I couldn’t tell who the title of this kdrama was referring to. Both Kim So-Hyung and her leading man, Hwang MinHyun look lovely. But after doing my usual character analysis, I’ll go with Kim SoHyun’s character, SolHee (SH). She’s the liar in these two introductory episodes.

1. The Meet-Cute

Brother: What are you doing here?
Kim Doha: Going to Seoul
Brother: Look look here. Last night, she text me saying she would kill herself, and now I can’t reach her. What is this?
Doha: We broke up.
SolHee: (listening in. She hears no alarm. Meaning, Doha isn’t lying.)
Brother: Did you get into a fight again? Never mind. We can talk later. Let’s go look for EunJu. (grabbing his wrist)
Doha: (pulling hand away) No. I won’t go.
Brother: How can you be so shameless? We forgave you for messing around in Seoul. Was she a joke to you?
Doha: I didn’t cheat.
SolHee: (listening still. No alarm bells ringing.)
Brother: Do you have a woman in Seoul? Is that what happened?
DoHa: I said no.
SolHee: (no alarm bells still)
Brother: (punches Doha twice) Stand up, you bastard. Let’s go.
SolHee: (spotting her pursuer, decides to intervene) Stop it please! Ahjussi, you’re the reason the bus won’t move. Get off!
Brother: (asking Doha) Did you bring your new girl all the way over here?
SolHee: (pushing the brother all the way out of bus) Sure, sure, yes. I’m his new girl. He’s mine now. So get out already!
Brother: (gets off bus, accidentally taking Solhee’s pursuer with him off the bus)

Then SolHee returns to her seat. The bus leaves the station.

Doha: (observing Solhee)
SolHee: I don’t need a thank you. I just need to get to Seoul as soon as possible.
Doha: (sits back)
SolHee: (lecturing him) Why didn’t you fight back? If you simply take the blows, you look like you’re a cheater.
Doha: (startled) Do you even know what you’re talking about?
SolHee: If I say so, it is so.

SolHee: (giving out her calling card) This is me.

It says “Liar Hunter, who serves the god of truth”.

Doha: (leans back again, ignores her)
SolHee: Whatever.

My comments:

a. Yes, we know that this wasn’t the first time their paths had crossed. On her way home the previous night, SolHee passed by him, walking on the side of the road.

Note: On the radio, the newscaster was announcing that the soccer game was going to begin shortly after midnight. The time may be important. If EunJa texted her brother AFTER midnight, then this would indicate that she was alive when Doha left her at the beach. Anyways…

SolHee saw that he was wearing a red soccer shirt, and she commented, “Even in the middle of nowhere, there are soccer fans.” She then honked at him, “Dae-Han-Min-Guk” (Republic of Korea). But Doha didn’t even look up. He was lost in thought, holding a bloodied white shirt.

Note: In Doha’s nightmare, he was walking on the beach wearing a white shirt; EunJa was walking behind him. But when EunJa passed out on his chest, he was wearing his red soccer shirt, not his white shirt anymore. In his nightmare, when he looked down at his hands, they were bloodied.

b. The Brother accused Doha of messing around in Seoul. FOR NOW, I’m assuming that Doha was hanging out with some musical group OR the singer Syaon and his buddy/manager/company president Cho Deuk Chan. They ame a long way together. According to Syaon, they used to “work out of a moldy half-basement studio.”

c. SolHee felt comfortable befriending Doha because she knew he wasn’t a liar. She relied on the built-in lie detector in her ear to differentiate liars from honest people. On the other hand, Doha seemed leery of her. I would be, too. Although she helped him out, she seemed a little off her rocker.

d. I don’t see him killing Eunja. In these two episodes, he’d been subjected to battery four times. One, the brother punched him twice in the bus. Two, the brother had also stabbed him in the back.

Three, the female patron at the club snatched his shades off his face. Four, the composer intentionally drenched him with soda. In three of the four incidents, we saw that he didn’t retaliate or respond with physical violence.

e. SolHee found it weird though that he was too nice. He didn’t fight back when he was called a cheater. And he said “it was okay” when his luxury car was scratched.

f. The brother is the violent one. He punched Doha twice. He tossed water at the police chief. And he banged his head on the prison bars.

2. “The Lovely Liar”

I hope the irony isn’t lost on the viewers.

For someone who calls herself a “liar hunter,” SolHee wasn’t above telling lies herself. In this brief meet-cute for instance, she lied four times about her real self. First, she called herself Doha’s girlfriend. Second, she was posturing herself as an omniscient sage with her catchy slogan, “If I say so, it is so,” when, not a few minutes earlier, she’d been cowering in fear from her gangster and didn’t know what to do. Third, she hid her real name behind an alias on her calling card. And fourth, when she said that she served the “god of truth,” she was equivocating. Her god of truth could be the shaman’s spirits, the Christian God, Buddha, or the Catholics’ Christ.

To me, her driver was right. Her real god of truth was money. She was a disciple of money, i.e., she followed the money. Truthfully speaking, money was her reason for pursuing this career. She even kept the gold bars in a “tabernacle.”

The other times she lied:

a. To check out the fiancé, she pretended to be the cousin of her client. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time. She would’ve been asked to role-play to catch the liars.

Her mother’s right.

b. The clothes she wore when she dressed up as the rich cousin weren’t hers but rented from a designer brand shop. This also wouldn’t have been the first time. She would’ve rented different clothes to fit her assigned role.

c. She bought her own building to conduct her business. But it said “tarot café” on the façade of the building.

d. She pretended to be a shaman. She assumed that nobody would believe that she had a preposterous thing like a lie detector in her ear so she decided she could act like a possessed shaman.

That’s her justification for lying: no one believed her so she began living a pretend-life.

To me, that’s also the main premise of this drama. Because of what she saw from her parents’ behavior growing up, she learned that lies were something sad or bad. She still has to discover and understand the reason that people lie.

It’s this: people lie because too often, the truth is harder to tell and accept than a lie. Lies are easier to handle than the truth. Thus, people choose to take the easy way out by lying.

3. “If I say so, it is so.”

Two things.

One, SolHee likes to think that she’s omniscient, but to me it’s apparent that she isn’t that good at predicting people’s actions. But she regularly “reads” people wrong.

a. After she finished with her rich lady client, she told her assistant that it would be a while before she would send the money because she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to pay her. As it turns out, the rich lady had already transferred money to her account despite her great emotional upheaval.

b. She heard that the composer Kim DoHa didn’t show his face in public. She called him “attention seeker” because he was trying to be mysterious. She said he put on his mask to get more attention as a composer. In truth, Doha was far from being an “attention whore.” He really didn’t want attention because if people knew that he was once accused of killing somebody, they would ignore his musical compositions and achieve to fixate on the scandal.

He even exchanged his electric blue Maserati for a black car because it was too flashy. SolHee didn’t want to believe him when he said that he didn’t attention. But then she realized that no alarm bells were ringing so he knew he wasn’t lying.

c. She saw Doha rough-housing with his manager and his car being driven away, she assumed that Doha was being hounded by creditors and had to give up his Maserati.

Two, I also think that she’s been successful discovering liars because of her intuition and observation. She’s quick to notice anomalies, then put and two together. So, sure. She can detect lies by listening to voices, but too often, she hones in on the liar because she can detect something visually or behaviorally wrong with the liar.

For examples,

a. The gangster’s right-hand man. She suspected him only because he was being obnoxious to her.

b. The rich lady’s fiancé. She suspected him of having an affair with the housemaid when the housemaid touched her stomach.

c. The real estate agent. She figured out that he was selling property in a restricted development area when she saw the elk.

4. On Doha’s character

a. He takes responsibility. When his manager/friend hesitated to ask him a favor and meet the composer, he offered to do it. He said, ”

b. He’s estranged from his mother. He doesn’t think his own mother really believed that he’s innocent.

c. He knows that his mother, like many politicians, is a consummate liar. She told him that she made the side dish herself with pears, just as he liked it. But when he looked at the food container, he saw that she’d forgotten to remove the label, “Kimchi for the elderly who lived alone.” Meaning, his mom lied. It’s one of those meals her office donated to the poor, and she tried to pass it off as her home-cooked meal.

d. I doubt he’s the killer. It’s more likely that he hid his ex-girlfriend from her violent brother and took the fall for her disappearance.

That’s it for now. My first impressions. Gotta run.