Oh Hae-young Again: Episode 2

by LollyPip

As Do-kyung’s and Hae-young’s pasts are unveiled, we gain more insight into why they are who they are now, and why Do-kyung ended up making that huge mistake. His premonitions are beginning to focus almost entirely on Hae-young herself, which raises a lot of questions about their origins and why they’re starting up now. Regardless of why, they seem to be pulling Do-kyung and Hae-young into each other’s orbits, whether they want to be or not.

 
EPISODE 2 RECAP: “A relationship due to willful negligence”

Hae-young fearlessly walks into busy traffic to retrieve Do-kyung’s wallet and returns it to him, saying, “I won’t die,” just like in his vision. But this time it’s reality, and as Do-kyung stares at her, mystified, she continues, “What I want most these days is to die. What I want never comes true. So, I won’t die.”

Do-kyung finally snaps out of his daze and thanks her, and Hae-young asks him to buy her a drink. She immediately takes it back, but snarks that she’s thinking of getting her nose done on his dime (since he smacked it earlier). Too bad, she was going to accept a drink as compensation, but he didn’t take her up on it fast enough. ~pfft~

Hae-young leads Do-kyung to a bar for that drink anyway, though he’s just drinking water (he doesn’t drink). She asks what her friend Hee-ran told him about her, which is tricky for him to answer, since he thought all this time that Hee-ran was talking about another girl named Oh Hae-young.

Do-kyung pretends not to remember, but Hae-young sees his eyes flicker and calls him out for lying. She harangues him for an answer until he finally yells over the music, “She said you’re pretty!” This makes Hae-young laughs at his discomfiture, then look at him with new, interested eyes.

Do-kyung sneaks looks at Hae-young while he gives her a ride home, but when she mentions that she was one of five Hae-youngs in school, two of them named Oh Hae-young, it triggers memories of the Oh Hae-young he remembers.

Hae-young asks why Do-kyung doesn’t drink, again pestering him for a specific answer when he’s characteristically vague, and he admits that he doesn’t like drinking and making mistakes. Hae-young figures that means he must have made a big mistake once while drunk, but he doesn’t elaborate. She says that women never make drunken mistakes, though she might if she knew she’d never see the other person again.

“Should we never see each other again?” she asks, sounding like she’s making an invitation. Do-kyung looks over and they lock eyes for a long moment, then he guns the motor. He screeches to a stop near her place, drops her off without a word, and peels out.

As soon as he’s out of sight, he stops the car and jumps out to vomit. He can’t untangle the images of this Hae-young from the other Hae-young in his memories, and yells in wordless frustration.

Do-kyung talks to Jin-sang, who just wants to know if he told Hae-young about the mix-up, and how they accidentally ruined her engagement. He swears he didn’t say anything, but Jin-sang warns him to avoid Hae-young in the future at all cost, just in case.

Curious, Jin-sang asks if Do-kyung knows how the Hae-young he used to date is doing, but he hasn’t heard a word. In fact, since they broke up, she seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. Jin-sang assumes she’s scared of Do-kyung, who just looks thoughtful.

Suddenly a woman comes slamming into the house, making noise and crashing into things, but this is apparently common enough that Do-kyung and Jin-sang barely even register the commotion, heh. Jin-sang asks in a whisper if Do-kyung has “seen” anything with his newfound powers, which Do-kyung describes as being like memories, only they haven’t happened yet.

Do-kyung wanders into the kitchen, where the woman stands in the fridge chugging a huge bottle of water, hair standing on end and clothes disheveled. Again he just ignores her and goes back to Jin-sang, who warns him not to tell anyone about his sudden clairvoyant abilities. He thinks it’s super-awesome, though.

The mysterious woman sits next to Jin-sang, hair obscuring her face, and we suddenly recognize her as Director Park! Oooooh, her name is Park Soo-kyung — turns out, she’s Do-kyung’s and Hoon’s sister. She’s also drunk as a skunk.

The house just gets sillier when Hoon comes home, his new girl An-na tagging along. Do-kyung actually makes her hand over her ID to make sure Hoon isn’t robbing the cradle, and she’s not even concerned that Hoon is twelve years her senior.

Do-kyung tells Hoon not to bring awkwardly-young girls to the house, but Hoon argues that Do-kyung gets to have a friend here, so why can’t he? Jin-sang runs with it and gets all handsy with Do-kyung’s pecs, hee, and An-na cheekily says that she and Hoon just kiss.

Cut to: Hoon and An-na making out heavily in his room. Just kissing, riiight. But Soo-kyung scares the daylights out of them when she rises up from under the bed, hair flying every which way and looking like something out of a horror film. She reaches out creepily to An-na, who bites her hand, ha.

Later as Do-kyung’s finishing some work at his own place, he has a sudden vision of Hae-young, simply saying, “Wow,” over and over. It looks as though she’s in his apartment, which unsettles Do-kyung, who is obviously alone.

Mama Oh makes as much noise as possible at breakfast until Hae-young snaps at her to use her words, and it turns out that she’s worried about the bruise on Hae-young’s face. She assures her mom that it was just an accidental collision, not that it calms Mama Oh much, and she tells Hae-young to wear a mask outside so the neighbors won’t see.

Hae-young belatedly realizes that her phone is missing, but luckily Do-kyung found it in his car and he’s waiting outside her house to return it. Remembering his vision, he asks out of nowhere if she knows where he lives, which is super awkward. He says he was just checking, and speeds off.

Soo-kyung is her familiar sleekly-coiffed self again at work this morning, though she’s still not happy with Hae-young and even offers to fight now that her cast is off. She makes it an open-ended offer when Hae-young declines, positive that she’d win.

Hae-young asks a male coworker his honest opinion of her looks, and when he says she looks pretty, she wilts in disappointment. She’s on her way to a class reunion today, and “a really pretty woman” will be there, and she’s thinking of not showing. She and this woman have the same name and were always being compared, and our Hae-young always came up short.

Our Hae-young says that she was so intimidated by the other Hae-young, who was smart, rich, beautiful, and sweet, that she barely spoke until after high school, preferring to blend into the background. In flashbacks we see how the other students were always calling for Oh Hae-young, but it was never her, it was always the other girl they wanted.

In fact, she was so used to ignoring people calling out her name, that when they really did try once to warn her that a basketball was coming right at her face, she didn’t react and was knocked out. But the worst part was that all the students called the other girl “the pretty Oh Hae-young,” and she’d been called “dirt Oh Hae-young.”

But she’d convinced herself that she’d never been hurt or jealous, because she believed that she was too strong to get hurt over such things. It’s clearly not true, but it’s how she’d gotten through high school. She hasn’t seen that Hae-young since she went off to college.

Hae-young’s coworkers are adorably loyal, and assure her that that other Hae-young sounds horrible. They tell her to go to her reunion — people change, and the other Hae-young may be completely different.

So Hae-young bursts into the restaurant to the sound of her name being chanted by all the men, only to have them hilariously trail off when they realize she’s the “wrong” Hae-young. At least they all remember her and common on how much prettier she’s gotten, and she smiles to herself when she hears that pretty Oh Hae-young didn’t come tonight.

Nobody really knows much about her these days, except that she had a boyfriend but broke up with him. They can’t even connect with her through social media — she’s just gone.

The conversation goes south when one old friend asks how Hae-young’s honeymoon went, but Hae-young coolly informs him that there was no wedding, managing to hold her head high. She stands to explain for the last time why she called off the wedding, then has everyone cheering as she dramatically talks about how much she loooves men, and couldn’t spend her life loving only one.

Hae-young’s cousin is planning her own wedding, and Mama Oh gets more and more frustrated as her nerves get plucked by Auntie’s complaints. When she turns down the custom hanboks that Hae-young and Tae-jin never wore, calling them bad luck, Mama Oh actually strips off her apron and sweater as if gearing for a fight. Heh, I love how Dad knows she’s about to blow her top, without her saying a word.

As Hae-young fends off a harmless drunk schoolmate (who swears he always liked her better, no really), a latecomer approaches her with a flower, and his face falls when he sees that she’s the wrong Hae-young. She yells defiantly that she’s sooo sorry.

Do-kyung nearly catches Hoon working on his movie script when he gets home that night, and they both go still when his phone rings with an unknown caller. They seem to know who it is, and Do-kyung refuses to answer when when An-na whines. Later Hoon tells her that it could only be ”that rude woman,” the one who left Do-kyung at the altar.

Apparently she never showed up on their wedding day, and nobody’s heard from her since then. Do-kyung had looked for her everywhere, and Hoon worried he’d go crazy when he couldn’t find her. Now the name “Oh Hae-young” is forbidden in this house.

We see Do-kyung in his wedding finery, repeatedly calling his Hae-young, who never answered. He’d frantically searched hospitals and even walked the stormy streets, but he never found her. The only clue he got was a picture of her on social media in Paris, with another man.

Hae-young stuffs her face when she gets home after the reunion, not noting her mother hovering in the living room like a hollow-eyed ghost. Repeats over and over, “Thank you. At least she eats well. Thank you,” to nobody, in an eerie voice.

Do-kyung is summoned to lunch with his mother and her boyfriend the next day, though he’s pretty grumpy about it, calling his mom a gold digger. She denied it, then fawns all over Chairman Jang when he arrives, and Do-kyung’s eyes nearly roll out of his head.

Chairman Jang brings up Han Tae-jin, and ooooh — he had been planning to invest in Tae-jin’s business, but Do-kyung used his connection to convince him to withdraw, and ruin Tae-jin. Do-kyung looks pretty nervous, especially when he hears that Tae-jin asked Chairman Jang why and he told him Do-kyung asked him to do it.

But it’s news to Do-kyung that Tae-jin is in jail, and the boyfriend figures that he really did get his revenge. Mom asks what made Do-kyung go to such extremes, but we don’t hear his answer.

A flashback shows us that it was Jin-sang who talked Do-kyung into getting revenge, when they ran across Tae-jin in a restaurant. Do-kyung hadn’t been sure that he was the guy in the pictures with Hae-young in Paris, and had been willing to just move on. Jin-sang had told him to get drunk and see how he really feels.

Do-kyung had downed several shots, and Jin-sang had goaded him into action. He’d decided to make a bet with himself – if he throws a dart and makes a bulls eye, he’ll seek revenge. It’s up to Fate.

He’d backed as far away from the dartboard as possible, but despite the distance and his shaky hands, the dart flew right to the center of the board. Though he’d been trying to take the high road, Do-kyung couldn’t hide his satisfied little smirk.

He aims that smirk right at Tae-jin later, when he enters an elevator with Chairman Jang, ready to take Tae-jin down. Tae-jin had looked confused, but returned Do-kyung’s smile nervously.

Now Do-kyung asks Jin-sang to find out why Tae-jin is in jail — when news of Chairman Jang revoking his investment got around, all the other investors did, too, and filed lawsuits against Tae-jin for fraud. Do-kyung tells Jin-sang to find a way to get Tae-jin out of jail, no matter what it takes.

Whatever he does, it works, and soon Tae-jin’s lawyer tells him that most of the lawsuits are being dropped and he’ll be set free again. Tae-jin’s first question is to ask how Hae-young is doing, consumed with guilt over how he broke things off with her.

Hae-young can’t sleep that night, so she puts on music and dances this hilariously dramatic flailing dance. Mama Oh finishes the dishes and looks at her daughter in exasperation… then joins her in the dance. This is the best thing ever.

The very best part is that Dad is just watching them, like this happens all the time, and Mama Oh eventually sits with him and says she should call a fortune teller. Something ain’t right with that girl.

Jin-sang attempts to do some damage control and visits Tae-jin in prison, telling him that Do-kyung really only told Chairman Jang to be careful with his investments. He’s willing to help Tae-jin get out of jail, but Tae-jin says that he can take care of himself.

Poor Tae-jin still has no idea why Do-kyung did this to him – he never even met the guy. Not that it matters now, but Jin-sang brings Do-kyung the news that when he’s out, Tae-jin wants to see him. His advice is to be honest — oh now you decide honesty is the way to go.

Hae-young’s sadly romantic, moody bike ride in the park is ruined by a wayward soccer ball, and she’s forced to stagger home covered in scratches. It seems like the whole neighborhood gathers to point and laugh, especially when they see her skirt tucked up into the back of her waistband, heh. Poor Mama Oh, she can hardly bear the shame of her daughter’s life these days, and she quietly suggests to Dad that it’s time to let go of her.

So the next time Hae-young arrives home, all of her belongings are on the lawn, including the unused wedding gifts. There’s a note from her parents that she’s on her own now, and she finds that the pass code to the house has been changed.

While she’s trying to decide what to do, Hae-young runs into Tae-jin’s lawyer, and she asks him if Tae-jin is okay. She tries to stay cheerful, but once he’s alone, she bursts into tears, wondering how he can possibly be okay.

Do-kyung finally breaks down and answers one of the calls from the unknown caller, and just as he hoped and feared, it’s his ex-fiancee Oh Hae-young. He’s instantly angry, saying that only she would be so brazen as to call him as if she did nothing wrong, but all she says is, “I miss you.” That’s more than he can stand, and he throws the phone away with a furious scream.

He breaks his own rule and heads to a bar, downing shot after shot like a man on a mission. The loud music in the bar hurts his sensitive ears and he blows up, yelling that this is more noise than music, demanding it be turned down. Only now does he notice that Hae-young is at a table nearby, also drowning her sorrows.

He remembers her wish to go back to being strangers, and starts to leave, but he can’t ignore the tears he saw in her eyes. He goes back and demands to know who made her cry, and they end up sitting on some steps under a fall of cherry blossoms.

Seeing as how they seem to be equally miserable, Hae-young spills her guts – she was dumped the day before her wedding. She repeats that Tae-jin hadn’t been confident of his love, and laugh-cries at the absurdity of him saying that he couldn’t stand watching her eat. It’s almost a relief to finally say the truth out loud, though she’s unaware that she’s talking to the person who made it happen.

It’s like a dam bursts inside her, but Hae-young admits that it feels good to tell the truth just once, especially to someone she’ll never see again and who’s just as miserable as she is. She asks Do-kyung’s reason for being so downcast, but when he’s not forthcoming, she says again that they should not see each other again, and starts to leave.

Do-kyung finally speaks, saying a simple, “I’m sorry.” Hae-young asks him why but he clams up again, unable to tell her that he’s the reason her life was ruined.

Hae-young goes but stops in the street, overcome with her emotions and the alcohol she’s consumed. A hand reaches out and pulls her out of the road — it’s Do-kyung, and he hails them a cab and takes Hae-young home. He can’t explain why he’s doing this, he only tells her half-angrily, “Even if it hurts, still, live. If you survive, it means you’ve won.”

The words seem to change something in Hae-young and the next day she hires movers to remove her things from her parents’ lawn. Dad looks miserable and Mama Oh bursts into tears the moment Hae-young drives away, but they both know it’s time to push the baby bird out of the nest.

Hae-young finds herself a tiny little apartment, and she pep-talks herself the whole time she’s moving her stuff in. She ends up shoving her dresser halfway into the wall and starts ripping away the cheap drywall, and finds a small hidden door behind the hole. On the other side of the door is… Do-kyung’s apartment.

Unaware of where she is, only seeing the fancy sound equipment and mice furniture, Hae-young wanders into the room ooohing and aaahing. She gets an eyeful of chocolate abs when Do-kyung comes out of the bathroom in only a towel, and smiles as she breathes, “Wow… wow,” and Do-kyung gapes as another of his premonitions comes true.

COMMENTS

I’m really liking how this show is shaping up, with both Do-kyung and Hae-young fighting the pain of their romantic pasts, and how they experienced almost the exact same rejection yet have reacted to them in entirely opposite ways. The plot isn’t complicated but it really doesn’t need to be, with such great characters in such competent acting hands, who make Do-kyung and Hae-young so real and immediately relatable. In fact I’d venture to say that we really don’t even need Do-kyung’s clairvoyance visions to make their interactions and eventual love story interesting, as much as I like dramas with a supernatural element, but I am looking forward to seeing how it enhances their relationship now that they’re realizing that they seem to be too intertwined to keep doing the “we’re only strangers” thing.

At least now we know why Do-kyung set out to ruin Tae-jin and Hae-young’s wedding – he thought that Hee-ran was talking about his ex-fiancee Oh Hae-young, and since she left him at the altar, he wanted to see the same thing happen to her. So he interfered with Tae-jin’s business investor and that caused Tae-jin to cancel the wedding. The only problem is, it was the wrong Oh Hae-young, and Do-kyung ended up ruining the lives of two people who never did anything to him. It’s a pretty despicable thing to do even if he had gotten the right fiance, not that I blame him for being upset enough to do it… it’s barely been a year since his planned wedding to his Hae-young, and he thought she had already moved on and planned a life with someone else. But being upset enough to wish ill on someone, and actually acting on those wishes to the point that an innocent man goes to jail, are two different things, and it’s not a good sign that Do-kyung actually went so far as to seek revenge.

I do think that Do-kyung regrets it, now that he knows that it wasn’t his Oh Hae-young at all, and that his actions hurt two innocent people. He’s still not excused, because he only decided to make it right when he learned the truth — back when he thought it was his ex-fiancee who’d been jilted, he was fine with his decision to seek revenge (in his defense, he didn’t know Tae-jin went to jail). Maybe not completely fine, because he’s clearly miserable, but not uncomfortable enough to try to fix what he did, or even stop before actually doing it. He’s got a lot to answer for, on multiple levels, to make this right.

This show has some of the quirkiest, silliest, most hilarious characters I’ve seen in quite a while — there’s not one that I find boring or bland. Do-kyung’s family is particularly ridiculous, which makes his straight-man demeanor stand out that much more. It makes me wonder if he also has a weird quirky streak, but that whatever happened with his Oh Hae-young killed it. Luckily, I know just the Hae-young to help him find his wild side again — our girl has enough eccentricity for herself and him both. I really hope that’s where Do-kyung’s character goes, because I would love to watch him find his sense of fun and silliness as he falls for the New Hae-young.

The reunion scene so perfectly outlined what it is that I love about our Hae-young so much — in so many dramas, that scene would have been heavily played for sympathy. Hae-young would have been deflated and embarrassed to be remembered as the “wrong” Hae-young, the one everyone thought of as plain and boring, the one they wilted to see show up. But our Hae-young didn’t take offense, or let it get to her, and in fact she even had them in awe of her transformation and cheering for her awesome resilience and sense of humor within a few minutes of arriving. That right there is what makes her such a great character, that refusal to let the world beat her down. Instead she stands up and demands respect, commands their attention, and has them eating out of her hands, even to the point where at least one guy tries to ask her out. She’s an amazing, strong, feisty and funny woman, and she knows it, and she’s determined never to go back to being “dirt Hae-young” ever again. Let’s hope that spitfire personality stays lit once she’s actually faced with her old nemesis.

I really love both families, in fact, both Do-kyung’s and Hae-young’s. Do-kyung’s family (and Jin-sang by extension) are certainly free spirits, unafraid to show their artistically odd personalities to the world, which makes them extremely fun to watch. Ye Ji-won as Soo-kyung in particular is so interesting, as we’ve seen in her interactions with Hae-young so far — she does high-kicks for no reason, and holds a grudge for months just because she was looking forward to the food at Hae-young’s wedding. She’s so weird and mean, and yet I sort of think she’s awesome. Hoon is also delightfully immature and doesn’t care who thinks so (in fact he’s very reminiscent of Heo Jung-min’s Marriage Not Dating character, Hoon-dong, which can’t be a coincidence — he makes the immature man-child oddly endearing), and Jin-sang fits right in with the rest of them, silly and carefree despite being a lawyer. But Hae-young’s parents are just as adorably odd, with her mother who can hardly bear the shame of her embarrassing daughter yet goes all Mama Bear the moment anyone else criticizes her, and her father who seems to have resigned himself to his life with these strange women. I luff them both.

I think the show is so great as=is, that I almost don’t want to ruin what’s already a good thing by introducing the other Hae-young. I’m nervous about how her reappearance will get in the way of Do-kyung and Hae-young’s tentative new friendship, and send Do-kyung back into a spiral of pain and guilt and undermine Hae-young’s confidence right as she’s learning to stand on her own two feet. I feel like I’m bracing myself for a storm and wishing that she’d stay away a bit longer and let them bond, but I suppose the reunion with her is inevitable for both of them.

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