Plus Nine Boys: Episode 5

by girlfriday

Feelings get laid bare in this episode full of twists. We find out what makes Jin-gu such bad news, but also what happened to make him change. The question is, would anyone who hasn’t seen the way he secretly looks at Se-young believe him? There’s no shortage of lows to go with all the highs, heartaches to go with kisses, and a heaping tablespoon of regret to go with insight.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Hello Gayoung – “언젠가 설명이 필요한 밤” (A Night That Will Need Explanation Someday) [ Download ]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 
Track 5: “Bad boy”

A quick flashback to a conversation with his buddy reminds us that Jin-gu and Se-young have an incident from their past that weighs on Jin-gu to this day…

We return to them in the present, as Jin-gu strikes up the nerve to finally confess his feelings with a rain-soaked kiss. He clearly doesn’t expect the response he gets: She slaps him across the face and calls him a crazy bastard for good measure. I love how the soundtrack cuts out when she does it.

He chases after her in the rain and says it: “I like you.” But she just scoffs even harder and calls him trash. Ouuuch. She shoves him away and he stops her again, pleading that it’s for real. She accuses him of thinking that she’s easy.

Se-young asks bitterly, “Do I look that easy to you? Is it a secret this time too?” Oh. We still don’t know what their incident is, but that’s a telling question. Jin-gu: “That was before I liked you.” Why does that not sound comforting?

She spits back, “Then you didn’t like me and you did that?” She says that she doesn’t work that way, and stalks off. He yanks her back again, this time admitting fully that he was a bastard back then: “But now I only like you, so what am I supposed to do?!”

She isn’t at all moved, and decides he must be doing this because he’s tired of other girls. But this time he’s genuinely hurt, and asks, “Have you seen me as trash all this time?” She points out that he hasn’t changed one bit—he still does whatever he wants, whenever he wants to, with no regard for the other person’s feelings.

He stops her one more time, and says he isn’t saying any of this lightly—he wrestled with it for a really long time: “Whether I should say it or not, what I would do if you didn’t believe me…” He says he did a lifetime’s worth of angsting over whether or not to confess, “But no matter how I think about it, I like you! So what am I supposed to do?!”

His voice starts to shake, “What if I said it and we grew further apart? Do you know how hard it was for me to bring it up?” But her answer is a shot to the heart: “Then you should never have said it at all.”

It’s enough of a blow to plant his feet right there, and he can’t chase after her any further. But he calls out to her one last time as she’s walking away, and asks if she really feels nothing for him at all, not even a little. She says no without looking back.

Heartbroken, he asks one final question that never gets answered: “Then what am I to you?”

They each arrive separately at the team’s lodgings that night, soaked to the bone and emotionally drained. Jae-bum clocks the strange mood, but everyone retreats to different corners, and Jin-gu gives himself a long dejected stare in the mirror.

Meanwhile, Little Bro Min-gu is having a better day than his hyung. He finally makes contact with his dream girl Su-ah, only to hold her diary hostage, literally over her head. Well that’s not cool. He enters his number into her phone and tells her to call if she wants her diary back, and walks off before she can argue.

He clearly thinks he’s being suave, though as soon as he turns his back to her, he shows how nervous he, and his bowels, really were. He spends the entire day staring at his phone willing it to ring, and just when he’s about to give up hope, she texts to meet him tomorrow.

He has himself a good squee and then posts a selca online with the message: “Han Su-ah! I dedicate my first love to you.” Pfft, way to put the cart before the horse there, buddy.

At the station, Uncle Kwang-soo tries to convince Jeon Hyun-moo to do him a favor and be the MC for Sponge. Hyun-moo declares that fill-in MC work is beneath him now (he’s rather famous for being everyone’s go-to substitute on any variety show, without discernment).

Instead, Hyun-moo pitches a show idea: “Reality is all the rage these days. You’ve lived alone, gotten married, gone to army, traveled. What’s left? Fighting!” Lol. He swears that if they can get Kim Bo-sung, Kang Ho-dong, and Choi Min-soo to fight, they’ll get 32% ratings.

Kwang-soo: “Would they do it?” Hyun-moo: “Why not? All you need is an ambulance and some ointment!” Hahaha. But when Kwang-soo tells him to do Sponge first, Hyun-moo pretends to take a call and saunters off.

Kwang-soo is already feeling down when Young-hoon catches up to him in a crowded elevator and asks repeatedly if he talked to Da-in. He keeps scraping at the wound, and with an audience at that: “I would’ve left the country! There’s probably no one else in the world who proposed and then got beaten with a bouquet of flowers.”

Young-hoon follows him into the office to try and figure out why she would’ve reacted that way, clearly more to satisfy his own curiosity than to make Kwang-soo feel better. Young-hoon thinks he must’ve done something severely wrong that day, but Kwang-soo remains clueless. He thinks back to the proposal and narrates that for a long time afterward, he couldn’t forget that look on her face, and wonders now why she rejected him like that.

Jin-gu and Se-young return to the office the next morning, and find themselves trapped in an awkward elevator ride for two, followed by an awkward round of congratulations from their coworkers for winning the cute couple photo contest. Agh, now their adorable photos are just painful reminders.

Their coworkers tease that they make a cute couple and that fighting always leads to this kind of thing, and they try their best to deflect attention and pretend everything is fine.

Se-young goes to Da-in’s café to brood over cheesecake alone, and Da-in asks if there’s really not something going on between her and Jin-gu. To her eyes, they look every bit like a couple no matter how much they fight, but Se-young denies that it could go anywhere.

Da-in knows something happened in their past, but says that Jin-gu seems sincere now. Se-young agrees that he’s sincere—the problem is that he’s always sincere, to every girl: “It’s momentary sincerity.” Still, Da-in swoons when she hears about the kiss.

Jin-gu tells his bar friend about the weekend, and the friend insists he come out to party tonight, because he needs to forget a girl with another girl. Er, isn’t that attitude why he got into this mess in the first place?

Min-gu waits on pins and needles for his (extorted) date with Su-ah, and lights up when she arrives. She remains standoffish the whole time, while Min-gu speaks to her in banmal and tells her to call him oppa, assuming that she’s younger.

He asks if she doesn’t recognize him, and leans forward: “I’m your destiny.” Barf. She just takes her diary and leaves, but he calls out to her that she’s dating oppa now. How does he say such cheesy stuff without gagging?

He trails after her, chattering away incessantly about himself the whole time. He doesn’t even notice when she walks away, but notes the tutoring academy she goes into.

After acting class, Dong-gu’s girlfriend Baek-ji complains that he’s skipping out on his promise to play piano with her. Of course his rival Do Min-joon is around to swoop in and offer to play with her, so when Dong-gu has a change of heart and returns to make it up to Baek-ji, he sees them together. He looks horrified to see Baek-ji smiling up at Min-joon, and then in a parody of Secret Love Affair, Min-joon pinches her cheek and calls it “special praise.”

Kwang-soo rejects yet another idea for his show (“If you slap someone in the shower, it doesn’t hurt!”) and throws his writers into a panic with just two days left before broadcast. He simply orders them to start over and trudges to the vending machine, where he overhears a guy complaining about his girlfriend’s constant whining about never going on a trip.

That triggers his memory and he remembers all the times that Da-in had asked hopefully if they were really going on vacation, only to be told he was too busy time and time again. He wonders now if she was mad because he never had enough time for her.

Mom and Dong-gu visit Da-in upstairs, and Mom is impressed as she watches Da-in change a light bulb on her own (seriously, this is impressive?). Da-in says she used to think it was a big deal but realized that she had to learn how to do stuff like this on her own, and even commemorates the day she changed her first light bulb—to her it meant that she and her daughter would be fine living on their own.

When Mom asks about her divorce, she says vaguely that she divorced for a very common reason like anyone else. Mom tells her she’s still young and should try dating, but Da-in says she’s happy the way she is. She agrees to keep trying to find a single friend for Kwang-soo, and Mom continues to divulge embarrassing information about him, like the fact that he got his heart broken really badly in his twenties and never recovered.

Dong-gu spends the next morning playing Beethoven’s 5th on his melodica of angst, while Mom and Kwang-soo argue when she finds out that he’s going to a friend’s wedding. It just makes her more impatient to see him married, which of course leads to more nagging.

Min-gu rushes over to the tutoring academy to wait for Su-ah, and presents her with a carton of milk that matches his own, calling it couple milk. She takes it silently and ignores his declaration that today is their second day of dating.

But once she steps inside and sees her friends, Su-ah does a total 180, smirking and bragging to them about the good-looking flower boy who’s chasing her. Ha, she’s not only three years older (this is her third year re-taking the college entrance exam)—she’s a total player.

Her friends tell her to stop seducing boys, but Su-ah asks what she’s supposed to do when she was just born a goddess. Pwahaha. Who knew someone could be more self-involved than Min-gu? Her friends gape when she tells them he’s a high-schooler, and they ask if she’s going to date him. She decides she’d rather mess with him a little instead.

Da-in and her daughter attend the mutual friend’s wedding, and Kwang-soo has to deal with all his friends asking him what he did wrong ten years ago to get that kind of rejection. Young-hoon insists on asking her himself, and Kwang-soo has to hold him down.

Da-in leaves early because her daughter has a potty accident, and when Kwang-soo sees her trying to hail a cab in the street, he pulls over to offer her a ride. They sit in the most uncomfortable silence the whole way, and as a last resort he turns on the radio and ends up playing Loveholic’s “If I Only Had You” (a song pleading a lover not to leave). It sends them both back to their happy days as a couple, though if Da-in has any warmth left towards Kwang-soo, she certainly doesn’t show it.

They get home and there’s this protracted moment where he tries to say it, but he just can’t bring himself to ask about the proposal. He just tells her to go in, and she stops to thank him, still speaking in her formal detached way. He tries one more time to broach the subject, but she just bows and goes inside, leaving him as frustrated and confused as ever.

He thinks back to that day after the proposal, when he had gone to her door to beg and plead, crying that whatever it is, it’s all his fault. She just sits there, immovable and silent, while he breaks down in heaving sobs outside her door. As he watches her go now, he narrates, “I’m still stopped in that place—the day we parted, that moment—all alone.”

Jin-gu goes clubbing with his friend after all, and agrees to blow off some steam and move on. Meanwhile Se-young has dinner with an old college friend and tells her about everything, repeating her complaint that Jin-gu isn’t sincere about any one girl.

At first it seems like she’s right about him—he’s only been rejected by her for all of a day before he’s sidling up to random girls in bikinis. His friend tells the girls that Jin-gu is a bad boy, which they think is appealing. He confirms that he’s bad, but says it almost to himself, sounding dispirited and vacant.

Se-young’s friend complains that she’s overthinking this whole thing with her insistence on pure sincerity, and thinks she should just date and find out for herself what’s what. The friend remembers how popular and swoony Jin-gu was in college, and guesses that Se-young must’ve had a crush on him too—everyone else did. Se-young denies it profusely, but her friend isn’t fooled.

Back at the club, the girl who’s been sitting with Jin-gu tells him she’ll wait out front so they can leave together. He gets up soon after and heads out, but ends up just taking a cab home alone.

He calls Se-young repeatedly, and when she doesn’t pick up, he texts her asking to talk. He narrates, “Why didn’t I recognize it sooner?” As he waits, we finally get the flashback to the spring of 2012:

Jin-gu and Se-young stay late after class to work on a project together, and he just playfully inches closer and closer, teasing that he won’t kiss her or anything… which is of course exactly what he does. He plants a kiss on her and then puts a finger to his lips to say it’s their little secret.

He narrates, “Back then, no matter whom I met, it was all easy because I never feared losing anything.” We see him make the same exact move over and over to different girls all over campus, until one day he gets caught red-handed by Se-young. She spins on her heels and walks away. His narration continues: “But then one day, I found someone I didn’t want to lose, for the first time.”

We fast-forward to their time after college as friends and coworkers, and watch as both Jin-gu and Jae-bum gaze longingly at Se-young as she sings at a noraebang. Jin-gu (voiceover): “They say it takes a man seven seconds to fall for a woman. For me it took seven months. I came to look only at Se-young… but by then, we had already become too close as friends.”

Back in the present, Se-young’s friend sees right through her and points out that she’s still concerned about Jin-gu to this day, which Se-young can’t deny. Her friend says that Se-young was really pretty back then, because she was in love.

Jin-gu waits at her bus stop, craning his neck hopefully every time another bus pulls up. Finally her bus arrives, but when she sees him sitting there, she turns away and doesn’t get off. As she rides the bus going anywhere but home, she gets another text from him: “There’s something I didn’t get to say.”

She ignores it like the last one, but her friend’s comment about how pretty she was back then stirs her memory. Now she sees Jin-gu’s niceness in a different light, like the time he pretended to be so bothered by her losing her business cards that he bought her a wallet to carry them in. He’d put one of his own cards inside, and asked her to call if she ever thought of him.

And after that first kiss, she was so adorably giddy and happy that she couldn’t contain her smile. She’d spent an entire day on cloud nine getting ready for a date with him, and that was the day she discovered him kissing another girl—when she was at her prettiest, because she was so in love with him.

Ugh, it hurts so much more to see the moment from her perspective, as her heart sinks to see him act exactly the way he did with her, and not look the least bit sorry about it. He rides off in the other girl’s car without even looking back, and she bursts into tears.

As Jin-gu sits at the bus stop, he thinks to himself that it was so difficult to confess his feelings, and that he didn’t even get to say the thing he really needed to say. He sends a third text: “I’m sorry.”

We get a montage of all three boys—Jin-gu waiting alone at the bus stop, Min-gu chasing after Su-ah, and Kwang-soo watching Da-in walk away from him. Min-gu (voiceover): “You’re the one who makes me smile the most.” Kwang-soo (voiceover): “But you’re also the one who makes me the loneliest.”

 
COMMENTS

I’m so glad we finally got a chance to see events from Se-young’s perspective, because until now, we’ve seen so much of Jin-gu’s unrequited puppy love that the impact of her heartache didn’t land with equal force… until we saw how giddy she was after their first kiss. It was a punch to the gut, watching her get ready with such fluttery anticipation, at an age when it never would’ve occurred to her not to trust the boy she had a crush on.

He was clearly the first to ever break her heart, and it’s no wonder that she doesn’t believe he’s changed—in her experience, everything he says to her, he’s said to dozens of other girls, in exactly the same way. He’s the source of her distrust, which makes it basically impossible for him to do anything to prove that he’s being sincere this time. I honestly believe that he’s changed, but I also know that if I were Se-young, I’d never in a million years trust him again, so her conflict really lands with me.

In some ways you could see it as karma, since he broke her heart when she was at her most vulnerable, which made her so guarded that now he can’t seem to get past her barriers; it’s literally reaping what you sow. The problem is, of course, that it’s never that simple in love. If Se-young wanted nothing to do with him, shutting him down would be enough, but she still clearly has feelings for him and harbors all that resentment to this day, to her own detriment.

Whether it’s in order to move on cleanly or to give him another chance, she has to deal with her feelings directly instead of pretending they aren’t there. Now that we have confirmation that Se-young is the kind of girl who loved so sincerely that she got burned and just retreated into her protective shell, it makes me root for her all the more. Maybe she should date Jae-bum, because I don’t want her to be so scared that she runs away from love altogether.

It cracks me up that I was convinced that Min-gu was the worst blowhard ever, only to have him one-upped by Destiny Girl. That was a really funny twist, because up until today I was feeling bad for her that this self-important kid was stalking her and acting like it was romantic. But now they might actually be well-matched, at least in a quid-pro-quo kind of way. She’ll probably sweep the floor with his poor heart, but I think that’s a lesson he really needs to learn the hard way.

What I need now is for Kwang-soo to gather up enough courage to ask about his failed proposal, because it’s killing me not knowing what went wrong with them. In some sense, Jin-gu has a leg up despite having been the worse boyfriend, because he at least has known for years what he did wrong and had time to regret it. Kwang-soo, on the other hand, is still stuck in that moment of failure going on ten years now—it’s like he’s 39 going on 30. It might not be the worst thing, if he can make it out of this year having grown up just a little and moving forward with baby steps instead of walking in place.

 
RELATED POSTS

• Plus Nine Boys: Episode 4
• Plus Nine Boys: Episode 3
• Plus Nine Boys: Episode 2
• Plus Nine Boys: Episode 1
• Nine is the loneliest number in Plus Nine Boys
• A romance and a curse for every decade in Plus Nine Boys
• Plus Nine Boys get their girls
• Coming-of-age drama Plus Nine Boys completes cast
• Oh Jung-se and Yook Sung-jae confirm Plus Nine Boys
• Kim Young-kwang, Oh Jung-se courted for new tvN drama