Tomorrow With You: Episode 4

by girlfriday

Hey everyone, thanks for being patient while we caught up with recaps—it was a busy weekend for us! I’m just popping by for an episode, and let’s just say I’m happy it was this one, because the romance really takes off in this hour and I had to keep reminding myself to write about it instead of just rewinding and squealing. Lee Je-hoon and Shin Mina are just a good drama pairing, but I love that their relationship feels realistic despite the fantasy surrounding them—minus the time travel, they could just be two normal people having a funny, awkward courtship in real life.

 
EPISODE 4 RECAP

Ma-rin waits expectantly on the subway platform of Namyeong Station, where she and So-joon survived the subway crash ten years ago. She’s finally remembered him from that first fateful meeting and texts him to meet her. Meanwhile So-joon has traveled to the future, and vanishes into thin air when he misses the train back, in a future where he’s now dead.

In voiceover he says, “‘Don’t go,’ she said. I’ve disappeared, and I don’t know if this is a dream, or the world I live in, or if I’m falling endlessly into time, but strangely all I can think about is that she said to me, ‘Don’t go.'” Ma-rin waits for hours, but So-joon doesn’t show. We finally see him lying unconscious in a tunnel next to the train tracks at Namyeong Station.

She finally gives up and heads out of the station just as an ambulance drives past her, and on the bus the latest news on the radio is about an unidentified man who was discovered near the train tracks. A second later, Ma-rin gets a call from the hospital that sends her running.

She rushes to the emergency room just as So-joon walks out, and she asks if he’s okay. But he just stares at her for a long while and says it feels like a dream. He wonders if he should’ve gotten injured or something, seeing how worried she was about him.

He says he got her text about remembering who he is, and she admits that she was thrilled and a little amazed to realize he was the man from the subway seven years ago, and so relieved to know that he was alive and doing so well. But then she got the phone call from the hospital and her stomach dropped thinking that something had happened to him, and wondered what kind of trick fate was playing.

So-joon says, “Then let’s live together,” which she hears as, “Let’s both live.” She says of course they’re going to live long lives, and he replies, “You promised to live with me.” She suddenly realizes the double meaning and asks what he meant, and he just smiles back at her. Cute.

They’re interrupted when So-joon’s friends Se-young and Ki-doong arrive to pick him up, and So-joon insists that Ma-rin take his wallet and get a cab, since she left her purse in his car.

So-joon whines like a kid in front of his friends and plays the sympathy card to go home early, though Se-young tries to hold him there to get an explanation for why he was passed out near the train tracks. He says he was drunk, and Se-young thinks it’s bizarre to see him alone with a woman or passed out drunk, two things she’s never seen him do.

Ki-doong covers for him so that he can slip away before she asks any more questions, and she pouts that it feels like Ki-doong and So-joon are keeping secrets from her.

She finds it suspicious that So-joon suddenly became rich after his parents died and doesn’t let her come near his house anymore, and that Ki-doong dropped everything to work under So-joon. She thinks that Ki-doong is wasting his life just picking up after So-joon, which he’s clearly sensitive about. But he insists that there are no secrets to be uncovered.

Ma-rin struggles not to peek inside So-joon’s wallet, and So-joon does the same with her purse… until she texts him not to look inside, which makes him open it up instantly.

Ma-rin has about an ounce more self-control than he does and waits a while before caving. She opens up his wallet to find her picture tucked inside next to his ID, and she tries to remind herself not to be swayed by him.

So-joon reads her resume and thinks that he’ll at least be able to take care of her financially, and then remembers Future Ma-rin asking him to call her Kkot-soon instead of Bap-soon. He tries out the nickname but can’t manage to stomach it.

They meet the next day for lunch so they can get their belongings back, and when Ma-rin arrives at the restaurant, Director Kim’s secretary is spying on her from the lobby. They eat inside a private room with a lavish spread, and he can’t stop grinning at her.

She playfully acts like they’re here for a hostage trade as they make the exchange of wallets. So-joon makes sure that her picture is still inside his wallet and smiles as he shows it to her.

She wonders how they’re going to eat all this food and whether they can get takeout boxes, and he muses that she’ll be frugal about keeping house, though she needn’t be if she lives with him. Ma-rin’s jaw drops, and he casually reminds her, “You promised to live with me.”

She can’t believe he meant the kind of live-with-me that means living under one roof, and points out the absurdity of asking to move in together before holding hands. She thinks this is like fattening a pig before you kill it, assuming that he means to eat her alive, shocked that the things she’s seen about second-generation chaebols in dramas is all true.

So-joon laughs and says he’s not a second-generation chaebol, and she tosses back, “Oh, you’re third generation?” She’s totally scandalized, wondering how it is that he sees her to treat her like some kind of mistress. But he answers, “[I see you] as the woman I want to marry. Not the woman I want to date or live with, but the woman I want to marry.”

She scoffs in disbelief, and he continues sincerely that he knows this isn’t the best timing, but he’s worried that she’ll mistake him for trash if he doesn’t make his intentions clear right now. She spits back, “Crazy bastard. You should’ve asked me to move in with you instead,” and gets up to walk out on him. Lol, this is going so badly.

He has to chase her out into the hallway, and suggests that they date first if marriage is too much of a burden on her. He tries to coax her back inside, but she shakes him off and says he doesn’t know her, or marriage, or women. No kidding.

He asks why being proposed to is something to get angry about, and she wonders what kind of proposal is so unbelievable and without pretext. She says that wasn’t a proposal—it was a trick.

He insists that he’s just sure that she’s the woman he wants to marry, and Ma-rin’s resolve begins to waver ever so slightly. He tries to hold her arm again and she shakes him off, barking at him to stay like a dog.

She keeps walking just trying to find her way out of the maze of hallways, and So-joon explains that he thinks that they’re fated to be. She doesn’t know yet if theirs is a good fate or a bad one, but he points out that if they hadn’t met seven years ago, neither of them would be alive.

“You saved me and I saved you,” he counters. He thinks they’re fated, and opens the door to their private dining room—they’ve just walked in one big circle and ended up back where they started. Symbolism!

He says he’s begging her like this just to eat a meal with him, and she’s finally convinced to go inside. As they resume lunch, she asks hesitantly if he really meant what he said, and then asks, “Do you love me?” So-joon halts at that question and says, “If I don’t get to marry you I think I’ll die.” Damn, he means it literally, of course, but why does it sound so swoony?

He asks her to think about it seriously, and then calls her Kkot-soonie. Ma-rin’s heart begins to beat rapidly, and she wonders to herself if this pain in her chest is the feeling of having her lifelong wish fulfilled.

The spying secretary turns out to be there on orders from Ma-rin’s frenemy Gun-sook, who goes pale to hear that So-joon and Ma-rin are snuggly and clearly in love.

That night, Ma-rin writhes in bed as she relives So-joon calling her Kkot-soon, unable to think of anything else. If she’s turned on by him calling her that, it’s freakin’ hilarious.

Somewhere in the future, So-joon tells fellow time traveler Doo-shik about proposing, which he claims to have done because Ma-rin was so happy that he was alive that he couldn’t just ignore her and let her die. Doo-shik teases that it’s because he told So-joon to have a baby and he couldn’t stop thinking about the making of the baby.

Doo-shik guesses that if he marries a woman who wasn’t previously in his life, it’ll change his future and reset his fate, which is what So-joon is banking on.

Secretary Hwang reports to Director Kim about the spying, and Director Kim assumes that So-joon is just playing around with Ma-rin because she’s not good enough to date seriously, though Secretary Hwang doesn’t agree. In order to prove his theory, Director Kim invites So-joon and Ki-doong to his housewarming party that night.

That evening, Gun-sook makes sure to have Ma-rin over to help her set up, and asks her if she’s dating anyone. Ma-rin says no, but then asks Gun-sook what made her decide to get married.

So-joon texts Ma-rin to ask if she wants to meet up tonight, and then a few minutes later, he walks through the front door with the rest of Director Kim’s colleagues, and they both stare at each other awkwardly from across the room.

Gun-sook makes sure to introduce Ma-rin, and So-joon invites her to join them for dinner, though he doesn’t let on that they know each other. During dinner, Gun-sook makes sure to pick at every single scab she can think of, calling her Bap-soonie in front of everyone and trying to set her up with Secretary Hwang, just to watch her reaction when So-joon doesn’t say anything against the idea.

Ma-rin heads to the kitchen, and Gun-sook asks So-joon outright what he thinks of the match, and he just awkwardly avoids answering. Urg, say something!

Gun-sook pretends to defend Ma-rin only to bring up all of her terrible rumors on the internet, and then wonders if maybe Secretary Hwang is too good for her. OHMYGOD, somebody stuff a dumpling in her mouth or I’m going to.

A plate crashes to the floor in the kitchen, and Gun-sook runs over and immediately accuses Ma-rin of throwing it on purpose. Ma-rin doesn’t deny it, saying that it was a message for Gun-sook to shut up.

Ma-rin says she took pity on her for being the outcast her whole life, but she can’t be friends anymore. Gun-sook grabs her by the hair and Ma-rin grabs her right back. They get into a fight, except they’re hilariously quiet about it because they don’t want anyone to hear.

Gun-sook tries to put Ma-rin in her place, and Ma-rin tells her to stop acting like she’s refined because she knows Gun-sook’s past. She says she always knew what Gun-sook thought of her, but she felt sorry for her because Gun-sook depended on her so much.

Gun-sook counters that Ma-rin is just easy to keep around and use, so she shouldn’t misunderstand if anyone is nice to her. That gets her right where it hurts, and of course that’s the moment when So-joon interrupts them, having come to the kitchen to look for Ma-rin.

Ma-rin looks like she’d like to be swallowed up by the floor right about now, and tells Gun-sook that they shouldn’t be in each other’s company anymore and walks out. So-joon stays back to tell Gun-sook that he’ll remember her as someone quite talented at poking people’s wounds, and says he’ll be seeing her often from now on, with Ma-rin.

At home, Ma-rin’s confidence takes a huge dive and she cries, thinking that Gun-sook was right about her. She kicks her phone away when So-joon calls, too embarrassed to face him.

He’s outside her place and worried about her, but she won’t pick up the phone. Suddenly Ma-rin’s mom walks up and demands to know who he is and why he keeps coming around, remembering him as the guy who got Ma-rin drunk the other night.

So-joon introduces himself and hands Mom his business card, and she eyes him skeptically and asks what a CEO is, pronouncing it wrong. He tries to invite her to lunch, and Mom just snaps at him and mutters on her way in that she always told Ma-rin to date at assistant manager level or higher, lol.

Mom tries to coax Ma-rin out of bed to eat with her, and purposely doesn’t mention the guy outside. But then she asks what a CEO is, and Ma-rin tells her it’s the president of a company, and Mom’s eyes go wide.

The next morning, Mom goes looking for So-joon’s company and trips over her feet because she’s so overwhelmed by the enormous size of the building. She goes in to ask the security guard if So-joon is the CEO here, and that’s all the confirmation she needs.

So-joon gets a dejected text from Ma-rin saying that she sent him an email, and he opens it up to find a pitiful, dramatic letter about how she doesn’t deserve him and will disappear from his life now and become dust. It’s totally over-the-top, and he gapes to see that it goes on and on and on.

He doesn’t know if this means she wants to break up or is asking for him to hold on, but he isn’t about to read all of that to find out, and shuts his computer.

Ma-rin drinks with her friend So-ri, who loyally says she’s going to tell the rest of the girls to stop hanging out with Gun-sook. So-ri thinks it wasn’t cool of So-joon to ignore Ma-rin like that, but Ma-rin defends So-joon and says she’s the one who asked him not to act like he knows her.

So-ri is still disappointed in him, upset that he must not have been serious about his proposal if he couldn’t jump to her defense at Gun-sook’s house. Ma-rin thinks he has no reason to be serious about her, and guesses that he learned just how unsuited they are for each other at that dinner.

So-ri argues that the worst kind of man is one that makes a woman feel small, and when Ma-rin says it’s her own inferiority complex that’s the problem, So-ri points out that he’s still making her feel that way about herself, which makes him not good enough for her friend in her eyes. Aw, you’re a good friend.

Ma-rin assures her that it’s over, but she tells So-ri not to put So-joon down because he’s a good person. She starts to cry as she adds, “And he called me Kkot-soonie!”

A little later, Ma-rin sits on a bench munching on a bag of dates, smiling to herself as she thinks of the time she ran into So-joon and spilled her dates. Mom calls to tell her that she’s meeting So-joon for dinner right now, proud of Ma-rin for snagging a man like that.

Horrified, Ma-rin begs her mom not to go in there, and rushes to grab a taxi to stop another embarrassing situation. So-joon arrives at the restaurant in a snazzy suit, and Ma-rin runs up behind him just before he gets to the door. She says that her mom misunderstood, and asks why he’d come here.

So-joon just says it’d be rude not to go meet her mother, and she asks if he hasn’t read her email yet. He pretends he hasn’t seen it and just continues ahead, but she stops him and admits that she doesn’t want him to uncover another embarrassing thing about her.

He takes her hands gently and touches her shoulders as he gazes at her for a moment. He flashes back to earlier that day, when he was about to walk away from her insanely long email. He thought better of it and opened it back up.

In her email, Ma-rin wrote how she became her family’s hope at a young age, but people quickly grew tired of her, and she grew up being rejected by countless people. Her father disappeared one day and she became a nuisance to her mother. She said that she can’t help but think that So-joon’s feelings for her will disappear in an instant just like everyone who loved Bap-soon turned their backs on her, and it scares her.

In the present, she tells So-joon to go, but he says, “What? Don’t go?” He wraps his arms around her and says, “Why does it look to my eyes that you’re telling me not to go?”

He searches her face and leans in for a kiss, but she backs away an inch and whispers that her mom is nearby. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her anyway, sweetly and softly.

Next thing we know, she’s waiting outside nervously while So-joon runs in to greet her mother. Ma-rin remembers her email and erases it, deciding that they can break up another time.

She’s surprised when he comes right back out, but So-joon says he told Mom he was going to take Ma-rin on a date, and she sent him out immediately. He suggests his house, and when she says no, all he has to say is one word to change her mind: “Beer?” Heh.

At his house, So-joon tells her not to go upstairs for privacy reasons, and then quickly hides the beer and pretends to have run out. While he pours juice, she picks up a giant high-top sneaker and wonders if it’s from the ’90s and puts it on. Suddenly the shoe conforms to her foot and reduces in size to fit perfectly, and she yelps in surprise. Dude, you can’t just leave all your space-age toys around for anyone to see!

He panics and makes her take it off, saying that he’s never even worn these once outside the house and that she can’t post about these sneakers on the internet. She gets up to leave, thinking that he’s not all that interested in showing her his house with all these restrictions about what she can see and touch, plus she expects his parents to come home any minute.

He finally tells her that his parents died in a traffic accident, so no one will be coming home. He tells Ma-rin the truth—that he’s not a chaebol, and he made his own fortune. He says brightly that he has no family, so there’s no one to interfere in his life, and Ma-rin’s response is: “You must be lonely.”

His smile fades but he seems touched, and he notes that they’re similar in not having anyone to lean on. He says that Song Ma-rin could handle a guy like him and then some, but she says that she wants to be with someone who likes her just the way she is, someone she’s comfortable and happy to be around, without a bunch of expectations.

He says that’s him, and she tells him she’d like it if he cut it out with all the marriage talk, wondering if he’s always zero to sixty without a middle ground. So-joon: “You make me not have a middle ground.”

He takes her hand and says she makes him nervous to leave her alone, because he’s always worried something will happen to her. “I don’t normally care about other people’s lives. But strangely, I want to be involved in your life, badly. I think that’s the right thing to do. Being together instead of alone, knowing each other, overcoming everything together—I think that’s right. So stay by my side, so that I can protect you. Entrust your future to me,” he says.

She says she’ll consider dating him if he stops talking about marriage, and he lights up and asks if they’re together now, wanting to hear her say it again. The whole time he’s smoothly scooting closer to her and pulling her towards him, and they turn adorable and shy as he says her hands are pretty and she says his nose is pretty.

He suddenly says, “Ma-rin-ah, shall we go?” She giggles and then points up. Up? As in upstairs? It’d better be up and not out.

He lays her down on his bed. She asks if this is okay so soon, and he says yes before kissing her, again and again. Rawr.

Their whirlwind romance happens in montage: They exchange cutesy I-love-you’s in a pojangmacha and go on vacation together, with lots of kisses in between.

Their wedding invitations get handed out to various groups of friends over dinner, in a very cool merry-go-round shot where the camera spins around the room and we move seamlessly from one dinner to the next, as if they’re all happening in one room.

Ma-rin’s best friends celebrate with cake and make them kiss, while So-joon’s friends are a bit mixed: Ki-doong is animated while Se-young looks like someone shot her puppy. Mom is so thrilled she just kisses So-joon’s cheek over and over.

So-joon puts a wedding ring on Ma-rin’s finger, and then he’s dressed in a tux at the wedding shop while Ma-rin gapes at the pretty and takes pictures. Ha, that’s a funny reversal.

And their wedding photo shoot is adorable, of course.

Soon it’s the day before the wedding, and Se-young’s dad tries to get her to stop working so much. She’s clearly having a hard time with this, and she steps outside to look at old pictures of herself with So-joon wistfully. She calls him a bastard and wonders why he went from never dating anyone to suddenly being in such a hurry to marry.

So-joon calls her right then, but she quickly tells him she’s in a meeting and hangs up. So-joon is miffed that she’s not giving him the time of day when he’s about to get married, and wonders if she’s mad at him for something.

Ki-doong is at So-joon’s house helping him pack up his office, and So-joon informs him that he’ll be moving this stuff into Ki-doong’s house. What, you’re telling him this now? Ki-doong protests, to no avail.

So-joon moves his office into Ki-doong’s apartment, and Ki-doong thinks it’s a little weird for So-joon to have two lives like this, wondering if it’s right not to tell Ma-rin about his time travel. So-joon says that telling her the truth doesn’t mean he can be truthful about everything anyway, and doesn’t explain any further.

Ki-doong asks what he thinks marriage is, and So-joon says, “Housemates contracted for life?” Pffft. He doesn’t know why everyone puts such meaning in marriage, when two people could respect each other’s lifestyles and live the way they always have. LOL, you are in for such a rude awakening.

Ma-rin visits the subway crash memorial and says that she’s getting married. (She still doesn’t seem to know that So-joon’s parents died in that accident.)

It begins to rain that night, and the rain continues on their wedding day. So-joon and Ma-rin walk down the aisle with an umbrella as friends cheer them on, and Se-young’s dad officiates. He tells them to be each other’s umbrella the countless times it’ll rain in their lives together, and then everyone chants for them to kiss.

Eeek, Ma-rin looks so in love and So-joon looks so terrified, and a little bit like he might throw up. (I love the salty look on Gun-sook’s face.)

As they pose for a picture, Ma-rin marvels at how he knew it would rain today and kept saying that they shouldn’t have an outdoor wedding, and he points out that she ignored him and believed the forecast instead. She says it’s odd that he’s always more accurate than the forecast, which he covers over with a smile.

From the crowd, we see time traveler Doo-shik among the wedding guests. He leaves quietly without making his presence known.

At the newlywed house, Ma-rin turns the aegyo dial to eleven and plays peek-a-boo with So-joon while he sleeps, calling him “Mine” over and over. He pretends to be asleep, but once she leaves the room, his toes curl under because he can’t handle the cheese.

She follows him out to the car as he leaves for work that morning and sends him off with a huge wave, calling him “yeobo” and “husband.”

She makes a heart with her hands and winks as she tells him to come home early, and he awkwardly fails to return the gesture and waves her inside.

At the same time they each look back at the other and think: “I married that man!” “I married that woman!”

 
COMMENTS

Ha, they seem to be feeling very different things as they think that. Part of me is disappointed that we sped through the cute dating phase of their romance, but ultimately I’m glad that we zoomed forward to their wedding because their marriage is the part of the central conceit, and now we’re past the setup and can be surprised about where the story goes from here. I do think that we needed these four episodes to work our way up to the romance, because no matter how motivated So-joon is by death and preventing future tragedy, we still have to believe in a baseline attraction and connection between them to lead to marriage, and in this episode I saw the sparks and bought into the romance wholesale. The proposal was insane, but then when he comforted her at her lowest point and bothered to read her crazy long email to understand her, and jumped through all those hoops to woo her, his progression from concern to attraction felt natural. The wedding was unnaturally fast, of course, but that’s motivated by something much larger and we need that to launch us into the backwards romance where love comes after wedding vows.

I like that Ma-rin has been so guarded until now (because So-joon really seemed like a crazy person most of the time, from her perspective), and the way she explains her lifelong fear of being loved and then abandoned makes perfect sense to me. It also terrifies me because I think she’ll break if she discovers that So-joon didn’t love her when he married her. It seems so unfair that he’s working with all this foreknowledge to get her to trust him and open her heart, so that by the time they’re getting married, she’s hopelessly in love while he’s nowhere near that level of emotional investment. I can’t help but be mad at him for that, even though this is exactly the position he needs to be in for his big comeuppance down the line. It’s just that my heart bleeds for Ma-rin, who is so vulnerable and relatable, and now completely head over heels in love under false pretenses, so I can’t help but feel protective of her.

But I think his desire to protect her is genuine, and that’s the thing about all the doublespeak he gives her in this episode—he wants her to misunderstand his concern for her future as love, which is tricksy and will undoubtedly lead to pain down the road. But he purposely only says what he means, careful to choose his words, and that makes me trust that he’s genuinely trying to take responsibility for both their lives, and that he’s not ONLY motivated by a selfish desire to live—he’s also determined to save her too. It also helped me forgive him a little when he struggled so much to court her, because he thought it’d be easy to just propose marriage over a fancy lunch, only to have her assume the worst possible things about him.

The mystery is getting more interesting as well, because I didn’t think much of time traveler Doo-shik’s theories in the last episode when he talked about his daughter meeting an unexpected man and having a baby to change her fate, because I didn’t believe him. But then in this episode when Ma-rin mentioned in passing that her father disappeared one day, it made me think that it would fit if Doo-shik were her father when she was young, and he somehow got himself stuck in a time loop in her future because he was so desperate to save her. It could be a red herring, since there’s nothing concrete to connect them at this point, but it would explain Doo-shik’s curious fixation on So-joon marrying this one particular woman, which I always thought was weird. In any case, this is a great place to be in the story at the end of Episode 4, with life and death hanging in the balance and marriage about to turn So-joon’s life upside-down. He really has no idea what he’s gotten himself into, but isn’t that the fun of it?

 
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