Just when I was getting tired of our characters’ lollygagging, the show finally decided to pick up. One side of the main couple has reached his breaking point, while the other side isn’t too far off. And with all the pent-up emotions between them, their collision promises to be a messy one.
EPISODES 8-9 WEECAP
Why did I think the last episode’s cliffhanger was real? No, of course it wasn’t real. Jae-won goes for his blackbox, thinking he’s finally about to reveal his long-lost lover’s face, but Kyung-joon recently removed the memory card. The universe is trying to make Jae-won go insane, isn’t it?
Jae-won and Eun-oh have an indirect argument through their interviews, him saying he needs closure and her saying she already ended things cleanly. Um, except, you kind of didn’t, Eun-oh. Ending things over the phone, and leaving him with a pile of lies, is anything but a clean break-up.
With everyone thinking Jae-won is going crazy, Jae-won starts to believe it himself. He even goes to a hospital wanting to get his mental state evaluated. There, he runs into a doctor who’s an old friend, and he asks for advice (lying that it’s Kyung-joon who’s dealing with the hallucinations).
Jae-won reveals (to us) that the one other time he saw Sun-ah was in a dream — she was standing outside the bar he was in. But Eun-oh says in her interview that it wasn’t a dream, and that they really did meet that day last winter. Seeing him pass out drunk, she joined him at his table, noting the ring on his finger. She touched his ring, inadvertently waking him up. Naturally, seeing her, he assumed that he missed her so much that he was seeing her in his dreams.
The teary-eyed Eun-oh used this opportunity to talk to him freely, saying that their wedding was just a joke and that he should forget her. But he started to cry and answered that it wasn’t a joke to him. He continued that he was slowly dying on the inside, making her break into sobs. Augh, this scene… I hate that the hero has to be drunk, but it’s such an open and vulnerable confrontation. And it’s only now that I’m reminded of why I love Ji Chang-wook and Kim Ji-won so much.
Later, Eun-oh figures it’s about time she returns Jae-won’s cameras. But once outside the police station, she chickens out and wanders over to her and Jae-won’s planned meeting spot at the Cheonggyecheon stream.
AHH, AND JAE-WON’S THERE. He sees her and chases after her, and THANK THE DRAMA LORDS, he catches her. However, officer Minho witnesses the scene as well, and he arrests Eun-oh for stealing the cameras.
We finally have the couple together, but then the drama flashes back to three days ago. Director-nim asked his subjects about running into their exes, and we learn that Sun-young and Geon saw each other recently. They got drunk and yelled at each other, and — ugh, come on, Show, just take us back to present day!
Once we’re back to the present, the couple is at the police station. Jae-won tries to insist that he didn’t actually want to press charges against Sun-ah, but the police remind him that he reported her multiple times. Eun-oh, wanting to keep her identity hidden, lies that Jae-won gave her the cameras and asks to be let go.
Even so, the police can’t send her off without leaving a record; they need to see her identification. To Eun-oh’s horror, Jae-won grabs her ID first and is completely stunned to see a different name. It dawns on him that she’d been lying to him, and he yells at her while she can only stand there.
It’s not until Jae-won storms out that Eun-oh snaps out of it and follows him. He leaves in his car, ignoring the sight of her running after him. He only stops when she nearly runs into a motorcycle, to check if she’s okay. And this is when everything blows up, when he unleashes all of his emotions on her.
Eun-oh can’t explain herself, so Jae-won ends up breaking his cameras and throwing his wedding ring into the stream. They part just like that, Eun-oh left by the river crying and narrating that she merely wanted to keep the “dazzling Sun-ah” in his memories. At home, Jae-won recalls these memories — only now, they seem fake.
Into the night, Eun-oh is searching the stream for Jae-won’s ring and is ecstatic when she finally finds it. Around her neck, we see that she’s wearing her own ring on a necklace. Much later, Jae-won shows up to look for his ring and is frustrated when he can’t find it.
Jae-won’s always been contradicting himself, but it’s nice to see that Eun-oh has been doing the same. She seemed so small and scared when she got caught, and though I felt bad for her, she had comin’. Over the course of a year, she’s only been hurting Jae-won and herself. Running away from something broken when she should’ve been fixing it.