Oh My Ghostess: Episode 11

by girlfriday

Either it’s opposite day, or all our characters are undergoing some big changes. What I like about Oh My Ghostess is that the situation under the surface keeps changing, so that even if the day-to-day is the same, our characters’ experiences and feelings may have shifted entirely. As expected, our ghost’s feelings only deepen with more time, and already they’re starting to veer into dangerous territory.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Park Bo-young – “떠난다” (Leaving) for the Oh My Ghostess OST [ 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.

 
EPISODE 11 RECAP

Sun-woo puts the moves on Soon-ae in their romantic getaway tent on the roof, but before he can unbutton her shirt, she seizes up and runs out with a hasty apology. He’s stunned and totally mortified, and Soon-ae runs all the way to the park.

She wonders why she’s feeling so feverish, and gets ejected from Bong-sun’s body like the last time when she came down with a cold. Bong-sun thinks Soon-ae came out on purpose to talk to her, and Soon-ae just goes with that.

They sit on the swings and Bong-sun asks if there are any new developments. She says she’s okay with it, but adds a little wistfully that it seems like Soon-ae has gotten very close to Chef. URG, I hate it that Bong-sun doesn’t get to know what’s going on!

Bong-sun worries about Soon-ae not having much time left, and Soon-ae is sobered by her concern. Bong-sun admits that she hated being able to see ghosts and was always so afraid that she lived in hiding, and this is the first time she’s been able to talk to someone freely.

Soon-ae says that Bong-sun isn’t alone now—even after she goes, Chef will remain by her side. Bong-sun isn’t so sure that after everything, Chef will stay with her in the end. She admits to feeling anxious, despite being happier than before because she’s living amongst people now.

Soon-ae looks over at her and thinks to herself: “Na Bong-sun, I’m sorry. Just a little longer… I’ll stay just a few more days next to Chef and then go. I’m sorry that I lied.” Bong-sun swings happily, musing that it’s been a long time since she’s been on the swings, and Soon-ae looks over at her guiltily, knowing that it isn’t true.

Sun-woo paces outside, not knowing what to make of the situation and just feeling extremely embarrassed. Soon-ae returns in Bong-sun’s body and comes up with an excuse that she had indigestion and had to go throw up her dinner. The relief rolls off of him in waves, and he admits to thinking all kinds of thoughts, like that he’d rushed things or that he smelled.

They fold the tent and he promises to take her on a real trip next time. He heads to his room still feeling residual awkwardness, and works off his um, energy, doing push-ups in bed. Soon-ae leans against the wall from her room and apologizes for being selfish, and asks for just a little longer to stay with him.

Officer Sung-jae comes home late that night, and Mom worries that he works too hard and is too nice, while Eun-hee says that’s why she married him. Of course neither of them knows Sung-jae’s hidden dark side.

He shows another burst of anger as he thinks about the weird ghost-warding things he found in Bong-sun’s room, and this time the black mist is visible in and around him, confirming that a malevolent ghost has hitched a ride.

The kitchen staff gathers around Soon-ae as she makes her first solo dish for today’s staff lunch, and they all sing her praises when they taste her pasta. Even Sun-woo agrees that it’s not bad, and she beams.

Sun-woo leaves the guys in charge of dinner because he has to do a magazine interview, and says that they requested Bong-sun to come along to talk about the cooking show. Outside, he cops to lying just because he didn’t want to go alone, and decides to take her shopping so that she doesn’t show up in her uniform T-shirt.

Soon-ae is over the moon that he’s going to take her shopping, and imagines the classic dramaland makeover sequence where she gets to try on pretty outfits and twirl as Sun-woo gives his approval and buys her bags and bags of new clothes.

In reality, Sun-woo stops at the first mannequin he sees and asks the salesperson to wrap it up from head to toe in Bong-sun’s size, and that’s the end of that. Soon-ae pouts to have her fantasy dashed, but Sun-woo says he hates shopping and can’t be bothered.

In the interview, Sun-woo is asked about his ideal type of woman, and he starts describing Bong-sun/Soon-ae: small, puppy-like, respectful, someone he can cook with, and he borrows a Witch Hunt-ism to describe her meek-in-the-day, dominant-at-night personality.

So-hyung admits to Sun-woo’s mom that she was flat-out rejected, and Mom can’t believe he’d be so blind. So-hyung thanks her for thinking of her so fondly, but doesn’t want things to get awkward with Sun-woo any more than they already are. Mom starts to ask if he mentioned another woman, but thinks better of it.

Soon-ae chides Sun-woo for describing her so accurately in the interview, but he doesn’t care if people guess that she’s the ideal girl he’s talking about. They linger at the door holding hands, and he finally lets go for the night.

But Soon-ae screams as soon as she enters her room, and he runs in to find the place flooded because of a leaky roof. Everything’s drenched, so he says she’ll have to sleep in his room tonight. Heh, she totally panics, when weeks ago she’d have poked a hole in the roof herself if she’d known it’d get her in his bed.

She doesn’t have any dry clothes either, so of course he gives her a white dress shirt to wear (really, are you all out of T-shirts?) and gives her the bed while he takes the floor. He turns on a romantic movie, and Soon-ae thinks to herself that this can’t happen yet because she wants more time, and cuts the movie off at the sex scene.

Sun-woo makes a mad dash to wash up in record time and then crawls up into the bed even though Soon-ae pretends to be snoring, but when he actually gets close enough to put his arms around her, she freaks out and kicks him off the bed violently.

She apologizes for freaking out and says that she’s thought a lot about taking it slow like he said, and she agrees that that’s what she wants. He’s mortified all over again but acts like he’s relieved that she finally sees his point, and says she’s matured. But he’s more confused than ever at her sudden turnaround and doesn’t know what it means.

Mom comes by the restaurant and is happy to be greeted by Joon, who she decides looks like a cocker spaniel and would be dateable if she were just a little younger. Ha. Mom is here on a mission to talk to Soon-ae, and hands over an envelope.

Soon-ae thinks it’s money (she must’ve watched a lot of dramas when she was alive), but finds a picture of a man instead. Mom wants to set her up on a blind date to get her away from Sun-woo, but he catches her in the act. Mom argues that Soon-ae’s fortune is that of a dead person, but Sun-woo says that he’ll deal with his own love life and sends Mom home.

He’s so distracted and worried about Soon-ae’s reaction that he burns the garlic on the stove and then burns Joon with the frying pan. Joon acts like he barely made contact, but quietly goes to the back to ice the giant burn.

Soon-ae comes in and sees how bad it is, and tracks down some ointment. She pulls Joon aside to the storage room, which Sun-woo notes anxiously. She puts ointment on the burn as Joon grunts in pain, and she wonders why he’s hiding something like this. He tells her not to tell Chef, because he doesn’t want to embarrass him.

She realizes that Joon is a total Chef fanboy, and he says that Sun-woo is different—he went backpacking around the world and ate out of trashcans from restaurants wherever he went. Well, ew. Joon asks how her “friend” is doing in her relationship, and she says that it’s going well, but now the guy is more aggressive and that’s a new worry.

She stops him to put some more ointment on the burn, which sounds really bad out of context, with him grunting, “Unhhhh, be gentle!” Soon-ae: “I’m being really gentle!” Joon: “Uhhh, uuuuuuuh, okay, stop!” Soon-ae: “Hold on, just a little more!” Joon: “Unnhhhhh!”

Of course, Sun-woo follows them just in time to catch the sex noises coming from the storeroom, and busts inside. It doesn’t look all that good, with Joon bent over and his shirt raised, and it’s even more suspicious when they answer awkwardly that Joon was asking her advice on a personal matter.

Joon scurries away quickly, and Sun-woo asks jealously how long they’ve been such close friends. Soon-ae answers vaguely that it’s been a week or two and makes her escape. Sun-woo can’t believe she’s pushing him away with excuses when she’s doing who knows what with Joon. Sun-woo: “Do you ask advice like this? Unnnhhhh! Like that?!”

When they return to the kitchen, Joon lets Soon-ae have the last popsicle, and the guys make fun of them for being all cutesy and romantic. It’s all in good fun and Soon-ae plays along, asking if they look good together.

They start singing congratulations for the birth of the Bbong-Jjoon couple, and that puts Sun-woo over the edge. He explodes and screams at them like a drill sergeant, muttering to himself that they didn’t even share their ice cream, and Soon-ae wonders, “Is it because we didn’t give him ice cream?”

She notices that he’s pissy all the way through lunch, and follows him into the storeroom to ask if he’s mad at her for last night. He admits to being mad, and asks if she’s playing games with him now. He scoffs that she was so intent on taking things slow, but seemed to be having lots of fun with Joon, and asks if she’s planning on two-timing them.

She’s shocked to learn the real reason he’s upset, and asks cutely if he’s being jealous right now. Sun-woo: “Jealous?! Do you know who I AM?” She says that there’s been a misunderstanding, only when he asks her to explain it, she can’t because she promised Joon she wouldn’t say.

That just makes him angrier, though he adorably waits outside the door anyway to give her a chance to explain, and then gets even pissier when she walks right past him.

He’s so petty that he takes it out on her in the kitchen by insisting that she did a terrible job of washing the shellfish for tonight’s special, and sends her to the market to buy shrimp instead. Well now you’re just being childish.

Soon-ae stops by Dad’s restaurant and finds him on the phone, and he says it’s a pointless call anyway, admitting to dialing his dead daughter’s phone once in a while, just because. Soon-ae is surprised that he kept the line going, and he says that the phone went missing, but he couldn’t bring himself to shut off the line.

She asks gingerly if it was an accident of some sort, and he says that he doesn’t know why, but she committed suicide. FINALLY. Now we’re getting somewhere! Soon-ae is startled, and wonders why on earth she’d kill herself.

A headache brings on a flash of memory—drowning in the water, nothing more—and she heads upstairs to her old room to look for clues that’ll shed some light on what happened. Tucked inside her diary, she finds plane tickets for her, Dad, and Kyung-mo, dated for a week after her death, on Dad’s birthday.

She remembers now making the plans in secret to surprise Dad for his birthday, and thinks that it doesn’t make any sense for her to commit suicide a week before that. She takes the diary with her and runs off, and Kyung-mo pouts that she never stays when he’s around, deciding that he got shafted because of Sun-woo.

But then aaaaaack, she takes the diary straight to Officer Sung-jae to share her theory that the trip and the suicide don’t line up. She explains that she knew Soon-ae because they took a cooking class together years ago, and only recently found out that she was the ajusshi’s daughter who died.

Sung-jae says that there’s no question that it was a suicide, and remembers that Soon-ae had sent a text to her father beforehand. He flips through the diary and finds something scrawled across a page that alarms him—the number 2368—and asks to keep the diary in case more evidence can be found inside. No, don’t give it to him! Sigh, she hands over the diary and the plane tickets.

Sun-woo overhears the guys talking about Joon’s burn, and realizes that that’s the secret everyone was so keen to hide from him. Embarrassed, he goes to check on Joon to make sure he’s okay, and confirms that Soon-ae was in the storeroom with him to put ointment on it.

He apologizes and feels like a total heel, and cringes when Soon-ae returns in a subdued mood. He feels stupid for going so overboard, and wonders how he’s going to make it up to her.

Soon-ae is so flummoxed by this suicide news that she ejects herself from Bong-sun’s body to go look into it some more. She rushes off, leaving Bong-sun confused, but just happy to bask in Chef’s presence.

Officer Sung-jae takes a walk on a bridge, presumably where Soon-ae drowned, and takes out a switchblade for no apparent reason.

Soon-ae runs to Medium Unni and interrupts a session with a paying customer, and Unni is surprised she’s even still around after her overnight trip with loverboy. Soon-ae tells her that she supposedly ended her own life, but it doesn’t make sense to her—it’s not something she would do, and she’s never heard of suicide ghosts.

Unni says that it’s rarer but they do exist if they had really long outstanding grudges, and doesn’t think much of it. What’s more important is that she hurry up and move on before she becomes a malevolent ghost, and Soon-ae says she will. It just bothers her because she can’t remember her own death, and can’t see a reason why she’d want to die.

Bong-sun eagerly waits for her nightly cooking lesson, and is disappointed when Sun-woo texts her that there’s no lesson tonight. She trudges upstairs, and he suddenly jumps out at her with a ginormous bouquet of red roses, shouting, “I forgive you, Na Bong-sun!” Pffft, don’t you mean sorry?

He’s so nervous it’s hilarious—his “apology” consists of telling her that she made him mad, but they’ve built affection through all their bickering, and he knows she can’t live without him, so he’s being reallllly gracious by deciding to forgive her.

He says that he hates flowers and shoves them toward her, declaring them made up since she accepted them. Then he fumbles with a ring box and blubbers on about how he haaaates this cheesy stuff too, while putting a couple ring on his finger and putting hers on a necklace around her neck, so the other guys won’t notice. Ermagerd, you are such a dork.

Bong-sun barely recovers from the shock and finally smiles, and he looks so relieved as he pats her on the head and pulls her in for a hug. He wonders aloud how he got this way and sighs, “You make me crazy, Na Bong-sun.”

Soon-ae returns, frustrated at not being able to remember her death, and figuring that seeing Chef will put her in a better mood. She skips up to the roof, but stops in her tracks when she comes upon Chef hugging Bong-sun and promising sweetly never to misunderstand her again.

Sun-woo caresses her face and says, “I must like you much more than I thought,” and Bong-sun answers in kind. Soon-ae looks stricken as she watches them, and then when Sun-woo leans in to kiss her, suddenly a black mist forms around Soon-ae, and she charges at Bong-sun with a frightening look in her eyes.

She pushes Bong-sun down to the ground, and Bong-sun looks up at her in shock. But Soon-ae is even more terrified than she is, and stands there stunned as Sun-woo makes sure that Bong-sun is okay.

Soon-ae looks down at her trembling hands in horror and backs away, and runs downstairs still shaking. She wonders what’s come over her and says repeatedly that it’s not happening.

But as she watches Bong-sun sleep that night, she can only think of Unni’s warnings that she’ll turn into a malevolent spirit. She takes over Bong-sun’s body to write a letter that night, and then ejects herself to watch Sun-woo sleep.

Bong-sun stirs awake and finds Soon-ae’s letter on her pillow:

Soon-ae: Na Bong-sun, thank you. I’m sorry that I’m leaving like this without saying goodbye, but I can’t be in your body any longer. I’m afraid that my feelings will grow deeper, that I’ll want to remain by that person’s side, that I might not be able to keep my promise to you. Things will go well between you and that person even without me now. I sincerely want you to be happy. The last thing I want to tell you is: Love with all your effort while you’re alive—yourself, and others too.

Bong-sun gets up and runs all over the neighborhood looking for Soon-ae, but she’s nowhere to be found. She realizes now that Soon-ae must’ve fallen for Sun-woo, but mostly looks worried that she can’t find her.

Soon-ae wanders aimlessly through the streets, and goes crying into Unni’s arms. Sun-woo darts awake after a bad dream and is alarmed to find Bong-sun’s room empty. She’s terrified about how she’s supposed to act around Sun-woo, when he calls to yell at her for running out in the middle of the night.

He says she’ll get hurt walking around with her head down like that, and she finds him standing across the street waving at her. She steels herself and makes the decision right then and there: “I can’t back down now. Chef is telling me to come to him. He’s waiting for me because he’s worried about me. I like him so much. I have his heart. I’m going to think of myself just this once. I’m going to protect his heart, no matter what.”

She goes running into his arms, and he gets all big-headed about how badly she’s fallen for him. (Lol, the Misaeng heart-lights make a comeback!) She refuses to let go, and he points out that she was the one who didn’t let him touch her earlier. He sniffs that flip-flopping is her hobby or something, but breaks into the world’s happiest smile as he hugs her back.

 
COMMENTS

Aw, I’m proud of Soon-ae for making the right choice. It was touch and go there for a while, with her making some questionable decisions along the way with regards to Bong-sun’s life. But she made up for a lot by ultimately choosing to walk away at the right time—when she discovered that she couldn’t control her anger, and that her feelings for Sun-woo were tied up in that. It makes me happy to know that she walked away before she got in so deep that she couldn’t keep her promises to Bong-sun, even though in many ways she already crossed a big line when she kept her feelings for Sun-woo to herself and prolonged her time here on purpose.

It’s nothing compared to what she could be if she let herself become a malevolent ghost, and I think she needed that jolt to realize how uncontrollable and dark that energy is. It scared her straight, and I like that for her, hurting Bong-sun was enough to make her see that it was wrong. It’s bittersweet that the evil energy is tied to how much she feels for Sun-woo, but it’s the greed to be with him that fuels the badness, and Soon-ae seems to have figured out what Unni meant by feelings being so dangerous to ghosts. It’s tragic for her, of course—she can’t control loving him, and it’s damned unfair that she died so young. But as a ghost, giving into her feelings selfishly means terrible things for all of them, and it seems like she’s actually taking that to heart now.

I’m just relieved that we’re FINALLY getting somewhere with Soon-ae’s mystery, because it always bothered me that she was so fixated on getting laid and not on figuring out why she can’t remember how she died. I get that we need to delay the plot point, but her lack of curiosity in the matter just never made much sense to me. It’s nice to get her separated from Bong-sun and thinking about her past in a serious way, because only she would know how illogical it is that she would commit suicide—she was a happy person with a loving family who made plans and had dreams for her future, and she knows in her gut that something about this story is wrong. It was heartbreaking to see that Dad thought she was so unhappy with her life (with him, and a life spent working so hard) that she would want to die, and now it seems just as important for Dad to be made aware that she loved her life with him and didn’t end her life, as it is to catch Officer Sung-jae for his crimes.

I hope that we’re in for a nice long stretch with Bong-sun in control of her own body and getting to know Sun-woo in a real way. There’s no doubt about how she feels, but she’s only ever loved him from afar and gotten such tiny moments with him that I feel like they’re starting completely over in a brand new relationship now. I’d like to see her grow in confidence and assert her identity, and to follow Soon-ae’s advice to love herself too. Maybe with the girls’ separation, there’s still time for Bong-sun’s character development, Soon-ae’s mystery to be solved, a chance for the girls to be friends, and even a little more romance? As if Sun-woo could let a day pass without some mortifying display of backhanded romance. He’s lucky Bong-sun doesn’t know any better, I swear.

 
RELATED POSTS

• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 10
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 9
• Dramabeans Podcast #29
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 8
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 7
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 6
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 5
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 4
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 3
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 2
• Oh My Ghostess: Episode 1