Really just quick takes for last week’s episode.

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

1. DoHa’s surprising reaction

I was expecting him to avoid encountering SolHee after she revealed that she was a human lie detector. After all, if he indeed killed EumJi, then he would be on guard every minute spent with Solhee. He would fear talking to her lest the truth should come out.

But he sought her out at her workplace to help her clean up the debris from her mother’s rampage. He didn’t act like he had something criminal to hide from her.

2. Lesson from SolHee’s mother

This is important insight into her character.

Mom: But you know, anyone can tell our family is poor. As for her not having a dad, she was hiding it as a secret so no one would know. If you tell everyone about things she wants no one to know, who’s going to like you? So, don’t tell anyone. People who know about that can’t stay by your side. They’ll go away.

While I understand why so many viewers hate this woman with a vengeance after what she did in the last episode, I keep pushing back against her detractors because they’re missing the big picture. She isn’t intrinsically and irredeemably evil.

SolHee’s mom’s greatest fear is poverty. That’s why she scams and defrauds people. She preys on gullible people, especially men whom she could sweettalk to part with their money. But even as a scammer, she demonstrates some scruples. Hence, I said she wasn’t irredeemable.

Let’s dissect her aforementioned statement.

a. she didn’t want SolHee to end up alone and abandoned. She warned the young SolHee to conceal her power because she thought her unique gift would lead to her being ostracized or bullied. This reveals the mom’s hierarchy of values. Yes, being poor was hard enough. But being friendless and abandoned was even worse.

b. That’s why she pitied SolHee’s classmate for having an absentee dad. She understood the child’s desire to have a dad, and consequently her need to lie about her dad’s presence. She could empathize with the child.

c. She wanted the young SolHee to do the same: to practice empathy. She wanted her to look beyond the lie and empathize with her classmate.

d. She also wanted the young SolHee to refrain from seeing the world simply in “black and white.” But given the young age of SolHee, it was natural that she was stubborn and rigid in her worldview. She would need a bit more cognitive maturity and real-life experience to understand that generally speaking, people lie out of fear. I already said this in my “First Impressions. Most often, people lie because they either fear speaking the truth or fear hurting the other person (e.g., their loved ones) with the truth.

Note: I think this conversation with her mom occurred BEFORE her father divorced her mom and ran away, too. Otherwise, Solhee wouldn’t be so harsh with her classmate having an absentee father herself.

3. The toxic women in Doha’s life

Why does he attract these women?

First, it was that girlfriend of his. She exhibited the typical behavior of a narcissist. She wanted to control DoHa and make him stay by her side so threatened to hurt herself. “If you break up with me, I will cut/stab/drown/kill myself.”

But is she really dead I wonder. I wouldn’t put it past Doha to take the blame for her disappearance to hide her from her psychopathic brother.

Second, that kpop singer Syaon. Not only does she leverage self-harm to get Doha’s attention, but she also intentionally inflicts distress on DoHa. She knows that DoHa has PTSD from his ex-girlfriend’s missing case.

She used the same argument as the girlfriend: “I will die with Oppa DoHa.” But SolHee detected that this was a lie and made her confess that she had no intentions of killing herself. She only wanted to “pour salt on Oppa DoHa’s wound because that was his weakness” she could take advantage of to get his attention. Ugh. She was more despicable than Doha’s girlfriend.

Third, his mom. He rushed to her side when she called on him because he thought she had something urgent to say. But all she wanted was to send him away to Germany. It’s an interesting contrast: on one hand, the toxic Syaon wanted DoHa by her side to compose music for her. But on the other hand, his toxic mom wanted him as far away as possible from her so she could begin her political campaign.

What annoyed me about the mom was that she used her “victim card.”

Mother: SeungJa-ya.

Note that she doesn’t call him Kim DoHa. When asked what name he wished to go by, Doha unfailingly chose to be called Kim DoHa.

Mother: I have always lived for you. Even after your dad passed away, in order to raise you without wanting, I started working as soon as the mourning period, only to hear people criticizing how vicious I was. And to get you acquitted while you went through that ordeal, I used all the connections I had and kneeled and begged them. So, just this once, could you help me out?

But wait! Didn’t she also ask him for tickets for SyaOn’s concert to help her out?

DoHa: Really. You really have become a politician now. After Father passed away, you garnered lots of votes with the single mom image. After I got into college, you sold the image of a parent sending her son to an elite college and became the candidate for Superintendent of Education. And a son like that can’t end up as a murderer. That’s why you kneeled.
Mom: How could you say that?
DoHa: Just be honest. That you want to send the son getting in the way of your career to a faraway country. That you don’t want to face the scary face that killed a person.
Mom: (banging her face on the horn)
DoHa: I’m not going to Germany. There’s something urgent and important here, too. I will get going now. (exits the car)
Mom: (honking)

My comments:

a. Sigh. Politicians. They’re always portrayed in kdrama as the modern-day face of the devil.

b. To DoHa, his mom sank to a whole new level. When she used his father/her husband’s death to win the election, he tolerated it. When she got him out of jail for political expediency, he accepted it. But he wouldn’t leave the country because he had become an albatross around her neck. My take on this is that DoHa believes that his mother was doing all this for her own sake. Just like sitting down together to share a meal was central to SolHee’s concept of a family, to DoHa, it was weathering a problem together. To him, his mother’s goal wasn’t family-oriented, but politically motivated.

c. Seriously, where’s his backbone all this time?

It’s amazing that SolHee had the measure of him at their meeting. She asked him why he didn’t fight back and simply took the blows.

4. Their date

How many times have they shared a meal together? I’ve lost count.

From being afraid to eat in public to eating in a very trendy place, beside her ex-boyfriend. he’s come a long way. Now all he has to do is remember the food that she can’t/won’t eat: eggplant, spoonworms, pupa and cilantro.

I love cilantro!!!!

Also, I don’t know about you, but I’d find it uncomfortable eating at a place like this. The dining table is too low! Look. Their knees are bumping the edges. I’d hate to have to hunch over the table while eating. And that’s a long distance for the fork to travel all the way to my mouth, especially when I’m dining on something with rice or red sauce. Ugh. Just terrible! This table is a design disaster.

5. Bread talk: life lessons from bread

The baker compared SolHee to a baguette.

Baker: You’re like a baguette. You’re hard on the outside, but I don’t think you are on the inside. But then, there might be holes all over.
SolHee: Why? You haven’t even talked to me that much.
Baker: Gosh. I don’t have to talk to you to know that.

We got the metaphor, right? She’s a female tsundere.

But then, we were also given an insight into DoHa’s character when he bought trays of bread from the bakery because a customer was dissing the baked goods.

Then, he walked out of the bakeshop with bags of bread he couldn’t consume.

His action tells me that:

a. he can be an “act now, think later” type of person,

b. he favors the underdog,

c. he’ll step into the breech for his friends, and

d. he’ll do something out of bravado (note: bravado isn’t bravery, lol) to protect friends, even acquaintances, from unfair treatment. I think that’s how he ended up being the boyfriend of his high school classmate. She was being shamed by their teacher in class for mooning over him when he suddenly stood up and claimed to be the one who liked the girl. My impression there was they weren’t dating and he just did to rescue the girl. It was a spur-of-the-moment bravado which led to unfortunate events. He didn’t know that this girl had “issues.”

e. he needs somebody like SolHee to teach him to stop being a pushover.

There you go. My quick takes. The show isn’t hard to follow. I’m only highlighting things that might be overlooked.