Hyde, Jekyll, Me: Episode 10

by girlfriday

Today it’s our hero who becomes the damsel in distress, when he walks right into a trap designed to take him down memory lane. The question is whether remembering the truth will make him retreat further into his hiding place, or give him the chance to rise above his fear. Who needs therapy when you’ve got a psychotic baddie who’s perpetually stuck in the past and forces you to confront your worst nightmares?

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Kim Bum-soo – “오직 너만” (Only You) for the Hyde, Jekyll, Me OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 10 RECAP

Robin is still posing as Seo-jin for the day (or who knows how long, given that Seo-jin has gone into hiding), a fact that Dr. Tae-joo doesn’t know when he lures Robin into the haunted house.

The only people who do know that he’s Robin are currently arguing about it now: Chairman Dad tells Secretary Kwon that it’s too risky to leave Robin in charge of the company at such a crucial time, and declares that Seo-jin will have to resign.

He orders Robin and Secretary Kwon on the next plane out of the country, when Secretary Kwon blurts, “Are you abandoning him AGAIN?” Oh snap. I love the look of horror on Secretary Kwon’s face, like he can’t believe he just said that out loud.

He cowers, but Chairman Dad prods him again and again to repeat himself, so Secretary Kwon figures he’s screwed either way and asks if the chairman is really going to throw away his son all over again. He says that as a father who raises kids himself, he would like it if the chairman would wait for Seo-jin, so that he has a home to return to when he’s better.

Robin goes deeper into the haunted house, per Tae-joo’s instructions. He wonders to himself if this has anything to do with Seo-jin’s kidnapping, and Tae-joo helpfully has him stop on the very spot from which they were taken. Robin thinks to call Secretary Kwon on his other phone, and manages to say, “Lee Soo-hyun?” loud enough that Secretary Kwon knows something’s wrong.

Hana stands outside staring at the haunted house entrance, trying to remember why this gives her a bad feeling. She recalls hearing that Seo-jin was kidnapped here, and has never once come near it since that day.

She calls Secretary Kwon and tells him what she saw, and doesn’t heed his warning to stay put until the guards come. She walks in and calls out to Seo-jin, but no one is in there. When she comes back out, she catches Robin walking away up ahead, so she runs after him.

Tae-joo instructs him to get in the car parked outside and drive, and Hana runs to catch a cab and keep him in her sights. She alerts Secretary Kwon, and soon Detective Na is called into action and Chairman Dad is fuming.

Tae-joo arrives at an abandoned warehouse and continues to lead Robin to his location. As he drives, Robin asks why he’s doing this, and Tae-joo says he was just pissed off because Seo-jin couldn’t remember and lied: “So let’s unravel it—the lies, the truth, everything you experienced… and everything I experienced.”

He watches on CCTV monitors as Robin arrives and heads into the warehouse compound, and then moments later, Hana arrives in the cab that followed. Tae-joo is busy setting up for what looks like a reenactment of their childhood kidnapping, which seems to put him on edge as well.

Tae-joo returns to the monitors just in time to catch a glimpse of Hana, and he furrows his brow to see that she followed Seo-jin all the way here. He seems to tamp down his worry and find a way to include her in whatever sick game he’s concocted, and breaks into a smile.

Robin finally gets close, and Tae-joo tells him to stop just outside a building and asks if he remembers now. He doesn’t, of course, because he’s not Seo-jin. But Robin was informed of Seo-jin’s kidnapping once, by Dr. Kang.

He flashes back to a session with her, where she shows him pictures of this very warehouse and tells him that as children, Seo-jin and Lee Soo-hyun were held here, and Robin was created out of the guilt that Seo-jin felt from leaving his friend behind and escaping on his own.

When Tae-joo orders him inside, Robin just walks right in. Hana comes upon the same building and calls Secretary Kwon to check in, and when she describes her location, he knows exactly where she is. He tells her that it’s where Seo-jin was held when kidnapped, and again tells her to wait outside. Again she ignores him, not that I can blame her.

Robin cautiously makes his way inside, but Tae-joo gets the jump on him from behind. Tae-joo clamps a cloth soaked in chloroform to Robin’s mouth, and he struggles to get free. He gets in a few jabs and wrestles Tae-joo to the ground, but he can’t fight the poison and loses consciousness.

By the time Hana works up the nerve to go inside, Tae-joo is locking a door behind him. He climbs into his car and watches the security feed from his laptop, still talking via cell phone. He’s left Robin tied to a chair inside the warehouse, though we have no idea if it’ll be Seo-jin or Robin who wakes up…

He opens his eyes, and the shock on his face means that Seo-jin is back. What a terrible way to wake up. Seo-jin takes in his surroundings and immediately flashes back to being held here as a child, and wonders to himself how the hell Robin got him here.

Tae-joo tells him not to look so shocked, admitting his surprise that cowardly Seo-jin came here so willingly. Seo-jin panics and struggles against his ropes, while Tae-joo leans back for a leisurely chat, musing that he didn’t want to relive the past either. Right.

He says that this pains him too, but that he endures, adding pointedly, “So you should endure too.” He tells Seo-jin that he tried to forget everything and live a normal life, and struggled with it: “Like you are now.”

But when Tae-joo discovered that Seo-jin was undergoing therapy, he admits that it comforted him, to know that Seo-jin was also in pain just like he was. The problem came when he discovered that Seo-jin didn’t suffer—that he forgot, told himself lies. Seo-jin’s eyes grow wide in disbelief, swearing that he suffered too.

Tae-joo’s got full-on crazy eyes now, as he argues that it’s not the same. He demands for Seo-jin to remember. Seo-jin has no idea what he’s talking about, and Tae-joo growls, “Are you still telling yourself lies?” He says that it’s hardest thing to do—to lie to yourself—but not impossible, and that just makes him more determined to force Seo-jin to remember.

He tells Seo-jin to look around the room, because he’s staged it to be exactly the same as when they were here as children. As Seo-jin scans the room, it triggers a panic attack, and he struggles for air. Tae-joo ignores him and says the only difference is that he isn’t there next to him, but adds that someone came along to help, much to his annoyance.

On cue, Hana steps into the room and runs for Seo-jin, assuring him that he’s safe now. She unties his ropes, and Tae-joo watches bitterly—jealously, like he’s on the verge of tears. He covers it up with a laugh and then heads back out to lock them in the warehouse together.

Hana runs back to the door after it shuts on her, but it’s padlocked from the outside. Tae-joo tells Seo-jin that it’s just like before—he won’t be able to protect anyone, but he’ll survive, just like that day. Tae-joo: “You’ll throw away, run away, and then you’ll remember that on that day, you threw me away and ran away too!”

We go back to the moment of Seo-jin’s escape as a child, finally seeing the events as they actually happened from Tae-joo’s point of view. Seo-jin tries to pull him up the window to escape, but when the kidnapper barges back into the room, Seo-jin cries at him to let go, hitting his hand and yanking himself free. And just before escaping, Seo-jin looks back with a smile on his face, looking triumphant that he got away. Yikes. Well, I certainly see why you’re both scarred.

Tae-joo presses a remote switch, and the warehouse fills with gas. Hana leads Seo-jin towards their only escape: through the windows. But just one glance up at the same window that he climbed out as a child is enough to make him panic again, and he backs away in terror.

Seo-jin looks around the room, and that’s when he discovers the lone gas mask that Tae-joo planted there. He looks over at Hana and quickly represses that pang of guilt he feels before reaching to pull the mask on. But he stops himself and looks back at her…

He flashes back to the kidnapping, and then to Hana running away from Glasses Strangler and begging to be saved, when he pushed her out of the elevator. He remembers her helping him through panic attacks, holding him, caring for him when he was sick, putting a band-aid on his finger, telling him to trust himself.

Suddenly, his protective instinct kicks in and he runs over to put the mask on her instead. Swoon.

He gasps for air and clutches her close, and Tae-joo watches in utter shock, too bitter to do anything but scoff in disbelief. Seo-jin thinks back to how angry he was to have Robin back in his life, but remembers Robin’s offer to help him start living—all he needs to do is say the words and he’ll be there to help.

Seo-jin uses the last bit of his air to gasp aloud, “Help me. Help me, Robin.” Hana is dazed, but awake enough to hear Robin’s name. Seo-jin slumps over, losing consciousness, and Hana rushes to take the gas mask off and put it on him.

But he lifts his head—it’s Robin, and he immediately runs over to the window to break it open. He runs back to lift Hana to her feet and tell her they’re leaving, and she can tell by the way he speaks to her that this is Robin. She looks from his bloodied hand up to his face and asks, “Robin?”

Tae-joo repeats the name, trying to figure out what just happened, but sirens wail in the distance and he’s forced to make a run for it. Robin and Hana are met with police and paramedics, as Tae-joo escapes. He thinks back to the day at the hospital when Dr. Kang first confronted him about being Lee Soo-hyun, hopeful that treating him and Seo-jin together would help them both.

But Tae-joo just flipped out, thinking that Seo-jin had lied to her about which of them had abandoned the other, and she saw just how twisted he’d already become. He knocked her down by accident.

In the present, he returns to his apartment and heads to his kitchen to pour two cups of coffee. It amuses me that he brings her coffee and cookies, like he’s entertaining a houseguest and not keeping her locked in a secret chamber.

Dr. Kang flinches when he reaches over to pull the duct tape from her mouth, and he reminds her gently that he has no intention of killing her. I half think he keeps her alive because he wants to consult her like she’s his therapist. He says that tonight was one part success, and one part failure.

He says he succeeded in confirming something, and laughs that Seo-jin became so good at hiding that he made himself a split personality to hide behind. When he says Robin’s name, Dr. Kang can’t hide her worry.

She asks about the failure, and Tae-joo says that there was an unexpected twist. At first when Hana appeared, he thought it lucky, since she could play the perfect part in his reenactment—he’d abandon her to save himself, “Just like he did to me, because that’s the kind of bastard Seo-jin is. But he didn’t.”

He says the rest as if he’s thinking aloud, working it out on the spot. He wonders, like it’s crazy to even think it: “Does he… want to protect her?” The thought that Seo-jin cares about another human being is clearly an option that never occurred to him, and then his eyes grow wide again, and he declares a little too excitedly that this isn’t a failure—it’s an opportunity.

Tae-joo gets a little frantic as he says that Hana’s too good for Seo-jin anyway: “I’ve told you about her, right? She’s a really good person. It’s ludicrous to even think of her with Seo-jin.” Oh no. Oh this is going to a bad place…

He goes off on this rapid-fire description of what a good person Hana is, and how much she’s putting herself through to undergo treatment and face her traumatic rooftop attack, just to find Dr. Kang. The irony that he caused her this pain is completely lost on him. Then he admits that at one point, he started to look forward to her visits, and anticipate them. Jeepers, no.

He starts pacing and wonders why he feels this way, when today is all he’s been working towards. Dr. Kang finishes his thoughts for him, knowing that he feels empty and meaningless. She says that he knew this already, that he’d get to the end and realize that it doesn’t matter if Seo-jin remembers or not. The events of that day couldn’t be helped.

Tae-joo has his back turned, and his eyes fill with tears. Dr. Kang says that the only way that he can move on and live a healthy life is to acknowledge that they were simply too young and too weak, and what happened that day couldn’t be helped. She pleads with him to let it go because it isn’t too late.

He wipes his tears and agrees with her that it isn’t too late after all, clearly thinking revenge and not forgiveness. He admits that he was a little deflated when it appeared that Seo-jin wasn’t living a very happy life, but now it seems that Seo-jin is trying to be happy: “He has something to protect, without suspicion, hate, or guilt.”

Hana wakes up in her room hooked up to an IV, with her friends watching over her. Once she gets her bearings, she asks about Seo-jin, but it’s Tae-joo who comes to see her.

Meanwhile, Woo-jung worries that Robin hasn’t returned any of her calls, and she makes her dad promise to let her know if Robin is going to disappear again, because not saying goodbye was her biggest regret the last time.

Cousin Seung-yeon arrives at the police station eager to find out what happened, and Detective Na finally snaps at him that he should be worried about Seo-jin, not the case. Seo-jin is asleep, but the doctor tells his parents that he woke up earlier and will be fine. All Dad wants to know is which of them woke up earlier—Seo-jin or Robin.

In Hana’s room, Tae-joo offers to hold off the police questioning, but Hana insists that she’s fine to answer questions. He only wants to know one thing, and asks why she went there last night.

Secretary Kwon sits by Seo-jin’s bedside and asks him the same thing. Then he remembers that Robin was the one who went there, and just asks Seo-jin to please come back. Aw, the way he begs him to return is so sweet.

Hana still hasn’t answered Tae-joo’s question, and he prods, suggesting that she could have died. She thinks about it and answers, “At first I thought it was strange, and then I was worried. And then… I wanted to protect him. I was going to protect him… but then he protected me.”

She then remembers seeing Robin there, and sits up with a start. She doesn’t explain, but wonders what this niggling feeling is. Tae-joo leaves, looking unhappy at her answer.

Much to her confusion, Eun-chang tells her that Robin was never there—he heard it straight from the police that the only two people they found in the warehouse were Seo-jin and Hana. She wonders if it was just a dream, but it doesn’t sit right with her.

It looks like Seo-jin is fighting to wake up, or perhaps fighting not to, as Tae-joo’s voice tells him that no one will come for him. But then it’s followed by Hana’s voice, running in to save him, asking if he’s okay. Seo-jin finally opens his eyes, and when Secretary Kwon confirms that it’s him, his tears nearly spill over in relief. He runs to get the doctor when Hana comes downstairs to look in on Seo-jin.

I swear that Seo-jin is smiling at her, even though his mouth doesn’t move. The first thing she does is ask if he’s okay, and he just keeps staring. Hana asks what happened last night, because she remembers Seo-jin putting the gas mask on her, but then Robin was suddenly there, breaking a window and holding her.

She asks if Robin came and went, and still he says nothing. But then she looks down at Seo-jin’s bandaged arm—the same arm that Robin cut open to break the window. He follows her gaze as she pulls the covers back and looks right at his arm.

She looks up at him, searching his face for answers: “Who… are you? Who are you?” Closing caption: Two personalities inside one body… are you two people or one?

 
COMMENTS

Does she know? Ack, I’m not really ready for her to know the truth. Couldn’t Seo-jin just insist that it was him the whole time, breaking the window and getting her out safely? I know he seemed entirely like Robin in that moment, but I feel like in this instance, a pretty believable argument could be made for her having mistaken one twin for the other. It’s strange, because in most dramas, I’m always dying for the secrets to just come out already, because it drives me crazy when people don’t know crucial things. Here, I want to prolong the twin cover story for as long as possible. I need Seo-jin to have his chance to win Hana over, and today’s sudden burst of heroism seems like the perfect place to start.

The kidnapping reenactment didn’t really feel all that dangerous, because it strikes me that Tae-joo would be sorely disappointed if Seo-jin died, like a cat that’s sad when its prey finally kicks the bucket and can no longer participate in games. I think Tae-joo still very much thinks of Seo-jin as his best friend, just in a very twisted way, where he wants his friend to keep playing with him until they’re even. He’s totally nuts, but I like that he’s got his own stunted, twisted logic behind everything. It’s interesting that Seo-jin had nothing worth taking before—he didn’t care about anyone or anything, and the only thing Tae-joo could think of doing was making him suffer an equal amount by reliving the past.

But now there’s Hana, who means something to Seo-jin. It’s no wonder Tae-joo was practically foaming at the mouth and calling it an opportunity, because tearing her away from him would cause a kind of pain he didn’t know was possible with Seo-jin. It’s even creepier when you factor in Tae-joo’s own admiration for Hana, and his insistence that she’s too good for Seo-jin, which sounds a lot like he’s going to try and steal his girlfriend in the non-kidnapping way (after which, I’m sure he’ll resort to kidnaping). Now that we know what happened during the escape, I do understand where he’s coming from—Seo-jin was just a child and did the wrong thing, but Tae-joo’s resentment is justified. The problem is that they’re both forever stuck in that moment, not acknowledging that those boys were terrified children who both wanted to survive.

I didn’t care for how elaborate the reenactment got (because the more machinations involved, the less believable the whole thing becomes), but it does buy us some key developments between our main characters. Seo-jin’s first act of selfless bravery is huge, especially in a moment when he’s being forced to relive the guilt of his most cowardly decision. In that sense, he has Tae-joo to thank, because it’s a little like immersion therapy. When faced with the same harrowing choice, this time he’s strong enough to be selfless and put Hana first, getting to overcome his fear and his guilt all at once. And even more significant for Seo-jin is the fact that Hana came for him, when he had given up the idea that anyone would care enough to save him. To someone like Seo-jin, that’s everything, and I have a feeling that he fell completely in love with her the second she ran into that warehouse.

 
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