Hyde, Jekyll, Me: Episode 5

by girlfriday

If only every prickly romantic hero had an impish alter ego to force him out of his comfort zone. Now that he’s forced to shack up with the woman he tried to send away, Seo-jin can’t exactly cut himself off from the rest of the world anymore, though not for lack of trying. He reluctantly agrees to split his days in half with Robin, fair and square, but living a double life isn’t easy on either of them, especially when feelings get involved.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Yoon Hyun-sang – “품” (In My Arms) for the Hyde, Jekyll, Me OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 5 RECAP

After finding Hana on his doorstep, suitcase in tow, Seo-jin goes back into his batcave to watch Robin’s recording from last night. Robin says that Seo-jin crossed a line when he went after Hana and made her cry, and he raises a fist to warn that Seo-jin will meet his end if he ever makes a woman cry again. Seo-jin: “I’ll kill YOU if you say those lines wearing my face!” Ha.

Robin threatens to go public as Seo-jin’s split personality if he attempts to alter Hana’s contract in any way. And it’s pretty entertaining that Seo-jin can do nothing but stew impotently.

Seo-jin leaves Robin an angry message that he broke their number one rule—they’re not supposed to pretend to be each other. He sticks his red thumb up at the camera (still wet with the ink from signing Hana’s contract) and asks how he’d like it if Seo-jin pretended to be him. I really hope that’s your revenge plan, because that’s going to be funny.

He throws a tantrum in the greenhouse and Secretary Kwon has to plead with him to go along with it just until they can find Dr. Kang. Seo-jin still hates not having control over the situation, and fumes that it’s taken him five long years to get this far, and Robin can just ruin it in one fell swoop.

Hana tiptoes into the greenhouse looking for Seo-jin, and when he sees her in front of his batcave door, he yanks her away sternly. He tells her that she’ll be living here as a ghost, unseen and unheard, and that every morning she’ll go see Dr. Tae-joo for a hypnotherapy session.

He walks away without letting her interject one peep, so she follows and asks if he really wrote this contract himself. She seems skeptical, but Seo-jin sputters that he did—who else would there be? She flips open to a page in the back and points to cutesy little notes added to encourage her to do well, and Seo-jin shrivels a little inside.

He yanks the contract out of her hands, but he does it so forcefully that Hana tips forward and loses her balance on the stairs. He catches her in his arms and even pulls her closer (hellooo, nurse!) to say through gritted teeth, “I told you not to be in danger. Don’t get hurt. Don’t get sick.”

It sounds like a swoony declaration from a rom-com hero… until he stands her up straight and adds that she can trip on her face as long as he isn’t around to see it. Ha, way to undercut the swoon. Because his concern over her safety is really for himself, of course, which he admits to freely.

Hana mulls over the strange whiplash behavior from Seo-jin, which amusingly makes him look like he’s got multiple personalities on his own without Robin. She smiles as she tries on the funny glasses that Robin wore to make her feel better when she was sad, and then she imagines cute little cartoon versions of them making trampoline jumps on her phone.

But then Chibi Seo-jin appears and yanks the screen protector out from under them, being the killjoy that he is, and Hana glares at him.

Seo-jin goes into his batcave and leaves a new message for Robin that for the time being, they’ll go back to their old rules: Seo-jin in the day, and Robin at night. Chairman Dad is upset to hear that this is the plan, and while Mom supports the idea of keeping Hana close to help find Dr. Kang, Dad is far more concerned about what happens to Seo-jin and Robin when a woman is involved.

Hana announces that the circus troupe will be going on a planning workshop this week, and they stir in excitement.

Meanwhile, cousin Seung-yeon and his spy secretary girlfriend make bets over who Seo-jin’s girlfriend is, between Hana and Woo-jung the fangirl. He sends a spy to follow Hana around for now.

When Robin wakes up that evening, he finds a note from Seo-jin to watch the newest video message and finds a key to his room. He skips downstairs and imagines Seo-jin sitting there nagging him while he gets dressed. Seo-jin reminds him that no one is supposed to know he lives here, and that they must abide by their hours, barring unforeseen losses of consciousness.

Seo-jin snarls at him to please get some sleep too, and Robin just waves all his nagging aside like a mischievous little boy. Okay, it would drive me crazy if my alter ego refused to get any sleep. I’m with Seo-jin on this one.

Robin just ignores the rest and runs out, beaming when he finds his car in the garage just where he left it. He notices Hana heading outside for a walk in the snow, and follows behind her. Seung-yeon’s spy is lurking nearby with a camera at the ready.

Robin just matches her steps, keeping the same pace, and suddenly Hana can feel someone behind her and she panics, thinking that it’s Glasses Strangler. Robin thinks she’s a dummy for not even noticing that he’s there, and decides to zip his monster hoodie all the way up to scare her.

He creeps up and barks at her, and Hana screams in fright… and proceeds to beat the crap out of him with her umbrella. Ha. He manages to say that it’s Robin, but when he lifts his head up, all she sees is his scary hoodie face, and she beats him all over again.

When he finally opens the zipper and peeks out, she sinks to the ground in tears, blubbering that she thought he was a killer. Robin just apologizes over and over, feeling terrible about the stupid prank (and you say you don’t make girls cry!).

She stops crying when she notices that he has a cut on his forehead, and she takes him back to her room to patch it up for him. I hope it doesn’t scar—what’s Seo-jin going to say about sporting the exact same head wound?

Robin picks up one of her notebooks filled with badly drawn sketches for her new circus stage act, and quickly fixes up one of the drawings. He asks if she needs a storyboard sketch artist, and offers his services since he has nothing but time. She notes to herself that this fits with what she’s suspected about him—that he’s a bit of a rich slacker, who sleeps all day and plays at night.

She agrees to hire him, but warns that it’s not an easy job, wondering if he’ll be up to the challenge. Robin asks how much she’ll pay, and then shocks her by rattling off the usual professional rates, finishing it with: “So do you want to talk to my agent?” Ha, the look on her face is priceless.

Robin takes her to see his webtoon publisher Editor Min, where she stares gobsmacked at the poster of one of his comic books, with his byline right there. Editor Min hugs Robin, overjoyed that he’s really returned.

Woo-jung comes home and wails the second she lays eyes on Robin, but hilariously attacks him instead of hugging him. She screams at him for disappearing and waaaaails that Dad said she was the one who drove him away. Hana’s jaw drops at the sight, especially when Woo-jung drops him to the ground like a pro-wrestler.

She finally calms down and then blubbers through her tears that she was scarred when he vanished because he was her first love, and he tries to stop her crying as if she’s a child. Robin offers zero explanation to Editor Min for why he was away for five years and just shrugs when he asks about Hana.

Woo-jung, on the other hand, is feeling territorial where Hana is concerned. She glowers as Robin pours her a drink and steps in between them when Dad takes pictures. When the guys head downstairs to chat, Woo-jung tells Hana that she sent Robin away to army twice—metaphorically, since that’s what she told herself twice over while waiting for him to return.

She assumes that Hana has only known Robin for a week or so, but Hana just causally counters with, “Fifteen years.” Heh. Woo-jung’s jealousy flares up, and she quickly spits back that it doesn’t matter who’s known him longer.

Editor Min asks after Seo-jin, though it’s unclear how much he knows about their real relationship. Robin says Seo-jin has gotten even grumpier in the last five years. When Editor Min asks about Hana again, this time Robin says that she’s the person who rescued him.

Upstairs, Hana and Woo-jung have gotten so sauced that Woo-jung is passed out at the table and Hana is drunkenly slurring at her alone: “I can have aegyo too! If I do it, it’s totally cute!”

She makes drunken cutesy faces, and the next thing we know, it’s morning and Seo-jin wakes up in bed feeling sore and hungover. Hana wakes up with a start and wonders how she even got here, and finds a sketchbook filled with Robin’s drawings for her circus act.

It brings back a memory of her crawling up the staircase with Robin gingerly trying to help her. She tells him not to try and touch her while she’s drunk, insisting on getting up the stairs on her own.

Soon he’s piggybacking her up to her room and setting her down on the bed. She pulls him in close and tells him to come to the workshop retreat, and won’t take no for an answer. When he reluctantly agrees to at least drop her off, she coos that he’s being a good boy and tugs at his ear before passing out.

Seo-jin waits for her to come down to the car so they can go see Dr. Tae-joo, and he asks Secretary Kwon why his insides are churning. The bodyguard ekes out that Robin drank all night with Hana, and he scowls.

Hana runs out to the car still reeking of alcohol, her thoughts still on Robin and whether he’s likely to remember her mortifying behavior.

Seung-yeon is shocked to get the report from his spy that Seo-jin is involved with both women, and even more surprised to see his cousin in a casual hoodie, remembering that Seo-jin didn’t even dress that way as a child. Yeah I’ll bet he always wore a bowtie. Though you shouldn’t really be talking about other people’s fashion choices, Faux Hawk.

Dr. Tae-joo notes that Hana looks happy today, and asks if she’s dating. She gets overly defensive about the denial, only to admit that she might be. This time he shows her a blurry CCTV frame of Glasses Strangler to help jog her memory. It’s too magnified to identify the face, but it gives her the creeps.

Under hypnosis, Tae-joo takes her to an art gallery, and tells her that in this space, she can do whatever she wants and see whatever she wants. He tells her to stop at a painting and focus on it, and recall the suspect’s face. Eek why “The Scream” of all paintings?

With concentration, she manages to make the face flash a couple of times, but when she strains to really get a good look, suddenly a specter of the Glasses Strangler leaps out of the painting and starts choking her. Ack! That’s creepy.

(Imaginary) Tae-joo wraps his arms around her and covers her eyes, softly reminding her that this is a world he created in her mind, so nothing bad can happen in it. She finally calms down and stops having a panic attack. He asks her to trust him and open her heart, and promises to erase all of her bad memories.

Back out in the real world, Tae-joo walks her out of the office and she says that her resistance isn’t because she doesn’t trust him—it’s that she doesn’t trust herself. She asks if most of his patients aren’t like that, suffering from illnesses of the heart because they can’t trust themselves. He agrees, and she asks him to trust her too.

As they walk down the hall, she catches a glimpse of Glasses Strangler being questioned by Detective Na, and it gives her a weird feeling. She asks who that is, and Tae-joo says he’s the CT technician at the hospital.

Robin wakes up that evening to find his new rocket alarm clock replaced with an old radio one, and a nasty note from Seo-jin not to switch it back. Robin chuckles to see a string of texts from Hana begging him to forget what happened last night and not to come to her workshop after all.

But he picks her up as planned, and she agrees to come down if he swears not to bring up last night. They leave in good spirits, but on the way there, Robin notices that they’re being followed. Maybe one of Seung-yeon’s goons?

He tells Hana to hold on tight and exits the highway to lose the tail, except then he picks up a second tail—Glasses Strangler, behind the wheel of a truck of doom. Well this can’t be good. (Also, how did he find them? I hope there’s some logical explanation involving trackers or something, otherwise the attack is totally random.)

Robin speeds up and avoid getting rear-ended by a hair, spinning around curves fast enough to force the truck off the road and into a ditch. But just as they sigh in relief to be out of danger, he misses a boulder in front of him and crashes right into it.

Luckily they don’t look badly injured, but the car is busted and Robin is worried to find Hana unconscious. He calls emergency for the nearest hospital and piggybacks her there. He hurriedly asks the doctor to help Hana, except then he collapses to the floor in a faint. Oh no. He’s going to wake up Seo-jin!

And yup, when he opens his eyes in the hospital bed, Hana is hovering above him looking concerned… and calling him Robin. His eyes widen he realizes that she’s calling him that, and he shoots up in bed to ask where they are. When she says they’re all the way out in Kangwon-do, he combusts internally.

Hana’s circus members get the call and hurry to pick her up at the hospital, and her friend Jin-ju warns the others that Robin happens to be Seo-jin’s twin brother. They arrive and introduce themselves cheerily, while Seo-jin freaks out even more to realize that they seem to know Robin.

He picks up tidbits from what Hana is telling the others, and is alarmed to hear that the killer came after them all the way out here. He sneaks off to call Secretary Kwon, who sleepily gives him the brush-off, assuming that he’s Robin. He has to call twice, which you know drives him bonkers, and eventually Secretary Kwon is convinced that it’s Seo-jin and immediately leaps to his knees and switches to jondae.

After calling Detective Na to find out what’s happening, Secretary Kwon calls him back to say that the police are forced to wait for the roads to clear because they’re snowed in right now, so he’ll have to stay there overnight… as Robin.

Seo-jin can’t believe he has to spend the night in Robin cosplay, and whisper-barks into the phone, “How? How do I pretend to be Robin?” Secretary Kwon: “Smile!” Even funnier is Seo-jin’s response: “Smile? Why??” as if it’s a totally foreign concept.

So when Hana comes out looking for him, he turns around with this awesomely awkward smile plastered on his face. When Jin-ju suggests that they head to their lodgings, Seo-jin answers in his usual formal speech pattern, and Jin-ju marvels at how much he sounds like Seo-jin. He grouses to himself and says it again more casually.

On the car ride over, Seo-jin shuts his eyes and chants to himself repeatedly that he’s Robin now: “I am Robin. I am that damned son of a bitch Robin…” He wonders if they’re staying at a resort and Jin-ju says it’s more like a pension, but when they arrive, Seo-jin is beyond horrified to see that the entire troupe is staying in one tiny country home.

He calls Secretary Kwon like a little princess and refuses to stay in this place, not that he has any options. He tenses when he feels someone creeping up behind him, and whips around to find a goat in his face. Hana laughs to find him screaming at the goat and then a tiny dog. She remembers that Robin liked dogs before, and Seo-jin mutters robotically, “Oh. What a cute dog.”

He needs to go to the bathroom so Hana walks him all the way out to the outhouse, and he grabs onto her jacket and pleads with her not to leave him here. He’s horrified that it’s just a hole in the ground, but fear seems to be his overriding emotion, and Hana has fun teasing him for it.

She leads him back by the hand and wonders how a person who lives most of his life at night can be afraid of the dark, and thanks him for carrying her all the way to the hospital when he must’ve been scared.

She plays a children’s game with him to take his mind off of his fear and Seo-jin thinks in his head that this is totally ridiculous, but finds himself answering her with a meow on reflex, playing the game despite himself. (And he totally smiles for real when she isn’t looking!)

They join the rest of the circus troupe for dinner, and Hana introduces Robin as their new storyboard artist. That’s news to Seo-jin, but he’s more worried about Hana’s announcement that he’s going to draw up new sketches for them right here and now. He sits in front of a blank sketchpad feeling every eyeball on him, and comes up with the excuse that he needs privacy when he works.

He locks himself up in a room and proceeds to make his best attempt at a drawing, and comes up with a stick figure. Hahaha, you are so busted. He thinks his cover is blown, but then he glances over at the stacks and stacks of soju boxes in the corner of the room, and comes up with an idea.

He calls Secretary Kwon to ask how much liquor Robin can hold (since Seo-jin doesn’t touch the stuff). His idea is basically to drink so much that he passes out, triggering their switch. That’s not a bad idea, though I have a feeling he’s underestimating Robin’s tolerance.

He gets the entire group drinking, and downs glass after glass… until every last person is passed out except for him. HA. Hana falls asleep on his shoulder and he pushes her away.

He’s just chugging soju straight out of the bottle by now. He heads outside and calls Secretary Kwon to complain drunkenly: “I can totally hold my liquor.”

Worse yet, being drunk just makes him more awake, and Secretary Kwon thinks he should just stay awake then, because he has a meeting at noon and can’t have Robin making an appearance during the day. Secretary Kwon laughs that he got to drink and go on a retreat thanks to Robin, which Seo-jin doesn’t find very funny.

Hana comes out and joins Seo-jin by the fire, and suggests roasting sweet potatoes. He even takes a bite and laughs—genuinely this time—at the soot she purposely smeared on her face to make him smile.

She could tell he was uncomfortable all night, and thanks him for coming with her anyway. She admits that there are times she feels really pressured, like when her troupe members all look to her to console them. She always tells them that everything is going to be okay, but it always crushes her heart a little to carry that weight. Seo-jin doesn’t say anything but seems to know exactly what she means.

She thanks him for being with her, and then breaks the moment with a sneeze. Seo-jin instinctively grabs at his blanket to shield himself from her cooties, though she thinks he’s about to share the blanket, and insists that she’s fine.

She keeps sneezing though, and Seo-jin mutters in his head that he’s doing all sorts of things because he’s drunk (uh-huh, blame it on the soju), and sweeps his arm around her, sharing his blanket.

Hana looks up into his eyes, and after a long beat, she says, “You’re a good person, Robin. That’s why… I like you.” Seo-jin’s eyes turn to saucers. Caption: While you were sleeping.

 
COMMENTS

Um, yeah. While you were sleeping, your girl declared her feelings for you… me… us? Man it’s already starting to get confusing, but that’s really the point, right? Hana is falling for Robin, but Robin isn’t even in the building right now, so how much of what she’s feeling is for Seo-jin? So far I think she’s pretty Robin-specific when it comes to liking him, but I know that I swoon more when Seo-jin is the one getting close to her. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but I can’t wait till Seo-jin starts getting jealous of her feelings for Robin. It’s just going to be so karmically satisfying.

Seo-jin is already dropping his guard and doing uncharacteristic things around Hana. I know that in his mind, it’s all in the name of self-preservation, so it’s not like he’s actually being considerate on purpose, but it’s highly amusing to see that the lines between Bad Seo-jin and Good Robin are blurrier than they realize. Of course, that’s nothing compared to Seo-jin actually having to pretend to be Robin for a night, which is so far my favorite version of either of them. It’s way funnier when he’s forced to keep his grumpiness on the inside and go through the motions of being a nice guy, all fake attempts at smiles and awkward social graces.

The mistaken identity hijinks are much more entertaining than the straight versions of the characters, so I hope there’s a lot more of that in store. Robin-as-Seo-jin would be pretty amusing too, like a kid playing boss for a day. I think overall I enjoy Seo-jin when he’s cornered and Robin has the upper hand, because it makes his grumpiness futile and suddenly adorable. And it kills me that Seo-jin is a total fraidy cat where Robin is brave, because in most other ways, Robin seems more childish. There’s a silliness to Seo-jin that comes out when he’s feeling desperate (what kind of plan is drink until you lose consciousness?) and it makes me look forward to his gradual transformation.

I’m glad that Hana is starting to come to life as a character now that we’ve got roommate shenanigans and a blossoming love triangle. Her confusion over Seo-jin’s emotional whiplash is understandable, but I like how direct she is with Robin. I was surprised at how bad I felt for Seo-jin during her confession, since he’s not exactly in love with her. But it still stings when she’s looking into his eyes, thinking he’s someone else and being so forthright. It’s part voyeuristic and part disappointing, though perhaps it’s just what Seo-jin needs to get his head in the game. Petty competition with his split personality might not be the most mature motivating force in the world, but it’s pretty entertaining for the rest of us.

 
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