Our story tightens up a bit this week, as the suspect list gets smaller and others no longer on said list start to partner up. As ever, though, the drama continues to excel at giving us reveals and confrontations that actually don’t bring us any answers. How do they do that?!
EPISODES 7-8 WEECAP
We knew our kind, swoony, and terminally ill hero wasn’t the murderer, and soon Chan-mi learns the same. But not before actually shooting Su-heon. However, the bullet barely grazes his arm, which I’m taking as intentional, because if not, why is she even an athlete on a shooting team?
Still, it’s a wild scene. Su-heon is utterly shocked that she suspects him, and his insistence of his innocence leads him to take the gun and turn it on himself. Just then, Chan-mi’s phone rings: it’s her brother Chan-gyu (A.K.A. Won-seok) calling. Or, more accurately, a call from his missing phone. WTH! No one responds on the other end of the line, but there’s a funky noise in the background that will become important later.
Chan-mi and Su-heon reconcile quite easily, and before we know it they are back to being partners in cuteness. I mean, part of this might be thanks to their chemistry… and here I have to remind myself this drama isn’t the least bit romantic, and not to expect any stolen kisses (even though there were several scenes where it looked to me like Su-heon was about to).
Anyway, the drama deploys my favorite trope ever, as Chan-mi tends to Su-heon’s bullet graze wound while they hide out in a photo booth. There are some fantastic character details here, like Su-heon’s self-consciousness with removing half of his shirt, and his insistence that they take photos while they are there: Su-heon smiling easily, and Chan-mi looking unsure. How very like both of them.
And the delightful character development continues as we follow these two this week. Su-heon not only gifts Chan-mi with his freshly-washed bright red shoelaces (MY HEART), but shares his thoughts on life and death — he says there’s not much difference between the two, and that they’re just two parallel tracks. However, he can’t take death as lightly for his mother as he does for himself, and when his mother winds up on life support, he’ll do anything to keep her with him (more on that later.)
While the Su-heon/Chan-mi storyline contains the cutest bits of the week, the really interesting plot movement is around Jae-bum and Oh-seong. These two meet quite a bit this week — and we travel back in flashback some as well — and the undulations of suspicion here are quite something!
At first, we see Jae-bum calling Oh-seong “the only person I can trust” (please don’t!), and he relies on Oh-seong’s answers around his suicide attempt as well as his un-remembered relationship with Won-seok. It’s so damn convoluted — I mean, he literally asks his friend, “Why did I jump?”
Then, it gets even more crazy, when Oh-seong tortures Jae-bum with a big reveal: he says Jae-bum asked him to keep this envelope of something safe before he lost his memories, and inside are polaroids of Jae-bum and Won-seok looking very much like a romantic couple. Jae-bum is confused, the drama doesn’t spare Oh-seong from looking Very Suspicious, and overall I’m getting these creepy Memento vibes of memory-planting and fact-altering.
Luckily, and to Jae-bum’s credit, he starts to wonder about his own trust in Oh-seong. Eventually this leads to a breakdown of sorts — he’s run away from home and can’t go back, he doesn’t know what or who to trust in, and he freaks out that he doesn’t remember certain things and thinks he’s done others that he can’t remember. It’s the makings of a nervous breakdown, and from where I’m sitting, Oh-seong is pulling all the strings.
This particular confrontation ends with Jae-bum asking wildly, “Why do you know everything? Are you manipulating me like you did Won-seok?” And here the drama does the thing it excels at best: giving us so much muchness, but actually holding back from explaining anything. It keeps the plot moving while the tension stays sky-high. I love this tactic.
At this point, Oh-seong is looking mighty suspicious all around. His manipulating of Jae-bum might not be proven but it feels pretty solid, and then — during an adorable impromptu good-guys-only birthday party for Chan-mi — Oh-seong turns up. When Oh-seong gets a phone call, Su-heon freezes when he recognizes the noise: it’s the exact sound he and Chan-mi heard on the other end of the line when the call came in from Won-seok’s phone. It’s a great reveal.
Su-heon tells Chan-mi right away, but holds her back from running off and doing something rash (pretty funny coming from him). They should be certain, he says, and she agrees. Interestingly, even though Detective Jin has really proven her trustworthiness and integrity this episode (go her!), Chan-mi refuses to involve the authorities in any capacity, and still has no trust in them.
The two come up with a plan to check Oh-seong’s call log to confirm he did indeed get a call at the same time as the call from Won-seok’s missing phone. Here, Su-heon pulls in So-yeon and Ah-jung as well, although they think they’re doing something else entirely. The side plot with these two girls still troubles me… Even though they seem to be decent and on Chan-mi’s side — I mean, the birthday surprise was precious — I have a bad feeling about them in general.
But what’s interesting is that now Ah-jung seems to be taking a bigger role in their “punish the bad guys” schemes. Because when Jung-kyung resurfaces and the kids are asked to deal with him again (seriously?!) So-yeon doesn’t want them to do it. She wants to protect Su-heon (who she’s definitely crushing on), but Ah-jung secretly agrees that they will. And sure enough, as our episode ends we see Su-heon approaching Jung-kyung’s trailer ready to wreak havoc.
While Su-heon and Chan-mi’s elaborate plan to check Oh-seong’s call logs was a fail (he just got a new phone), their second plan proves more fruitful. Chan-mi temporarily delays Oh-seong with the help of Jae-bum, while Su-heon utilizes Ji-hyun’s (toxic) crush on him to visit her house.
I don’t know how a girl like Ji-hyun cannot realize he’s being duplicitous, but while she’s “slipping into something a little more comfortable” and “making ramyeon,” Su-heon is picking locks and trying to find Won-seok’s old phone in Oh-seong’s room. What he finds instead are more polaroids. But this time it’s not just Jae-bum and Won-seok — nope, it’s Jae-bum + Won-seok + Se-jin + Oh-seong. Luckily, Detective Jin turns up before Oh-seong can permanently damage Su-heon, but what the heck!
I’m officially stumped. The best I’ve got right now is that the boys took these photos as a joke and then later they were used as leverage by Oh-seong. Or, there is indeed a couple in the midst of all this confusion — I just can’t make out who that might be yet. We can’t take anything at face value – especially photographs — and I love that.
The drama is definitely painting Oh-seong as the mastermind behind most — if not all — of this mayhem, though. We know he was at the scene of Su-heon’s second punisher moment, but there are still too many threads to put this together in a way that makes sense. But also, is the drama being too obvious about it? Is this just another misdirect? With all the fun stunts they’ve pulled so far, I’ll actually be disappointed if it was just Oh-seong alone behind everything, blackmailing and manipulating our other players. There has to be more depth to this web, right?