The thread is open.
Don’t mind the password-protected my “First Impressions.” I’ll open it after I edit it and get screenshots.
gifs from kimgoeun’s tumblr
I like her little mutiny against life. She literally stopped working and was doing nothing, unlike this mad bunny.
gifs from kateknowsdramas’ tumblr
Did Siwan close his eyes before the ball hit him? How many retakes did this scene take? When he first fell, I thought his head was going to hit the steps? But then in the close-up, his head was nowhere near the steps.
Let’s enjoy the show!
😂😂😂 good catch on SiWan’s scene with the ball. I didn’t notice that till you pointed those things out.
In case you didn’t catch it on my notes, the titles for episodes
Ep1 – An underpaid pushover at work
Ep2 – The perfect place for a new beginning
Ep3 – The outsider of Angok
Ep4 – Meet YeoRum, the drunk
Guess they dropped 2 eps last night? I haven’t had the chance to watch yet.
Thanks for the titles, @nrllee. I don’t seen them on viki. Where do you find them?
Thanks @pkml3 and @nrllee.
I was watching some other show’s BTS where a person is supposed to fall or get hit and the actor said it was very hard to act like they were unprepared for the fall/hit because they knew it was going to happen. Humanly speaking, it was next to impossible to not expect to get hit by the ball, so actors have a hard time keeping their eyes open and expressions neutral just beforehand.
@packmule3 where I watch the drama they have the titles. I can’t access Viki.
O…turns out YeoReum actually means “summer” in Korean. The school girl’s name is Bom – which is Spring. And the dog…is GyeoUl 😂😂😂😂…Winter. I approve. The last GyeoUl I encountered was…similar. 😂😂😂.
Sigh the FL is still annoying me. Why did she go and get drunk again? Didn’t she learn her lesson the last time? 🤦♀️ There were contrasting scenes…
Ep3 beginning when YR talked about her new life and the move…there was a positive spin on pretty much everything in her new lodgings. She didn’t see the cobwebs, the dust, the lack of…she saw the potential.
Contrast
Ep4 beginning when lady librarian was talking about her potential life in Seoul. She was trying to convince herself that it was just as well she failed the examination to transfer…She listed all the negatives about Seoul. The air is awful…work is stressful…and rent is expensive. But still you could tell she wasn’t convinced. She still wanted to go.
We are introduced to 3 characters.
1. Policeman son of the realtor. MooChul
2. Male Student who has a crush on Bom. JaeHoon
3. Man who has been watching from next door is revealed. Son(?) of the restaurant owners. GeunHo. He looks to be mentally challenged?
Things of note
1. We are told about DB’s past. His family ran the billiard hall which was named after his genius older sister. His professor wants him back to finish a paper? Is he a genius too? The pressure got too much for him and he bailed? Is the person who died in the billiard hall his sister?
2. YR says DB reminds her of Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea. How so? Did she think he was battling an inner demon?
3. The other book that was mentioned was Musoyu. Which is an essay (?) penned by a monk about non attachment and decluttering your life. https://www.brianbrookshire.com/musoyu/
What didn’t make sense to me
1. How Uncle (convenience store owner) could do a 360 suddenly like that just because of Bom and what his son (hello UJu from HP) did. 😑
2. Why there’s garbage here. In this picturesque spot? 🤔
https://i.ibb.co/J79Lkkh/4-D211-FDF-37-CA-4036-AA83-760-C331-AAEE3.jpg
3. The stupidity of FL with her drunken withdrawal of money from the ATM. 😑🤦♀️ She deserved to lose all her money.
4. Why her brother would ask her for money to fund his son’s school trip. Had she always just done that for him in the past? Is that why?
5. Grandpa would announce village wide for everyone to look for money in a black bag. And expect everyone to just return it to YR when they find it. Is that how it is in the village? 🤔. I would believe it in Japan…but in Korea? Wait…is that a racist comment? 🤷🏻♀️
I don’t quite know how I feel about this drama. I am a bit ambivalent? There’s not much of a mystery to solve. Writer has already given us the identity of the strange person watching YR. And one by one all the villagers are already warming up to YR so there’s no more “danger” as such. And I can already sort of guess at DB’s backstory with all the details revealed. What more is there to keep me watching? Maybe just SiWan’s beautiful face? 😂. Yeah…I think given I bailed on Run On, I can keep going for 3-4 more weeks just to see him on screen.
Episode 3 started out ok with YR thinking positive and seeing sunlight through the trees, but I found the colour palette changed to dull and dark and later, even the moon could not be seen behind the leaves. Most of the scenes took place in the evening from the end of Ep 3 into Ep4. Might the dark colours be a sign of YR (and DB) living under a cloud? YR’s might be a cloud of her inept decision making, and DB’s a cloud of running away without completing his college finals?
I was thinking that the book repairing scene reflected how both YR and DB needed to fix their lives. It’s unlikely that some simple gluing back of torn out bits will be sufficient. Perhaps YR especially needs to be dried out in a freezer like that wet book, when she gets sloshed! LOL.
When it rains, DB and YR first have a broken umbrella, but then DB buys a nice, new, red umbrella for YR to use. Appropriately, show will probably have YR and DB helping each other in their quest to find themselves, although I imagine DB will do more for YR than she can do for him. He will probably add more colour to her dull life, and be the one to protect her, as seen by that red umbrella.
It was cute to see that DB practised greeting YR over and over again, only to get the words wrong when he met her. He seemed so calm most of the time that it was nice to see him slightly flustered.
@nrllee – I was disgusted by the drunken antics of YR (I FFDed it). I, too, felt that she deserved to lose that money. Knowing that she did something as embarrassing as sleep in the library when drunk, she still drank again. Her type of being drunk (on just a bottle or can of soju) is the dangerous type where she wanders off and endangers herself, while she inconveniences others.
It’s fortunate that the people who saw that money were honest. It’s hard to fathom how a 28 year old, who lived in the city and worked for 4-5 years, had not learnt any smarts at all about being safe, protecting herself and her belongings. The fact that anyone could just enter the billiard hall and that she did nothing about it, shocked me. She seemed to think that people in the countryside would not be out to harm her.
Her billiard hall home finally gets fixed up, no thanks to her helping herself but because others pushed Sung Min for her or felt guilty. From the start she should have argued that the owner was responsible for fixing everything, but it took a school girl, Bom, to tell Sung Min off.
I believe he’s in deathly fear of his father, and that’s why he did what he was supposed to have done all along ie fix the hall, because he didn’t want YR to reveal how the money had been found. His father would have accused him of deliberately taking the money to get YR to leave, in just the same way the father had accused the restaurant lady and husband of defacing the building.
I’m guessing that the real culprit behind the defacement was also Sung Min, since the words on the wall were targeted at YR, to scare her away. No one knew her well enough to hate that much.
Librarian Ji Young – She takes every opportunity to get distracted, since she’s so bored. She even jumps at a coffee break, and wants to know what DB is up to whenever he goes out.
Dae Beom – I think it was in Wikipedia or MDL that DB is described as a math genius. However his paper was on “Geometric Interpretation of Entanglement Entropy” which is physics (hence his desire to explain how books, being made up mostly of cellulose could be frozen, LOL). So both he and his sister are supposed to be super smart. DB seems to be unstable, however, or unable to accept failure. He seems to have taken that quiet librarian’s job to ‘recover’ from his ‘episode’ but he’s so smart that despite his meltdown in class, his professor wants him back.
You got me wondering as well. I looked up notes on Santiago. So far YR hardly knows DB, so I cannot understand what she bases her thinking on. All she can see of DB, which might be similar to what Santiago was like, is that he is patient, enduring, and is well regarded by his fellow locals. Santiago was considered to have had bad luck because he had not caught fish in 84 days (is this a significant number? 7 x 12 = 84. In the Bible 7 means ‘perfect or complete’ and 12 is significant as well as in the 12 tribes of Israel) but he earned the respect of the community when he brought back the carcass of an 18-foot marlin, after battling for 3 days. His struggle and sacrifice in battling the marlin, the sea and the sharks was somehow likened to that of Christ’s (3 days in the tomb to resurrect). However, YR has not known enough of DB to have been able to apply these images to him.
WRT the garbage… I thought that YR had actually hauled them there herself but can’t think why. Then I thought that the cleaners of the environment had gathered trash to be collected from that spot. But it’s a very strange place to have bags of trash.
I’m rewatching the part when she’s drunk and she really deserved to fall flat on her face, because poor DB couldn’t break her fall without getting hurt or accidentally molesting her LOL. He has so far interacted with her without touching her. He stopped her falls by pushing her with the bag of money. I’m watching to see when they do touch each other!
And I found it deplorable that YR had been in the same clothes since the previous day, been through the dumpsters etc and didn’t even change into something clean, when spending time with Bom and Jae Hoon. Shouldn’t there have been a smell? However suddenly YR’s face looked like it had been washed and her t-shirt no longer looked grubby. Something strange in the editing or wardrobe got the state of the clothes wrong.
Now that Jae Hoon has appeared, we have the foursome who appear in the cartoon opening credits with dog.
I wonder who Joon’s mother and Sung Min’s wife is, and if we’ve seen her yet.
Another thing about the editing… we never see YR get close enough to the truck to put the envelope of money in it, so how did the envelope get there.
Although he fixes library books, DB tears apart and burns his own college thesis/paper. He’s burning his bridges, or trying to, but it’s true (as the preview mentions) that it’ll be a shame, that someone as full of potential as he, buries himself.
Great pick ups @GB. My first thought when they were repairing the books was how different they approached the task. Granted DB had done it many times before so he’d worked out a system but I think it highlighted how both approached life. YR just grabbed all the pages and proceeded to apply glue only to find that she didn’t remember which book each page came from. That seems to be how she approaches situations in general. She launches in (well meaning) without much of a plan and then gets herself into a pickle eg the dog. DB is methodical, structured. He thinks things through. Taking the blame for Joon because he could see his distress. Also I vaguely remember YR asked him how he remembered which page came from which book and he did something about the characters? Or was that YR? I have to rewatch. And that was also how he viewed people. Everyone had their own “story” as such even if they interacted in real life and their lives intersected. DB knew each person had their own stories so he could read them in context.
I get the feeling the dog is a metaphor/contrast for someone/something too. Because the lady restaurant owner was the person who interacted with YR, I am wondering if it’s got to do with her son (does he have an intellectual disability?) who she seems to want hidden? Is that why she and hubby want to buy the billiard hall? So no one finds out about him? 🤔. But there are no secrets in the village? Surely everyone would know about him already? The lady didn’t treat the dog very well but the dog looked fed. Her son (?) was “fed” but to keep him locked up like that with no other human interaction seems cruel.
Yes there are a lot of gaping holes in the plot with the change of clothes, parts of the plot and timeline but I am glossing over them 😂.
@nrllee
Book fixing – Truth to tell, I was rolling my eyes when she simply grabbed all the loose pages like that. How can an adult who likes books, not know that pages of different books cannot be put together and glued?
True, both YR and DB are the same age, but can’t be more different in their approach to the same things. YR does practically everything without a plan or preparation. DB said he remembered the names and locations in the books, which helped him know to which books the pages belonged. YR admits that she cannot even remember the names of characters even if she read them multiple times.
Show is making her a doofus, probably so that in 12 episodes we get to see a growth arc (hopefully). It annoys me, though.
YR without a plan – She abandons her job without much savings (it seems she was not even aware of how little money she had in the bank), grabs the most unsuitable building to live in because it was cheap, drinks because others do so, continues drinking even when she knows she causes trouble when drunk, insists on taking care of a dog when she can’t even take care of her laundry, refuses to call out the restaurant ahjumma on animal abuse and scamming her out of $450. If she began with $500 then she’s only got $50 left to live on.
And still she insists on giving people a treat, on paying back the scheming Sung Min, etc without considering that she’s going to run out of funds very soon.
She certainly needs the cooler head of someone like DB to keep her from self-annihilation. Twice already she has been walking on roads, unaware that she could have been killed, and she’s only been in Angok for a week or two?
😂😂 I couldn’t go on after Ep 3, @GB and @nrllee.
I agree with everything you said, @GB. YR is simply Too Stupid To Live (TSTL). I don’t think I’ve watched a female lead like her in a long while. When she was conned by that ahjumma to pay $450 for the dig, and the high schooler like Bom displayed more street smarts than her, I felt like reaching inside my laptop and boxing her ears. 🤦♀️
And why does Siwan pick characters who are prudish and afraid of skinship?!
As for that Santiago comparison, I could only think of three reasons YR saw him as Santiago.
1. YR doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is her being delusional.
2. He reminded her of that quote she read in Ep 2, “But man is not made of defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” He looks like he’s temporarily hiding from the world, not because he’s down and out for good, but because he’s gathering strength.
3. She sensed an old soul in DaeBeom. Despite his youthful appearance, he projects the haraboji vibes, like the Old Man Santiago. I don’t think DaeBeom appreciates being regarded as a grandpa, though.
🙂
Hi @pkml3, I’m going to keep watching. It’s a toss-up whether I continue to criticise YR or watch her growth…. either way should be ‘fun’. I like being catty with annoying characters.
I want to see what DB is going to end up doing, assuming that we get some kind of resolution. I want to know what happened to cause a death in the billiard hall and how DB used to live there, but it’s owned by the old man, father of Sung Min.
I want to know what the restaurant ahjumma is doing, hiding her grown up son. I’m sure everyone must know he exists, except YR, who’ll probably get a great shock sometime, when she meets him.
I expect any romance to be rather low key, since DB can’t even bring himself to touch YR. I want to see what the heck that’s about too. Some trauma about being touchy-feely? I haven’t heard of one. I’ve looked up touch aversion and at its extreme there’s haphephobia. But this is a fear of being touched, not a fear of touching others.
Anyway, he might be special, being a genius and all.
No, I don’t think he wants YR to consider him a grandpa either! 😆
@GB @packmule3 I will keep watching. Even if YR annoys me. She has zero common sense? That’s what annoys me the most. 😂. I don’t mind naïveté but when they keep repeating the same error then it just shows they didn’t learn anything in the first place. No growth so far @GB if we go by the drinking…😑. Other than her being a pretty face I am wondering what on earth attracts DB to her. Because she’s “kind hearted”? Thank goodness she has Bom now as her friend. That one has a mouth on her but she’s streetwise and has her wits about her. Fact that she’s a high schooler only makes YR’s stupidity harder to watch.
Not sure why SiWan seems averse to skinship 😂. Maybe he’s read all our reviews of his lack of passion/spark (with the female in question) when it comes to kissing? Rendering him with a complex as a result? 😂. I have no insights as to why DB seems to avoid physical touch altogether either. I mean, prodding a drunk person to wake them up doesn’t count? He’s happy enough to cart a child off in the library so it’s not all physical touch he’s paranoid about.
@nrllee
That’s right, no noticeable growth in YR at all. Only excuse is that it’s just been a matter of weeks… but still.
As for YR’s attractions… I guess Show is making her out to be a bit more than a hare-brained pretty face. She’s someone sincere, honest, full of heart/soft-hearted, who goes in with her feelings to help where she can. She reminds me of the Liar Game FL who’s repeatedly called stupidly honest. The latter was conned multiple times by the same persons but refused to change. The point of that show was that Liar Game was a horrible ‘creation’ to confirm the deceit and self-serving attitude in humans but the FL flew in the face of human weaknesses, meanness and deceit to prove the opposite.
Summer Strike, however, is not that kind of show, so other than making YR out to be foolishly thoughtless, unable to make good decisions, or take care of herself, so that she makes DB stand out by contrast and she gets to appear to grow up, I’m not sure why her character is written the way it is. It’s a great character to slime though LOL. (*meow*)
Yeah the kids like Bom and Bom’s fanboy will be able to teach YR a thing or two about being streetwise. Even the little kid, Jun, knew how to demand to be paid for a commissioned job.
LOL
I did not see much on our criticism of him being lacking in skinship. So his romantic scenes were cringe-worthy?
Thank heavens for other actors. One that does romantic scenes very nicely is the Cdrama actor Wang Zi Qi. Unfortunately the contemporary romance show(s) he was in were not great, but the couple scenes were lovely.
Haha, @nrllee.
Siwan has a “kiss complex”?? Say it ain’t so!
@GB, I think the posters here panned his kissing scene in “Run On.”
https://bitchesoverdramas.com/2021/01/15/bitch-talk-im-siwans-corner/
He was in a guest in a show where he was teased about his lack of kissing scene (or was it anemic kissing??) I can’t remember the details now.
Hah! Thanks @pkml3 for the link. Now I really have to watch to the end to see just how ‘bad’ his kissing or lack of, is!!!
This book repair business is catching… 😂😂😂. It (and librarians maybe?) could be the flavour of the month. Fare thee well amnesia and prosopagnosia/facial blindness.
https://www.soompi.com/article/1556475wpp/kim-hyun-joo-is-a-politicians-wife-with-a-big-secret-in-new-drama-trolley
I realized (because I took some screenshots of the drama), in ep4, as YR is doing her voiceover about her warm and fuzzies by the end of the episode, DB’s act of burning the project/thesis, her voiceover was superimposed on him.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SHAiZdiMRCrPvFVFRQ-k3xQJVsYYLcrdFWj39FqSgaY/
Hi @nrllee, Thanks for the screenshots. I noticed it and thought it was incongruous but did not go further to think why show did that.
YR’s victim mentality – I find YR’s choice of words for discovering that she was wrong about being hated, also incongruous. The sentence: “But today my world was turned upside down” is usually applied to when something bad happens and not when something good turned up when something bad was expected. Perhaps it means that YR always expected to be the doormat, and instead of fighting it, she kept enabling it. So when something bad turned into something good, it really shook her world. She has to change the way she thinks about herself with regards to others.
Yes, the “feeling of hatred”, might perhaps be applied to DB’s hatred for the situation at his last employment or place of study.
Wanting “to leave this place”, might refer to DB having left that place of work or study. DB seems to have come home to Angok and does not look like he wants to leave. He mentioned that he likes things the way they are.
Back to Running – Perhaps DB is another person who considers himself a ‘victim’. I was interested to note that your feeling about DB’s running in the morning was that he had purpose, unlike YR (as you wrote in one of the first posts). However @pkml3’s take on his running was that he was also running away from something, like YR.
I took it that he ran because he enjoyed the morning air, the exercise and was happy where he was. When one morning YR was also out walking/running and DB ran and overtook her, she was embarrassed and turned around to run in the opposite direction. She was not quite ready to make a journey together, but later she was happy to fix books with him.
On the night DB was upset about having been conned to see his old professor again, he wanted to relieve his pent up frustrations by running. And that’s when, if I remember right, he bumped into the drunk YR and found himself trying to help her keep her money and not become roadkill. He ended up having to walk with her, although he had wanted to run alone. When he found that he just could not get her to keep her bag of money (she kept giving it back to him), he threw the money at her and ran away. LOL so there was more than one reason for DB’s running.
The next day he apologised to her and said that he should have walked her home. If in Seoul, these two would have been unlikely to have met, since they came from very different disciplines and possible jobs. But in Angok they seem destined to make a walking journey together.
@GB there was another running moment in Ep3. I am trying to work out if there’s any hidden meaning behind it. It was when YR decided to head out for an early morning walk/run. She was walking briskly (she wasn’t really running) and then noticed DB running behind her. She nodded a hello as he ran past her and then for some reason she decided to turn back and run the opposite way? Was she embarrassed? Is that why she seemed to abandon her initial route and turn back? 🤔. Or was it just to highlight to us that DB is a lot more stubborn/determined and sees things through. Whereas YR tends to bail when things get awkward or difficult? There was no way she was going to catch up to his pace of running anyway so why stop her initial plan to run/jog that route?
https://i.ibb.co/NN9LVvP/28146-A2-A-AF4-F-477-A-A8-C7-6-CD2-F6-D3-DFE9.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/CMMpCPH/B06752-E7-547-E-4-A4-A-8798-D862-A92-C04-BC.jpg
I agree that DB is running away from something. Ep4 revealed that his sister SunAh was also a genius. The billiard hall was named after her. DB lived in the billiard hall when he was little. I have a feeling the sister is the one who “died” in the billiard hall. I am wondering if the stress of being a “genius” and the pressure of performing pushed her over the edge and she took her own life. So DB actually “ran home” after his meltdown in University (probably in Seoul).
@GB sorry. I must be blind. You did mention the running incident in your comment above. My bad.
No problem @nrllee. I just made a big boo-boo in something else and am now trying not to worry too much. It happens!!!
Here’s my little rant: A certain fatigue is setting in with me for “drunk scenes that convey anger/intense sadness” in k-dramas. I think it’s an overused trope—and really, after more than a few moments of seeing people weave around, barf, make public scenes, complain of being hungover, etc., it’s a waste of screen time. Sure, it may be what people in SK do when something bad happens—perhaps it’s a socially accepted way for people to blow off steam. But I can’t help but wonder if showing people getting drunk as routine and expected in these shows might also perpetuate the habit.
So far, there’s been not one but two drunken scenes in this drama. Neither drunken scene moved the story along, except to make the female protagonist more disliked in the town.
Anyway, I thought the first episode of this drama, when the FL was still in Seoul, was almost poetic. The countryside scenes (after that lovely swim in the ocean) have been more prosaic and, for me, are starting to get boring. So I’m probably going to drop it, although I thought it did show promise at first.