It’s almost D-Day, and our heroine has formulated a plan to prevent the kidnapping of an innocent child. In the future, our hero makes a shocking discovery that may help him put all the pieces together. But the villains are catching on, and both of them are in danger of losing everything. It’s a tense, tearful ride as they try outrun the constantly evolving danger they find themselves in, and endure one emotional blow after another.
EPISODES 7-8 WEECAP
Hope returns as Ae-ri finds her mother, erasing her murder from the future and restoring Seo-jin’s freedom, but Mom disappears the next day after fobbing Ae-ri off with half-truths.
She threatens someone at Yoojoong Construction to leave Ae-ri alone or she’ll expose what she knows.
Do-kyun and Hyun-chae plan their operation: how to make it look like she jumped off the bridge, going to choose a dead orphan to serve as Da-bin’s literal body double.
Ae-ri puts a tracker in Da-bin’s teddy, sending the login info to Seo-jin. She grows increasingly desperate now that her mom has disappeared again, and recklessly runs off to murder Taek-kyu in cold blood.
Thankfully Gun-wook makes her tell him and Soo-jung the whole truth, and the three of them work on a plan to avert Da-bin’s kidnapping on September 6.
But it doesn’t work out as planned. Ae-ri makes the mistake of giving too much information to Hyun-chae, even though the woman practically has I’M SUSPICIOUS written across her forehead. I wanted to reach through the screen and shake her—and again when she put the missing child poster on Seo-jin’s front door. How is that safe or useful?!
Future Seo-jin finds Da-bin and Hyun-chae at their villa hideout, gazing at them in euphoric disbelief until he spots Do-kyun, cozily playing house with his family. Taek-kyu brains him, and they drag Seo-jin into a bedroom and plot his murder. Oh, my heart.
Ae-ri, unable to reach Seo-jin in the days leading up to the kidnapping, carries out her plan and manages to save Da-bin (and Future Seo-jin) at the last minute, only to be arrested for attempted kidnapping herself.
She tells the police the truth, but of course both they and Seo-jin think she’s a crazy stalker.
Seo-jin begins to get flashes from the reality-that-would-have-been, however. Ae-ri is released from prison, and when she reluctantly takes his call that night, Future Seo-jin begs her to save him.
I’m glad that Ae-ri’s plan at least saved Da-bin and Seo-jin, but this is the first week I’ve found myself frustrated with the writing. So far both protagonists have been clever and careful, but Ae-ri seemed to lose her caution right when they needed it the most. Ae-ri has always stuck me as straightforward but not naive, but I was a bit disappointed this week. It’s a small complaint, and I understand that we’re only midway through the show, but it always rubs me the wrong way when a heroine suddenly loses some of her smarts to service the plot.
Now Do-kyun has their texts, and he’s going to figure out their secret, which means Ae-ri’s life will be in continuous danger. I have to give it to the show, despite my nitpicks—it constantly has me on the edge of my seat, tense and worried. These episodes are over an hour, but I never feel the length, and I’m always sad when one ends (once I start breathing again). If I wasn’t recapping this, I’d have waited to binge-watch it for my own sanity.
We’ve learned of the additional wrinkle of Hyun-chae’s father, who seems to be blackmailing her for money using the cover story she’s built for herself.
And Taek-kyu is working for some higher-ups to cover up whatever caused the Taejung Town collapse, but the reveal that Yoojung Construction’s plot is totally separate from Do-kyun and Hyun-chae’s scheme makes sense, because the latter feels far too personal.
I wondered before why Hyun-chae didn’t just divorce Seo-jin instead of going through this elaborate scheme, and now she’s told us. This way she continues to possess everything she wants: Seo-jin’s money, Da-bin, and Do-kyun. In that order, it seems. What little she’d keep in a divorce settlement would probably be extorted by her awful father, and she’d run the risk of Seo-jin exposing her lies. And Master Manipulator Hyun-chae has the perfect tool in Do-kyun.
I’m really hoping Ae-ri’s release means that Seo-jin has started believing that the secondary realities he’s seeing are real. Subconsciously, he already has, or he wouldn’t have been crying when he found Da-bin again at that cafe. Show, all I need next is for these two to start working together in the same timeline. They have to grab whatever advantage they can, now that they’ve been exposed to the enemy.