Master’s Sun: Episode 6

by girlfriday

With a brand new beau and a lollipop to prove that he’s sweet on her, our heroine sets out to live her dream as a regular girl with a regular life. Easier said than done, of course, when the dead come knocking with unfinished business, and she finds that the choice isn’t as easy as she thought it’d be. Can she turn a blind eye to the things she can see, or is there no unseeing the pain of others?

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Hong Dae-kwang – “You and I” for the OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 6 RECAP

After receiving her lollipop declaration of “I’ll be brave/You be strong,” Gong-shil runs in slow motion to her bodyguard in shining armor. Her hair’s behaving way too poetically for this to be real.

Kang Woo turns around and she tells him that she’s ready now, and she’s found the strength to tell him the truth. She takes a breath, and then confesses that she can see ghosts. She asks if that changes how he feels, and he declares grandly: “You could tell me you’ve been abducted by aliens. It wouldn’t matter.” Hahaha.

And then he grabs her for a hug as the camera swirls around them, revealing a circle of ghosts clapping for the happy couple. A UFO beams down a light for the cherry atop this crazy dream sundae.

In real life, Gong-shil asks, “Couldn’t this dream become a reality?” What’s even better is that it’s not a dream, but a fantasy she’s describing to Joong-won. HA.

He says her chances aren’t exactly high, and she pouts that she once met a crazy guy at the asylum who swore he had been abducted by aliens, and even he found a wife to love him. Joong-won takes issue with her calling anyone else crazy, and Gong-shil says she was totally open-minded and went UFO-hunting with him and everything, and when she told him she could see ghosts, he called her crazy first.

Joong-won deadpans that she could’ve been abducted by aliens, and she agrees that it was dangerous after all, since ghosts are real, so anything’s possible. I love that Joong-won spits out these sarcastic remarks, she takes them at face value, and then it just infuriates him all the more. He grumps that talking to her turns him into an idiot.

She wonders if Kang Woo will believe her like Joong-won did, and he offers a piece of genuine advice (I do like how he’s her romance coach, even if he’s reluctant about it): ask Kang Woo if he believes in ghosts first, before just dumping the whole truth on his lap.

She flits away happily, musing that she never thought something so sweet could ever happen to her, and he tells her to go be sweet with Kang Candy all she wants.

But then when she really leaves, he mutters to himself that it used to take three tries to get her to go, but now she’s leaving at one. As soon as he says it though, she’s back for more questions, and he ends up having to fill his get-lost quota anyway. He decides it’s a good thing that she’ll stick to sweet Kang Candy and leave him alone.

On her way home that night, Gossip Man jumps out at her in the alley, and she pelts him with her bag and goes running the other way. Turns out Kang Woo brought a few coworkers home for a visit, with Uncle VP’s assistant in tow because she’s being a spy.

As they sit down to eat, Gong-shil apologizes to Gossip Man, letting it slip that she didn’t think he was a person, but that naturally leads the conversation into ghost stories, and everyone takes turns talking about their spooky encounters.

Gong-shil notes that Kang Woo remains silent throughout, and she asks if he doesn’t like ghost stories. He says he hates them, and thinks that anyone who believes in that crap is stupid and pathetic. Oh noes.

Gong-shil frowns, her dreams of hugging Kang Candy under a UFO beam floating away with every word. But when Kang Woo storms off to the bathroom, he jumps at his own reflection, revealing just how frightened he was by their stories. Hm, a crack in the Mr. Perfect armor?

Meanwhile, Aunt is busy playing matchmaker with Joong-won and Yi-ryung, and all it really takes is for him to hear that Yi-ryung is going to inherit her family’s ginormous fortune, before he decides he’d like a long leisurely dinner to get to know her better.

But all Yi-ryung wants to do is talk about Gong-shil and how crazy she is, thinking that she’ll woo Joong-won away like this. He cuts her off, not giving a damn about that, and asks her to talk about her family’s plans for building a new resort. Heh.

Uncle VP is still in the office till late at night, and he stops when he hears whistling down the long, empty corridor. He follows the sound, and it leads him all the way into Gong-shil’s office.

It’s dark and there’s nothing inside, that is until he moves aside a stack of boxes. A quick flash reveals a face looking back at him, but soon it changes into a dog with glowing red eyes. It lurches and bites, and Uncle flees in terror.

He calls everyone back to the office, and the entire security team sets out to find the dog that bit him before opening tomorrow. Yi-ryung confers with Kang Woo after her date, and says that Gong-shil doesn’t seem to mean anything to Joong-won. Kang Woo says there must be a reason that he’s keeping her close, and Yi-ryung remains convinced that he likes Gong-shil and is jealous of Joong-won.

Gong-shil gets to her office, and the first thing she does is root around for her Kang Candy, relieved when she finds it. It’s broken in two though, and Joong-won can hardly contain his amusement at that. He finds a dog collar on her floor, with an army tag for the dog’s nameplate.

She sees how stressed he is about not being able to open Kingdom’s doors in the morning, so she assures him that she’ll find the dog. Her bright idea: walking around the mall with two sausages on sticks, calling the doggie’s name.

She stops to ask the other mall ghosts if they’ve seen the dog, but doesn’t get much help from them. Joong-won is scowling the whole time, until talk turns to Gong-shil’s failed attempt at telling Kang Candy the truth about ghosts. He visibly smiles to hear it went badly.

He says that all people hate ghosts, and he just lets her be around him because she’s useful. So she takes that as advice and decides she’ll find the dog to be useful to Kang Woo. Heh. You can practically hear the little boy voice in his head: You said you were going to find the dog for me.

Elsewhere in the mall, a man hides in terror. He sees Yi-ryung drop her purse nearby, and crashes into her to steal her wallet. Do they… recognize each other? It’s unclear if it’s recognition or just shock, but in any case, he goes running again, and Kang Woo gives chase.

The man scrambles for an unlocked exit, and oh, he isn’t the dog. Is it weird that I assumed he was a shape-shifter? The dog runs after him, barking and growling the whole time.

Gong-shil follows the sound and comes face to face with the dog, just as the man slips away. One of the security guards gets a look at the man’s face, and he says he was an employee at Kingdom who went off to the army.

Kang Woo finds Yi-ryung in tears, and wraps his jacket around her. He carries her away in his arms, like a big ol’ hero. She’s falling pretty hard for him, whether she likes it or not.

Gong-shil tells Joong-won that she found the dog, and sure enough, the dog is now placidly sitting next to her and letting her pet him. Kang Woo catches that bit of the conversation as he’s leaving, and wonders what she’s talking about.

Gong-shil says the dog is clearly trying to show her something, and decides that she should follow him. But Joong-won refuses to let her go running after a thief, and touches her to make the dog poof away. Aw.

She smiles to realize that Joong-won is worried about her, and grabs his hand in gratitude, saying she misjudged him. He promptly charges her for the handholding, just to cover up his involuntary bout of niceness.

Meanwhile, news reports reveal that the pickpocket is AWOL from the army. Kang Woo checks the security footage to make sure there wasn’t a dog, and then goes looking for Gong-shil. He sees her shoving something into her back pocket, and asks suspiciously what it is.

He says he overheard her telling Joong-won that she saw the dog, and she hesitates before saying he misinterpreted her, and she was talking about a person. He continues to interrogate her, asking what she’s hiding in her pocket, and she sheepishly takes out the lollipop he gave her, cracked in half.

She apologizes for letting the precious lollipop break, and runs off with her head hanging. See, now don’t you feel like a heel for giving her the third degree?

Kang Woo reports the day’s events to Daddy Joo, and then heads up to the rooftop where Gong-shil is still sighing over her broken lolli. He apologizes for being so harsh earlier, and admits that he doesn’t hate ghosts, but is afraid of them. He says he witnessed some pretty gruesome deaths in the army, and the thought that ghosts are around would be too much to bear.

He tells her not to put too much meaning in the broken candy, and says that it was meant to be eaten that way. He takes half and they share it while making moony eyes at each other. Cute.

Joong-won saunters out to his palatial garden, where suddenly the ghost dog appears in front of him. He can see it? It’s definitely the same dog. Suddenly, dancing girls appear and start singing “Nobody,” and the dog joins in. Gettin’ weird.

He tells himself it has to be a dream, but when he slaps himself, nothing happens. Finally after the third slap he darts awake, wondering why he’s having dancing dog dreams.

At the office, he orders Gong-shil to follow the dog and stop him from having strange dreams, and she refuses, wanting to ignore that part of her life now more than ever. She reaches out to touch him, but he backs away and insists he’ll go with her to fulfill the dog’s last wishes and send it on its way to doggie heaven.

Yi-ryung saunters into Kingdom and presents Kang Woo with a pair of musical tickets to thank him for last night. She starts naming a place to meet before the musical, and he wonders why she’s making plans with him. Haha, embarrassing.

She says it like it’s suuuch a chore, but that she’s willing to be his date for the evening. He just cuts her off and says he already has someone to go with. I do enjoy it when he flattens her ego.

He goes straight to Gong-shil to ask her out, and she giddily accepts, though she warns that she doesn’t do well in the dark, and might run out. Kang Woo says it isn’t a horror musical, and besides, she can always hold his arm if she’s scared. They agree to meet tonight.

Thus when Gong-shil heads out with Joong-won to follow the dog, she’s in a hurry to get this done so she won’t be late for her date. Joong-won is extra pissypants today, and insists they stop for a drink. You’re totally going to make her late on purpose, aren’t you?

He doesn’t even let her order the thing she wants at the coffee shop, and orders the same thing he always gets, because he can’t read the menu board (a fact he keeps to himself). Gong-shil asks if Hee-joo ever appears in his dreams, because she hasn’t seen her around Joong-won lately.

She asks him to talk about her in an effort to draw her out, but he refuses, saying that telling people about himself leaves him vulnerable to showing his weaknesses, and he can’t have that. She wonders if he doesn’t trust her, thinking that she’ll run off with the money. He says he doesn’t trust her in the least, but she points out that following her, following a ghost dog—that’s technically trust. Heh.

The dog leads them to a furniture store, where the AWOL soldier is crouched in a storage room, at the end of his rope. He takes out his gun and wonders aloud if he should just end it now and go to his friend.

A flashback reveals their sweet backstory at the army base. The soldier was assigned to train the army dog, and they became the best of friends, him teaching the dog to dance to his favorite girl group, and the dog coming to his rescue when his superiors bullied him. Life was tough for him, but his friendship with the dog kept him going.

One day the dog fell ill and became too old for army duty, and the soldier pleaded with the vet to save his life, promising to take him home when he got out. But the rules were strict, and he was forced to put the dog to sleep, by his own hand. Augh. That’s horrible. No wonder he’s traumatized.

Compounded with the loss, life at the base became unbearable, and he finally snapped and fought back to his superior officer and ran away.

Gong-shil says the dog is trying to stop his friend from doing something bad and raising a paw at her, but Joong-won says that if he’s armed, this is as far as they go. He makes her wait outside for the military police to arrive, but she hesitates, especially when the dog starts crying.

Joong-won reminds her that her whole goal was to ignore what she could see. He stretches out his hand: “You have a date at eight o’clock. Go home and shower and put on nice clothes and do your makeup, and go on your date like a normal woman. Isn’t that why you’re always asking me to hold onto you?”

He steps forward and urges her to take his hand, but this time it’s Gong-shil who pulls away: “I must just be a crazy woman, and it can’t be helped.” She runs inside after the dog.

Upstairs, the soldier raises his gun to his chin, and reaches down to pull the trigger. The dog races toward him, and in the last second, a beam falls from the shelf above him and the shot misfires into a feather pillow.

Joong-won hears the shot and races inside after Gong-shil. Aw. She gets shuffled along by the panicked crowd trying to leave the store, and Joong-won actually gets upstairs to the soldier before she does.

He’s met with a gun, and an agitated soldier at the other end of it. Eep. But thankfully he doesn’t seem interested in harming anyone but himself, and lets Joong-won go.

Joong-won takes two steps away before stopping with a sigh, as if Gong-shil has rubbed off on him like a terrible disease. He turns back and tosses the soldier the dog’s collar, and lies that he can see the dog’s ghost.

He says exactly what Gong-shil would’ve—that the dog is always by his side, watching over him, and that he doesn’t want his friend to do anything bad. He adds that the dog is raising one paw at him, which was their special way of telling each other that everything would be okay. The soldier breaks down in tears.

What Joong-won can’t see is that the dog is doing exactly what he’s describing. Gong-shil watches it all with tears in her eyes, as man and best friend have a heartfelt and bittersweet reunion. The SWAT team arrives just behind her, and the soldier lays down his weapon and gets carted away.

She smiles up at Joong-won, moved at what he did, while he mimes his annoyance at her. Ha. And as the soldier gets taken back to the base, he hears “Nobody” playing overhead.

Joong-won lies to the furniture store manager that they came to buy a sofa, and he suggests they look at beds too. Yes, please. They wait there until the news crew clears out, and Gong-shil says he did a pretty good job pretending he could see ghosts.

He’s watched her enough times to know the drill by the now. She asks if he’s going to keep his promise, and we see that Joong-won offered the soldier a job at Kingdom if he finished out the rest of his service without incident. Oh you big softy. (I like that his last words are, “Don’t forget pil-seung,” which is the name of the dog but is also the army salute, like he’s saying, Don’t forget your duty/allegiance.)

He sighs now that the ghost dog is smart—he saved his master AND secured him a future. Gong-shil says it was a good idea not to ignore what she saw, which only irks him more, since he was the one who ended up in the line of fire. He leans in close and warns her to listen to him next time.

He pushes her away which only makes her sit closer, and she hands him the release form from the furniture store to sign. He waves it aside and tells her to read it, and she says she already did, insisting he read his own copy.

He decides he’ll take it to his secretary, and that raises her suspicions—can’t he read? He finally admits that he can’t, asking if she’s happy to have found one of his weaknesses. She just remains quiet and looks on with sympathy, and he finally tells her the story.

He says that ever since the kidnapping, he can’t read, because they made him read out of a book the entire time he was held there. It also happened to be a book about people dying off one after another (Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None), and he grew increasingly terrified that once everyone had died and he finished reading, he’d be the last to die.

He didn’t die, but now every time he tries to read, he starts to throw up. She wonders if there’s anything she can do to make it go away, and offers up her arm for him to touch, to see if that works. Ha, cute.

She decides that she’ll help him read from now on, and takes the release form to read aloud to him. Naturally he’s a big pain in the ass about her pitch, speed, and intonation, and she can barely get through the first line.

We cut away to the neighbor boys, who return to the playground the next day. The creepy possessed doll is still right where they left it. Little Bro runs up to shake its hand, and the doll smiles back. Bah, I thought I dodged the Chucky bullet, but I guess I should be grateful it wasn’t the main ghost today. *tags javabeans* Not It!

Yi-ryung ends up buying tickets to see the same musical that night with her manager, and sees Kang Woo waiting outside. He answers a call from his boss, and she overhears him say that he’ll continue to observe Joong-won, but that he doesn’t feel comfortable lying to Gong-shil anymore, because he feels like he’s betraying her.

Oh crap. He gets off the phone and Yi-ryung comes right up to ask why he’s spying on Joong-won.

Joong-won calls Secretary Kim to pick them up, and peers over at Gong-shil, who has fallen asleep next to him. He thinks over her proposal that he try holding her hand to read, since holding his hand makes her less afraid of ghosts.

He picks up the signed release form and slowly reaches over to take her hand. He looks down at the paper, and then back over at her, and starts to lean in closer… and closer…

 
COMMENTS

Dangnabbit. You would end there. It was a sweet episode, though I was hoping for a little more advancement in the central mythology, now that there’s more for Gong-shil to worry about with ghosts and possession and being their possible window back into this plane of existence. I did like the Ghost of the Day, probably because I’m more easily moved by animal love than human love. I thought it was a shame that the dog didn’t stick around to just be Gong-shil’s ghost pet, because she could certainly use a guard dog, even if he is dead.

It was a nice reversal today to have Joong-won be the catalyst for solving the dog case, even delivering the clincher speech while posing as the ghost dog whisperer. He notably touched Gong-shil first all episode long, which is such a great way to turn a practical gesture for her (ghost-zapping) into a meaningful one for him. Try as he might to ignore the plight of others, he seems to be a caring person underneath it all. This way, he gets to be the good guy, and then blame Gong-shil instead of admitting that he has feelings. His fear of showing another person his weaknesses was a good way to make him relatable, because even though he talks about it like he’s at war and showing his soft underbelly would be a weakness that leaves him open to attack, it’s also just a simple universal fear of being honest and vulnerable.

His is pronounced, of course, with his traumatic kidnapping and all, which is why it says so much that he’s willing to tell Gong-shil about something that would make him seem weak. It really is a case of I-show-you-mine-you-show-me-yours, because all she does all day is show him her weaknesses and share her neurotic fears, and lean on him for support. My favorite thing is how she asks for his advice on her love life, and he actually advises her pretty well despite himself. I really hope he’s the first to fall hard, so they can milk as much petty jealousy out of the setup as they can. It’s telling that all she really wants is for Kang Woo to believe her like Joong-won does. And there’s no denying it anymore, even if he still calls her crazy. Like she points out, once you’re already following the crazy woman, following an invisible ghost dog… well, there’s no arguing that you’re a skeptic anymore.

The biggest step for Gong-shil was in choosing not to ignore the ghost for the first time, when she had every opportunity to take Joong-won’s hand and go meet her dashing prince on her fantasy date. For all her wishing that she could just be normal, she can’t ignore the plight of others either. And that seems to be the best balance for her—it’s not that being with Joong-won makes the ghosts disappear, but that he gives her the strength to face them. She thought she wanted them to just go poof, but what she really needs just to know that there’s a safety net in place.

 
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