Discovery of Romance: Episode 6

by dramallama

The human mind does strange things with memory. We remember what, when, and how we loved, yet we rarely remember the pain. The good memories fill us with nostalgia, but the painful ones move us forward. It’s through the convenience of forgetting the painful memories that Tae-ha finds himself stuck in the past. But as he digs into his selective memory, he finally takes some steps forward to uncover some hidden truths.

 
EPISODE 6: “Even if the sky falls, I’m not going to you”

Tae-ha stirs awake in the morning with a mysterious microphone and the memory of last night fresh on his mind. He kicks his blankets and hides under them in denial, but he puts on his carefree façade when the interviewer asks him about last night. Flashing a smile, he laughs it off, “I was just a little bit drunk.”

He openly admits that he remembers his confession to Yeo-reum last night but makes an excuse that he was just confusing his old feelings for her. Mmm-hmm. But if there’s one thing that he regrets, it’s suggesting a second round at the noraebang.

Back to last night, we see drunk Tae-ha doing some intense third-wheeling, taking a video of Yeo-reum and Ha-jin singing a couple song and intrusively (and hilariously) dancing.

While Yeo-reum takes a bathroom break, Tae-ha and Ha-jin have a moment for themselves, where they argue over honorifics (and Ha-jin’s refusal to use them). Their argument grows tense, and when Yeo-reum comes out of the bathroom, one of the coworkers tells her that something’s gone wrong between the two.

She runs over, only to see Tae-ha and Ha-jin rocking out to Girls Generation’s “Gee” with some killer costumes and dance moves. HA. Once the song is over, Yeo-reum tries to drag Ha-jin away, but Tae-ha stops him. In memory of the day they officially became hyung and dongsaeng, he gifts Ha-jin with the tambourine and he takes the mic. They part ways with a nice bromantic hug while Yeo-reum scoffs.

Now in his sober state, Tae-ha grabs the microphone and shakes his head while Ha-jin does the same with the tambourine (“Hyung my ass”). Tae-ha throws it away and tells us that alcohol is always to blame. That night is done and over with. And he just confessed his feelings because he was drunk, nothing else. “Why would I like my ex? There are plenty of other girls that like me.”

As evidence of that statement, Tae-ha’s phone rings. Keeping his cool, he picks up as oppa and addresses Director Yoon as if he’s a girl until he finishes the interview. Haha.

Eating breakfast with Director Yoon, Tae-ha asks about terminating the contract with Yeo-reum. Director Yoon tells him not to even think about it, as quality designs at this rate are hard to come by. Then Tae-ha asks if he’s ever liked a girl with a boyfriend. After some thought, Director Yoon says he knows of a guy who loved a married woman, The Great Gatsby. When Tae-ha asks how Gatsby ended up, he deadpans that Gatsby dies.

At that, Tae-ha bursts into complaints. “Is Gatsby crazy? Dying for love? I am not going to die.” Stuffing his breakfast into his mouth, he repeats that phrase a couple more times. “I am NOT going to die.” Haha.

Tae-ha and Director Yoon return to the office just as Yeo-reum and Sol arrive. Tae-ha hides away at the sight of Yeo-reum, but she finds him and strikes up a friendly conversation. She claims that she doesn’t remember anything from last night, not even the confession. Making him antsier, she hands him coffee and fixes his collar.

Unsure of whether or not Yeo-reum is telling the truth, Tae-ha nervously paces in his office. He thinks back to the night when she accidentally slept over at his house and seems reassured at the fact that she didn’t remember then either. She wouldn’t remember last night, right?

Director Yoon invites Tae-ha to lunch with everyone, and though he warily glances at Yeo-reum, he agrees to do so. During lunch, Sol compliments one of the coworker’s manicured nails, which she can’t do because she’s always working with wood. The coworker’s boyfriend paid for her to get it, but she sadly claims to be in an ennui phase in her three-year relationship. Her boyfriend criticizes her looks nowadays, and she’s getting self-conscious.

Director Yoon says that it’s just attention, but Yeo-reum disagrees. She quickly looks at Tae-ha and claims that she knows the feeling of growing apart. That man may have changed.

Flashback to the good ol’ days ten years ago. Yeo-reum tells Tae-ha about Sol’s leave of absence because of her break-up. Though she seems to be seriously telling Tae-ha about the situation, he just smiles because of the cotton candy all over her mouth. Even a little kid comes up to laugh at her face. He doesn’t tell her because he finds it so cute. She eventually sees her face in the bathroom and gives Tae-ha a good punch for not telling her. But their conflict is easily resolved with kisses. D’aww so cute.

Yeo-reum then uses another example to show how her ex changed. In this flashback, she and Tae-ha are out for chicken. She gets her fingers and her mouth covered in sauce, and he just hands her the box of tissues, telling her to clean up after herself.

Back at the lunch, the women coworkers gasp. Director Yoon freezes with disbelief, but all the women seem to be convinced that this change was a serious issue. When asked what happened, Yeo-reum steals glances at Tae-ha and says, “What else can you do with a changed man? There’s no use in fighting. Why do I have to put in effort if he doesn’t put in any?”

Tae-ha glares at Yeo-reum and leaves the table to take care of the bill (and probably to prevent an outburst). She follows after him, leaving to open up her shop. Once they’re out of earshot, Tae-ha corrects her about the chicken memory. According to him, that never happened.

But Yeo-reum makes a point in saying that they remember different things. “Memories that are important to some people may not be as important to others. Like last night. I remember everything.” Uh-oh.

Tae-ha stands speechless and shocked at this revelation as Yeo-reum continues. She accuses him of feigning ignorance and tells him to fess up to last night. He accuses her right back, saying that she knew all along and still decided to introduce Ha-jin to everyone. Doesn’t she think about his feelings?

She replies, “Why should I care about your feelings? You take care of your own feelings. Yeah, I’m a bitch, but I have no reason to care about you. I have someone else to care for, and I need to take care of myself over you.” Oof, cold and pretty bitchy.

Mom’s assistant Gi-eun struggles through a crisis, typing out personal resolutions for what to do with her life. She contemplates her two options – stepping up from her assistant writer position or getting married – presented by her alter egos. But they basically tell her she’s a failure, so she slams her head on the table in defeat.

Producer Bae walks in on her misery and asks where Mom is. Gi-eun says that she’s out to get some sunshine at the school because of her vitamin D deficiency.

At school, Mom watches the boys’ soccer practice, focusing her attention on one particular boy. After practice, she asks him why he didn’t score any goals today, and he replies that his cleats are too small. She tells him to ask his grandma to buy him new ones, and he runs off past Producer Bae, who’s arrived to see her.

Back to the awkward lunch. As the rest of the coworkers leave the restaurant, Tae-ha stops Sol to give her a bag of marinated crab to deliver to Yeo-reum’s father, remembering how much he liked them. Sol freezes and looks at him with disbelief as she reminds him that Yeo-reum’s father passed away – a month before the two broke up, in fact. This seems like news to Tae-ha, and he stops Sol, shocked.

Producer Bae sits down with Mom and admits that he remembers the supposed cheating ten years ago. He had married a woman he’d just met and had no real attachment to her. And Mom had complications with her husband. She cuts him off saying, “Those people who died haven’t done us much good, and we haven’t done anything to be proud of either. But we’ve reached the end with them.”

He asks if Mom still resents Yeo-reum’s father and says that he misses his wife even though her nagging drove him crazy. But she sticks to her perspective: Once they die, it’s the end. She doesn’t even believe in the afterlife anyway.

Back to a shocked Tae-ha, Sol tells him that Dad passed away from a car accident in front of the local pharmacy. She’s baffled that he’s forgotten something as tragic as this, but Tae-ha’s reaction is quite strong, almost as if he’d never known.

Upon returning to the shop, Sol fumes that Tae-ha remembered that Yeo-reum’s father liked marinated crab but didn’t remember that he passed away, while Yeo-reum looks away with an unclear expression.

As Director Yoon drives Tae-ha, he guesses that the ex Yeo-reum discussed was Tae-ha. He shakes his head, thinking about how much wrong Tae-ha had to commit to make a girl still resentful. But Tae-ha remains silent, his mind elsewhere.

Ha-jin’s mother comes in to get some Botox shots from Joon-ho and makes sure that it’s all a secret from her son. But we see that it’s not a secret at all, as Ha-jin casually asks Joon-ho what procedures his mother came in for. Heh.

He opens a text from Ah-rim about the kimbap date but quickly realizes that Joon-ho is looking over his shoulder. After a struggle, he reveals the text, and Joon-ho takes note of this suspicious date.

Ha-jin makes time for this date and looks genuinely happy to see Ah-rim. She asks how old he is, and she happily notes that he’s the same age as her oppa. Ha-jin freezes for a moment as she explains that she got separated from her oppa when she was younger. She thinks that she’ll be able to recognize him right away, even though they’ve spent twenty years apart. And she keeps her scar so that he’ll recognize her.

Ha-jin mentions that her oppa might pretend not to know her, but Ah-rim doesn’t understand. She jokingly says that she’s going to kill her oppa since he made her live this way. They laugh and continue with their meal as Ha-jin continues to ignore calls from Yeo-reum.

Yeo-reum calls him from the clinic, where Joon-ho doesn’t reveal anything and walks away briskly. She finds it strange that Ha-jin’s not picking up, so she tracks him with her GPS. She spots him from outside and witnesses the kimbap date. He’s smiling, laughing, and most importantly, ignoring her calls. The realization (misunderstanding) hits, and Yeo-reum walks away deflated.

As he drives Ah-rim home, Ha-jin asks about her schedule. She’s a busy bee, with her morning juice deliveries, school, and late night work at the bicycle shop. On school days, she barely has time for breakfast. Before she leaves, Ha-jin tells her to ring his doorbell when she delivers juice on school days and she agrees. The car pulls away, and Ah-rim happily admires his courtesy.

Back home, Yeo-reum demands to know everything that Joon-ho knows about the kimbap affair. Sol shows sympathy for him, but the knives are at his throat as the ladies sit and stare him down. Chewing on his dinner and darting his eyes back and forth, Joon-ho quickly analyzes this situation. Yeo-reum left the clinic before he did but came back home later than him, so she must know everything!

He puts his chopsticks down and reveals it all. Ah-rim is still a student, works for juice delivery, and works at the bicycle shop. She took Ha-jin on a kimbap date because he’d agreed to perform surgery for her acquaintances at no cost. Yeo-reum nods, seemingly knowing all of this, and accuses Joon-ho of not telling her about the kimbap date earlier. Sol gives him his punishment – dishes for a month – and Yeo-reum orders him to keep this revelation a secret from Ha-jin.

Meanwhile, Tae-ha drowns his sorrows with drinks and looks through his box of memories. He puts on the wooden couple ring and begins to doubt his supposedly real memories. “Could my memory be wrong? How could I forget that Yeo-reum’s father passed away? I remember everything. Maybe my memories are wrong, maybe that wasn’t our first kiss. Our love may only be in my memory since it seems like Yeo-reum has forgotten everything.”

He spots his camera on the shelf, which triggers another memory. In a flashback, we see Tae-ha carefully cleaning his cameras when suddenly Yeo-reum barges in, accusing him of being late. He’s lost track of time and apologizes for not making it. She’s furious that he made her and her friends wait for two hours at the station. He tries to pull her aside, but she refuses, saying that she knows that she’s not important to him. She tries to throw his camera, but he convinces her not to. She’s on the losing end of the relationship, so she swallows her anger.

With this memory – notably his first bad memory of their relationship – Tae-ha is convinced that he didn’t remember wrong. He calls up his hyung Director Yoon right away, asking him to look into the accident that killed Yeo-reum’s father.

Sol offers to help Yeo-reum track down this Ah-rim girl in exchange for borrowing Yeo-reum’s clothes for her reunion tonight, where Eun-gyu will be waiting for her. She purposefully skipped the first part to make him wait.

She arrives to the reunion and confidently greets Eun-gyu. But he’s there with none other than his current girlfriend. Sol looks crushed, especially when she finds out that they’ve been a thing since he first got hired.

She asks him why he didn’t tell her, and he shrugs it off with a “just because.” Unable to handle this situation, Sol stands up and gives him a good piece of her mind. Calling him a bastard, she accuses him of using her and splashes her glass of beer on his face. She demands another refill on her beer and starts chugging…

And Eun-gyu grabs her arm to stop her from drinking so fast. Unfortunately, it was all her imagination. Sol makes an excuse that she just dropped by and has to leave soon for another appointment. With that, she runs out in tears, completely dejected, and gets in a cab with Taxi Ajusshi, who recognizes her from the other drunken night.

She changes her direction, and once she gets there, she asks Taxi Ajusshi to wait. She stares up at a window, picks up a rock, and hurls it. Watching Sol break the window, he assumes that she slept with the guy (in his mind, Joon-ho) and he broke up with her. Looking straight ahead, Sol tells him that the world has changed, and now those who don’t sleep around are considered the problem. Aww, you poor soul.

The next morning, zipper mouth Joon-ho spills the beans. He tells Ha-jin that Yeo-reum knows everything, but he promises that he didn’t tell her about his long-time search for Ah-rim. As they’re talking, Yeo-reum texts Ha-jin, knowing that Joon-ho told him everything, as the two don’t hide secrets from each other. She lets him know that she’s borrowing his bike.

Wearing shades, she enters the bike store and asks Ah-rim for night lights. As she grabs the lights, Yeo-reum does a quick scan of her and estimates her body proportions. She notices that Ah-rim smiles a lot, but has nothing particularly better than herself.

Saying that she forgot her wallet, Yeo-reum walks out and finds the next store that Ah-rim works at. After a swift interaction involving not buying a sweater, she walks out with the conclusion that Ah-rim does have one thing – she’s nicer than her.

To top things off, Yeo-reum brings kimbap for Ha-jin. He acknowledges that he was in the wrong for not telling her about the kimbap date and says that he’d rather she punch him. She insists that she’s too nice to do that, and they resolve the conflict with him kissing her. She plays it cool but still gives him a subtle vicious look. Yikes, he’d better not get caught again.

Director Yoon reports back to Tae-ha with surprising news that Yeo-reum’s father’s accident is nonexistent. There was never an accident by the pharmacy, and there are no records of Dad’s death from that year. Huh?!

To clear this confusion, Tae-ha visits Yeo-reum at her shop. Though she insists that he just doesn’t remember, Tae-ha begs to differ. He remembers the cotton candy and the chicken, even though he claimed that he didn’t remember the latter.

He admits, “I was so used to having you around that I became too comfortable, so much so that I made mistakes. I wasn’t curious about what you wanted and didn’t care much even when you were in pain. I remember it all, even all the things I did wrong. But I don’t remember anything about your father. You didn’t tell me.”

Approaching Yeo-reum, he demands to know why she didn’t tell him. She’s not fazed by his directness and says that if he’s got such a good memory, he should remember around when it happened as well.

In a flashback, we see Yeo-reum alone at her father’s funeral, calling Tae-ha and asking him to just come be by her side. Back in the present, Yeo-reum accuses him, “There was a first call, a second call, a third, and many more after that. You said you were busy every time and never asked why I needed you. Of all the days that you blew me off because you were busy, think about what day it was. You probably won’t remember because there were so many.”

Unable to contain his frustration, Tae-ha says that she should have clearly told him about her father. But Yeo-reum argues that he should have come to her at least once even without a reason, given that she’d called for his help multiple times.

She seems pretty resolute. “Kang Tae-ha, you said you started to like me again, right? But there’s nothing you can do to go back. We were done five years ago.”

Tae-ha responds that she will come back to him, but Yeo-reum disagrees, “Maybe if the sky falls, but I’m not going back to you.” With a gleam in his eye, Tae-ha grabs Yeo-reum’s arm and says with conviction, “That sky will fall. You can count on it.”

 
COMMENTS

Whoo, he said it. We’ve known for a while now that Tae-ha’s got some lingering love for Yeo-reum, but I’m glad he’s openly admitted it… sober. I loved that Tae-ha was so reluctant to accept his feelings. His denial was so obvious and quite hilarious. He’s been making excuses that these fluttering feelings were absolutely no big deal, and I’m glad he’s finally being honest with himself that no, this is a big deal. That being said, I don’t know how I feel about the progression of their relationship in relation to the whole situation with Yeo-reum’s father. I wasn’t expecting an element of mystery with Yeo-reum’s father, though the few hints from previous episodes did foreshadow the significance of his death. It seems that everything is somewhat interconnected with his death, and it is compelling.

Finding out about Yeo-reum’s father’s passing was the big ball drop that made Tae-ha really think about his broken relationship, and it was definitely necessary. It made him realize his wrongdoings and get the fuller picture of his time with Yeo-reum. I just hope this isn’t a plot device and that they don’t drag on this mystery. I can see the looming cloud of darkness approaching, and I would hate for it to loom for too long. Let’s just hope they flesh this out more in the coming episodes without cutting out precious hilarious moments like the bromance and Eric being a noraebang maniac.

I’m wondering how Dad and his death affected Mom and Yeo-reum. It seems that Mom’s affair happened before his death, and her suspicious encounter with the boy has got me asking so many questions. Did her supposed affair have anything to do with Dad’s mysterious death? Why does she hate him so much? Too many questions for such a stingy show. Yeo-reum’s sudden cold change in personality may also relate to her father’s death. We’ve gotten hints that she had a difficult struggle in their last months, and it seems that her break-up with Tae-ha may have given her a harsh dose of reality. Maybe an overdose of it.

And that may be the reason for her current relationship dynamic. Yeo-reum and Ha-jin don’t seem to be as ideal as we first saw them. They’re showing us that they have more of a dysfunctional relationship. They’re storing ammo against each other, ready to reveal the other’s secret right when it’s opportune. And poor Joon-ho needs to deal with both sides. She’s silently vicious and manipulative, and though it is scary, I wonder how badly she needed to be crushed to change from her bubbly naivety to a being a calculating bitch. She scares me sometimes, but her jarring personality change now seems more tragic than chilling. Ha-jin, on the other hand, just seems a little insensible and oblivious. There’s nothing good that’ll come from hiding a sisterly relationship, and his reluctance to just tell the truth is making me suspicious.

Perhaps it’s the tragedy that Tae-ha sees when he realizes the person Yeo-reum has become. He’s affected by her bitchiness and sees the manipulation she’s mastered, but he knows that there’s a better, brighter, and more genuine side to her. She has the right to be whoever she wants to be, but it seems that she’s lost her sincerity. Maybe it still exists, maybe it doesn’t, but I think he’s the only one who can bring it back. And he’s taken a big step forward by remembering all the memories – the good and the bad – and admitting his mistakes. He did make mistakes, and it’s not going to be easy to make those amends.

But Tae-ha’s not taking this lightly, and I love the determination he’s showing to get her back. I’m hoping that his determination and lurve will melt Yeo-reum’s cold façade and help her come to terms with her unresolved issues. She deserves happiness with someone who will be honest, accept her flaws, and stay by her side. I understand her choice at the moment, but things are far from over.

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