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Twinkling Watermelon: Episodes 13-14
by Dramaddictally
Our penultimate week is on a mission for feels — from a chest-clutching love story to a tear-filled rescue. Plus, our time-traveling hero is about to discover he’s not alone on his trek to the past. And the person who’s sharing his journey is exactly the one he wants by his side.
EPISODES 13-14
These episodes belong to Chung-ah and Yi-chan and man were they worth the wait. We finally get a clearer picture of Chung-ah’s backstory and also witness the unfolding love between her and her future husband. Not to bash Eun-gyeol and Eun-yoo (I love you guys!), but their cutesy affection is overshadowed this week by Yi-chan and Chung-ah’s deep feelings. I’m starting with their story because we’ve waited long enough to have them in the spotlight.
For a few weeks, Chung-ah’s life struggles have started to resemble a Cinderella tale. Her mother is gone. Her father is away on business most of the time. And she’s left in the house to be abused and locked in the attic by her “teacher,” the Evil Chairwoman, who tries to force her to speak.
We see a flashback of Chung-ah as a child attempting to escape. She runs to her father, where she’s able to call out, “Dad!” But rather than leading to a rescue, the display only backs up the Evil Chairwoman’s case that Chung-ah is making progress on her speaking lessons. Chung-ah is sobbing, but Chairman Yoon doesn’t intervene. From what we’ve seen, he has no idea about the abuse and he really loves his daughter and wants her to succeed. Still, he’s not there to protect her.
So when we get into the love story between Chung-ah and Yi-chan, it makes a lot of sense that this girl who’s never seen love before has such a strong reaction to it. We open on Yi-chan as he pouts about Chung-ah’s refusal to see him. By the time Eun-yoo comes around, apologizing for leaving the festival and admitting that she likes Eun-gyeol, he’s already over it. He thanks her for the good times, but we can see his heart has moved on.
Then, there’s a string of precious moments as he follows Chung-ah around with googly eyes. When he sees her feeding a stray cat and signing to it, you can literally see his heart melt. His expression is slight, but Choi Hyun-wook nails it.
After all the longing looks, there’s a scene that’s not cute at all (and very anger-inducing), when Chung-ah is being bullied in the street by two boys. Yi-chan appears, grabs both boys by the ears, and yanks them away from her. When they don’t stop mocking her, he lays a punch on one of them and they all wind up at the police station. Halmeoni comes to the rescue, defending Yi-chan because she knows he wouldn’t fight for no reason, and she can tell he likes Chung-ah.
By this point, Chung-ah is starting to question her own noble idiocy (she rejected him so he could be with Se-kyung). But before she gets the nerve to fess up, he calls her to the band practice room to be clear about his feelings. He’s prepared notecards, that he flips one by one, as she reads what he has to say, which is along the lines of: You liked me first — how can you make my heart flutter and then just ditch me?
He reveals that he wanted to sing for her at the festival, but since she wasn’t there, he’ll have to do it now instead. He’s got a song just for her, about facing hardship and being there for her, and he sings and signs the lyrics. Tears stream down her face, and as he nears the end, flipping through his dictionary to remember the signs, she walks over and hugs him tight, crying harder and not letting go.
Later, when the band goes on a camping trip and Chung-ah and Eun-yoo come along, Chung-ah tells Yi-chan about “face names.” These are name signs given to an individual, because it’s cumbersome to spell out birth names in sign language. The name sign her mother gave to her is “Clear Sound” and she thinks Yi-chan should be “Shiny Voice.” She can’t hear his voice, but she can see and feel it. He’s so moved, he kisses her. And there’s something breathtakingly pretty about the way he takes her hand during it.
The love she’s receiving from Yi-chan, as well as the attention she gets from Eun-gyeol and the band, give Chung-ah the strength she needs to fight back at home. After the camping trip, Chung-ah gets whacked across the face for skipping lessons — and for using sign language “where the whole neighborhood can see.” The Evil Chairwoman is yelling, as if Chung-ah can understand, and Chung-ah starts signing: “I’m not alone anymore. You’re the queen of this house. But there’s another world out there.”
This gets her slapped again, but this time, she hits back. She runs upstairs and tries to send a message to Yi-chan, but it’s intercepted and the fax machine is smashed. She gets locked in the attic again, and she’s so conditioned to be afraid that the Evil Chairwoman doesn’t even bother to tie her hands because she’s already cowering on the floor.
Eun-gyeol arrives to the Jinsung house and finds the broken fax machine. He then threatens a housekeeper into telling him where Chung-ah is. When he opens the attic door, he understands immediately that this is a habitual thing, and he cries. She signs, “You found me. The hide and seek is over after 12 years.” And it’s clear no one has ever bothered to look for her before. They sob and he hugs her, and then he grabs his mom’s hand and takes her out of there.
They’re stopped before they make it through the front gate, but Eun-gyeol has no fear. He’ll tell the world about the child abuser in the famous Jinsung family. The Evil Chairwoman says they’ll regret it if they leave. They go anyway, but as they do, she says she tried to warn them — and I think we are in for some major melodrama next week.
Eun-gyeol takes Chung-ah to the boarding house, where Halmeoni is understanding and outraged. She says Chung-ah can stay there. Yi-chan is so angry that he wants to go over to Chung-ah’s house and stir up more trouble. But Eun-gyeol says Chairman Yoon isn’t home and they should wait until he returns. Eun-gyeol trusts the chairman will do the right thing once he’s aware.
But Halmeoni and Yi-chan aren’t so easily won. Halmeoni says it’s up to Chung-ah if she wants to forgive her “ignorant father.” And Yi-chan makes it clear that her dad is complicit by not paying attention. Yi-chan is yelling and can’t be calmed down — and it’s obvious he’s also talking about his own father, who abandoned him long ago. “They never asked us if we wanted to be born. They can’t abandon us after they have us.” The pain is real and this scene totally demolished me.
At the same time, Halmeoni tries to comfort Chung-ah who breaks down into horrible sobs. Halmeoni hugs her and Yi-chan says he was able to endure because of his grandmother, but Chung-ah had no one by her side. He wonders how she’s able to show him such care if she’s never had it herself. And then he expresses his fears of ever getting married, unsure if he can love properly if he never had parental love.
Wow, those were some heavy sequences. Let’s move on to our other couple because they’re cute as ever this week too. We come back to the rain scene at the airport where we left off last time. Eun-gyeol has just asked Eun-yoo to stay with him and she responds by asking him to take her home (so, that’s a yes). At her house, they have a mini heart-to-heart when she learns that he’s a child of deaf adults (CODA) and we see them connecting and getting closer — literally, when the lights flicker and she winds up shivering next to him in the dark.
Eun-gyeol has promised to help her get where she’s going, but she says that if she goes, she’ll never come back. Well, in that case, he’ll delay it as much as possible so he can be with her for a long time. At this, she’s totally swooning, and the room goes black. The next thing you know, he’s skipping down the street with joy and then they’re both showering in their respective houses. What happened?! Confusing signals, Drama!
That night, Eun-gyeol receives a call from the Time Master and learns that his trip will end soon. The time portal opens when two moons appear. It’ll happen soon, but he won’t say when. The problem is, now that Eun-gyeol has feelings for Eun-yoo, he’s not so psyched to leave 1995.
We learn a little more about Eun-yoo’s backstory when she and Eun-gyeol are on a proper date at a carnival. She opens up about why she’s scared to play cello and why she’s running away. We learned earlier that her friend, the number one cellist in the country, killed herself, and Eun-yoo was tossed into first place. While Eun-yoo is in mourning, her mother tells her to use her sadness to fuel her music. I mean, no wonder she can’t play. She’s been conditioned to think of her friend’s death every time she touches her cello.
We see Eun-yoo on stage at a performance, where she flubs and then screams that she can’t hear. Later, the doctors find nothing wrong with her and assume it’s psychosomatic. She’s hospitalized and, much later, we’ll learn that this is how she met Eun-gyeol’s brother, Eun-ho. He taught her sign language at the hospital.
After telling her story, Eun-yoo feels comforted by Eun-gyeol’s response, and no longer feels like giving up on life. She agrees that they should delay her return as long as possible and wants to try living and having fun.
These two discover each other’s time-travel secret when the gang is on a train to the countryside for that camping trip. They each get a call from the Time Master on their cell phones, and then see each other wandering around with phones in hand. Shocked, they get off the train together (leaving the rest of the band to go on) and reveal the details of their identities.
As they discuss what they’ve been doing in 1995, they realize they had opposite goals: couple-making and couple-breaking. Eun-gyeol wanted to get his parents together so he could be born, and Eun-yoo wanted to break her parents up so she wouldn’t be. He tells her that he stopped Yi-chan’s accident from happening and he thinks that’s why he was sent back in time. But she’s not so sure. If that were true, why would she be sent back then? “There must be a connection between us.”
Harabeoji picks them up on his way to the cabin where the rest of the band is camping — and it looks like he might be the missing link. We learn that Harabeoji was once the front man of a famous band, but a scandal collapsed his career. He fell in love with a rookie actress and got her pregnant, which drove away his female fanbase and tanked their record sales.
Eun-yoo, upon hearing this story, digs a little deeper and realizes that Se-kyung is the baby Harabeoji gave up for adoption. Once they return from the countryside, she goes to see him (posing as Se-kyung), and says she wants to know about her mom. We don’t hear what he tells her, but she leaves extremely distressed. She calls Eun-gyeol, saying she’s homesick.
When they meet up, Eun-gyeol tells her Chung-ah’s harrowing story and she decides not to say anything about Harabeoji. But in the conversation, it comes out that Eun-yoo knows Eun-ho — and Eun-gyeol realizes she’s the girl his brother likes. Then, she drops this information: Eun-ho told her the date of his father’s accident and it hasn’t happened yet. Eun-gyeol didn’t prevent anything. And that’s where they leave us until next week.
Oh, the amount of questions still lingering in the air. First and foremost, Eun-ho told Eun-yoo the precise date of Yi-chan’s accident but he’s never told his own brother? Sounds suspicious. My bigger questions remain. Why did these two go back to 1995? Will we find out who the Master is and how he’s able to operate outside of time? Wasn’t the point of the story for our leads to learn how to be carefree kids? If so, why are we still focused on saving the parents? I feel like Yi-chan’s accident is the last thing I want to focus on next week. We spent a long time watching Eun-gyeol try to protect his dad; I hope we don’t have another round of that coming up.
My favorite scene this week (maybe in the whole drama) is where Yi-chan breaks down and yells about his and Chung-ah’s parents. He says they didn’t ask to be born — and we know Eun-yoo has felt that way too. But Eun-gyeol is different than the rest. He’s spending all his energy on his parents’ love affair because he wants to be born. It’s a testament to Yi-chan and Chung-ah as parents, and I find something fundamentally touching about it.
Since this drama has not disappointed me yet, I’ll continue my sky-high hopes for the finale. Come on, Show! You can do it! Let’s get all the questions answered and put everything in its place so our leads can get back to the future.
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