The finale!
I laughed way harder that I should have with these screenshots. Which episode did this come from?
But hey! At least, he was dating a girl. For some of us here, we’re dating kdramas long past the wrap-up parties.
Let’s enjoy the show.
27 Comments On “Yumi’s Cells 2: Eps 13 & 14 Open Thread”
Comments are closed.
Thanks @pkml3. LOL Dating kdramas… quite apt.
I’ll miss my Saturday night rewatch date, but will fill it up with Extraordinary A Woo which gives me enough lingering feelings, I feel I’m dating it by myself LOLOL.
Huh? What just happened? That ending of Ep 13 is like running into a brick wall.
Hi @pkml3, the ending at Ep 13 or 14 or both? Heh!
I had hoped they might not end it that way, but I’m not surprised that they did. Like a typical manhwa, we are left hanging, and waiting, but indefinitely.
It was still an ending nearest to what I wanted for Yumi … being at peace with herself while in between relationships, and able to fall in love; looking forward to happiness, and with Writer Cell still being her prime cell (we note that only Writer Cell could fly), plus fulfilled up to that point in her life without having to be in a relationship. On this note, it was a happy ending for me.
I liked the cells interactions in real life… especially the animated ddeokbokki versus Hunger with fork LOL.
I liked that the connections remained with her exs and that they were relatively good people. It’s true-to-life that we have people who come and go in lives, and they can still be good people for us even when ‘gone’.
I do feel for Woong, who’s been sincere in love, throughout, although immature in not including Yumi earlier in his decisions and real challenging circumstances. It seems too late for him now.
Ba Bi is enigmatic ie he tells Yumi he is seeing someone but his close colleague knows he is single and not even interested in blind dates.
In the end Yumi was the first to date but it was her contacts who ended up with her friends as couples, while Yumi remained single.
We know that she’ll ultimately get married, but I’d like her to enjoy her life without needing to be dating at the same time.
Anyone think Yumi is arrogant? Good luck doing better than Wung or Babi lol
Sympathies @Packmule03 – this is a bitter sweet series indeed. The style seems at time almost like the unravelling of a thriller!
Ba-Bi had lost his sparkle by this stage – partly because he was hobbling around on the – tv writer induced – broken limb and partly – it seems – because he knew Yumi’s heart wasn’t in it. Or was he aware (haha) that he couldn’t beat the writers of the show? When he got the nuisance call from DE – he looked defeated… of course it would happen at the very point his mobile was lying next to Yumi as he rushed out to buy her food in the process of caring for her!
‘Woong the innocent’ is not aware he is part of a narrative where his role is to provide some redemptive loving support. He has also forgotten the extent to which he dropped Yumi and hurt her deeply – far more deeply than Ba Bi did.
Yumi, though, is profoundly ‘in collusion’ with the writers of the show and do I jest or not – they seemed to signal that with her writing of the ending of her webtoon story (an indication of the ending of her romantic story). It is her inner world that rules the show so that her being ‘calm’ when she sees DE’s missed call on Ba Bi’s screen marks the end of the relationship. He is working his socks off to make it work but nothing will suffice.
Yumi’s creative inner world is mirrored in the show’s ending. She has written it and it happens. We see her achieve success and having achieved it and, expressed her skills and desires and self in so doing, she is now open to being approached by Sun Rook.
I was surprised the writers stuck to the webtoon structure but they did it in a way that we were never sure they would. I think they intended to redeem both the Woong and the Ba Bi ark too. I’m not sure it felt like that to the viewers!
BTW I agree with @GB that he is enigmatic but I think his intentions are good in saying he has a love interest. He seems to be in love with Yumi still and is coming to terms with what has happened.
I am glad to have this discussion to debrief on all this!
*that Ba Bi is enigmatic*
Is Ep 14 up already, @GB?
I meant Ep 13. But if it ended without guy #3 showing up just like in the webtoon, then the screenwriter decided to have a different ending and different message.
And…
I like that message, oddly enough.
Love cannot be rushed or forced as if the girl has a deadline to accomplish it. It isn’t a career where the girl gets a promotion (i.e., marriage) after working several years with one or two bosses (i.e., boyfriends). There’s a season to everything, and a time for every purpose under the sun.
The webtoon shoehorned Yumi’s wedding in the plot. My impression was Guy #3/The Husband was just added in because the original writer “suddenly” decided to end the webtoon, and he didn’t want to leave his readers hanging. As a result, the husband was half-baked as a character unlike Ung’s and Babi’s personalities.
Lol. Kinda like “W” where the comics writer wanted to terminate his lead character’s life….
Welcome to the blog, @ottimista.
I think in the webtoon, she DID find someone better than Ung and Babi. 🙂 We’re just not shown HOW.
As for arrogance, it depends on your perspective. One person’s arrogance can just be another person’s self-confidence or another person’s bravura or another person’s defiance against fate and social conventions.
Okay, I couldn’t resist. I peeked at the ending.
😂😂 It’s a do-your-own-happy-conclusion.
I’m at peace with that. We aren’t given a rushed and sketchy romance for Yumi for the sake of a HEA.
@Packmule3 – yes, Shin Sun Rook has his own story ark with Yumi on the webtoon. He gets the cell treatment and everything. His cells are apparently very similar to Yumi’s.
I don’t sense that we will see the story unfold in she show as you say – but we do know they have a happy and compatible relationship in the webtoon.
One reason to read the webtoon now!
Yup, @pkml3… it’s sort of like the webtoon, I guess, (I have not read it)… we assume the ‘faceless’ man is going to be the one she ends up with but we won’t get to see that, and somehow that’s just fine.
@Kate yes, nice tie up with Yumi’s inner life. LOL she’s a writer and in league with the show’s writer too.
True, Ba Bi went out to buy beer for his football game viewing time, but as luck (or fate) would have it, DE had to make that 1 drunken call then. It was so enlightening for Yumi to experience an absence of emotion. It is often said that the opposite of love is indifference, and I suppose we saw it in this case.
It was obvious that as long as Love Cell was missing, Yumi was just going around with Sensitivity (Jane Austen might have called it Sensibility) wrongly pulling her along. She never was all that interested in Ba Bi. I felt it was a mix of the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) because Ba Bi was always popular with women, and very sweet to Yumi, and the mistaken idea that she needed to be in a romance to be happy that put Yumi on the wrong path. I did say before that I felt she was more in love with being in love than she was with Ba Bi.
LOL the Cell Awards at the end of the year! In the end the winners were not her cells, but Ba Bi’s or Woong’s cells that supported and took care of her? That’s an interesting comment. She thinks she didn’t take as good care of herself as her ex-boyfriends had done? I also loved the fat cells that came to roost around her love handles. LOLOL.
It was a creative piece of work and lots of fun to watch!
@GB – you have described this so well… I love the way you talk about Yumi being pulled around by Sensitivity/’Sensibility’…and the motivation behind this.
I was happy with the Cell Awards!
Welcome @ottimista,
Interesting question. Do you find Yumi arrogant? May we ask why?
Over time we see that all the characters turned out nicer than they may have appeared when we first met them. Control Z, who seemed rude but isn’t really and didn’t get around to explaining his name. Ruby, who is full of childish aegyo and grasping. Even the taciturn father of Ba Bi and the 2 ex-boyfriends who failed in the honesty department, all turned out to be pretty okay folks towards Yumi.
She did her best to be polite and sincere, to do the right thing, and she always knew how to be grateful for all the help she received. Hence she awarded the cells of Ba Bi. She was mistaken in her feelings for Ba Bi and came clean to break off their relationship. She didn’t want to take from Woong, although he was doing well, or give him the wrong impression of her intentions. She had grown to become much better than the Yumi who had lied to hide her own embarrassment over the choice of hotel room. 🙂
@Kate, you are so right about the Show mirroring Yumi’s last chapters (or vice versa). I happened to go back to the part where she wrote that the female protagonist in her story couldn’t hear the male protagonist at the party, because the music was too loud. And we see that Yumi not only didn’t catch the name of the publisher’s employee who would help her, but she didn’t even remember his face! That was a cute parallel. 😂
@GrowingBeautifully, I agree that characters who either annoyed or appalled us ended up looking good by the end of the series, and I attribute that to how Yumi handled each one. Yes, Yumi is Writernim’s avatar, and Writernim didn’t want us hating any of her babies at the end. Even Da Eun is shown realizing that she was wrong to drunk call BaBi, showing that her character is maturing a bit.
Would I love to see a third season with the romance unfolding between Yumi and Sin Sun Rok? You bet! But I can imagine the storyline from Yumi’s perspective, because she’s been so well developed as a character over two seasons.
@Kate, you mention BaBi knocking his socks off to make the relationship with Yumi work. He did shower her with kindness. But in the end, we see that his basic nature is one not compatible with Yumi’s. He’s not as transparent as she needs in a partner. He broke her trust on multiple occasions. Yumi gave him a second chance, and he repaid that with a whopper of a lie that spanned a full week. His tearful marriage proposal after Yumi discovered the deception was an attempt to tie her to him by law since trust was shattered. Even setting up the meeting between Yumi and his father, BaBi manipulated the situation by withholding information. He didn’t give Yumi much advance notice, and he gave his father none. And then the untruth–we were just in the area, so dropped by spontaneously–rolled so easily off BaBi’s tongue. During their meeting at the airport, BaBi also told a white lie about seeing someone when asked if he had a girlfriend. The choices BaBi makes, thinking he’s sparing someone a burden, have more harmful consequences than the feared burden. That’s a lesson BaBi can’t seem to learn.
In a small way, Woong gets the resolutions he wants. First, he got the acknowledgement he needed from Yumi–graciously given in his office–of his business success. He’d been motivated to climb back from bankruptcy by love: thwarted love that wanted to prove something to Yumi. When Yumi, in all sincerity, said Woong had done well, it was a healing moment for their relationship, allowing it to transform to deep friendship. Second, Woong told Yumi he could be happy for her if she married someone other than himself, but not if it was BaBi. He distrusted BaBi, having been on the receiving end of BaBi’s situation manipulation and lack of full disclosure. He also knew how much Yumi valued transparency, since that issue is what ultimately caused his own breakup with Yumi. How galling it would be for Woong if Yumi married someone demonstrably less transparent than him! There would be little hope of Yumi and Woong maintaining an ongoing friendship if she’d married BaBi. So Yumi calmly putting an end to her relationship with BaBi was a win for Woong, even if his own romance with Yumi is never to be resurrected.
Good points, @Welmaris. 👍
I’ll repost this as a separate thread on the blog and use it as a sort of a “bench memo” for me. 😂😂 Thanks!
I agree with @pkml3, good points @Welmaris. Especially about Woong’s resolution. He needed Yumi to acknowledge that he wouldn’t always be thought of as a loser by her, and her praise was exactly what he and Louis needed to salve their wounded egos.
I did notice Ba Bi’s lies and how he does not see any problem with them. I definitely did not like the wedding proposal at the point of the exposure of his deceit and was a bit confounded that Yumi had caved in immediately to agree to marriage, especially since she was never able to say honestly that she even loved him. It was a swift move by Ba Bi to distract her from the negative issue he was confronted with. For all intents and purposes, he seemed to have succeeded, since we did not see them talking through his huge deception.
He appears to have been a very sweet, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth manipulator, and oh sooooo charming. I can understand many falling for him. There are many Ba Bis in real life too, so Bitches, beware! 🤪
@Welmaris’ thread is in queue, @GB.
It should post after midnight (if I set it up correctly🤪).
Our first impression of Babi was right after all. Sweet but shady.
I’ll miss all the cells. 🥲
@Packmule3, I’ll miss the cells too. When this series started, I was sceptical, but soon was convinced using them was a creative, powerful way to tell a story. If other webtoon/screen writers try to do the same, I’ll avoid them as plagiarizers.
When Yumi’s villagers kept thinking they were seeing the long-missing love cell, but instead were mistaking Curiosity or Naughty, that was a great way to show different kinds of attraction. That for a year Yumi stayed in a relationship without Love present–Sensitivity, Reason, and the fan club standing in for the missing Love–helps us visualize and understand why she and BaBi floundered as a couple.
As for my own cells, my village has been overrun by Fat cells. I should take a screenshot of Yumi’s and tape it to my refrigerator, wine cooler, pantry, etc.
And much as I disapproved of BaBi as husband material for Yumi, I applaud actor Jin Young for his portrayal of the character. His acting seemed unforced. He had to walk a fine line between being charming and being cunning, and he did it convincingly.
When we see actors as characters in Kdramas, they often decorate their flats with photos of themselves. I’d like to imagine Kim Go Eun, Jin Young, and Ahn Bi Hyun in real life filling their homes with plushies, figurines, and posters of their cells. What a hoot if Jin Young put up a life-size cutout of his paper doll drawing!
@Welmaris – your points are well made and interesting as usual!
However, my points were more about the writing than Ba Bi’s truthfulness. They were written with a certain irony. Perhaps I didn’t underline that sufficiently.
This writing included clunky devices such as the absurd situation with the car accident. I used Ba Bi’s working his socks off in the context of the ‘you can’t beat the narrative’ argument I was attempting to set up. I set that as counterpoint to the determining power of the writer narrative and Yumi being the centre of that – even determining her own destiny as she writes the ending of her own story.
More on the writing.
The last 2 episodes for me, felt like being played with by the writers as we were set up with an ongoing uncertainty – Woon v Babi or the Webtoon ending? I found it unsatisfactory if the centre of the story was Yumi then why not focus on her and her cells? I also found the filer elements frustrating because they were keeping us from moving to that ending that was being teased.
For me this wonderful series rather lost its magic in the final 4 episodes. I don’t think they will have a Season 3. I loved Season 1 and a lot of Season 2 but there was something about the time leap devices and the story telling as they tried to finish it that felt disingenuous compared with Season 1.
Annyeong. Good reading everyone.
When Ep 14 ended, i was like “oh is that the end?” what??? i was sure there’s gonna be a season 3. but after reading you guys, i was like, oh. i guess, that’s it. waaaaah. i’m gonna miss the cells the most. it was satisfying to see Yumi continue her connection with both Babi and Woong even though they’re Exes. It was good to see her Love cell return. That she can be happy again. That we got a glimpse of the husband to be. I still would love a Season 3. but it is all up to us to imagine that HEA for Yumi. It’s been fun y’ all. love that scene with Yumi at the window with all her cells – seeing her cells in 3D is too adorable!
them FAT cells… yes, they’re at my love handles for good haha. they won’t be kicked out ever hahahahah.
the Yumi awards was surprising. kudos to her ex loves – like that song that says “God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you.” even though these loves led to broken heart, they made her into the better version of herself that is ready for her true love.
round of applause to the cast! wasn’t expecting Woong to return in Season 2. that was a good surprise. Babi’s character was a hard act, but JY did really good. so good that i felt bad for him. Woong’s present seem bright and shining. so proud of him.
ps i started watching “extraordinary attorney woo” and “Mr queen” – loving these shows 🙂 plus AOS and Cafe M of course.
**dating Kdramas here big time … hahaha and loving it. it was fun to have my mom who was in town for a week joined me in binge-watching “Angel’s Last mission: love”
*Disingenuous* is rather strong… perhaps better to say that keeping the two MLs in play as contenders for Yumi’s heart thus maintaining the uncertainty about the ending + all the story telling devices and twists and turns required to do that, worked for me at least against the enjoyment of these two final episodes.
But so much was delightfully told and moving and true to life that this is a show I will want to watch again when the dust has settled.
@HK-Lady,
Agreed re the cast! The actors made us really care about our central characters.
I finally got to watch the last two episodes after being out of town this last weekend. I have mixed feelings about the ending. I did appreciate finally seeing Yumi’s process as a writer (totally understand Deadline Syndrome!) and getting even just a tiny sense of the story she’s been working on all this time, or at least of how it will end.
But as the show was winding down I felt almost a sense of panic. I kept stopping the video to see how much time was left (“She has said said good-bye to Wung and Ba Bi and now there’s only 14 minutes left?!”).
I think would have been satisfied with the ending as it was–with Yumi actualizing her goal to be a writer and finding a peaceful resolution and even friendship when it came to her former boyfriends–except for that moment in the first season when the cells are walked through Yumi’s life library and we see half of a wedding photo, with Yumi beaming, standing next to a tall man whose face we don’t see. I thought the show was heading toward at least letting us know who that would be and why she ultimately chose him. (In the back of my mind, I also always thought it was going to be Wung, because in that same Yumi’s library tour the cells see a photo of Wung holding an umbrella over her in the rain, and it’s described as an important moment in her life.)
Instead we only see her shaking the hand of her presumed next beau. (You can get a better glimpse of him if you go back to 52:55 in episode 14. He seems to be the man raising his glass, whom we see sideways through the window. At least, he seems to be the only man there who is wearing a brown jacket with white shirt, which we glimpse when he shakes her hand. He looks to be tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, and wearing glasses).
Also–I’m still mulling over what that dream with the zombie meant, from Episode 11. Someone here said she dreamt of a zombie because she had just revived her dead relationship with Ba Bi (I’m paraphrasing here). But it can also be noted that before the zombie scares her she is being chased down a dark street (supposedly) by a man. She runs to what she thinks is a woman with a baby carriage. Although she hears a baby crying, the baby carriage is empty and the woman turns out to be the zombie. Could the man chasing her in her dreams be Wung/her previous relationship? And might the baby carriage symbolize her subconscious realization that her biological clock was ticking? Perhaps that’s one reason she had so readily said yes to Ba Bi’s suggesting they get back together. Her love was dead/gone at that point, and she was just going through the motions of a relationship. Her not being in a relationship in the end perhaps was her coming to peace with that, however subconsciously.
I also wonder if Ba Bi was as much of a player as I first imagined. After seeing what his father was like, I’m wondering if how he acted was as a counterpoint to his dad’s gruffness. The overt kindness he showed everyone, including (especially) young female interns, might have been his attempt to not seem like his father—? However, I can’t explain Ba Bi’s need to hide things, like moving to get away from the intern or his broken leg/not going on a business trip. You cannot be in a solid partnership with anyone who doesn’t tell you almost everything about their lives (e.g, “I was kind to this intern—maybe too kind—and now she has confessed her love to me.” or—especially—“I broke my leg! I know we just got back together and I don’t want to be a burden to you, but I’m not going out of the country after all.”)
It’s been fun talking about this show with everyone! I’m not sure what my next show will be!
Well…we’ll see! I am not sure how weighty this statement is.
https://giaallana.com/2022/07/26/kim-go-euns-yumis-cells-in-talks-for-a-third-season-heres-what-might-happen/
@BethB,
Interesting as ever- thank you.
One of the confusing things re Ba Bi for those who read the webtoon, apparently, was that the storyline given to him included elements from the Shin Soonrock storyline. So Ba Bi of the TV series had more about him than Ba Bi of the webtoon.
I imagine they would have to do this for Ba Bi to carry Season 2. If he were only a ‘type’ of boyfriend eg a player … as viewers we would not have been as invested.
I wonder too if they did this because they did not intend a Season 3 and there were lovely elements in the endgame romance that they wanted to include.
This is interesting – the writers of Yumi’s Cells 2 talk about their approach to the show in relation to the webtoon etc
https://www.soompi.com/article/1539059wpp/yumis-cells-director-and-writers-talk-about-what-they-did-differently-with-season-2-wittily-comment-on-potential-for-season-3