Once again, we run the gamut of emotions from light to heavy, which I always find to be a welcome thing when a drama heads to its more serious moments. Yes, some of the conflicts amp up in this episode, but it also has more of its trademark goofy parody sequences to lighten the in-between moments. The threesome parody in this episode is possibly my favorite Hong sisters parody ever.
SONG OF THE DAY
Jang Geun-seok – “Good Bye.” This song plays late in the episode. [ Download ]
EPISODE 14 RECAP
Tae-kyung is about to tell Mi-nyo something, starting, “Go Mi-nam, I… you…” But then, he’s interrupted by excited fans, who wave excitedly as they arrive in buses.
Tae-kyung is annoyed with the interruption, particularly since Mi-nyeo takes it as her cute to excuse herself. Explaining that she’ll act as though he’s just sending her off, she starts to leave.
He holds her back, saying, “Hear me out first.” Leaning in close, he says, “I like you.”
(Omo!)
Having gotten that out in the open, he lets her go, but now she’s so shocked that she stands in a daze. As the fangirls swarm around him, Mi-nyeo wonders if she heard right. She thinks, “I wish the world would quiet down so I can hear the soft words in my memory.”
She thinks back, confirming that he had indeed said those words, and suddenly the world around her is all roses and butterflies. LITERALLY.
As this finally sinks in, Mi-nyeo starts giggling out loud in glee, exultant. She doesn’t see Tae-kyung sitting in his car a short distance away, who smiles and says, “So she did hear me properly.”
On the plane, Shin-woo looks at the empty seat next to him and tells himself, “I knew she wouldn’t come. But since I told her that I’ve already begun [to have feelings], that’s enough.”
Almost immediately, photos pop up online of Tae-kyung and Mi-nam at the airport. Heyi is annoyed — why would Tae-kyung go to the airport to see Mi-nam? — and displeased. Meanwhile, may I take the moment to point out the HILARITY of the top 3 online star searches, as seen in Heyi’s web browser??
- Dong Bang Single
- So Nyeo Junior
- Super Shidae
Tae-kyung gives Mi-nyeo a ride home. Mi-nyeo wonders how to handle herself around him, given his declaration: “Should I tell him that I heard him and give him permission too?” However, she imagines him issuing a gruff response, and considers trying the opposite instead — she could say she didn’t hear what he said and ask him to repeat it. But she imagines him sneering at that, “You didn’t hear? Then cancel it!”
Mi-nyeo decides to accept his statement gratefully, and figures that she doesn’t need to hear him say it anyway, because “if I hear him say that he likes me again, my heart may burst.”
Tae-kyung breaks the silence by suggesting they grab something to eat, and asks if she likes spaghetti. Mi-nyeo hiccups. Puzzled, he repeats the question, and she hiccups again. Testing out a theory, Tae-kyung enunciates clearly, “Do you LIKE charcoal-grilled kalbi? Do you LIKE naengmyun? What about sushi, do you LIKE it? I LIKE sushi.” She hiccups every time he says the word LIKE.
He prods her to answer (which is his way of getting her to say she likes him back). Mi-nyeo answers, “I really, really like [it] very, very much.”
Sushi lunch. Mi-nyeo takes all the shrimp and crab off his plate because of his allergies, happy to eat them. When Tae-kyung tells her to give him two pieces in exchange for the ones she took, her face falls — she was counting on eating them. So Tae-kyung relents and tells her to eat them all, so as not to lose points. (“Why is it so tough to preserve my score?”)
When Mi-nyeo brings up the issue of photos from the airport being made public, Tae-kyung answers that he’s not very worried. There’s nothing scandalous about him seeing her off, although he is aware that fans often create stories out of nothing. He adds (with a perfectly straight face), “There are a lot of love stories that don’t even feature women.”
He’s talking, yup, about fanfic. (I love it!) In what is my favorite giggly sequence this episode (possible this drama?), he explains, “Most of them are a love triangle between me, Shin-woo, and Jeremy.”
LULZ! Imaginations run wild in his exaggerated examples: two hands cover Fanfic Tae-kyung’s eyes and he asks hopefully, “Shin-woo?” The hands move aside to reveal a hurt Jeremy, who says, “You’re always looking for Shin-woo.” Holding Tae-kyung’s hand to his chest, Fanfic Jeremy says, “You’re inside my heart.”
At that moment, a glass shatters — Fanfic Shin-woo has walked in and seen this intimate moment. Angry at being thus replaced by Jeremy, he vows, “I’m going to destroy you both!”
(OMG. I love that the writers work in details incorporating some of the more ridiculous aspects of idol life. First Sung-chan’s ridiculous English, and now yaoi fanfiction.)
Jeremy logs on to read the latest stories online, getting a kick out of them. He’s waiting at the broadcast station where he is going to make a surprise cameo appearance at the end. He plans to use this as his platform for telling Mi-nam how he feels in the form of a song.
However, his web browsing leads him to the airport photos of Mi-nam and Tae-kyung, which makes him wonder what’s going on. With the question dangling in the air, he can’t concentrate until he confirms the truth with Tae-kyung, and heads out. He only has an hour before he has to make his appearance, and if he doesn’t make it there will be trouble.
Hoon-yi sees Tae-kyung and Mi-nyeo arriving at the agency together, and gapes. Why did Tae-kyung interfere and go to the airport? A little triumphantly, Tae-kyung tells Hoon-yi, “Take a good look.” He whirls Mi-nyeo around and hugs her, prompting her to press her nose. Having proved his point to the manager, he heads off to work.
Hoon-yi can’t believe it — so her pig-nose was because of Tae-kyung? She asks anxiously, “Does he know what that means?” Hoon-yi can’t understand why, of all the people in the world, she’d fall for mean ol’ Tae-kyung. She answers, “At some point, I started to feel electric shocks.”
Jeremy arrives in time to catch the end of this conversation. Staring at Mi-nyeo intently, he asks, “Do you like Tae-kyung hyung?” She’s a little surprised by the blunt question, but nods. Jeremy’s face twists to hear it, and he runs off.
When they learn that Jeremy is still missing from the studio, Hoon-yi and Mi-nyeo try to track him down. They have no luck, but Mi-nyeo remembers the bus and follows her hunch to the bus stop.
She sees Jeremy sitting alone in an empty bus and races after it. She climbs onboard and starts to approach Jeremy, who looks up and glares: “This is my bus. Get off.” Seeing how upset Jeremy is, Mi-nyeo feels horrible as he continues, with wounded confusion:
Jeremy: “When I thought you were a guy, I was okay with it. When I found out you were a girl, I was okay with it. But if you like Tae-kyung hyung, I can’t be okay with it. Why? Why wasn’t it me? I told you about my treasure bus, and I let you close to Jolie, and I was going to sing a song only for you. Why don’t you like me?”
They sit in silence on opposite sides of the bus for a while. Jeremy answers a call from the studio, and agrees to sing his song over the phone instead. He’s chosen a cheerful children’s tune called “Such Good Words.”
As Jeremy introduces his selection, he looks over at Mi-nyeo, directing his words to her: “These good words were so precious to me that I saved them up. If I keep them inside too much, they turn into words I can’t say again. But I hope they’re not disagreeable words, useless words, or words that make you sad.” Knowing he’s talking to her, Mi-nyeo gestures that no, she doesn’t think that.
He starts to sing: “I love you, these words are such good words. When our family goes to bed, they give and receive these words. I love you, these words are such good words. These are words Jeremy wants to give to her.”
Lee Hong-ki – “참 좋은말” (Such Good Words). Again, ripped from the episode. [ Download ]
When he finishes, she tells him, “They’re very good words.” He answers, “But you can’t accept them. Right, Go Mi-nam?” That’s true, and Mi-nyeo apologizes.
Jeremy tells her frankly, “I can’t say it’s okay right now. When this bus returns to its place, then it’ll become okay.” When the bus rolls to a stop, he tells her, “When I get off this bus, I’m going to return to being the happy Jeremy. Forget everything I said here. If you don’t forget them, I can’t return. Got it, Go Mi-nam?”
True to his word, when he steps off the bus, he puts on a cheery face and talks in his usual energetic way. They head off to eat ice cream together, with only the fleetingest of looks betraying that Jeremy isn’t as happy as he’s acting.
Tae-kyung and his producer meet with a former singer who once knew Go Jae-hyun. The singer explains that Go Jae-hyun was a nice, ordinary guy who had dated Hwa-ran. The relationship fell apart when she went to another man, and afterward he got together with another woman, who was preparing to be a singer herself. Not knowing of Tae-kyung’s personal connection to this story, he insinuates that Hwa-ran had quite a lot of men in her day.
Tae-kyung mutters to himself, “That grand love sounds quite messy when discussed in other people’s words.”
Hwa-ran hates the idea of “that woman’s daughter” and her son being cozy, and decides to do something about it. She presents Mi-nyeo with a gift — a dress — and says meaningfully, “I picked right, didn’t I?”
Hwa-ran assures M-nyeo not to worry — she doesn’t want to mess with her. Mi-nyeo asks Hwa-ran to pretend not to know until her brother returns soon, and that her bandmates are not to blame. Hwa-ran concludes, “They knew and covered for you, and were your friends. You did something very dangerous. It’s complicated to explain to you, but Hwang Tae-kyung and I have a special personal relationship. Be careful not to get involved and make things complicated.”
Mi-nyeo promises, “No matter what happens, I will make sure not to cause trouble for Hwang Tae-kyung. I cannot let him be hurt.” Hwa-ran replies, “From his perspective, it would have been better not getting involved with you.”
Mi-nyeo chalks Hwa-ran’s statements up to being a protective mother, but still, this whole situation makes her uneasy. She can’t let Tae-kyung know that she knows about his relationship with his mother — he was so sad on his birthday that she couldn’t bring herself to say it — but feigning ignorance means she’s caught in the middle: “It feels like I’m lying to him, and it doesn’t feel good.”
I appreciate the way the writers turn the situation from serious to funny in a natural way: After everything that’s happened, Mi-nyeo has had quite a tiring day. However, Tae-kyung doesn’t know this and wonders why she hasn’t called him all day. He concedes, “Well, I did tell her not to inconvenience me, so she must have spent all day waiting.”
To his surprise, she answers the phone in a sleepy voice. Disappointed (and offended), Tae-kyung retorts, “Forget it! Keep sleeping, you sleepyheaded Pig-Rabbit!”
Not satisfied to end things on that note, he calls her out and takes her to the movie theater. When she warns him that she may fall asleep, he insists that he didn’t call her out to watch the movie (i.e., as a date) — he just needs a guide in the dark. He didn’t need HER, he needed her EYES. He orders her onward: “Go Mi-nam’s Eyes, guide me.”
He takes her hand as she leads him inside the darkened theater, but balks at her seating choice and orders her to move. He complains at her next choice, too — but it’s clear to us that he just likes holding her hand and is prolonging the moment.
We can be sure of that because he doesn’t strictly need her hand-holding — at one moment he forgets himself and starts to lead her instead. Surprised, Mi-nyeo asks whether he can see. He clears his throat and says, “Go Mi-nam’s Eyes, eyes can’t talk.”
Afterward, they step out on a deck overlooking the city, and the lights are so bright that she can’t see the stars. Noting that he can’t ever see the stars, she breathes on the glass and draws a star in the mist. Seeing another star — a lamp — she comments, “Even when it’s not a dark night, there are a lot of stars around us. After I stop acting as Go Mi-nam and go far away, I’ll search for stars and think of you.” After her brother returns, it would be better for her to be at a distance.
Tae-kyung answers lightly, “Go looking for those stars. I’ll check up on you to ask how many you’ve found. I’ll be expecting you to see a lot.” She thinks to herself, “But the star I like the best is one I can’t take with me, so I’ll miss it a lot.”
Tae-kyung promises to show her more stars and motions her closer — then holds up his knuckle. If he were to give her a noogie, she should see five more stars.
Mi-nyeo wonders worriedly if he would really do it, and braces herself as he pulls back, winding up for a big one…
…but instead, he swoops in for a kiss.
(I don’t know if there were spoilers for this kiss but if there were I AM SO GLAD I didn’t know about them. Full squealing effect preserved!)
Shin-woo returns from his trip to Busan, and Mi-nyeo feels sorry and uncomfortable around him. He has brought back a gift for her from his mother, because he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the full story. He doesn’t expect Mi-nyeo to accept it, but wanted to show her his mother’s gesture.
The time away seems to have been good for Shin-woo, because he talks with more assertion now. He tells her that he’d been a good hyung to her, but their relationship lacked tension. Now, he intends to add a sense of pressure to her, which sounds bad but means merely that he’s going to take a new direction: “I’ve stepped back until now because I’ve been comforting you. Now I’m going to step forward and comfort myself.”
Planning progresses for Mi-nam’s solo album, and Hoon-yi announces with great excitement that the real Mi-nam is returning the day before the showcase. Jeremy wonders what the real Mi-nam is like, and gets back the answer that Mi-nam may look like his sister but his personality is different: “He has Tae-kyung’s charisma, Shin-woo’s softness, and Jeremy’s brightness.”
Although this should be good news, each member has his own subdued reaction to it.
Hoon-yi is so psyched to have his Mi-nam troubles nearing their end that he lets slip to the stylist that Mi-nyeo and Tae-kyung like each other. The stylist had believed that Heyi and Tae-kyung were dating, so now she tells Heyi that she knows the truth.
Heyi’s reaction to news is sheer shock: “They’re for real?” This pushes her over the edge, and she bursts out, “How can that he set me aside and go for her? I really hate Go Mi-nam!” Shoving items off the counter, she sobs angrily.
Per their half-joking “agreement,” Mi-nyeo shows Tae-kyung pictures of all the stars she found today: a star-shaped shirt pin and a tomato stem, for example.
He teases her for only finding three, so she responds bashfully, “Right now, the star I like the most is with me every day.” Then, afraid she said too much, she points up to the sun as though saying she meant the star in the sky. Not him, of course!
He plays along, “Ahh, that star you said is the coolest. Where is that?” Mi-nyeo doesn’t want to admit the truth, so she says, “You can’t see stars anyway. You don’t have to know.”
Tae-kyung offers to watch her favorite star with her tonight, and they set a date. He wonders if they’ll be able to see any in this weather, but decides, “I don’t need those stars anyway. I’m the star she likes best.”
Sung-chan takes Mi-nyeo to meet the producer, who has finished work on Hwa-ran’s remake song. As she listens to the song playing in the background, knowing this was her father’s work, she decides to tell Tae-kyung about her father tonight.
Spying a star-shaped ashtray, she picks it up as the two men gossip about the songwriter and Hwa-ran having been lovers. Shocked, Mi-nyeo lets the ashtray fall from her grasp, and it shatters on the ground. (Ah, the familiar destruction of a symbolic trinket to foreshadow impending troubles! This has been used in more than one Hong sisters drama before, and is frankly a tactic I could do without.)
Not knowing that Mi-nyeo has broken her star (in a symbolic gesture), Tae-kyung takes out a star-shaped necklace wherein the star is meant to represent him. He plans to give it to her later, and (very adorably) taunts Pig-Rabbit with it, saying, “This isn’t yours.”
Mi-nyeo asks her aunt whether her father was really involved with Hwa-ran. Aunt Mi-ja hadn’t told her “because I thought it would upset you to know your father left your mother for Mo Hwa-ran. You were looking so hard for your mother. If you knew that she’d been abandoned and died alone, you might hate your father.”
Mi-nyeo is devastated and still half-disbelieving, so she decides to confirm the truth. She heads to the hotel, where Hwa-ran’s assistant informs her of Mi-nyeo’s arrival. Deciding to get the truth all out at once, Hwa-ran calls Tae-kyung to summon him too, saying, “It’s someone you know. I want to confirm it before it causes trouble for you. It’s a girl named Go Mi-nyeo.”
Hoping that the information is false, Mi-nyeo asks Hwa-ran to confirm that she and Go Jae-hyun were just friends. Hwa-ran answers, “We weren’t just friends. We loved each so much that we can’t forget each other for the rest of our lives.”
Shocked at his mother’s revelation, Tae-kyung bursts into Mi-nyeo’s room looking for some proof. Spying the photo of the young twins with their father, his eye then falls on the autographed photo of Hwa-ran. Mi-nyeo’s handwritten note wishes him a happy birthday — and although that’s not exactly incriminating, it makes him wonder why she wouldn’t have given it to him on his birthday.
Mi-nyeo isn’t very impressed to hear of Hwa-ran’s grand love, and says, “You abandoned and hurt the person you should have treated as the most precious in the world. I can’t believe when a person like that speaks of love. That’s not love.”
Hwa-ran laughs: “You say the same thing as your mother did. She ignored me and didn’t believe your father would return to me.” Mi-nyeo insists, “My father had no reason to love a person like you.” Hwa-ran holds up the CD as proof — he wrote the song for her, and even her mother acknowledged it.
Hwa-ran: “Do you want to insist it’s not true? My son Tae-kyung may not have understood, but he acknowledged it. That’s why he remade this song. I told you I saw you once as children. If your father hadn’t died early, I could have become your mother. Tae-kyung knows that, too. …But you didn’t tell him you’re Jae-hyun’s daughter, did you? Does he know that you know he’s my son? If you didn’t say that, you must not have told him that I know you’re a girl.”
Mi-nyeo: “I didn’t mean to deceive him.”
Hwa-ran: “Tell him that. See if he believes you.”
Tae-kyung bursts in, half-incredulous and half-reproachful to see Mi-nyeo standing with his mother. Hwa-ran makes things worse by turning Mi-nyeo around to face Tae-kyung, and announcing, “This girl is the daughter of the man I loved. She says she didn’t intend to deceive you.”
Tae-kyung walks out without a word. Seeing Mi-nyeo’s reaction, Hwa-ran asks, “Is the reason you wanted to deny it because of my son?” She tells Mi-nyeo to recognize the truth and give up.
Reporter Kim works on his story about Mi-nyeo and Shin-woo’s relationship, but something is niggling at the back of his mind. Every time Mi-nyeo made an appearance, Mi-nam was absent. It’s the Clark Kent principle, and he puts two and two together.
He tries to confirm this with Heyi, but she no longer wants to be involved with A.N.JELL. To which he responds, “Go Mi-nam and Go Mi-nyeo are the same person, right? Is he a guy, or a girl?”
Working off this assumption, the reporter tells Sung-chan that he wants to delay printing the story until he can interview Mi-nam and Mi-nyeo at the same time. Sung-chan asks Shin-woo to handle this with the twins.
As Shin-woo steps out of his meeting with Sung-chan, he sees Tae-kyung stomping upstairs, with Mi-nyeo following close behind and pleading for him to listen.
Tae-kyung asks when she found out about his mother. Hearing her answer, he says, “So there was a reason that whenever I felt upset about my mother, you showed up.” Has she also been meeting with his mother for a while? He adds, “My mother loved your father so much she abandoned me and wanted to be your mother. Did you hear that?”
Mi-nyeo starts to talk, but he cuts off her explanation: “She said you were close enough that she used to bring you cookies. Do you remember? Try getting along well with her from now on. But don’t involve me.”
She holds his arm and pleads for him to listen. He throws her arm aside, snapping, “Don’t be where I can see you. I don’t want to see you.”
He storms off, leaving Mi-nyeo to crumple to the ground in sobs. But he doesn’t get far, and wipes at his own tears as he listens to Mi-nyeo crying a level below — as Shin-woo watches from across the lobby.
COMMENTS
Half the time, I find Hwa-ran to be such an excessively hateful person that it’s hard to find the truth of her character — is she TOO awful to be a credible villain? The best villains show complexity, and don’t explain their reasons in one-dimensional, simplistic terms like “I loved him that much.”
The other half of the time, I think that there must be more behind her actions and find her fascinating. If you see her as a supremely selfish and weak woman, she’s more intriguing than if you were to write her off as a stock villainness. For instance, take her desire to separate the couple. Initially, she sees Mi-nam as an extension of his/her father and looks upon him approvingly. But then, Hwa-ran sees flashes of Mi-nyeo’s mother in her, and therefore finds the idea of that girl with her son to be abhorrent.
It’s not that she loves Tae-kyung so much to want him to be with a good woman — Tae-kyung is just an extension of herself. She looks at the world through a twisted perspective, like looking through a fisheye lens: she and her love are at the center, and everything else is skewed around to fit the frame, shoved off to the side.
We can’t leave out mention of Lee Hong-ki’s fabulous bus scene, can we? GREAT SCENE. Like withJung Yong-hwa yesterday, the beauty of the acting wasn’t in the big, dramatic emotions, but the way both guys found the quiet little beats to twist your heart into a painful knot. He didn’t rage at Mi-nyeo, but asked plaintively why she didn’t like him back when he liked her so much. We know it doesn’t work that way, but Jeremy’s heart has its own straightforward way of working.
The way he sings his song is just killer, because you can’t fake that, folks. You can fake crying to some extent, but cry-singing isn’t something you can reproduce authentically without actually going there, and Lee Hong-ki goes there. Ow.
I have to give mad props to Park Shin-hye for rounding out the bus scene so well even though she hardly said a thing. I love that she respects his pain to give him his space when they sit in silence, and I love the look she gives him to assure him that his song isn’t worthless. I wondered if it was out of character for Mi-nyeo to understand so readily that Jeremy liked her — when she was so dense with Shin-woo and Tae-kyung — but I suppose Jeremy was the most straightforward in saying, straight-out, that he liked her.
Criticisms:
The Hong sisters do comedy and angst very well, and manage to mix the two so that most of the time the drama doesn’t get too sunk down in the melodrama. However, I think in every one of their dramas except (surprisingly?) Fantasy Couple, their Big Misunderstanding has been just a wee bit too much for my tastes. Hong Gil Dong wasn’t so bad, but I recall that at the time, the Big Misunderstanding in My Girlclosely echoed the setup of Delightful Girl Chun-hyang, and that was a complaint for some fans of My Girl. Instead of feeling like a natural development in the couple’s romance, it felt like it was forced conflict, and it didn’t quite ring true. But I’m sure the Hong sisters took complaints to heart, because when people assumed they’d use a similar structure in Fantasy Couple, they announced that they wouldn’t. Thankfully, that drama avoided a time leap, and I hope this one does too.
To take a look at this episode in a critical light, I’d say we’re dealing more with forced conflict than natural development. Tae-kyung’s response at the end is probably understandable given the context, and I think he’s right in feeling hurt. But he’s overreacting, and his negative opinion of Mi-nyeo is one that would take five minutes of explanation to dispel. All he has to do is calm down and hear how she came to find out the truth, and I think we’d be good. She was wrong in hiding the truth from him, but even so, honestly this is hardly a big enough offense to rend asunder a Love That Is Meant To BeKDRAMA.
To play devil’s advocate, we can also take an apologist standpoint. Tae-kyung has put Mi-nyeo on something of a pedestal, since she has been so good and so forgiving this whole series long. Hearing that Mi-nyeo actively deceived him must shake his entire faith in her. It doesn’t help that it was his hated mother who uttered a defense of Mi-nyeo (“She didn’t mean to deceive you”). Coming from those lips, it sounds like an excuse rather than the truth. And worst of all, his mother issues are his blind spot, so he reacts to the emotion rather than sorting out the facts. It may be that Mi-nyeo meant well, but he sees her standing with the mother who abandoned him, who all but declared she’d rather have raised Mi-nyeo than Tae-kyung. To know that Mi-nyeo knew the truth and was still able to treat his mother civilly, well, that feels like a betrayal. Almost like she chose his mother over him.
It’s not expressly logical, but such is the heat of the moment. (Honestly, I don’t entirely buy the apologist argument, but I thought I’d put it out there.)
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November 19th, 2009 // by javabeans
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