After hitting rock bottom, our heroine summons her inner strength, and is able to rise to the challenges around her, be they financial, familial, or societal. It doesn’t hurt that she has three well-meaning men around her — each one completely different, but each one caring deeply about her wellbeing. What a trifecta.
EPISODES 5-6 WEECAP
Dal-li is beginning to learn of the sacrifices she has to make to keep her family’s gallery up and running. Selling her family home mansion was the first step, and she does it without complaint, but she also does it without giving much thought to where she’ll rest her head.
She can’t sleep in her office — Moo-hak drives her off to a ritzy hotel where she checks in and checks out within a ten-minute span. For the first time I think Dal-li is beginning to learn the value of money.
Instead of reaching out to the people around her (*ahem*, like the awesome brother figure cop who adores her), she heads to a seedy motel, and meets with some awful violence. In her innocence, Dal-li is walking around with a wad of cash stuffed into a white envelope — it’s to pay her employees the following day. Anyone with a small amount of situational awareness can tell she’s gotten herself in a pickle, but I don’t know I quite expected the violent attack that we got.
Dal-li is robbed, beaten, and utterly distraught. To make her only more precious and in need of a bear hug, we follow her around that night after the incident while she’s in her pajamas and sporting some terrible bruises.
The first one to show up to her aid is Won-tak, who explodes at her for not telling him about the desperate straits she was in, and takes her to his apartment to stay for a while. There is something so warm and wonderful about Won-tak. Is it just Hwang Hee’s energy, or is it this role? Either way, amongst the trifecta of men around Dal-li, Won-tak is the one that she’s the most open with. He’s also the most real and emotional, when we contrast him to Tae-jin’s austere smexiness and Moo-hak’s pomp and attitude. (But I find I love all of them, which is what’s making this so fun.)
Throughout this week’s episodes, there were several times you could feel a plot point coming from a mile away… and then spent the episode(s) waiting for it to actually come to fruition. The first was Da-li staying with Won-tak. It was written in the stars ever since the premiere week, and I’ve been waiting for it to happen. (Next up is for Moo-hak to realize who is crashing in his upstairs apartment!)
The second plot point was waiting for Moo-hak to realize the violent attack that Dal-li had experienced — and this one took the entire episode to tease out. Still, I get why they waited so long — there was something so intimate about the moment where Moo-hak begins to see through Dal-li’s cover, and reaches out to softly pull down her huge black sunglasses.
This was a lovely moment in and of itself, but I also think it was a turning point for Moo-hak himself. We knew he was attracted to Dal-li from the moment they met, but I think it was in this moment that he realized how much her safety and wellbeing meant to him.
Like the bombastic hero he is, he hides his feelings while claiming that the money he’s owed is what he cares about… but we also see him struggling with his emotions. He can’t seem to stop thinking about her, whether that’s turning from aggressor to protector, or texting her late at night about sashimi.
There’s a third man in our trifecta, though, and that’s Tae-jin, who’s slowly taking on a bigger role in Dal-li’s life. Interestingly, he also shares a similar intimate moment with her, pulling down her sunglasses to expose her bruised face, and offering to do whatever she wants to resolve the situation. Tae-jin gives off the feeling of being able to exert power, and at the same time relinquish (or yield it) at Dal-li’s command, and that’s kind of a sexy angle to play with, especially for a character that smolders with hidden desire.
Despite loving our OTP, the scenes that Dal-li and Tae-jin share are always quite charged — it’s masterful in fact — we can feel the history behind them, and the tension that’s between them in the present. (I think a lot of this is just the chemistry between Park Kyu-young and Kwon Yul; it has a very different tenor than her chemistry with Kim Min-jae.)
And so, with so much of this Triple Crown of heroes front and center in this week’s episodes, I’m almost jonesing for three different dramas. I love Dal-li’s story and relationship with each of them, and I’d like to see an entire story for each of them.
But lest it sound like we spend more time on our heroes than our heroine, this week was very much about Dal-li and watching her pick herself up. There’s more to face than just debt, and I think recent events proved to her that her cousin is No Good. Dal-li might be naive, but that intersects in interesting ways with her cleverness. Her press event after the fake article is the prime example of this: she was able to take a PR disaster and turn it in her favor.
As to the nefarious goings-on in the background, Dal-li’s not-so-hidden enemy (her cousin) shares ties to Moo-hak’s kinda-hidden enemy (stepbrother). I gave up on the cousin, but I was hoping for Moo-hak’s hyung to have a little more decency. However, he’s jumping in a web of corruption with our ever-corrupt Assemblyman archetype, so before long, I expect Dal-li and Moo-hak to be even more united against their common enemy.
Dal-li certainly has an uphill battle ahead, but now that she knows what’s at stake and is learning what it takes to win, I think she’ll be more than able. And while I don’t think she necessarily needs our three heroes to succeed, they sure add a fun element to the story, by both complicating it and coloring it.