Heart to Heart: Episode 4

by LollyPip

This show has gone from “slow and a bit dragging” to “hilarious yet heart-tugging” in the space of one short week, and I’m loving every second of it. It’s been a long time since I laughed this hard, and the humor is so offbeat and quirky that I’m constantly taken by surprise. But that’s not all the show gives us, and there are plenty of tears and emotional confessions in store as well. Some pretty big cats get let out of the bag in this episode, and at least one green-eyed monster shows up to throw a wrench into things. Some wrenches aren’t bad though, in fact they can be pretty damn amazing…

 
EPISODE 4 RECAP

Now this is my kind of cold open — Yi-seok and Hong-do lying in bed, looking at each other with a sense of wonder and tentatively reaching out to touch. Then we see a simple montage of still shots, all of them of Yi-seok and Hong-do snuggling in bed. They’re very definitely unclothed, and very definitely happy.

Back where we left off, Yi-seok urges Hong-do to Doo-soo’s door to say good morning, but when she finally sees him and gets up her nerve, what she says instead is, “Detective Jang, I like you.” Smiling, Doo-soo takes a step towards her, but she runs out of there like her hair is on fire, with Yi-seok laughing after her.

Hong-do doesn’t stop until she’s safe at home, and she gets a call from Yi-seok calling her to breakfast so they can dissect what just happened. She does, but calls him from outside the bakery, too shy to go in, and he has to go out and coax her in (and by “coax” I mean “drag by the helmet”).

Hong-do insists on sitting half hidden in a ficus tree, and Yi-seok tells her that he’s determined that her fear is actually created by her blushing, rather than the other way around. He points out that she can talk to men if she wants to badly enough, which he assumes means her original fear was created by a woman.

As he chatters, Hong-do just quietly despairs, then she lashes out at Yi-seok to take responsibility for the fact that she said the wrong thing. He’s shocked but amused that she actually told Doo-soo that she likes him. They relocate to Yi-seok’s office where he instructs Hong-do to say it again to him, so he can see how Doo-soo must have felt.

Hong-do re-enacts what happened and Yi-seok gets a bit twitchy at how it affects him, but he makes her repeat the words, “I like you” over and over. Hee. He claims he feels nothing (sure, keep telling yourself that, sweetie), so Hong-do assumes Doo-soo must have felt nothing.

But he calls her right then, and Yi-seok wrestles the phone from her to tell Doo-soo to pretend this morning never happened. Doo-soo asks why he always answers Hong-do’s phone and how he knows what happened, saying that he feels like they’re messing with him.

Yi-seok tells him to think of it as being included in some experiments, and at that, Hong-do attacks him for her phone. Doo-soo can hear them grappling for the phone, but Yi-seok just chatters that she’s only embarrassed about this morning.

Detective Yang sits with Doo-soo after Yi-seok hangs up on him, noting his bleak expression and assuming he had a fight with his newly-arranged fiancee. They have two different conversations as Doo-soo muses about Hong-do’s strange behavior and Yang talks about the fiancee, until Doo-soo finally barks at him and chases him off.

Shielded from his ear-ringing symptoms by Hong-do’s presence, Yi-seok has a consultation with the little elderly lady, who talks on and on about her son. The problem is, she seems to think he’s right there in the room and only twelve years old, and even feeds a bottle of juice to the empty space next to her, spilling it on the floor.

Yi-seok gently tells her there’s no twelve-year-old boy in the room with them, and the confused look on the woman’s face is heartbreaking. He informs her that she’s got a delusional disorder, and asks if she’s stopped taking her medicine.

Later, Dr. Uhm storms into the office, angry that Yi-seok made the patient cry. He counters that she should have known the woman wasn’t taking her meds, and that it’s irresponsible to let her keep her delusion just because she’s not dangerous. Dr. Uhm says he’s being like this because of his unresolved feelings about his own mother, and he shoots back that she’s the one with mother issues, not having one herself. Ouch.

Yi-seok takes Hong-do to a fancy restaurant, but gripes when she refuses to take off her helmet. He gets a bottle of wine to celebrate her confession, promising he won’t drink any himself. Hong-do, on the other hand, downs her glass in one go and pours another. Yi-seok tells her to pace herself and says he’s NOT driving her home.

Hong-do grumbles over the way he treated the grandmother, saying he has no love in his heart, and Yi-seok snarks that she must be positively overflowing with love the way she so easily confessed to Doo-soo. He asks why she likes him so much, but she just gulps her second glass of wine.

Hong-do insists that she likes absolutely everything about Doo-soo, and that she’s getting treatment because, without him, her life would be meaningless. Yi-seok’s annoyance at her answer reveals his jealousy, though he resists downing his own glass of wine.

Aw, Hong-do is such a cute, happy drunk, as Yi-seok leads her to her scooter after dinner. Her helmet is too heavy and keeps tipping her over, but she insists she can drive herself home. Yi-seok hangs onto her until the designated driver arrives, who complains that he can’t control a scooter and a drunk passenger, but Yi-seok cheerfully turns her over to him and drives away.

Cut to: Yi-seok driving Hong-do home. HAHA. He doesn’t know where she lives, but she’s way too drunk to tell him before she passes out. She keeps slumping over onto him and he keeps shoving her back to her side of the car, whining about what an ugly drunk she is.

Hong-do wakes up the next morning in a strange bed, completely disoriented until she recalls some vague memories of Yi-seok carrying her to his place and dumping her on his bed. Oh no, she even vomited on his white carpet in the process. Horrified, she quickly grabs her stuff and high-tails it out of there.

He calls her as she’s leaving to tell her where to find her scooter, chiding her for her vulgar drunken behavior (though there’s no heat behind his complaints). He’s at his family home and Hong-do hears him talking to Butler Ahn, which reminds her she’s late for work.

Hong-do quickly dresses in her disguise and rushes to work, cursing her hangover headache. She runs into Yi-seok outside the house and quickly hides her face, and overhears him telling Dr. Uhm that he’ll take her to the nursing home later to talk to the elderly woman again.

With a lead on the guy who broke into Yi-seok’s office, Doo-soo and Yang go to his house to talk to him, Doo-soo going around back to head the guy off as he tries to sneak out. The idiot makes a jump for it, hurting himself in the thirty-foot fall.

Doo-soo takes a call from Se-ro, who’s upset that he was cleared of responsibility in her complaint, but they’re interrupted by Yang screaming about getting dog poop on his shoe. Se-ro mishears and thinks Doo-soo called her “dog poop,” but he denies it and apologizes. She’s in no mood to be mollified, and says that she’s filing another complaint against him.

Hong-do gets a dressing-down from the housekeeper for being late and smelling like alcohol, and spends her time with the chairman covering her mouth to hide the odor. He assumes her reluctance to talk is because she’s uninterested in his book, and when she sprays herself with perfume he takes offense, assuming she thinks he smells bad, and he fires her.

Yi-seok finds out that the thief has been caught, but that all but one of his gold heart collection has been sold. He’s upset, but he’s more interested in finding out what Doo-soo thinks of Hong-do’s confession. Doo-soo asks if testing herself that way really helps her, and Yi-seok tells him that it’s mean to let her keep liking him.

Se-ro is on the set of a sageuk drama, where she’s playing a starving beggar. In her scene she receives a bowl of food from a wealthy homeowner, but when she sits to eat it, the mush reminds her of Doo-soo saying “dog poop” and she hesitates. Suddenly she’s imagining his voice repeating,”Dog poop, dog poop, DOG POOOOOP!” She tries to eat but spits the food out, her scene once again ruined by Doo-soo.

On his drive home, Doo-soo calls his fiancee to discuss plans for their honeymoon, though she’s obviously much more excited than he is. He can’t even think of an answer when she asks what he likes about her. He’s disappointed to find that Hong-do hasn’t brought him any snacks today, looking up and down the street for a glimpse of her. Awww.

Hong-do as walks home, disappointed at being fired, when Yi-seok calls. She doesn’t notice Doo-soo walking right behind her, headed to her place but not recognizing her in the grandma disguise. She nearly makes a huge mistake by asking Yi-seok about going to the nursing home, which she overheard while dressed in disguise, but she’s spared having to explain how she knew about that when Doo-soo calls out to her.

He assumes she’s an elderly lady visiting Hong-do, which makes it even funnier when she breaks out into a pretty spritely run to get away from him (and cute, Yi-seok grouches when she hangs up on him because he didn’t want to eat dinner alone). Doo-soo catches Hong-do when her wig flies off, and she cringes when he recognizes her.

Yi-seok takes Yeon-woo to a convenience store to eat, claiming that these kinds of lowbrow dates are part of the breaking-up process. She tells him she’s getting married, but he’s too busy dissecting why she’s marrying someone else to actually feel any disappointment. Yeon-woo gets fed up with his assy behavior and leaves him there.

Hong-do and Doo-soo sit in the park to talk, back-to-back so he can’t see her face. He’s amused and fascinated by her disguise, and asks what its purpose is. It’s wonderful how he compares it to a child playing make-believe, and knows that it’s why she can talk with him right now.

Hong-do tells Doo-soo that her grandmother raised her and was her only friend, and that she lived alone after she passed away. She says she was always alone in that house until she met him, making him smile. Dressing this way was the solution she came up with to go outside and learn more about him, after he caught her robber seven years ago.

Doo-soo is touched that he’s the reason she started going outside, and tells her so. He asks if her confession means she likes him as a man, which she admits. He thanks her but says that he’s afraid she’ll get hurt, because he has something to tell her… She apologizes and tells him not to be burdened by her confession, but he tells her that he’s getting married.

At home later, Hong-do stuffs her face and talks back to a quiz show, but it’s harder now to pretend that everything is all right.

Chairman Go and Yi-seok’s dad have a disagreement about the bicycle company, with Dad wanting to branch out from bicycles and the chairman telling him to do more than just talk, and draw up an actual proposal. He tells Dad to show up to work every day and he’ll listen to his ideas, since he values commitment and consistency in his employees.

Dad agrees to show up at the office but doesn’t seem all that interested in real work, nor is he interested in the fact that his family has been preparing a memorial for Yi-seok’s deceased hyung all day. He actually seems baffled why they would go to such lengths.

Yi-seok brings a huge bouquet of flowers to the house for the memorial, and asks Butler Ahn about the grandmotherly lady he saw at the house the day before. Butler Ahn says she quit, and gives him a heads-up that his father is here.

Inside, Yi-seok is greeted by the sight of his father berating his mother for not being able to let her dead son go. I think I see why she can’t stand him. Mom looks so different now that her manic phase has passed, with subdued clothing and tame hair, that she seems like an entirely different person, and she doesn’t utter a single word.

Se-ro says she’s going to an audition and for them to go to her brother’s memorial without her, griping that Mom thinks of nothing but her dead child and that she’s tired of doing this every year since she never even knew her brother. Yi-seok tells her to hush and just go with them, and turns to Dad to say that he’s one to talk since he never remembers the memorial day.

Dad asks if he’s been bringing sunflowers to his brother’s grave every year, and Yi-seok is shocked to find out that they’re Dad’s favorite flowers, and it was Mom’s way of having him be present in some small way.

Even though Yi-seok champions for his mom, he later slumps into Dr. Uhm’s office to complain about his mother’s fixation on his brother. He’s just as frustrated by his father’s lack of emotion, wondering how those two could have lost a child together and have such different reactions.

Yi-seok cheers up a little to find Hong-do, and asks her to follow him. They visit the elderly lady who’s now refusing to talk, but she’s listening because her lip quivers when Yi-seok asks if she remembers her son’s death. Hong-do notices the woman’s not wearing socks, and she gently covers her feet with a blanket against the cold. This seems to loosen something in the lady, and she starts to talk.

She says that she’s never told anyone, but the day her son died, she’d brought home bags of socks from a factory to sew and make extra money. Her son was hungry but she was distracted, so she sent him out to get himself some food. While out, he was hit by a truck and killed. Despite Yi-seok telling her it’s not her fault, she says that a mother who loses her son is a sinner and that to this day, she doesn’t wear socks because her feet never get cold.

As they leave, Hong-do takes offense to the fact that Yi-seok prescribed the woman more medicine and tells him to cancel it. She argues that the woman is only depressed because she doesn’t hallucinate her son anymore, asking if it’s so terrible to let her think her son is there and be happy.

It’s no wonder she’s so emotional about this, since she explains that she couldn’t go to her grandmother’s funeral or see her grave because of her anxiety. She cries as she says she’s forgetting her grandmother’s face, voice, and smile. She raises her voice, yelling that she would do anything to see her grandmother again, and leaves Yi-seok standing there. But after she leaves, a nurse comes out to ask Yi-seok if he meant to prescribe only simple vitamins to the lady.

Se-ro storms into the police station and dumps an entire bag of dog poop on Doo-soo’s desk. Okay gross, and HAHAHA. She says that she’s repaying him for ruining her shoot, like for like. I kind of love her, and the way she swans out of there like a queen.

Hong-do goes to Doo-soo’s place, and witnesses him and his fiancee after a date, as the girl basically invites herself in. Poor super-literal Doo-soo is baffled, and I see why he’s still single when he doesn’t pick up that her request for ramyun is just an excuse to get inside.

It starts to pour, but Hong-do doesn’t notice. She stands outside Doo-soo’s apartment telling herself it’s just this one last time and she’ll never come back. She says goodbye to all the familiar spots outside his place that she knows so well, and even the driving rain can’t hide the tears coursing down her face.

Yi-seok calls her to tell her to come to his home quickly or he’ll drink, and she’s soaked and pitiful by the time she shows up. She showers, coming out without her helmet, and it’s cute how fascinated he is by how she’s wrapped her hair in a towel and out of her face.

Yi-seok grills some food and teases Hong-do about her confidence around him, and I love that she gives it right back to him. And HA, he’s set out two entire packs of beer, presumably hoping she’ll get drunk again. In his first sincere compliment of their acquaintance, Yi-seok tells Hong-do that she was really good earlier with that elderly patient.

Hong-do says that she’s decided it’s over with Doo-soo, and there’s a definite hopeful glint in Yi-seok’s eyes as he asks if she’s glad he called her over. She asks if he’s ever broken up before, and he says he’s in the process of it right now. He tells her that his first goodbye was with his brother, who died in a fire 14 years ago, at age twelve.

He muses that he knows one person who’s afraid to forget, and another who’s afraid to remember, clearly talking about his parents. He sighs that even with their different reactions, they all have one thing in common: loneliness.

Yi-seok snaps out of his own head and says he needs a beer, but Hong-do tries to take it from him and reminds him that he asked her to help him not drink. Yi-seok stops for a moment, then yanks the beer (and Hong-do) closer. He says almost dreamily that her face is really red, then reaches out to touch her lips.

When Hong-do allows the contact, Yi-seok cups her cheek and lightly kisses her forehead. Again she allows it, and his eyes look into hers for permission before leaning in for a real kiss. And another. He sets the beer aside and stands Hong-do for a longer, deeper kiss, and soon she’s reciprocating enthusiastically as they take each other’s clothes off and tumble into bed.

COMMENTS

What an interesting turn of events to say the least, and how refreshing to see adults in a drama, acting like adults. Unfortunately, as great as those kisses (and more!) were, I don’t think that at this point Yi-seok and Hong-do sleeping together has anything to do with love, but with the theme of this episode… loneliness.

Obviously, Hong-do has lived a very lonely life if it’s true that she’s only ever had her grandmother as a friend, and that she was so crippled by anxiety that she’s literally never left the house as an adult without either a disguise or her helmet. It’s amazing that she’s as comfortable with Yi-seok as she is, enough to get in his face and talk back and tell him when he’s wrong. It’s not love, or even emotional awareness yet, for her. She’s tired of being lonely, and tired of feeling judged and rejected — and even though this man makes fun of her and even laughs at her, he does one very special thing: He accepts her as she is.

And in his way, Yi-seok is as lonely, or maybe even more so, than Hong-do. At least her loneliness has an internal reason that she can overcome if she works hard enough. But Yi-seok is lonely within his own family, and it sounds like things have been that way ever since his hyung died. Mom is locked in the past, practically ignoring her surviving children in her grief over the lost one. And Dad is so afraid to feel anything real, he barely even thinks of his firstborn son at all. No wonder everyone in the family is estranged and hostile with each other, except for Yi-seok and his mother, who only seem to have a good relationship when she’s in a bipolar upswing. His family is about as dysfunctional as it gets, which goes to show that just having a family doesn’t mean you aren’t alone in the world.

So I can imagine that meeting someone who simultaneously needs him, yet tells him when he’s being a colossal ass, is quite a new experience for Yi-seok. He’s so used to being in charge that having Hong-do get in his face and tell him when he’s wrong has got to be as frustrating as it is fascinating. Which is what I love about how he looks at her — like she’s this baffling, amusing, amazing creature that so fascinates him, he doesn’t even mind that he doesn’t understand her. She’s so much fun for him to observe and interact with, that he’s now just creating situations in which to see her, and pouting and acting out when he can’t.

So, while I don’t think that either Yi-seok or Hong-do are romantically interested in each other at this point, I do think they feel a subconscious attraction, enough to come together to ease their individual loneliness. I’m worried about Hong-do’s morning-after reaction, because aside from the fact that this was most certainly her first time, I don’t think she even thought of Yi-seok that way until that moment when he pulled her close and looked at her that way. I do think it’s obvious that Yi-seok has been feeling some attraction for a while now, whether or not he actually realized it, because he’s exhibited multiple clear signs of jealousy for her feelings for Doo-soo. Not to mention, he blocks every phone call from Doo-soo and does his best to keep them apart. But, given that this night happened because of loneliness more than anything else, I do think there will be some backpedaling and awkwardness on both sides while they try to reconcile what they’re really feeling. I’m perfectly happy if that takes them quite a while to work out, as long as it involves lots and lots (and lots!) more sexy kisses.

 
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