimental storytelling is phenomenal. Each episode gave us new characters and places, but also new methods of getting to know them. And the music choices varied as much as the visuals, from jazz to opera to chansons, accreting the layers of fun. Because no matter how dark the themes got, that’s what the drama aimed for: beauty, variety, and fun — all the elements it’s nudging us to add to our lives.