Continuing where I left off here,  Reply 1988: Ep 2 The Husband-Hunting Game, part 1

To me, there were two signs in Episode 1 that Taec was the endgame.

I already mentioned one: that the adult Deoksun didn’t bother to introduce her name and Taec’s in the voiceover.

The set-up of the drama is an interview. In the epilogue, we see that adult Deoksun is being interviewed about her young life and how she met Taec. THAT was the reason she didn’t introduce herself and Taec at the beginning of the episode. It would have been redundant as the interviewer would have known who she and her husband were.

Two, there was a Chinese checkers boardgame in JungHyun’s room. His mom had picked up a piece and fiddled with it when she had a heart-to-heart conversation with JungHyun. 🙂

My point is the boardgame was for comparison and contrast between baduk and Chinese checkers.

Taek was the Baduk guy.
JungHyun was the Chinese checkers guy.

The boys were represented by two different board games. As a game of theory and strategy, baduk grossly outmatches Chinese checkers. Chinese checkers isn’t even Asian in origin. It was invented by a German toy company. lol.

To me, it was a giveaway that the screenwriter chose a simple game to designate JungHyun. Would a screenwriter give her hero a simple game like Chinese checkers and a secondary male lead the more important game Baduk?

From what I was told by the other viewers, the screenwriter spent a lot of time researching the world of baduk and interviewing the famous baduk Korean players, prior to writing the script. To me, that was another big clue as to WHO the eventual husband would be. There was simply no way the screenwriter would relegate Choi Taek, the baduk player, into a secondary male lead when she went through the trouble of building this baduk world for the drama and integrated the game into the storyline.

Then, in this Episode 2, more clues about the husband were revealed.

One was the book titles.

To me, that was sneaky but obvious. When I mentioned these in soompi, the Ryu Joon Yeol fans cried foul again. Really! They were such crybabies.

Here are the book titles.  I think Viki blurred them out.

“Officer and the Princess” was for JH.  This was a foreshadowing. JungHwan would enlist and become an officer in the Air Force. The drivel about the hero’s chiseled chest is a reference to JH’s chest.

Here, JungHwan had rock hard chest. hahaha.

And here was DS, between a rock (of a chest, hahaha) and a wall.

But as it would turn out, all the fuss about JH’s chest was similar to the write-up about the officer’s muscles in the romance book.  At first, Deoksun gushed about the physicality of the hero in the book but in the end, she didn’t find the book interesting.

I interpreted that as a foreshadowing. lol.

Here’s the second book mentioned in this episode, “Audition for Love.”  Viki blurred the titles so you wouldn’t see them. But it was there.

This book is for DongRyul.  I had asked @aoikarin to take these screenshots so I thank here wherever she is right now.

In his own way, DongRyul loved Deoksun, too. His hair-tugging and teasing were a classic sign of a guy wanting a girl’s attention.

Also, if you noticed he was the first one to bring up the topic of Deoksun being cute. Later, in Episode 14, he would ask Deoksun what his “chances” were at gaining her affections. He would also joke that it was annoying that Deoksun liked Taek more. “Do you hate me?”

So early on, he “auditioned” to be the guy in Deoksun’s life but he knew that he had no chance against Taec. He was then content to watch her from afar and to vicariously enjoy the romance budding between her and Taec.

Interestingly enough, DongRyul also literally auditioned in a talent show in a later episode. He would sing the song, “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder.

Anyway, Deoksun described this romance book as “weak” because it was only about kissing. lol. I thought that it was a joke alluding to DongRyul’s obsession about porn.

“Dangerous Roommate” was obviously for TK. This was the book that DS hugged and begged to include sexy passages. lol. [credit: Dramabeans for book title]

To me, “Dangerous Roommate” alluded to Taec. Taec’s room was their room. The kids always used his room to hang out in, as you saw in Episode 1. And when they were little, Deoksun and Taek slept together in his room… you’ll find this out later.

So, Taec was the roommate from the very beginning.

In later episode, you’ll see Taek telling Deoksun to go to “his” room at the hotel in China during his baduk competition.

The other clue about the husband here is the montage. Taek was the only one with the montage. Remember in epilogue of Episode 1, the adult Deoksun was asked when did she and her husband first meet, and she apologized and said, “When did we first meet? I’m sorry. When I was young I inhaled so much coal gas. It’s been decades since we first met. We grew up in the same alley. I didn’t know I’d marry him. Not even in my dreams. I mustn’t have been in my right mind. I was crazy.  Truly, I inhaled the most coal gas in Ssangmun-dong.  For a very long time. About 20 years? I think I wasn’t in my right mind because of that. My husband is lucky. How else could he get such a beautiful wife?”

Well, here in Episode 2, she answered that question.

Here’s the backstory.

“Taec moved to this block last. After Taek’s mother passed away, Taek left his hometown, filled with the memories of his mother, and came to Seoul. I don’t know why this shy father-and-son pair came to this neighborhood of all neighborhoods, but one thing for sure is that the four mischievous kids in this alley gained a new friend.

From the time Taek was young, he didn’t say much and was quiet. So he might have found his unusually boisterous neighborhood friends to be too much for him.

Still, Taek was always together with us. Even though we did mischievous and pathetic deeds, he was always by our sides. Of course, although he always had a dour, emotionless expression, he was always with us.

The alley can create friendships just with time. That is how a quiet kid and four loud kids became friends, and that was how we became five.”

She only recounted how she first met Taec, and left out her first encounters with the other kids.