The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 11

by girlfriday

Sunny becomes the focal point of this episode, which is a nice change of pace, though of course it really boils down to how much angst she causes one goblin and one reaper. If she thought Reaper was the weirdest man she’d ever met, she’s got another thing coming. One thing’s for sure—she won’t be confused about why these two guys are friends.

 
EPISODE 11 RECAP

After confirming that Sunny was Shin’s sister Kim Sun in a past life, Reaper asks what happens now. Next thing we know, Shin walks into Sunny’s chicken shop with Reaper in tow. With no explanation or context, he just grabs Sunny in a hug and cries, “Sun-ah!”

So of course Sunny thinks he’s crazypants, and asks if Reaper is just going to stand there and watch. Taking his cue, Reaper pries Shin away from her and asks him to cool it with the skinship, but Shin is beside himself still trying to reach out to her and cries in sageuk tone: “I am your brother! I missed you, Sun-ah!”

Sunny addresses Reaper and asks why he’s still hanging out with the guy who called them a fried egg (ha), so Reaper bravely explains that Sunny was Shin’s sister in a past life. She thinks the whole thing absurd, though it makes her smile to realize Reaper must’ve missed her a good deal to make up an excuse like this to see her.

Shin asks if she really doesn’t remember anything, and tells her that she was a Goryeo queen, and he was a warrior. Sunny says she does remember… that he owes her 5,000 won for sweet potatoes. She calls him crazy and shoves the boys out the door, where they run into Eun-tak on her way in.

Sunny tells Eun-tak to sprinkle salt behind them to keep them away for good, and Eun-tak can barely hold Shin back from chasing after Sunny again.

At home, Eun-tak and Reaper have a stare-down, and she asks for an exchange of information. She starts to ask if Sunny is an old girlfriend of Shin’s, but at Reaper’s expression, she realizes that isn’t the case.

Reaper confirms that it’s definitely nothing like that, and then it’s his turn to ask. But Eun-tak cuts him off and says it’s a secret, knowing that he’s curious whether Sunny is seeing other men. He calls it unfair, but Eun-tak calls it loyalty.

Shin returns to the chicken shop day after day, with some new offering each time: the persimmons that Sun used to like, the shoes Sun used to like, clothing in Sun’s favorite colors. Yeah like, 900 years ago! Each time, Sunny shoots him down coldly.

She points out how busy she is, as business is suddenly booming, but Shin says that’s his doing too. Eun-tak returns to the shop after a delivery and scowls to see Shin there yet again, and he shuffles off dejectedly.

Sunny asks Eun-tak if she really has to date that guy of all guys, and suggests that maybe instead of bringing useless gifts, he should just buy chicken every time he comes by.

Eun-tak turns to Deok-hwa for answers, hating that she’s so suspicious of something romantic between Shin and Sunny. Deok-hwa just offers up the truth right away: that Sunny was Shin’s little sister in her past life, which Reaper must’ve discovered by touching her hand. Waitaminute… how do YOU know this?

Eun-tak recalls the moment that Reaper and Sunny held hands, which confirms Deok-hwa’s tidbit about grim reapers and their special ability.

At home, Shin asks Reaper if Sunny is really his sister, and if he hasn’t seen anything else in her past. Reaper reminds him that Sunny broke up with him, but he tells Shin not to take it too hard since she can’t remember her past life.

Shin sighs that he probably ought to leave the past in the past, since Sunny has her present life. He just wishes that he’d been able to do all the things he wanted to do for her, back when they lived in the same time. Shin: “She was such a modest, elegant, and dignified child. How did her character change so?”

Reaper huffs that there’s nothing wrong with Sunny’s character, getting defensive. Shin just counters that Reaper can stop trying to get back together with her, suddenly protective of his human sister being romanced by a grim reaper.

Reaper quickly backpedals and says that they should leave the past in the past, and Shin warns, “Not until there’s dirt in my eyes! Get away from my sister!” Reaper wonders to himself, “I know this drama. I’ve seen it a lot in the mornings…” heh.

Sunny asks Eun-tak if she believes in past lives, and Eun-tak says she does, sharing what she’s heard about souls having four lifetimes—one to plant seeds, one to grow, one to harvest, and one to use what’s been harvested. She says that there’s no telling which lifetime they’re living now, but that likely they have past lives and future reincarnations.

Sunny likes the sound of that, and asks if Eun-tak has heard anything else. Remembering Shin’s sad story about his past, Eun-tak just tells Sunny that the Goryeo queen was someone who was very brave in the face of love.

Sunny decides that she wants to go talk to this so-called oraboni of hers, so Eun-tak brings her to the house, where Shin and Reaper just gape at her awkwardly. Sunny is surprised that the boys live together, and Shin adds that Eun-tak lives here too.

Reaper offers her beer, but she snaps that she didn’t say he could speak to her. That makes Shin tsk-tsk at her character, and both Eun-tak and Reaper turn to him with warning glares. Heh, I love it when they gang up on him.

Sunny asks for proof that she’s Shin’s sister, so Shin shows her the scroll portrait. She doesn’t remember anything about Kim Sun, though Eun-tak finds it curious that Sunny always said that she was waiting for a king.

Sunny just thinks that the girl in the portrait is young and beautiful, and asks if she lived a long and happy life. The room falls silent, and Eun-tak leads Reaper out of the room to give the siblings a chance to talk.

When Sunny asks if the queen was unhappy, Shin begins his story by saying that he spent more days reading her letters than he did seeing her face, and that her letters gave him the strength to endure.

Goryeo. Tensions rise in the palace with every new word of Shin’s victories on the battlefront, and the young king Wang Yeo’s aim starts to falter during archery practice, which the queen watches from a distance.

Snakey eunuch Park Joong-heon advises the king to send Shin a letter, not praising his victories, but threatening him with the safety of his sister. The king is so tense that he snaps his bow.

Sun watches the king from a distance as he turns from archery to books, sighing that he hasn’t come to see her once, and is the type of man to make a woman fall ill.

The king isn’t paying attention to his books though, and sits there remembering the night he and Sun ran to each other in the palace, under the falling cherry blossoms.

Eunuch Park persists in telling the king that someone of low birth should only be given a certain amount of power before it becomes their own demise, and it makes the king paranoid that someone will try to poison his queen.

He reacts violently when the queen is given a tonic, and he overturns the tray in an angry fit, shouting for her not to drink any tonics, no matter who brings them. He doesn’t explain why though, and just appears to be acting erratically to everyone else.

On the day that Shin returns triumphantly from battle, the king bursts into Sun’s room and demands to know which of them she’d wish to be alive in the end: Shin or the king?

She can only shed a tear at his horrible question, and the king says bitterly that it must not matter much to her, since she doesn’t have anything to lose in either scenario. She calls him ugly (it’s a generic word that can mean everything from ugly to stupid, but it’s also the term Shin used affectionately on her), and he grows livid, thinking it an insult.

He says he doesn’t know anymore who his enemies are, whether they’re the barbarians, or her brother. “Park Joong-heon is your enemy,” she replies, standing firm.

The king declares, “You will have to choose—whether you will live as my woman, or die as the sister of a traitor.”

We all know what choice she made.

Back in the present, Reaper sits glumly on the front stoop, while Shin tells Sunny that his sister lived a short life, but he thinks there were moments of happiness in it, “Because until the moment she closed her eyes, she was looking at that dummy.”

The story brings a sharp pain to Sunny’s chest, and she asks after the king and whether he was reincarnated too. Shin doesn’t know, and when she asks if the king was good-looking, he laughs and says that’s one thing that’s remained consistent about her across lifetimes. She asks why he speaks of Sun so ardently, as if he’s lived from then till now and remembers her directly. He says, “You may not believe it, but that’s because I’ve lived carrying those memories.”

She doesn’t believe him, and says she came mostly because of the gifts he kept bringing her, which made her think that he had regrets about not being able to do those things for his sister, which made her a little sad.

Shin says that at times like this, she really does seem like Sun, but Sunny asks him not to use banmal with her, and not to expect to suddenly be friendly. After all, she points out, estranged siblings can be awkward as it is, and they’re estranged by whole lifetimes.

Sunny grouses when Reaper doesn’t show his face before she leaves, but he’s waiting outside and follows her down the driveway like a hangdog puppy. She asks why he’s following if he’s not going to hold onto her, and he asks if he can do that.

She asks what happens to them after that, and he has no answer. She mutters that he’s ugly, the same thing that Sun had said to the king, and walks off with a sigh.

Shin wonders if Sunny is really his sister, and asks Reaper if she left well. “She always leaves well,” Reaper sighs. Reaper wants to know who drew that portrait of Sun, and Shin says, “Wang Yeo. It’s the image of my sister, but it’s the image he saw, containing his regret, his sin, and his longing.”

Shin guesses that it was likely his final act in life, and Reaper asks, “After killing everyone like that?” Shin repeats, “After killing everyone like that.”

Eun-tak is suddenly struck with worry and heads to the chicken shop to check on Sunny, and sure enough, she’s slumped over at a table, covered in sweat and looking like death. Sunny says she doesn’t even believe in past lives, but ever since leaving that house, everything hurts.

She clutches her chest and says it hurts here, or someplace deeper, “As if someone heartless is walking through my heart and causing it to sink.”

Eun-tak wraps Sunny in her coat and helps her home, and just outside Sunny’s apartment, they run into Hoobae Reaper, who’s shocked to see the goblin’s bride here. Sunny says he’s the upstairs neighbor, and Eun-tak hurriedly takes her inside. Hoobae Reaper is amazed at how small the world is. You’re telling me.

While Eun-tak tries to bring her fever down, Sunny says she saw once that Reaper had a goblin husband and wife in his cell phone contacts, and asks if Eun-tak and Shin are the goblin couple. Omo.

Eun-tak freezes up at that, and Sunny guesses that Eun-tak isn’t going to tell her about what Shin and Reaper really are. Eun-tak can only apologize, and Sunny wonders if she’ll have to break up with Reaper for good. She asks if Eun-tak is a regular human, and seems to rest easy when she confirms it.

Eun-tak walks home and can sense that Shin is walking behind her. She asks how long he’s been following her, and he doesn’t miss the opportunity to toss her a line and says, “Every step you walked, I walked with you.” She beams.

Eun-tak feels bad for Sunny, who basically went from a totally normal life to a sudden genre-switch. Eun-tak figures that her own life was weird enough to begin with that goblins and grim reapers weren’t all that strange to her, but Sunny isn’t exactly equipped to suddenly have a goblin oppa and a reaper boyfriend.

Eun-tak wonders if maybe she has a past life she doesn’t remember either, and if she might’ve crossed paths with Shin in a previous life too. She hopes that Sunny really is Shin’s sister because she’s a good person. Shin doesn’t think she’s that good a person, which Eun-tak just chalks up to sibling rivalry.

She wishes she had an oppa like Shin, and then remembers, “I have an oppa too! Tae-hee oppa!” Indignant, Shin stops in his tracks and accuses her of being this close to taking Tae-hee to her favorite restaurant in Canada. Lol, you can’t be pissy over things she didn’t do yet!

She says that she’s only ever going to go there with Shin, but he spits back, “Yeah right! You do go!” She wonders how he knows, and he runs away from her like a child.

It’s graduation day for Eun-tak, and she sits quietly at her desk as the other girls take group pictures and celebrate. The class president surprises her with a phone call, and suggests that they keep in touch. Eun-tak agrees with a little smile, having finally made her first living friend in the world.

Then it’s time for the parents to be let in to congratulate their kids with flowers, and Eun-tak looks especially dejected as she sits there alone. But once the crowd clears the doorway, a familiar pair of snazzy red heels appears, and Samshin Granny struts into the classroom and gives Eun-tak a hug.

Samshin Granny pats her on the back and says she did well, and that her mom would be proud of her. Eun-tak remembers the time this same woman gave her spinach on her birthday, and asks why she’s getting a hug.

Granny pets her on the head and touches her face sweetly, saying that it’s because Eun-tak is pretty, and she was very happy when Eun-tak was born. Suddenly a memory of the old grandma who wiped away her tears as a little girl comes back to her, and she realizes that it’s the same grandma.

Granny shushes her with a smile and hands her a bouquet to congratulate her. On her way out, Granny stops in front of Eun-tak’s nasty teacher and says to her, “Child, could you not have been a better teacher?” The teacher bursts into tears right then and there, and Granny levels a stare at her before walking off.

The teacher runs out of the room wondering why she cried, and in the hallway, Shin walks past her and recalls seeing her face in Joseon. He narrates that every hundred years or so, one or two people are reborn with the same face they had in a previous life.

Joseon, 1861. An innkeeper with that teacher’s face serves Shin a meal, and he sees far into her distant future, where he describes to his companion a strange world where they speak the same language, but people seem to cherish a piece of scrap metal as if it were a precious child.

He mimes what he saw. Hahaha, it was a vision of high-schoolers tapping on their cell phones and posing for selfies. He tells his companion to remember this rectangular object, for future investment purposes.

In the present, when Shin enters the classroom and sees Eun-tak, he remembers now that he caught a glimpse of her looking exactly like this, back in Joseon when he had seen a vision of that innkeeper’s future life. He realizes that they did cross paths once, and didn’t know it.

She waves happily to see him there, and as they walk out, Shin keeps staring at her face and wonders how he could’ve seen her then. She asks when, and he says he saw her from a very long distance, calling it a strange and beautiful thing.

Eun-tak asks what he saw exactly, and he says he saw his first love in Joseon. Well that’s not the thing to say! She scoffs and clips out in shortened teen-speak that she’s not curious and didn’t ask, and he asks what strange language she’s speaking.

He demands to know who gave her those flowers—was it Tae-hee oppa, he grounds out jealously. She says that if Tae-hee oppa had come, she wouldn’t have sent him away, and brags that she has other friends to bring her flowers.

She asks Shin to take her picture, and then when she takes the camera, he keeps posing for her, thinking she’s going to take one of him. Instead, she keeps bypassing him to take shots of the school and her classmates, to remember the good and the bad. Poor goblin just stands there trying to look pretty for the camera, to no avail.

Thinking of the new friend she made on her last day of school, she supposes that good things come late, just like Shin. He takes that literally and says he tried to come early, and adds that Deok-hwa had to work and Reaper is depressed, but they passed on their congratulations.

Eun-tak sees that Reaper came anyway, as did Sunny. Shin looks over at them and guesses that they came to see each other, not the graduate, and Eun-tak gets an idea and leads Shin through a door portal.

Sunny admits that she came here to see Reaper, thinking that seeing his face would help her make a decision. “But seeing your face… I just like it,” she says. He ventures a tiny smile.

They relocate to a coffee shop and she asks about his research, wanting him to share his findings and return her ring next time. She asks him to give her flowers to Eun-tak since that’s what she bought them for, and she’s confused when Reaper passes his bouquet over to her.

He says that his are for Sunny, because that’s what he bought them for. “I wanted to give someone flowers, just once,” he says timidly. She’s touched, but it makes her ask again who he is, and Reaper knows that she won’t believe him, but admits that he doesn’t know. She sighs that everyone in that house says unbelievable things and must be unbelievable beings, and that there are never any answers for her and Reaper, and everything seems headed towards tragedy for them.

Shin gives Eun-tak her mother’s bankbook with the insurance payout as a graduation gift, though Eun-tak says she can’t access the money until Aunt signs over her legal claim to it. Shin tells her that he got Aunt to sign off on it, and that the present is from her mother and he’s just the messenger.

Her eyes fill with grateful tears, and she thinks she won’t be able to spend any of it because it came from Mom. He says that her mother would’ve wanted her to use it, and that it would’ve been her deepest wish to provide for the 9-year-old daughter she left alone in this world.

Eun-tak wonders how Aunt and her cousins are doing, and we cut to them being released from jail. Aunt’s memory seems to return to her, and she vows to track Eun-tak down and get that money back, and her daughter thinks to start looking for her at colleges, since Eun-tak surely would’ve gotten into a good school.

Reaper comes by Shin’s room with a new death note, and Shin guesses that it’s for Grandpa, but Reaper says it’s for Eun-tak. Again the card is blank to Shin’s eyes, but Reaper says it’s a deadly fall that happens in two weeks.

He wonders why Shin isn’t cursing god, but Shin figures that this will happen countless times, and he can’t lose it every single time. He thinks of Samshin Granny’s warning that Eun-tak would face death again and again, until one day he wouldn’t be able to stop what’s coming.

She’d called his choice a childish one, and said the best course of action was to pull out the sword. Shin says now as if responding to her, “I’m not going to try my best.”

Shin sits Eun-tak down and shows her the death note, and tells her it’s hers. He admits that he’s been keeping a secret from her, and tells her the truth about being fated to die if she doesn’t pull out his sword. She realizes that all of those accidents weren’t accidents, and he confirms that death will keep coming for her as long as she doesn’t pull out the sword, and that it’s just the fate she was born with as the goblin’s bride.

Eun-tak says with tears in her eyes, “God is so cruel, to you and to me.”

She cries herself to sleep that night, and then in the ensuing days, she hilariously flip-flops from one extreme to the other, just like Shin did early on. First she decides that she’ll just die and be reborn and come find him again, and he passively agrees.

Then she decides that she’ll pull out the sword, since he could live forever and never meet another bride. Again he agrees. Then finally, she comes to him crying and declares that they’ll die together so that neither of them has to be alone.

She’s quivering, and Shin stops humoring her and says sincerely, “Ji Eun-tak, look at me. You’re not going to die. I’m going to make it that way. I’m going to stop it. I’m going to stop all of it.”

She bursts into tears and he hugs her close, apologizing for the fate she faces because of him. “But we have to cross this,” he says, “I don’t know what door we’ll go through, but I won’t ever let go of your hand. I promise. So trust in me. I may be a bigger person than you think I am.”

The next day, Eun-tak heads out for work, and Shin tries to stop her because it’s too dangerous. But she argues that even if she’s going to die tomorrow, she has to live today, and living locked up in a house afraid of death isn’t living.

“So I’m going to work, and prepare for college, and walk the same path I’ve always walked, and come home, because that’s life. So you die trying to save me, and I’ll die trying not to die. I trust you,” she says. She argues that she has too many things to live for, most of all him. He relents and tells her to summon him if she senses any danger, and then spends the day pacing in the house like a worrywart.

When Shin’s hands start to smoke, he senses that he’s about to be summoned, though he doesn’t look amused when she calls him to fix a flickering street lamp that she deems dangerous.

She continues to abuse the summoning privileges, calling him when she sees a dangerously handsome man in the street, or when she spots a pretty outfit that’s dangerous for her bank account. When she summons him and says that she missed him so much she couldn’t breathe and that was dangerous, he smiles the cutest smile ever and says, “Me too.”

He must really be in a good mood, because it suddenly rains down cherry blossoms in the dead of winter.

Later, Sunny walks down the same street and gapes at the unseasonal bloom.

Reaper contemplates the jade ring and heads to Sunny’s shop, which is empty for the night. He sits at the table where she was drinking earlier and starts to leave the ring on table, when he hears a noise at the door.

He’s so startled that he drops the ring, and in his haste to look for it, he’s nearly discovered by Sunny, who’s returned to the shop because she forgot her phone. She doesn’t seem to see him, despite having already walked into the room, and he quickly dons his invisibility hat and disappears out of view.

He’s relieved when she picks up her phone and walks out, but then she comes right back inside, holding a cherry tree branch. She starts to calculate someone’s height and guesses that it’s about this high… and swipes the branch right over his head, knocking his hat to the ground. Eep.

Reaper materializes right in front of her the second the hat comes off, and they stare at each other in shock.

Sunny shakes as she says this is the answer, and calls it so unbelievable that it makes everything else a little believable, like how he knew her name, why he doesn’t have a name, and why he never had answers.

She knows he did something to her last time and asks him not to do it again, and he assures her that he won’t (erase her memory), and will just be found out.

She asks again what he is, and this time he answers, “I’m a grim reaper. I knew I shouldn’t, but I dreamt of a happy ending. But as expected, it’s tragedy. Shall we break up now?” Tears stream down her face as he waits for her answer.

Eun-tak texts Shin an update that she’s finished her college orientation and registered for classes, and her two remaining ghost friends walk along with her while chattering away about boyfriends.

The bitter ghost girl who always talks about her ex convinces Eun-tak to go deliver a message for her, so the three of them head to the ex-husband’s office building that night. Eun-tak checks her lighter to make sure she’s got backup, and finds the ex-husband at his desk.

He takes her up to a precariously high landing on the side of the high-rise building, which seems like a Very Bad Idea for someone who has a pending death note involving a fall! Come on, now. It doesn’t really occur to her because she’s busy passing on the ghost’s message that she knows all about the cheating ex-husband using her life insurance payout to buy his mistress gifts.

Eun-tak gets fired up on the ghost wife’s behalf, and the husband grows increasingly agitated, especially when Eun-tak starts talking to the ghost right in front of him. The ghost wife continues, and Eun-tak repeats, “Is that why you pushed me off the roof that day?”

It hits Eun-tak like a ton of bricks, the crap she’s just stepped into, and she looks around nervously. And in that very moment, her death note changes. That’s no fair!

The ghost wife says that she’s got an incriminating recording, which only makes the husband more agitated to hear. Eun-tak worries that this has gotten out of hand and says they could all die like this, but the ghost wife says she’s already dead, not caring that Eun-tak isn’t.

Unsurprisingly, the murderer husband’s first thought is to push Eun-tak off the building, and he starts to back her towards the railing. Eun-tak stammers that she really wasn’t planning to call her boyfriend for this, and warns the man that her boyfriend is going to be pretty pissed.

The husband just chuckles, so Eun-tak takes out her lighter and blows out the flame. In an instant, the husband gets slashed in the back and goes tumbling down the staircase.

Eun-tak looks up to see Shin standing up above, his goblin sword in hand. He sighs, obviously upset with her, and she ekes out an apology in a tiny voice.

Shin kicks the husband all the way to the police station and says, “Go receive your human punishment. If you receive my punishment, you’ll die.” The husband crawls into the police station while babbling his confession.

The ghost wife apologizes to Shin, who doesn’t look sympathetic. He approaches her, but Eun-tak jumps in between them to defend her friend, and he argues that she almost died tonight.

She knows, and hurriedly tells the ghosts to go on their way because she’s going to be in some trouble. The ghost wife thanks Eun-tak sincerely for listening to her, and the ghosts vanish.

Eun-tak is quiet until they get home, and she asks meekly if Shin is still mad at her. He turns around like he’s going to yell at her again, but this time he just grabs her in a bear hug and says he’s not mad—he was worried.

She asks why it feels like she’s in trouble, and says that her heart stings. Shin argues that it can’t sting worse than his, like he went to hell and back countless times in the past hour.

She sighs that they’re a pitiable pair, and he says she’s wrong. She calls them unfortunate then, and he says no to that too. She asks if he’s done being mad at her now, and again he says no. To retaliate, she says that in college she’s going to go on lots of blind dates and wear short skirts, which of course gets a resounding “No!”

Reaper and Hoobae meet for coffee, and Hoobae notes that Reaper isn’t looking so good these days. He’s here on official business, to ask Reaper to file the official paperwork for his other missing person (not Eun-tak), and Reaper says there’s nothing to report really, since he doesn’t know anything.

His other missing person is a soul he ran into twenty years ago—someone who was dead, and seemed to have been lingering here a very long time. The soul wasn’t afraid of grim reapers, which Reaper had never encountered before, and he got away.

At the chicken shop, Eun-tak’s ghost friend introduces a new face in town, who’s been around a long time and has a lot of know-how, and even got away from a grim reaper twenty years ago. Eun-tak starts to say that she had a similar experience when she was nine, when the man enters in slow motion, wearing a plain white hanbok and looking creepy as hell.

He walks up to Eun-tak with purpose and then lifts his face… Ohmygod, it’s evil eunuch Park Joong-heon. He reaches out a decayed hand and says, “It’s nice to meet you. So you’re the goblin’s bride.”

He licks his lips, revealing a tongue so black it looks like it’s covered in ink, and Eun-tak looks up at him, terrified.

 
COMMENTS

Well, consider me creeped out. That guy is way scarier as a dead guy. It was an effective entrance for the only real villain that this story has, other than the nebulous fate or god, and I look forward to what kind of trouble Park Joong-heon will infuse into the present-day storyline. I do wish the setup for his introduction had been subtler; this show is so in-your-face with the exposition, and it could’ve been an interesting mystery if we had even heard of this dead man who’s not afraid of reapers before today. I imagine that he’ll have a lot of beef with both Reaper and Shin, and that Shin will want very much to get his revenge for everything he lost because of this man’s evil tongue. That’s a conflict I want to see play out (hopefully for longer than one episode), especially now that Shin is the one in a position of power. I mean, what good is being a god if you can’t smite your enemies, right?

I’m glad that Shin told Eun-tak the truth about death coming after her (finally, no secrets between them), though it then annoyed me greatly that she forgot his very specific warning not to go to high places and put herself in danger anyway. I was with her about living your life even with death on your tail, but then she went and nearly got herself killed, and I was rolling my eyes at her stupidity. I suppose I should just be grateful that she went through her death angst pendulum on fast-forward, and we got to see the comical highlight version instead of in real time, after we watched Shin go through it about three hundred times in the first half of the drama. At least he’s actively fighting fate now (and maybe god) and trying to live, which is a relief. I was touched by Samshin Granny stopping by on Eun-tak’s graduation day, and it made me hope that Granny was being sincere about just having a particular fondness for Eun-tak, and wanting her to survive. I know she and Shin are at odds, but I would like to believe it’s because they both love Eun-tak. It makes up for her having been so alone in the world before, to have gods looking out for her, and being a literal godmother to her on a day when she needed her mom.

The one thing I really wish for Goblin is that it would pick up the pace, because while I enjoy the episodes, I find that every big revelation is exactly what we expected and weeks later than when we wanted it. We all knew who Reaper and Sunny would end up being, so the fact that it took until Episode 11 for Shin to reunite with his sister is a bit frustrating. The development makes me happy—any forward movement makes me happy in this show—I just want everything faster, so that we can get past the information we already know, and learn some new things for a change. And if Sunny isn’t going to remember her past life, I want Shin to make a connection with her in the present day as her oraboni now. His attempt to appeal to her taste from a century ago was hilarious, and I want him to keep trying to win her over, even if he fails miserably at it.

I also want more from Reaper and Sunny’s relationship, because the bittersweet yearning is beautiful in light of their tragic love story, but in the present they haven’t even fallen in love, and they keep breaking up. Could we give them a chance to date first? Or better yet, let’s have Reaper finally catch up and find out that he’s the king, and actually deal with the consequences. I know it won’t be pleasant—broken bromance and all—but isn’t it also the thing we’ve been waiting for all this time, that will finally change the game? I know it will bring more angst, but at least it will be different angst, which I would prefer. Especially since Reaper thinking that a reaper-human romance is impossible is pretty much the least of his worries, except he doesn’t know it. Is it bad that I hope the villain is here to blow the lid off of everyone’s secrets, which makes me root for him a little?

 
RELATED POSTS

• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 10
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 9
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 8
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 7
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 6
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 5
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 4
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 3
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 2
• The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 1