The thread is open.
@nrllee, I’m transferring your post here.
Ep3
As KH is in a comatose state in hospital, we see a series of flashbacks (from his distraught mother I think?)
She’s ruthless in her demands of him to become a prosecutor. Never allowing him to feel full or stay too warm so as to force him to study more.
She seems to be channeling that same drive to will KH to get better despite the dire prognosis. He has the mental capacity of his 7yo self. He fractured his neck meaning he’s now a quadriplegic.
Turns out Evil Prosecutor and his ballerina daughter planned the whole accident. Mr Thug puts it altogether and he sounds vengeful? Although he seemed disappointed that his “plan” was now derailed. So maybe KH was a pawn he was using after all?
MJ’s nail salon is doing well. She meets up with SamSik again (who is recently released from prison) who still seems enamored by her. Sam Sik seems to have a history of thieving. Just when she thinks everything is looking up, her business partner runs away with the money from the nail salon business.
Mummy Pig decides to take KH home to recuperate. The village finds out news of his state spread. She finds out that KH refuses to eat because he remembers her reprimanding him from eating because being full makes him sleepy. And being sleepy means he can’t study. Mummy Pig weeps when she realizes the error of her ways. KH finally eats as she apologizes for her past wrongs.
I’m not entirely on board with how Mummy Pig decides to “encourage” KH to start moving his arms again. After the incident with his initial food refusal, she decides to use food again as an incentive to make him move his arms/hands. It made me horribly uncomfortable watching her leave his meal in front of him as she eats on her own completely ignoring his pleas for help. Watching him struggle to move unsuccessfully only to have the untouched food removed after she’s finished had me questioning her parenting style 🤔. I am all for tough love but this is taking it a bit far given their past history with food. She’s successful of course (this is KDrama after all) and KH finally manages to eat some food by using his hands.
Enjoy the show!
Thank you, @packmule3 and @nrllee. Yes, there are some times when she reverts to her overly tough love. Episodes 3 and 4 were a hard watch because of that.
Mrs Face Mask has gone creepy with her offers to wash Kang Ho’s lower half after he got muddy from playing with the twins. Thank goodness he knows something is wrong with her and is avoiding her.
Episode 3 and 4 show us something of Kang Ho and Mi Joo’s relationship. It looks like he is probably the twins’ father (unless Mi Joo had another man in between then and now).
Sam-shik is also lying about his job after he got released from prison. It seems he’s working in a bar, not on a fishing boat, and he got 5 million won from his mother by lying that he needed it for release funds. So many losers in this drama.
I need this drama to give me more hopeful and positive scenes, because right now it’s getting me down. There seems to be no positive outcomes. Even if Kang Ho gets better, he committed crimes for which he’ll have to pay. The acting is good, but I wonder how this screenplay will pan out.
Thank you @pm3 for opening this thread.
I like the way Kang HO’s mom explain why he has the brain of a 7 year old kid despite his real age of 35. The mom said, many people want to go back to being young again but they can’t, and Kang Ho was given the chance (from someone above) to go back. She advised to enjoy this life. I think it’s a good way to look at negative things in a positive way.
Thanks @packmule3.
I agree @Fern about the desire for more positive outcomes or just a more hopeful outlook for humanity. Even the normal bucolic scenes in the drama fail to give us this because none of the village folk are your “typical” good hearted kind variety. It’s getting me down when all I get is backstabbing and squabbling every time they come on screen. I had expected this to be a “feel good” drama, so I am holding out for these moments. If they are there, they are few and far between. Hopefully they will give us more as the drama progresses. I guess it makes sense that the twins belong to KH and MJ. They too were born on the same day in the same house as well.
Thanks @nrllee for your quick recap. Reading your post feels like sufficient for me. Like you and @Fern, I was hoping for a more warm, positive tone very soon after Episode 2. I’m not in the mood for many minutes showcasing the negative aspects of human beings. I don’t think I’ll watch until (ie if) show brings on the happier feels. I’m not on board with Mother. I feel it’s not so much a matter of Good or Bad Mother, because she loves her son, but more Wise or Misinformed Mother, who repeatedly fails in positive nurturing.
I want the happy woman who chased pigs to come back on screen. We may have to wait several long episodes before we see her again. I don’t know if Show will give us the back story of how Mother decided to become such a ‘tyrant’ towards her young son, but that part of the story is missing. To us now, it just seems like an incomprehensibly drastic change from the positive person she’d been.
If you continue to recap @nrllee, I’ll be happy to read, however I’ll hold off watching for now. The lighter, happier tones of The Love You Give Me and Bora Deborah offer a stronger lure.
@nrllee and @Growing Beautifully, I keep having the feeling that she treats her pigs rather better than she treats her son. Not only are they clean, but they are fed well. Unwise or misinformed is a good description of the mother’s actions.
Ha, even the twins were complaining about the bickering villagers and saying about the example being set for them.
@GB no problems. Join us when you feel like it. I’m away for the next 2 weeks so if I get a chance to catch up and write I will. Don’t hold your breath though 😂. I agree about wanting the happy lady who was kind and chased the piglet to reappear on my screen. Something tells me that part of her vanished when her husband died. He was the sweetest man. I adored how he treated her and his unborn child.
@Fern I agree about the pigs getting better treatment than her own son. 😕. As a sign of my ambivalence towards the main characters right now, I actually thought the Canadian backpacker (?) who is helping out in the piggery was the most dependable person in terms of “happy feels” during screen time. It’s bizarre that I feel that way. 😂
There must be some reason why the backpacker is there. Yes, his use of the language app was funny. It was said that his father had a pig farm, but I’m imagining that it must be a very large North American style operation. I hope that he’s not another bad guy planted there to spy on Kang Ho.
@Fern O I didn’t think of that. About Andrea the Canadian that is. I just watched Ep4. The twins are the real stars. They are cuties. I am finding YS’s parenting of KH difficult to fathom. When she found out how he was living his life in Seoul, she came home and started to hit and scold him when he clearly had no comprehension of his wrongdoings. It was hard to watch. It’s abuse. That’s how it came across to me. 😑. Had KH been his original self pre-accident, I would not have had the same feelings. But he was clearly not. And he was defenseless in the wheelchair. That only exacerbated my feelings of injustice. I am not sure how to respond to YS right now. And I guess she did eventually apologize when KH was distraught and seemed almost desperate when he apologized for being a “bad person”. She has moments of sage advice eg when she talks about pigs falling down and looking up. But then she has these other times where she’s flown into a rage and seems incapable of parental calm that’s required in those key moments.
Ep4 ends with MJ back at the village and the star crossed lovers meet again.
@nrllee, that’s what I meant by episodes 3 and 4 being brutal. Not only did YS attack her own son, but the mother of a prisoner who was using his name in a
protest.
Who knows, Canadian Andrea may end up being the white knight (no puns intended).
It’s an unusual name: Italian for Andrew, but is normally, in America at least, the feminine version of Andrew. For that reason, I would expect him to have an Italian surname or family links to Italy, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, or Malta. Do you remember that Andrea was the baptismal name of Dr Ahn Jeong-won who wanted to become a priest like his brothers? He must have been named for Andrea Kim Taegŏn (1821–1846), first Korean Catholic priest, Patron Saint of Korea for the Catholic Church.
Speaking of religion, did you notice that YS visited every available religious congregation to pray for KH?
@Fern yes I did notice that YS visited every available religious congregation to pray for KH. And yes I did wonder about the unusual name for the Canadian helper. Thanks for the background for the name
Andrea. I didn’t know that before. 🙂
Began this show a few days ago and am caught up to episode 4. There’s a big discrepancy between the opening imagery and music—a cute little pig running across the countryside while a happy tune is playing—and the actual drama. Bribery, murder, blackmail… a son who hates his mother so much he wants to be adopted, a fiancée who willingly sets up her fiancé’s murder, a father who is murdered in a fake suicide. When are the happy scenes going to come (as promised by that opening music?). If the ML truly murdered a mother and her baby to help his sponsor then I don’t care if he recovers or gets his redemption arc. The show needs to clue us in even just a little at this point that the ML wasn’t as evil as he seemed in the flashbacks we’ve already seen. We are only 4 episodes in—I can’t imagine where this is going in the next 12. If he recovers his memory, how will he reconcile himself to all the bad things he has already done (even if not murder)?
I was hoping that Kang Ho somehow faked the murder of the mother and baby — got them to a safe place overseas for example. That’s the only way I can feel any empathy for him as he was. He may have had plans to get the disabled man out of jail but the crash happened.
If he did commit the crimes, it’s as I wrote above, he will have to pay for his bad deeds if he gets well. If the law doesn’t find him, his former bosses will destroy him because I can’t imagine them sympathetically taking blame on his behalf, can you?
@BethB @Fern yes I agree about the bad deeds KH was supposed to have done that he needs to atone for. @BethB you’re not alone when you say you were expecting cuter and more “feel good” vibes when it comes to this drama. So far it’s been few and far between. Once KH’s dad passed, everything just went south.
EPISODE SIX (Spoilers)
How can there be a redemption arc for the mother/son relationship when she has STAGE 4 CANCER and he is still suffering from brain damage (and likely won’t be able to comprehend that she is going to die). Ugh. If she is this sick and there is no cure for it I’m not sure she can last another eight episodes (this is a 14 episode drama, not 16, as I alluded to in a previous comment).
This cancer diagnosis seems as misplaced as the unexpected leukemia diagnosis of a certain young man suffering from nosebleeds in another drama (a drama that, up until then, had been lighthearted, and which many BODers had enjoyed–I won’t name it in case there is still someone here who hasn’t seen it).
This show just keeps piling on the tragedy. In a flashback in this episode we see that the (pre?)teen-aged mom watched her entire family killed by a white truck of doom. Yet, at the same time, it keeps going off into side stories about the townspeople, like the songwriter and his complaints about the pig farm, which don’t seem to really add anything to the plot.
Adding up the tragedies so far:
–Mom’s family killed by a white truck
–Mom and dad’s pig farm burned
–Mom’s husband murdered, disguised as suicide
–Mom abuses son until he goes off to college, all to turn him into a prosecutor
–Son becomes a corrupt prosecutor, sending innocent people to jail, and possibly murders a mom and baby (also leaves his girlfriend abruptly and cruelly)
–Attempted murder of the son (by same people who killed his dad), which results in paralysis and brain injury
–Mom diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer
–(this is minor–but the local livestock are suffering from foot and mouth disease, which I assume might come to their farm, given how they have such terrible luck–why else would they keep mentioning it?)
–[did I miss anything?]
There are moments of comedy–like the two men sent to find something (what? the documents the dad had?) having to walk through pig crap in the house and accidentally saving the son’s life from an assailant–and then saving the mom when she collapses outside the pig farm (the comedy is when they fall backwards into pig crap just before she faints).
But this cancer diagnosis is just too much. I was willing to bear with the show because I thought there might be a happy resolution at the end. Instead we’re likely to see a deathbed scene and a son who is left alone, whether he has recovered by then or not.
I think I’m throwing in the towel. But–if the mom’s diagnosis turns out to be wrong (unlikely since there are lesions in her brain) and there is a sort-of happy ending/resolution, let me know and I’ll consider coming back later.
Thanks @BethB for the quick review and info about Ep 6. I’m glad I didn’t continue to watch. I’d have been so fed up. Enough with laying on the grief so thickly. Where’s the more hopeful, lighter note that opening music seems to promise?
Same here. I wanted a feel-good drama with some necessary strife, but this is weighted too heavily on the bad news side. I feel rather bad for the actors, whom I like, if everyone feels as we do.
Thanks for the review and the heads-up, @BethB.
I think I’ll just rename this thread to “Eps 3 to ??” Whoever wants to continue watching this show can just leave breadcrumb trails for the others. 🙂
This show is a MUST-WATCH. No episode has disappointed and in fact each episode has left me wanting more but I can only get two new ones per week, so on Netflix I wait until Thursday to watch two together. AHHHHH.#thatisall
Episodes 9-10 SPOILERS
I didn’t watch these episodes but read the recaps on Dramabeans. Just came back to note that my prediction about the swine virus came true. Apparently the local government slaughters all of the family’s pigs. Oh and the mom tries to kill herself and her son with pesticide. That doesn’t work… then the mom tries to hang herself. Yikes! (I’m not going to read any more recaps for this show…)
What is it with all these dire SK shows lately? What’s especially puzzling are those with cheery opening music like this one and Dr. Cha. (In Ep 14 of Dr. Cha a health issue resurfaced… I won’t say more, but–I’m no longer enjoying that show and am not sure I’ll watch the last two episodes). As an antidote to this, I am hoping for some fun Rom-Coms in June!