Witch’s Romance: Episode 2

by odilettante

The show finds its footing in this episode, as it settles into a breezy and enjoyable rom-com, with a pair of leads that sizzle with intense chemistry. Things heat up for Ji-yeon as she deals with the aftermath of her exposé news article, her mother’s desperate desire to see her get married one day, and, of course, Dong-ha’s “white knight” kiss — which she manages to pay back ten-fold.

EPISODE 2 RECAP

Just in case anyone forgot the embarrassment Ji-yeon endured from the end of the last episode, this episode begins with Soo-chul doing his “fake-out” confession — and Ji-yeon being saved from humiliation with Dong-ha’s kiss.

After their lip-lock, Dong-ha pulls her into a hug, and discreetly apologizes if he made her feel bad, but it was better than letting her leave the stage alone. Ji-yeon admits to herself that she enjoyed the kiss, but now she’s left wondering if this was just one of Dong-ha’s acts of charity.

The MC declares the two to have won the bottle of wine, and Dong-ha murmurs that this probably would be a good time to leave. But not before Ji-yeon gets a little bit of her pride back.

Stalking up to a now thoroughly cowed Soo-chul, she confidently leans over him and tells him that as much as he seemed to know about her (thanks to info fed to him by her coworkers), he doesn’t know her life’s creed: to not let losers raise her blood pressure, and to not let a chance for revenge slip past her.

For someone who tried to insult her by calling her “ahjumma,” she says that he’s one to talk, because he looks like over-boiled spinach and moldy bread. I love that Dong-ha totally gets a kick out of his buddy getting verbally destroyed.

With her head held high, she strides out of the bar, arm and arm with Dong-ha — but as soon as they’re alone, she shoves him away, demanding to know if he’s always this thorough with his charity. Did he think her so pitiful to be rejected by Soo-chul, that he decided to save her with his “lip service”?

Ji-yeon insists that she was perfectly fine without him, and she would have exited the stage with dignity, leaving Soo-chul to be humiliated instead. Dong-ha points out that that Soo-chul was hired by her coworkers to purposefully mortify her. And how much do I love that everyone is now calling him “spinach mold”? Even her coworkers are calling them that as they now insist on a refund, since their plan didn’t work.

When Dong-ha suggests that she reflect on why her coworkers might have gone to such extremes to embarrass her, she finally reaches a breaking point, demanding to know why the world always blames the victims.

This is about more than just a petty office prank, though, as she brings up a situation of a woman being jilted at the altar on her wedding day. “Would you say the same to her? That she needs to reflect on herself?” Angrily, she asks why anyone would reject a woman in such a manner.

Dong-ha doesn’t have an answer. All he can do is explain the reasoning why he chose to save her just now: because he opposes a group of a people that gang up on one person; because there’s no one else around who will help her; and because she probably doesn’t have any friends who will comfort her when she feels miserable and mortified — or help her drink the bottle of wine she won.

Ji-yeon takes offense at this, pulling out her cell phone and insisting there’s thousands of friends listed in there. But is there one who will be willing to join her in a drink right now? Dong-ha agrees to give her ten minutes to find someone, and Ji-yeon scrolls and scrolls through lists of names before deciding on one.

But this friend may not be so friendly after all, since Ji-yeon is greeted by having a bowl of salt thrown on her — or rather on Dong-ha, who takes the brunt of it as she ducks behind him for protection. After the door slams in their faces, Ji-yeon admits it was a hoobae who used to work at Trouble Maker, until Ji-yeon fired her. HA! And this was her first choice of a drinking buddy?

Oh, but wait — it turns out to just be Ji-yeon’s imagination. She shakes off the thought of calling that “friend” and continues to scan down through her list of names. As she does so, her phone rings (caller ID: “Mrs. Choi Jeong-sook”) and she answers with the breezy and informal, “Jeong-sook-ah!”

Only it turns out to be her mother. Hahaha!

Mom is understandably confused as, in order to keep up appearances for Dong-ha, Ji-yeon continues to act like she’s on the phone with an old friend. Mom worries that her daughter is on drugs or drunk, before breaking down in tears because it seems the shaman’s prediction that Ji-yeon would go crazy due to loneliness has finally come true.

After hanging up on her poor bewildered mother, Ji-yeon informs Dong-ha that this friend she’s known “since birth” can’t make it tonight. She picks another name on her phone: “Traitor.”

Ji-yeon decides against calling, and instead orders Dong-ha to follow her.

They arrive at a small restaurant, where Ji-yeon is greeted with surprise and delight by her old friend BAEK NA-RAE (Ra Mi-ran). Na-rae’s husband, KANG MIN-GOO (Lee Se-chang) isn’t quite as thrilled to see Ji-yeon, and her chilly demeanor towards him makes the feeling mutual.

Ji-yeon critiques everything about her friend’s restaurant, which leads Dong-ha to question if they’re really friends after all. But Na-rae cheerfully informs him that she’s Ji-yeon’s only friend. Ha!

As they chow down on Min-goo’s specially made fish cakes, Ji-yeon continues to belittle him, snarking that he only managed to move from working at a food truck to owning a restaurant because he found the right woman. Dong-ha is a little shocked at her attitude, but Min-goo agrees with her: Na-rae is his muse, the Camille Claudel to his Rodin.

Na-rae explains to Dong-ha that Min-goo has always wanted to be a poet, and she wrote novels before becoming a copywriter. Aw, the married couple are super adorable as they affectionately hold hands, and it’s clear how much they love each other.

Dong-ha is charmed by their romance, but Ji-yeon reminds them how broke Rodin was, and how Camille (a talented and successful artist in her own right) ruined her life because of him. Clearly she thinks that Min-goo is not good enough for her friend. But as Na-rae shares stories from their school days, Ji-yeon’s attitude slowly begins to thaw, and soon everyone is having a grand old time around the table. Dong-ha teasingly notes his surprise that she’s actually capable of laughter.

He receives a phone call just then, and bids his adieu to the happy party, adding that if it’s fated, he and Ji-yeon will see each other again. She thoughtfully watches him leave.

Later, in the dark at his borrowed apartment, Dong-ha stares at a nearly-dead plant, reminiscing about an (ex?) girlfriend, who had previously chided him for ignoring the plant because he was so busy studying. She tells him that the plant isn’t really dead — it may look like it, but someday a flower will bloom.

In the present, Dong-ha tells his plant that he diligently watered and watched over it everyday, so why hasn’t it come back to life? From the way he phrases it, he could just as well be referring to his past relationship, too.

As she crawls into bed, Ji-yeon watches as the clock on her phone ticks over from 11:59 pm to midnight. Yet another March 15th has come and gone.

At the Trouble Maker office the next day, the team watches the news where Kim Jeong-do, aka Mr. Not-so-perfect Actor, threatens in his charming way to sue the magazine for spreading such lies about him secretly having a wife and child. He makes a promise to expose the truth.

The phones immediately start ringing off the hook, but Ji-yeon heads out to try and confront the common-law wife, who was once Ji-yeon’s university sunbae. She spends a long time waiting at the gate of the house, hoping for someone to show — but no one does.

Back at the office, the Trouble Maker trio try to figure out how to get their refund from Spinach-mold (this nickname is never going to get old), while Soo-chul calls Dong-ha to see if he has any sway with Ji-yeon to get them to leave him alone before they ruin his life.

Ji-yeon, having given up on her attempt to meet with her sunbae, tries to come up with a way to prove that Kim Jeong-do is lying. But she and her photographer work buddy are unable to think of a reasonable plan.

Her mother makes a surprise visit at the office, and the rest of the staff eavesdrop as Mom tries to convince Ji-yeon to go with her to visit the shaman so they can break her curse of being unmarried. Ji-yeon refuses, insisting that she’s happy with her life just the way it is.

When Mom realizes that not even the “I just want to see you happy because I’m you’re mother” card and the “I had cancer and you promised to do anything I wanted” card are working, she gives her final threat — if Ji-yeon doesn’t leave with her right now, she’ll go to Ji-yeon’s boss and bawl her eyes out, saying that her daughter is the death of her. The embarrassing thought of her mother making a scene in the office seems to do the trick of convincing Ji-yeon.

Dong-ha arrives at the shaman’s house where the lights eerily blink on and off. He cautiously walks through the rooms, calling out that he’s there from the “Part-Time Expert” company — and nearly jumps out of his skin when two arms wrap themselves tightly around his waist. But it’s just our resident shaman, who happily explains she was waiting for him.

She chirps that the lighting has been acting up, asking if he could fix it for her. As she shows him to the fuse box, she makes him put his phone in a basket, since phones aren’t allowed in the “sacred place.” He fiddles with the fuse box (as she inexplicably clings to his legs) and gets the lights to work again, but offers to stick around to fix some faulty wiring.

Just then, Ji-yeon and her mother arrive, and Dong-ha ducks out of sight. Ji-yeon is immediately ordered to put her phone in the phone basket as well, and wouldn’t you know — she and Dong-ha have the exact same phone.

The shaman confronts Ji-yeon for living her life the way she has for almost forty years, and then… spits on her? Ha! Needless to say, Ji-yeon is not a willing participant in any of the shaman’s schemes. But she eventually acquiesces to being hit forty times on her back with a stick to expunge her bad luck.

Halfway through the beatings, the shaman gets distracted by her own cell phone (so I guess at least one phone is allowed in the sacred place). She orders Mom to take over while she takes the call.

Mom is so desperate for Ji-yeon to get married, that she’s now willing to hit a daughter that she never used to beat as a child. It’s a tender moment between the two women, as Mom cries that they have to do all this because of that jerk who left her at the altar.

Ji-yeon remembers that day when she stood alone in the church, and she steels herself for the rest of the beating.

She tells her mom to stop feeling sorry and to just get it over with. Mom promises that once they finish, Ji-yeon will be able to forget about “that traitor” and finally be able to live well.

Dong-ha overhears all this, since he’s been periodically eavesdropping (and seems fairly concerned for Ji-yeon, despite his attempt to stay focused on his electrical wiring). He now begins to make sense of her outburst from yesterday, when she demanded to know why someone would jilt a woman on her wedding day.

Having been smacked on her back forty times now, Ji-yeon is ready to leave — but Mom wants to wait for the shaman to return, since she was promised an animal amulet. Ji-yeon refuses to wait (and who can blame her), grabbing one of the amulets at random. She then also hurriedly picks up what she thinks is her phone from the basket, but it’s actually Dong-ha’s phone.

The women are long gone by the time the shaman returns, and she immediately notices the amulet is missing. As she pays Dong-ha for his work, she muses out loud why Ji-yeon would take the blue horse, since that means yet another year of misfortune for her.

Later, Dong-ha is out doing one of his many part-time jobs, and answers what he thinks is his phone, only to discover that he has Ji-yeon’s phone instead. Due to the fallout of the Kim Jeong-do scandal, everyone is frantically trying to reach her.

Ji-yeon is instead at a pojangmacha, washing away the pain and frustration of the day with spicy chicken feet and soju. She’s well into her second bottle of soju when Dong-ha calls her, using her phone to call his. She blows him off, thinking him a stalker for figuring out her number.

As he’s grumbling at her for hanging up on him, her phone rings. The caller ID shows up as “Traitor.”

Based on what he’s pieced together, he assumes it’s the guy who left her at the altar. He nervously answers the phone, immediately launching into an explanation that he’s not in any sort of relationship with Ji-yeon, either as a boyfriend, lover, or hoobae, and that he just happens to be the person who has her phone. “But because you didn’t show up for the wedding, she’s having a hard time.”

Only the “Traitor” is Ji-yeon’s bestie Na-rae. She recognizes Dong-ha’s voice, and lets him know where he’s likely to find Ji-yeon.

Ji-yeon is on her fourth bottle of soju by the time Dong-ha appears. He finally convinces her that their phones were switched. When she finds out that it happened at the shaman’s, she carefully asks if he saw anything, but he says he didn’t. Aw.

He sees the pain reliever patch she bought to put on her back and his nurturing instinct kicks in. Remembering Na-rae’s warning that Ji-yeon shouldn’t be drinking alone, he decides to stick around. They split a bottle of soju, and by the time they finish it, Ji-yeon is so drunk she can barely stand.

Getting home is an adventure, as Ji-yeon weaves back and forth across the sidewalk, picking a fight with an advertisement banner and then becoming enraptured with her reflection in a safety mirror. (She marvels at how perfectly awesome she looks, then wonders slurrily, “But why do I look kinda fishy today?” You know, because of the fisheye effect of the distorted mirror.)

They finally arrive at her apartment, and Dong-ha realizes that she lives right across the rooftop from where he’s temporarily living. As she opens the door to go inside, he wishes her good night, planning to head back his room. But she growl-yells that he can’t leave yet — he has to have one last drink before he goes. And then she literally drags him inside, ha.

Once indoors, Ji-yeon dumps an armload of beer and snacks onto the coffee table, and happily gulps down a can of beer. When Dong-ha says that he should really be getting home, Ji-yeon messily opens up another can of beer, and they both attempt to rescue the foam spilling over the top by slurping at it.

Their faces are just centimeters apart, and as they realize how close they are, Dong-ha slowly pulls back — and Ji-yeon licks his finger. The little “meow” sound effect perfectly encapsulates the image of a cat stalking her prey as she leans towards Dong-ha, who tries to pull further and further away, flustered at their closeness.

But the prey doesn’t seem to mind being caught. Despite his protests, he’s soon kissing her.

They continue to share sexy smooches as they make their way to Ji-yeon’s bedroom. Dong-ha strips off his T-shirt and removes his wallet from his back pocket, tossing it carelessly on the beside table. Dong-ha is busy gettin’ busy, but Ji-yeon is distracted when she spots his ID card with his birthdate: April 30, 1990.

She quickly does the math in her head, and realizes that he’s twenty-five (Korean age). Dong-ha is completely focused on kissing Ji-yeon as she mentally freaks out over their fourteen-year age gap. She realizes that when she was a teenager, he was a baby crawling on the floor; when she got her first professional job as a reporter, he was ten years old; and when she was thirty, he was…

Her imagination takes her to a courtroom, where she stands accused of being a child molester.

She tries to defend herself that they truly love each other, and it was only one night. Dong-ha, in his high school uniform, makes his most aegyo face as he pouts out a “noona.” Pffft.

But the judge harshly reminds her that the defendant is just sixteen years old, sentencing her to two-and-a-half-years of jail time.

Back in reality, Ji-yeon panics and literally kicks Dong-ha out of bed.

COMMENTS

Pardon me for a moment while I take a cold shower and collect my thoughts on this episode, because I’m pretty sure all that’s running through my brain right now is a “squee” so high-pitched it can only be heard by the neighbor dogs.

Uhm Jung-hwa is just so fabulous. I’m totally sold on the way she’s portraying Ji-yeon, and I can’t really picture the role being played by anyone else.

Because I also adore Ji-yeon. I love that she’s successful at her job, and so passionate about it that she doesn’t care that the rest of the Trouble Maker staff doesn’t like her — she just wants to continue to uncover the truth and know her words make an impact. She’s happily independent most of the time, and the few times when she feels pangs of loneliness, she doesn’t try to stifle her emotions like a robot. Instead, she admits them and then figures out a way to remind her how awesome her life is.

Not to mention she’s so much fun as a happy drunk. Despite how her day may have gone, after her four bottles of soju, she’s ready to take on the world — and seduce that cute guy who seems to keep following her around.

Which, ok, ok — let me just momentarily PSA to say that Dong-ha should really have tried harder to make sure Ji-yeon got home safely and left it at that, because taking advantage of anyone who’s drunk is a major no-no, even if the drunk person seems to be pretty conscious of his or her actions.

But.

Watching Ji-yeon dominate the decision-making was pure joy. I loved the way she was the one who initiated the contact, who threw him up against the bookshelves, who paved the way to her bedroom. Even if it was ultimately her decision, I also really appreciated that Dong-ha was 100% there with her, proving that his attraction to her is natural and real.

Which makes the fact that now we’re faced with their age difference all that more exciting, because even though I’m sure they were aware there was some difference between them, I doubt either anticipated fourteen years. In fact, they’ve felt like they’re on fairly equal footing: Ji-yeon may be successful in her career, but Dong-ha is the one with the relational maturity.

So now I’m really looking forward to seeing how their attraction plays out as they — or perhaps mostly just Ji-yeon — come to terms with a fairly substantial age gap. As someone who hasn’t watched the original Taiwanese version (so don’t spoil me, please!), I’m just going assume based on I know from being a fan of the noona romance in general, and predict there will be not just a lot of internal struggles, but also lots of negative feedback from friends, family and society.

But I’m sure that fate will somehow find a way to intervene — after all, Dong-ha was born in the year of the horse, and Ji-yeon selected the blue horse as her amulet. And as far as amulets go, I’d definitely want mine to be Dong-ha. Just sayin’.

All in all, this is bound to be a fun ride, especially since Uhm Jung-hwa and Park Seo-joon’s chemistry is so natural and intense every time they’re on screen together. I find I just can’t get enough of the two of them.

Or cable-worthy kisses.

RELATED POSTS

• Witch’s Romance: Episode 1
• Kissing tips and beating hearts in Witch’s Romance
• First teasers for Uhm Jung-hwa’s new rom-com
• Uhm Jung-hwa headlines noona romance for tvN