There are scenes in Episode 7 which can be perceived or understood in different ways.
These are my interpretations. You don’t have to agree with them.
A. Ep 7, 50:01 Noona made a notch on the tree.
Noona: If you grow this much, I’ll find mom for you. Look. If you want to grow this much, what do you need to do? You need to eat well, don’t you? If you don’t eat because mom’s not here, do you think you will grow? You won’t grow, right? Do you understand?
HS: Noona, why are you getting mad at me?
Noona: I’m not mad, I’m worried.
Dad: Do Hyunsoo. Do Hyunsoo.
Noona: No matter what Dad says, just say yes. If you don’t want him to make you write a hundred proverbs in the basement, okay?
Three things I can say about this scene:
1. He wasn’t eating because he was missing his mom. Change in eating habit is one sign of a child dealing with abandonment issues.
2. This is probably why he makes a conscious effort of making mealtimes with Eunha very special. I wrote about this before, didn’t I? I mentioned that he’s the one in charge of meals. When Eunha had that school fight, he treated her to her comfort food, egg tart. When she had to stay with her granny, he reminded granny that Eunha already had an egg tart. When he woke up late, he still made a healthy breakfast drink for Eunha and JW.
I think he’s compensating. Food is his unconscious way of promising that he’d always be there for Eunha, and he wouldn’t disappear like his mother did.
3. He asked his sister “Noona, why are you getting mad at me?” His question indicates that he’s able to identify anger.
And yet, when JW went to the school counselor, the school counselor showed her a video a 13-year-old HS unable to interpret the feelings of a girl in a drawing. He couldn’t discern why the girl is crying.
At 27:41
JW then asked the school counselor if HS has a congenital antisocial personality disorder.
In my layman’s opinion, he doesn’t have CAPD, and this flashback of his interaction with his noona is proof of it. He was actually hypersensitive because he SENSED that his noona was mad (that their mom left them and that he wasn’t eating) but was covering it up. His noona was denying her real feelings and said instead that she was worried.
His antisocial personality couldn’t have been congenital (that is, from birth) if he could lose his appetite because he missed his mom, and he could read his sister’s unspoken emotions.
4. His relationship with his dad didn’t help either. Noona advised him that “No matter what Dad says, just say yes.” In effect, what she was saying was to hide his real feelings. In order to survive in that household, he had to learn to mask his emotions.
So to answer JW’s question regarding HS’ personality disorder, I highly doubt it was congenital.
B. 37:08 The grandma tore up Eunha’s workbook.
The grandma went crazy when she saw Eunha working on advanced math. (I’m guessing that “3-2” because the second book of the third grade series)
Grandma: What is this? This isn’t for your age. It’s too advanced.
Eunha: But I can solve it.
Grandma: Did your mother make you study this? Will you be punished if you don’t? Does she hit you?
Here, she was horrified at the idea that Eunha could have been pressured to work ahead.
Eunha: I just do it because I can.
Grandma: (starts ripping the page) Don’t this. It drives people crazy. It’ll kill you and your mother.
Eunha: Grandma, you’re scaring me. I want to go home.
Grandma: Don’t cry. I’m doing this for you. Please stop crying. What do you want? What do I need to do?
Eunha: I…I want…I want a tart.
Grandma: What?
Eunha: But me an egg tart please.
And then they eat a restaurant. Notice the table they’re sitting at. This was a children’s table.
What’s my interpretation of this scene?
1. I think that the Grandma Baek had a flashback, and the trigger was the advanced math book. She remembered a time when her son was made to study advanced academics and would be physically punished if he didn’t.
Note: The real Baek Heesung was also a smart child. One newspaper clipping said, “Our Smart Child.”
She ripped the pages of the book probably because she recalled how books like that could drive people crazy with stress. I think she was projecting her own unhappy experience unto Eunha. Her son’s life was miserable because of the pressure to live up to expectations, and she didn’t want Eunha and her mom JW to duplicate her tragedy.
2. From the accusations she leveled at her husband in Ep 8, Mrs Baek raised her son all by herself as her husband was never around. She seemed to indulge him like spoon-feeding him. It’s more likely that the absentee Mr. Baek pressured his child to measure up to his expectations, not Mrs. Baek.
3. She seemed willing to indulge Eunha’s wishes.
She sat at the children’s table. She originally told Eunha to hurry up eating so she could attend to her store. But when she saw Eunha gobbling down her food, she reversed herself and told her to slow down eating.
She cooked food and fed Eunha. Her behavior with Eunha suggested that she would get along fine with her if there was no restriction imposed on her.
I’m also beginning to think that the scene she created at the last New Years Party was staged to preempt her forming any attachment to the child, and that she was acting upon Mr. Baek’s orders, and not HS. You see, in the beginning of Episode 8, Mr. Baek also ordered Do HyunSoo to cut ties with Baek HeeSung’s friends.
Baek: If you take a look at his social media page, you’ll understand the kind of relationships he had. As for those, you can gradually cut off those relationships.
C. At 38:05. The mysterious tapping sound
Any guesses? My guesses:
1. metronome
2. MRI
He might have gone to the hospital to have a brain scan done, and that’s where he heard the sound.
3. crickets (just kidding)
D. At 56:49. Jiwon played the cassette player (meanie!)
JW: How does this voice sound to you? It sounds sad to me. For some reason, it feels like this person is crying.
HS: (seeing the fish keychain) What is this?
JW: It was in DHS’ bag.
HS: Why this now?
JW: This was DHS’ trigger. They say once he listened to this tape, the normally gentle DHS would suddenly become violent. But no one knows how he got it, or what the tape is. The place this tape was recorded, a place where no one knows what happened, I think it’s probably here.
HS: Really?
JW: Just when did Do Min Seok start murdering people? I can’t even guess. Who knows? Early on, DMS could have ordered his young son to bring food and water to the victims locked up here.
HS: I want to leave, JiWon.
JW: As he listened to this voice, Do Hyunsoo would have remembered the things he did. Vividly. It would have been pleasant for him. And when he was interrupted, he would have lost all reasoning.
HS: I said let’s leave.
JW believed that the music he was listening to was the humming of one of the victims of his dad. But I think the music could have been one of two things: it was his noona humming to him to comfort him after their mother disappeared, or it was his missing mother humming to him when he was little.
Then, to torture him further, JW pretended that the Chinese restaurant owner was coming over to join them. JW wanted the two of them to meet because the owner was bringing over items that DHS made for HS to look at. The owner called her up right then to say he was five minutes away.
HS started to tremble. JW saw him struggling and thought, “DHS. Show me your real self. Choose.” She reached inside her jacket for her gun. She was thinking that DHS’ next move would determine their future.
She was waiting for him to violently attack her. But all he could manage were unsteady, trembling movements as he pushed her against the wall and placed a hand on her neck. She was steeling herself to shoot him when he collapsed to the ground.
That’s when she realized that he was hyperventilating. For a second, she wondered whether she was being too tough on him. But she reminded herself the had lied to her for 14 years. She couldn’t let herself weaken.
Remember I mentioned this in my earlier post. When JW told the widow that “people should only get punished for the crimes they committed. Whether it’s criminal punishment or a personal grudge,” I said that the “personal grudge” was relevant here. Her words told me that she bore him ill will for his deception. She resented him for lying for ages. It didn’t matter if he was proven innocent of the murders. As far as she was concerned, he had done her wrong for deceiving and lying to her. That was a personal offense, and she was seeking a personal vendetta.
Moreover, to me there was no way that HS could be oblivious to JW’s real intention here. He would have to be really stupid not to see though her act. She was rattling his cage to see him react. And he knew he couldn’t do anything because
one) he couldn’t deny without digging himself a bigger hole, and
two) he knew he’d wrong her with his lies and deceptions.
three) he felt sorry for her for dragging her into his life.
This is what he meant by “I’ve always thought that I was lucky to have met you. But for the first time, I thought that you shouldn’t have met me. Now I understand what you meant back then. I feel sorry.”
On the way back to Seoul, he asked her not to look for Do HyunSoo.
HS: JW, don’t do it.
JW: Don’t do what?
HS: Don’t look for Do HyunSoo.
JW: Why?
HS: I don’t want you to. You told me he might be a serial killer. It’s dangerous.
JW: That’s why I want to catch him. I can’t let someone that dangerous roam around and live freely.
HS: (And he sighed)
That night, he was kept awake by Baek’s warning that should his secret identity be nearly revealed again, he would have to leave for a place where no one can find him.
****************************
Gotta end here.
@pkml3
I’ve been trying to re-watch Ep 7 but I keep losing concentration.
About HS and ASPD – My most recent thoughts on Hyun Soo is that if it is possible for there to be a spectrum for ASPD, then he is at the low end ie his ASPD is not as ‘strong’. It looked to me like he was born with it only because from an early age, he was unable to identify emotions. The report on him as a child said he had signs of Schizoid Personality Disorder. I do feel that he was likely born with some disorder, but he seems ‘high-functioning’ enough to ‘pretend’ and make himself like others so that it’s no longer obvious.
The other thing I thought was part of ASPD was that it’s not that ASPD persons don’t feel, they do, but they cannot define the emotions. Therefore he lost his appetite when his mother left, but he might not have been able to say why.
From Quora (by someone named Jason Whistler who claims to have ASPD)
About HS recognising anger – I find that it’s the only emotion he’s able to identify or at least guess at. At least it’s the one he mentions and he is always interested to know why a person is angry. This is consistent with what the quora quote claims.
He keeps watching JW’s expressions carefully to try to figure out what she’s feeling, but he fails. It’s made doubly hard because JW does not tell him the truth. When he’s confused that she’s angry in the hospital, just like Noona, she says it’s not anger but something else. In JW’s case she accuses him of not knowing how she felt when she feared he might die. She was really angry with him for betraying her and for not understanding her feelings, but she confuses him with that kind of answer.
About Grandma Baek Yes – I believe she’s projecting something of her past upon poor Eun Ha and her maths book. It’s telling that she chooses to sit at a child’s table for the egg tart rather than make Eun Ha sit at an adult’s table.
Yes, that insight about creating a scene at the birthday party, it was to keep herself from getting attached to Eun Ha. From hindsight, we know that Dad Baek has been calling the shots and forcing compliance by playing the guilt trip game with his wife and even HS.
One of the messages of Show
I feel that one of the things Show is saying, is that those who are psychopaths might not be all that bad, but the ‘normal’ people are the ones who are evil. Even JW who bore a grudge was pretty evil towards HS, to the extent he was having a panic attack.
What put this thought into my head was what KMJ says to Hae Su. He tells her that he thought about her a lot and felt that she was the biggest victim.
– In other words, she couldn’t be the guilty party because she was normal, but DMS and DHS must be guilty because they are not normal.
But he’s totally flabbergasted that the beautiful girl he still admires tells him how wrong he is.
The accomplice wouldn’t have said that the foreman died because he was ‘too nosy’, because Hae Su knew why she had killed the foreman and it was a because he had insisted on sending HS for exorcisms repeatedly.
Anyway, KMJ’s point of view, is the public’s point of view (about ASPD = guilt) and I feel that this show is telling us that it’s wrong.
@pm3, I agree about the grandma. She was probably forced to play a game by her husband, and living the lie is causing her to lose it. We see her cook the exact same pancake for her son in a flashback in Episode 8.
The suspense and the bitches talks about ASPD plus the lead actors character convinced me to watch this drama. Haven’t watched anything like this in a long time. In the first few episodes, I got some weird nightmare since I watched them at night! After the gory scenes, I guess the stress level has subside.
There’s really something with JW’s personality and the Baek’s family. Thanks to all your analysis!
Hi @Eureka! Would love to read your thoughts on this show too! Yes, fortunately the scary, bloody scenes have abated for now. I’m thinking that there might be one more, since we have a killer loose among our bunch of characters. As long as no one pushes the killer to take action, they’re ok, but since neither Ji Won’s det team nor Hyun Soo’s ‘Scooby Gang’ are going to be still, we might have another stress-filled, nerve-wracking, bloody episode in the future.
@Snow Flower Good point about Mum Baek losing it. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, on why she was always that highly strung. I even wondered if she kept a poker face and ‘hated’ HS and family, because she too was a person with ASPD and didn’t bother to look friendly or something.
Then I changed my mind and did think she was the sensitive type that couldn’t take the stress of deception. But now knowing about how Dad Baek guilt-trips her constantly, how he belittles her and makes her feel useless and it does make sense that she’s snapping because the tension has been going on too long. Suddenly with a young child back in the house triggering memories of past experiences with the real Hee Sung, she’s gone into ‘crazy’ mode. However that’s just in time (drama style) to shake Hee Sung back into the land of the living.
Now, what’s Dad Baek going to do!!!
I still don’t think he has ASD 🙂 we’ll have to see what he endured as a child to be sure. But couple of things jump at me.
1) the hints that his dad made him torture or kill animals. His dad might have had some sort of personality disorder or maybe he was plain evil. There has to be a reason he appears with a dog leash as a spectre and there are cages in his basement. A similar dad existed in another drama, come and hug me. I like this drama a lot because it shows that you are more than your genes. The dad is a psychopath. The son is not.
There is a term “conditioning” for responses that the brain can be trained for. If HS dad punished him each time child HS showed emotions, child HS would probably be severely traumatized (we already know he has PTSD because he sees his dad and he started hyperventilating in the basement) and loose his ability to express emotions due to the extreme negetive consequences that he’d then learn to avoid.
2) I want this drama to show that you can’t self diagnose a condition. Just because a person is different doesn’t mean he has a problem.
Just like MY of PBIO in the end didn’t have any disorder, it’s likely HS won’t either. These disorders need a diagnosis. One can’t randomly decide in absence of a professional analysis.
It makes me so sad that he lived for 14 years without therapy. JW should get him some asap. Does she know just what all he endured as a child ?
3) this reason is much simpler. It makes for a more “heart-tugging” TV. Who wants to see a hero who feels no love use his wife for 16 episodes to his benefit ? He feels no hapiness either so the point of a happy ending would be moot. Oh no no no… One would much rather see a man tortured and abused endlessly to still find it in his heart to love selflessly and be loved in return.
4) He does things that are impossible to be motivated in absence of love. For example, taking the hit of that bag full of hardware so that JW isn’t hurt. Taking the blame for his sister and not holding her responsible for it. Knowing that JW is after him but still not hurting her in any way. This is the biggest point. If no one else he himself knows that he’s innocent. He also knows that JW will punish him if she finds proofs against him. He still only requests her. No violence at all even when she makes him realllllly uncomfortable. JW was counting on him becoming violent due to ASD too here. She was wrong. He feels remorse for her. He’s sorry she has to go through these things because of him.
Also, about the Baek dad (creepy man) telling HS that he’ll have to go “where no one can find him”. Well, guess what Beak… HS wears a watch that reports his gps location to his wife. So she will find you (and probably kill you. She’s gotta gun too – she’s cool that way) 🙂 I’d love it if this troupe comes to life !
I agree, @GB. Mum Baek was kind after all. When Eunha started sobbing, Mum Baek reasoned out that she was doing this for her own good; she was preventing harm to befall on Eunha. So there must have been something similar that happened in her life that she didn’t want repeated. A history of a parent demanding a child to excel.
And I mentioned elsewhere that I don’t believe that the real Baek Hee Sung is bad. Because he brought Do Hyungsoo home after the car accident. He stopped the car and he offered to bring HS to the hospital. He wasn’t going to run away and he didn’t leave him behind.
And remember what he said on the phone? He talked about doing something which was difficult, but he had to do it. So there’s the impression that he was a responsible person.
He can’t be the accomplice. He doesn’t have the “right” personality.
@pm3, no I don’t think the real Baek Hee Sung is a bad guy. I said that he was related to the murder in the other post. What I meant was he might be chasing after the truth somehow and found out about Daddy Baek’s wrong doing hence that phone conversation before hitting Hyun Soo. Or that wasn’t related to the murder but I still think he had found out some bad things about his Dad.
I also think Mommy Baek is actually a kind mother/lady but she has got pushed by Daddy Baek all these years to get things the way he wants.