The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 7

by girlfriday

The housemates at casa de goblin are becoming their own strange little family one baby step at a time, and their awkward and hilarious friendship, semi-peaceful coexistence, or whatever it may be is definitely the best part of this show. It helps that everyone’s maturity level is about the same, because apparently if there’s one thing that transcends the living, the dead, and the otherworldly, it’s pettiness.

 
EPISODE 7 RECAP

Unable to touch the goblin’s sword, Eun-tak makes a last-ditch effort to go for the fairytale twist and plants a kiss on Shin’s lips. His eyes go wide and he just stands there like a statue, blinking in shock.

When she pulls away, he asks if she’s gone crazy. Eun-tak gets angry at that, arguing that she’s doing everything she can think of to make him prettier (thinking that this is what happens when she pulls out the sword), and that she’s the loser in this deal: “I’m sure you’ve done this lots of times, but that was my first kiss!”

His mouth hangs open and she grouses that she didn’t want to use it up like this, and suddenly reaches for his collar again to give it another try. He backs up and tells her to stay back, but now she’s determined to do anything to keep her end of the bargain, thinking that he’s going to take back the presents and kick her out of the house. Shin asks what she plans to do if it doesn’t work this time, and she says, “Then there’s only one thing left—true love.”

He starts walking to the door, and Eun-tak shouts after him that she’ll love him if she has to, because she’s not going to give her stuff back. Lol. He whirls around and she walks right into his chest, and she apologizes, especially for going to the trouble of making it snow.

At the mention of it, Shin makes the snowflakes freeze in midair. She asks meekly if he’s going to kick her out now, and he barks back that he’s not, and stomps off. Eun-tak happily trails after him with the reminder that he can’t go back on his word now, not after he signed her contract.

Back at home, Deok-hwa asks with tears in his eyes if Uncle Shin is really not coming back, and Reaper clutches the house deed to his chest and says gravely that Shin ended his immortal life, and that death is just another door that everyone will walk through someday.

Deok-hwa breaks down in big wailing sobs and cries at the foot of Shin’s chair for him not to go. He even takes out his shiny new credit card and cries, “I don’t need the card! Just come back!” Awww, you know that’s love right there.

Right on cue, Shin walks through the front door with Eun-tak, and Reaper gapes, clutching his house deed a little harder. Deok-hwa is just happy to see him again and Shin hugs him tightly as Deok-hwa cries, “Uncle, are you back? Are you back? I love you!”

Shin comforts him and says, “Yes I am. Speaking of which, will you give back the card?” Hee. Deok-hwa’s tears dry instantly. He clutches his wallet as he recites Reaper’s line about death being just another door, and suggests that Shin just go back where he was headed.

Reaper agrees, to which Shin requests that he return the house deed. Reaper directs his anger at Eun-tak and her lack of follow-through, and that reminds Shin to ask for the purse, perfume, and 5 million won he gave her.

Now all three of them are clutching their precious parting gifts from the goblin, and Eun-tak goes for the hail-mary: “Ajusshi, I love you!” Deok-hwa and Reaper stare at them, while Shin just shakes his head implacably. All of a sudden, Reaper shoves Deok-hwa out of the way and says into Shin’s ear, “I love you too! Ajusshi!” HAHAHA. Shin jumps back and yells at him to shut up.

With his parting gifts all repossessed, Shin meets with Grandpa and asks if he already burned the painting he gave him. Grandpa says he did, and Shin laughs it off hoping that it’s a joke. Grandpa rather enjoys making Shin sweat a little, and he says it’s his punishment for saying goodbye.

Grandpa says he’ll have Deok-hwa bring the painting back, and when Shin says he’s grateful and sorry, Grandpa asks if he could maybe stop trying to die and start trying to live. “Isn’t it a good thing that through you, somewhere in this world, someone who lived well can be given a strange and beautiful fortune, a miracle?” Grandpa asks.

Outside, Grandpa’s secretary gets out of his car and looks up at Shin’s mansion and wonders aloud, “A man who doesn’t age…” Uh, that’s not good.

Shin ponders the unexpected twist that the bride couldn’t pull out the sword, and also his vision of Eun-tak at 29 without him by her side. “Is it the future that changed, or the oracle that changed?” he wonders. He admits that he likes being back here, and calls himself thoughtless for being happy at that.

Reaper sits Eun-tak down to grill her, and she gives him the quick version about not being able to touch the goblin’s sword. Reaper grumbles that he came back alive, and she misinterprets the comment to be directed at her, agreeing that she almost got left behind in that field.

Reaper thinks in his head that she still doesn’t know what happens when she pulls out that sword. “Should I tell her? Then the goblin will die of anger. And this house will be mine,” he thinks.

Reaper wonders why she can’t touch the sword, and she asks if maybe the goblin was right about her not being his bride: “Will the real bride who can grab the sword show up? Will she… be pretty?” Lol.

Eun-tak figures that Shin won’t give her a hard time, but the very next morning, she can’t even take a bite of her steak without Shin passive-aggressively commenting on the house expenses going up with another mouth to feed. He wonders how they’ll do aallllll those dishes they have, and Eun-tak volunteers to do dishes.

Then while she’s washing dishes, Shin walks around behind her sighing that there’s sooooo much laundry, and wonders if he should just throw his clothes away. Are you reverse-Cinderella-ing her?

He sticks to her side the whole time she’s doing all these chores, and when he starts commenting on the dust in all the rooms, Eun-tak shakes out the wet towels right in his face.

She does it again and again, and then they start bickering about who’s got more resentment to air. She argues that he shouldn’t be so quick to assume that she isn’t the bride just because she can’t touch the sword, and that he might regret being mean to her later.

She tosses his own words back at him, about how he liked every day he spent with her, because the weather was good, or bad, or just so. He startles her by saying, “Yes. Today too.” The sudden swooniness catches her off-guard.

She asks why he’s giving her a hard time then, and he says those are separate things. She doesn’t think so, but offers to amend their relationship status then, if he doesn’t think she’s bride material. She suggests girlfriend to his boyfriend, but he says no. He shoots down acquaintance too, and when she suggests tenant, he tells her to pay rent then.

Later, Eun-tak complains to Reaper about it and says she and Shin are enemies now. Reaper suggests that maybe they need something more powerful than the goblin’s curse to beat it: “True love?” he offers. Eun-tak says she already tried that, thinking of the kiss, while Reaper asks what she tried exactly. Behind them, Shin hides his face behind his towel shyly and stammers, “Were you always the kind of girl to just say that stuff… about the kissing… to just anyone?”

She points out that she didn’t actually say it—he did—and argues that it doesn’t really have anything to do with him because it’s her kiss to tell. Shin: “Where is there a yours and a mine in a kiss? Even if there is, half of it is mine!” Eun-tak: “Fine, have half.” Shin: “No, I don’t want to! I don’t need it!” Eun-tak: “Fine, I’m going to keep it all!” Shin: “Do it! You’re the greedy one!” Pff, I can’t believe this is a fight. They stomp off in opposite directions, and Reaper mutters, “Some of us can’t even call because we don’t have business cards, and you guys are…”

Reaper gets so worked up that he storms into Shin’s room and demands that he kick Eun-tak out if she’s not the bride: “What, you don’t want to? I’m asking you to kick her out so we can live happily, just the two of us, like we used to!” LOL, this took a weird turn.

Reaper sounds like a jealous boyfriend, and Shin is confused at the description of them having lived cozily before she got here. Besides, Shin argues, Eun-tak knows too much about them to be kicked out now. Reaper sees right through him and says he just doesn’t want her to go, but Shin won’t admit it. Reaper thinks he’s happy that Eun-tak couldn’t pull out the sword because he gets to live and see her for longer, and Shin rambles that he’d be crazy to be happy about that when he’s been waiting to die for 900 years… except he’s totally grinning from ear to ear as he says it.

So then Reaper graciously offers to take her to the afterlife, since he and Goblin are such good friends, and he’s probably really annoyed by all the kissing and whatnot. Shin blurts in a panic, “Who says we’re friends?! Where is there friendship between us? Is cheering me on to die what a friend does?!” Reaper gets his big aha moment: “See? You’re happy right now that you didn’t die!”

Shin swears that he’s not, and that he’s just trying to keep his promise like a man because he signed a contract. Reaper snarls, “I guess you weren’t a man when you gave me the deed to the house.” Reaper storms out, leaving Shin calling after him in a futile attempt to get the last word in. I love that he’s taken to calling Reaper “saja,” which is short for “grim reaper,” but also means “lion.”

Shin reads over Eun-tak’s contract and smiles giddily to himself. Most of the clauses are protective: that he won’t kick her out of the house, that he won’t forget that he’s supposed to be her lamp and watch over her until she dies. It also asks him to show up when she summons him on the first snow each year, and to act as her boyfriend until she gets a boyfriend.

He finds her studying out in the dining room, and she says it’s to be near the snacks, since he stopped bringing them to her room ever since he stopped needing something from her. He takes issue with her getting snippy, but she warns him that you don’t mess with a senior about to take the college entrance exam.

She asks sweetly if he happens to know the answers to the test, which of course he does. He offers to tell her once she’s done solving her practice questions, and she suddenly lights up. Shin hesitates and starts to bring up the first snow, but she cuts in at the word “first” and tells him not to be too burdened—it was her first kiss, but… He cuts back in to stammer that he was going to say first snow, and they both get awkward.

The day of the college entrance exam rolls around, and Shin walks Eun-tak to the bus stop and gives her a lunchbox. She takes it huffily, noting that a lunch wasn’t really what she was hoping for. He offers to give her the test answers if she really wants, but she stops him before she’s actually tempted to hear them. Atta girl.

She brags that she’ll get them all right anyway, and Shin is so impressed that he pets her on the head affectionately, just like she taught him. It unnerves both of them, and they get so lost in the moment that they don’t even notice the bus arrive and take off with all the other students.

They realize how awkward it’s gotten and Shin says he’ll pat her on the shoulder very naturally, and Eun-tak says she’ll look at his watch very naturally. That makes her eyes pop out though, because she’s about to be late.

Shin: “Don’t worry. Have you forgotten that your boyfriend is a goblin?” She reminds him that he said he didn’t want to be her boyfriend, but he says, “That was a lie,” and grabs her hand and starts running.

Time slows as they run happily down the street together, and Shin takes them through a doorway and comes right back out after teleporting her to school. As he walks out, a bicyclist nearly runs into him and stops to yell, but Shin vanishes and reappears right in front of him. When the bicyclist passes, Shin gets a glimpse of his future—riding recklessly into traffic and getting hit by a car.

After the exam, Eun-tak comes out to see all the other students being greeted by their mothers, and can’t help but think of Mom. She looks at the sky wistfully and waves up at her with a smile.

Eun-tak heads home by herself, but when she arrives, she finds Shin, Reaper, and Deok-hwa standing by the door to greet her with a cake. Awwww. Reaper says it was his idea, Shin paid, and Deok-hwa picked it up, holding the cake out to her. That is so adorable.

Eun-tak is so touched that she bursts into tears, and the boys are taken aback. But she says through tears, “It’s because I’m so happy!” She decides to make a wish and asks to go to the movies with Shin, since she gets a discount for having taken the college entrance exam.

She blows out the candle and Shin tries to stop her, but he’s too late and he gets teleported three feet away, ha. Reaper and Deok-hwa are confused when he shows up behind Eun-tak, and he just tells them not to try and understand. Shin announces that her wish is granted and tells her to get ready to go to the movies, and the boys are disappointed when he doesn’t let them come along.

Reaper says he has something important to ask Deok-hwa, and then asks where he got his business card, describing its rectangular shape and four corners like it’s a foreign object. Deok-hwa says he got his from the family company, and Reaper whines, “I want one!”

Reaper thinks of something else he’s curious about, and asks Deok-hwa about being Sunny’s landlord. Deok-hwa confirms that he owns a building, and next thing we know, Reaper is standing across the street from Sunny’s chicken shop as she locks up for the night and heads home.

He follows her just out of sight, when a drunk customer runs into her and asks her to stay open for one more drink. Reaper glares, and all of a sudden, the drunk man flies way up into the air and lands in a bush. Well that’s not suspicious or anything! Sunny gasps and wonders why she keeps seeing such strange things lately, and runs home in a fright.

Shin and Eun-tak kill time before the movie by playing the toy claw machine in the arcade. Shin offers to win her anything she wants, only to fail miserably, and she snarks that it’s useless that he can summon gold when he can’t even get a toy out of a machine.

They settle in for the scary movie and Shin tells her not to be embarrassing and shout too much, and Eun-tak asks how scary it could be compared to her 19 years of a horror show life.

Ha, they’re watching Gong Yoo’s Train to Busan, and apparently goblins are terrified of zombies, because he screeeeeeeams bloody murder and sends popcorn flying everywhere like a big scaredypants.

She clamps a hand over his mouth and has to apologize to all their neighbors, and complains later that she didn’t get to pay attention to the movie at all because of him. She says she isn’t very hungry, so Shin gets petty and orders a single sandwich and doesn’t share.

Eun-tak asks why he’s still holding a grudge and why he bothered giving her all those gifts if he was going to take them back. She thinks it’s weird that he gave them to her like he wasn’t going to be around anymore, and then realizes that all the gifts were exactly what each person wanted.

“Like a farewell gift. That’s right, isn’t it—farewell gifts? You were going to leave us once that sword was out, weren’t you?” she asks. Shin reminds her that he said he’d prepare to go far away once he found the bride, and Eun-tak gets choked up as she asks where he’s going, and if he still wants to leave.

But he answers, “No, I don’t want to go. But if the bride really does appear, that choice will no longer be mine.”

She hangs her head at that, thinking that he means to leave with another woman someday, and he asks if she’ll let him go then. “No, I won’t,” she says, tamping down her tears. She tells him to just abandon her, and adds that she’ll leave first so that she doesn’t have to watch him go.

Deok-hwa drives Eun-tak to school the next day and hears that she’s still Cinderella (or Kongji, the Korean folk version) in the house, while she dubs Shin the evil stepmother.

Deok-hwa thinks it’s odd that his uncle, whose thousand-year wrath can be squelched with one glimpse at an idol girl group on TV, is nothing but a big grouch ever since Eun-tak came along.

He figures that she must really not be his type, and Eun-tak grumbles at the mention of girl groups and says that everyone says you’re supposed to get prettier once you go to college. “Just wait till I get into college!” she grinds out, cracking her knuckles.

She goes to fill out an essay application at a university and Shin arrives to pick her up with a bouquet of flowers. Eun-tak walks around campus and stops to stare at the baseball team, and freezes when she sees a ball hurtling right at her in the air.

She braces for impact, but a glove swoops in to catch the ball just inches from her head, and she looks up to see a handsome oppa standing over her. She smiles and then seems to recognize him: “Tae-hee oppa?” He recognizes her too and says she’s gotten prettier and taller, and pets her on the head.

In the distance, Shin drops his flowers and scoffs bitterly as he watches the whole exchange. He wonders jealously if that baseball player is the lunch date 29-year-old Eun-tak was waiting for in his premonition, and clouds roll in as lightning strikes overhead. Heh.

At home, Deok-hwa tries to get Shin out of his funk, but he just lies in bed and mutters, “He tousled her hair. I wanted to break his wrist.” He whines that he should’ve just had him play piano so that they wouldn’t have met, and Deok-hwa doesn’t understand a word he’s saying.

Eun-tak comes out of the shower and tousles her hair, thinking of Tae-hee oppa with a big goofy grin on her face. She flashes back to her childhood when she’d been a little girl waiting outside the batting cages and admiring him. She didn’t know then that Shin was in the batting cage right next to Tae-hee, and thought that the ajusshi was super annoying for cutting off her view of oppa.

She takes out her ice cream cake, and Shin zaps everything over to his side of the table and announces that he’s going to eat it all by himself. “I want to eat ice cream because it rained. Because it rained,” he says, clearly wanting her to ask about it.

He hoards the cake like a little boy and she calls him petty, and finally asks why he’s depressed. She guesses that it’s because of the sword, and wonders if it’s supposed to be pulled out at all, saying that they tried kissing and loving and nothing worked.

He argues that she didn’t mean the “I love you,” and she counters that he didn’t mean it either. She says he has a weird personality, and he says the same of her, but she says defensively that she’s young. Shin: “So what? You’re going to get old and I won’t! I’m going to stay young and beautiful!” Pfft.

She points out that not getting old doesn’t exactly make him young, and says she saw her first love today and has no room to see Shin as beautiful. He sputters, “What love?!” She brags that Tae-hee oppa is really good at baseball, and Shin crows that he’s so awesome at baseball, she doesn’t even know. I’m so embarrassed for you right now.

The next day, Shin storms into the baseball team’s locker room and demands to see Tae-hee, who comes out in slow motion like Shin’s about to fall in love with him too. Shin grouses without any introduction: “Were you… going to look like this? You’re the best looking one here!”

Tae-hee seems to recognize him and asks if he doesn’t remember seeing him when he was a little boy. Flashback to the batting cages: Little Tae-hee saw Shin swinging wildly next to him and tried to offer some batting pointers. Shin insisted that he didn’t need any help, so Little Tae-hee had asked if he wanted to make a bet.

It’s not like a goblin to ever pass up a wager, so Shin agreed that the first person to hit ten balls would get a wish granted. And then he proceeded to get his ass kicked by the little boy, who was way better at baseball, even then.

After winning the bet, Little Tae-hee ran home and found that his piano just up and vanished, just like he’d asked. And back at the batting cages, Shin played for real when no one was around to watch, hitting homeruns without breaking a sweat.

In the present, Tae-hee asks if he isn’t the same ajusshi, though he thinks it’s weird that Shin hasn’t aged a day. The only thing Shin can do is deny it, though it doesn’t seem convincing.

At home, Shin asks Reaper to help him out and erase Tae-hee’s memory, but Reaper isn’t inclined to help him out, even when Shin says rumors will spread and he’ll have to leave.

Shin says that Reaper was the one who wanted to live happily together, and Reaper counters that according to Shin, they never did in the first place. Shin leaves in a pissy mood, and turns back to light Reaper’s bean sprouts on fire out of spite, saying that he’ll regret not helping him out.

Eun-tak steals into Shin’s room and takes two copies of her contract with Shin out of the purse he took back from her. He catches her red-handed and wonders curiously why there are two contracts when he only signed one. She uses her book of poems as her excuse for being in there and stomps back to her room with it. She notices a line he’s written in the margin: “It was first love,” and thinks peevishly that he must’ve had a first love, upset all over again that she gave him her first kiss.

Her mood instantly lifts when Tae-hee oppa calls, and soon after, Shin stands on the roof of a high-rise like a goblin stalker, trying not to die of anger as Eun-tak meets Tae-hee for a date.

Shin comes home to a frantic Reaper, who’s pacing up and down not answering his ringing phone. It’s Sunny, but he’s freaking out because he doesn’t have anything to say to her without a business card, and begs Shin to answer for him.

But Shin’s still holding a grudge and refuses to answer for him. Reaper wonders where Eun-tak is, and Shin snaps that she’s busy roasting sesame seeds (a common metaphor for romance) at the ice cream shop, and Reaper wonders in his literal way why she’d roast them there.

Reaper is too panicked to care though, and just rushes over to the ice cream shop to interrupt Eun-tak’s date and demand that she answer the phone for him. Tae-hee bows, thinking that Reaper is her father, and Reaper is greatly offended and asks his name.

Eun-tak barks at Tae-hee not to say his name or look Reaper in the eyes, and Reaper says ominously that if she doesn’t answer the phone for him, he’s going to ask the boy’s name and write it down. Eun-tak takes the phone outside, and Reaper sits down with Tae-hee and mentions that he quit piano to play baseball.

Eun-tak thinks that Reaper’s lady friend will misunderstand if another woman answers his phone, so she tries to make her voice sound deep and acts like she’s “Kim Woo-bin’s” secretary, calling him Chief, and then Department Head. Sunny asks what kind of company promotes employees in one second, and says that he’d better show up at the café tomorrow, no matter what his title is, or he’s dead.

Eun-tak relays the message to Reaper and wonders where she’s heard that voice before, but Reaper wants to know what other personal information he should prepare before his date. She runs through the basics like age, marital status, blood type, assets, and ideal type, and the next day Reaper memorizes his stats on his way to the date.

So this time, instead of sitting there silently, Reaper rattles off his personal stats like a laundry list—he’s 34 years old, blood type AB, rents his house, will buy a car soon, and so on. He ends with: “And I missed you.”

Sunny’s jaw drops and she replies, “Me too.” He smiles the most adorable smile when she says that. She doesn’t see why he avoided her calls for so long if he really missed her, and he says he didn’t think she’d like him because he doesn’t have a business card.

He promises to answer the phone from now on and asks Sunny for her business card, wanting to know what kind of person she is. She leans in and says, “My face is my business card. It says it right there on my face: Pretty person.” He grins like a fool and agrees.

She asks what he likes, and he blurts, “Sunny-sshi,” making her swoon. When she clarifies that she meant hobbies and such, he says that he likes her unpredictability, which is more exciting than a drama to him. He says that she’s his new hobby, calling her both “like a plan of the gods, and like a mistake of the gods.”

She asks if he has a religion, and he starts to get up and leave, sighing that there’s yet another thing he doesn’t have that he’s supposed to. This time she’s prepared and shouts that he doesn’t need one, and orders him to sit down or die. When she wonders what his deal is, he starts to rattle off his stats again, ha.

After coffee, Sunny thinks they’re headed to dinner when Reaper says she already ate a whole hot dog and shouldn’t overeat, and that he has to go to a work dinner or pay a fine. She looks like she wants to give him a black eye.

Reaper and his reaper hoobae head to their work dinner, and that same bicyclist who nearly ran Shin over runs into Reaper, shoulder-checking him. Hoobae says that the man will receive retribution from the gods in a month’s time. Hm… is that what happens when you touch a reaper, or are they saying that it was already his fate?

Reaper arrives to pay for the work dinner (with company funds), though he belatedly realizes that the money is missing, and he’s been pickpocketed by the man who just bumped into him. Their reaper colleague says they have no choice but to put on their hats and file out one by one. Ha, reaper dine and dash?

But their plan involves leaving one man behind to take the fall, and our Reaper finds himself standing at the table alone at the end… and his hat has gone missing. Aw that’s mean! Reaper has no choice but to call someone for help…

Cut to: Shin sitting next to Reaper at the police station, saying that he’s never seen this man before in his life. Reaper mutters that he’ll trade him for Tae-hee oppa’s memory wipe, and Shin suddenly tells the police officer that they know each other, starting now.

Shin smoothly hands over his business card, and Reaper’s eyes go green with envy and he shouts, “You have a business card?!”

He’s still huffy about it as they exit the station, and when Deok-hwa runs up with tofu for Reaper to eat, he asks if Deok-hwa knew that Shin had a business card. Deok-hwa says of course he does—he owns their family’s whole company—and Reaper pouts jealously and stomps off alone.

Deok-hwa watches Reaper dodging around other pedestrians and asks why he’s always doing that, and then it dawns on him that this is that thing he heard them mention, about seeing something when he touches people. Shin confirms that Reaper sees a person’s past life when he touches them.

Deok-hwa asks if Shin has any special powers like that, and Shin says being alive is his special power. Deok-hwa trails after him like a puppy, teasing, “You don’t have anything other than making it rain, do you?”

Shin is furious when he walks into Eun-tak’s room and sees all her bags packed, and Reaper says she’s probably with Tae-hee oppa. She hangs up on Shin and doesn’t answer when he calls back, so Shin heads out to go threaten some ghosts to find out where Eun-tak is.

Deok-hwa delivers the scroll painting that Grandpa asked him to return to Shin, and he and Reaper decide to look at it for curiosity’s sake, thinking that it must be expensive.

Deok-hwa rolls open the portrait of the young Goryeo queen and says that she’s pretty (speaking of past lives…) and wonders if she was Shin’s ex-girlfriend or something.

But it’s Reaper who’s absolutely floored, and his face twists up in pain as soon as he lays eyes on the portrait. Time seems to slow, and a tear escapes, and another… and soon he’s crying and clutching his heart in agony.

We cut to Sunny looking forlornly out the window at her chicken shop, and then we flash back to Goryeo. The young king had come outside the palace walls and laid eyes on a beautiful young girl who was playing with friends and balancing bowls on her shoulders as she walked—his future queen.

He smiled at her and as soon as she noticed him, she lost her footing and the bowls shattered on the ground.

Samshin Granny calls it the start of a truly tragic love, and sighs, “Fate is so sad. Love isn’t a sin, so they may not have sinned…”

She’s talking to Reaper’s hoobae, who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but asks why she keeps raising his rent. He doesn’t seem to know that his landlady is Samshin Granny, and she just says in a deadpan voice that she keeps seeing the grim reaper since he moved in.

Shin finds Eun-tak singing at someone’s wedding (the lyrics go: “Among people countless as the stars I met you / We knew each other as if in a dream / My heart was full just giving but I received love too / It was all a miracle / Even if eternal time passes we’ll meet again / If our love is fate / If I’m your miracle”) and she smiles when she sees him in the audience.

They walk home together and she says that she got a second job, and she likes singing at weddings, except sometimes they make her a little sad because weddings remind her that she doesn’t have a mom to light the candle, or a dad to walk her down the aisle, or friends to bring her gifts. She says, “That’s why I think I obsessed about being the goblin’s bride. Because it felt like I was getting a family.”

Her eyes glisten with tears and she says she thought that a family had come to her like fate, and Shin starts to feel bad. But she says she’s the sorry one, and apologizes sincerely for not being able to pull out the sword.

She says that she’s working extra jobs and preparing to move out, and asks if he’ll just wait a little bit and give her a fifty percent discount on the nagging until she goes. Shin just quietly wraps his arms around her in a hug, and says that he can’t give her the discount.

She pulls away and asks in a quiet voice for forty-five percent then, and he starts laughing. All of a sudden he’s struck with massive pain in his chest from the sword, and it sends him reeling.

Alarmed, Eun-tak looks for some way to help him and reaches for the sword… and this time she can wrap her hands around the hilt. Omo.

She tells him to hold on and starts to pull the sword out, and it actually begins to move. But before she can pull it any further, he shoves her away, and she’s thrown so hard that she goes flying into the air, straight for the side of a truck.

Shin teleports behind her just as she’s about to crash-land, and he breaks the impact of her fall, sending the truck colliding into a row of cars with such force that they turn over like dominoes and burst into flames.

He gently puts her back down on her feet, and as he hugs her tightly from behind, he says in voiceover: “The oracle was right. The future I saw was right. Through this girl, I will end his curse of immortality and return to nothingness. The human lifespan is but a hundred years. Is the thing I’m turning around to look at one more time my immortal life? Or is it your face? I think it’s your face.”

 
COMMENTS

I didn’t think we’d loop back around to her being the sword-puller so fast, and I’m not really sure it’s a good thing, given how much circular angst it caused before. I’m not eager to go through that again, so I’m hoping for a change this time, whether she learns what the true consequences are, or Shin makes an active choice not to die. It’s promising that he went to such lengths not to die in the episode’s closing moments, so let’s hope that he means to try and live a little, and not just buy another round of goodbye presents. You might want to save the receipts this time. Just sayin’.

I don’t even know why she can touch the sword now, since their feelings for each other didn’t seem to palpably change. I thought he already loved her, and Eun-tak doesn’t seem to me any more or less in love with Shin than she was an episode ago. I don’t question their connection, since they obviously have feelings for each other and are happy together; I just don’t know what changed, unless it was actually an age thing and she needed to be twenty? Are her feelings sincere now and they weren’t before? I hope that this is a question the show intends to answer, because I don’t want to wave it away as fated to be and just accept it. If the goblin’s immortal life or death is riding on whether or not this is true love, I want to at least know the moment it happened.

But right now it’s Reaper fate I’m most curious about, because now that we know he sees past lives the way Shin sees future lives, I’m just waiting on pins and needles for him to touch Sunny and start connecting some dots. Not that I want their comical dates to go too serious, mind you, but I feel like we’ve been dancing around Reaper’s past and his amnesia for a while, and after finally seeing his reaction to the portrait of the queen, I want to dig into that story pronto.

On a character level, I’m glad to see Eun-tak growing up and preparing for independence, because even if Shin ultimately lets her stay in that house, it’s important to me that she grows up and starts taking care of herself, and that she lives her life by going to college and meeting regular boys her age. I thought she lit up beautifully when Tae-hee oppa made her heart flutter, and it made me wish for her sake that she could go live a normal life for four years and not have to deal with death and curses.

I liked hearing her say that she may have latched onto the idea of being the goblin’s bride because it meant she wouldn’t be alone in the world—we all saw it and understood her desperation to have a family, but I’m glad she’s figured it out for herself. That’s the sincerity that I saw—her genuine happiness to be greeted by the boys with a cake when she was feeling so alone after her exam—and I’m honestly more interested in that spark of genuine warmth she gets from the family as a whole, than in the romance. And maybe this is mean of me, but man I hope she dates Tae-hee oppa, because Shin’s jealousy is too delightful to end here. How funny is it that she has a first love in her past at such a young age, while the goblin is experiencing everything for the first time in his long life with her? Some jealousy will do him some good, I think. Or in the very least, it’ll do me some good.

 
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