Episodes 15-16 (Final) » Dramabeans MGG

The Interest of Love: Episodes 15-16 (Final)

by Dramaddictally

Our tale of angst and woe has ended, leaving our characters pretty far from where they began. We get lots of growth and forward movement in these episodes, much of it earned by looking back at the past. And while the drama ditches the idea of tying up every loose end in favor of giving us grander themes to think about, it still supplies the kind of closure that we need — and that our quartet of characters deserves.

 
EPISODES 15-16 WEECAP

Wow. I’m not sure how it’s possible but I’m simultaneously underwhelmed and highly impressed. These are simple episodes, where really not much happens. And yet, the meanings behind the few happenings are huge. The drama dropped some of its early themes over the past couple of weeks to focus on happiness and — even though nothing turned out how they thought they wanted it — that’s pretty much where our characters land.

As expected, after last week’s events, we have a send-off for our second leads. Mi-kyung takes a position at a U.S. branch of KCU and lets everyone at work think that she and Sang-soo broke up because the long distance would be too tough.

She seems healthier than she has been, and ready to get over Sang-soo — it’s Kyung-pil that’s still bothering her. The two have a tender moment when she asks Kyung-pil why he cheated on her in college. He’s honest, saying he liked her, but her family told him he wasn’t supposed to. It crushed his pride, and so, he ruined everything, not feeling brave enough to try to stay with her. It’s a conversation both of them needed, not to put it all behind them, but likely to start the real healing process.

We see Mi-kyung’s crowning growth when she realizes that her father buys her things not as a replacement for his affection, but as a way of showing he cares. She thanks her father for all he’s given her, rather than trying to fight against it. Then, Sang-soo drives her to the airport, as she kindly jokes that he owes her at least that much. When they arrive, she goes in alone and confidently walks toward her future and away from Sang-soo.

Poor Jong-hyun doesn’t get that nice of an arc, but he still gets a send-off. We watch him go through the same motions as Sang-soo, trying to locate Soo-young after her disappearance last week. Her phone is off, she’s moved, and she no longer works at the bank. When he can’t find her, he sits down by himself and thinks about another retake of the police exam.

With Mi-kyung and Jong-hyun out of the picture, our leads delve deeper into their despair. Sang-soo is very distraught about Soo-young leaving the way she did. He’s drinking a lot and asking himself how Soo-young could do this to him. We saw a change in his character when he broke up with Mi-kyung and decided to follow his heart. His expectation was that Soo-young would be on board with moving forward with him, and now he’s crushed with disappointment.

Kyung-pil sends Sang-soo the audio recording he made while talking to Soo-young in the hotel room on the night of their supposed affair. It apparently contains the reason why Soo-young wanted to carry out their scheme — something about doing it for Sang-soo. But Sang-soo seems to think it’s an explicit recording and deletes it without listening to it. Afterward, he drunkenly gets into a cab and doesn’t respond when the driver asks where he wants to go. The look on his face tells us he’s about to take a very expensive ride to go look for Soo-young in her hometown.

And Soo-young is indeed back in her seaside city. Since she arrived, she’s found out some upsetting news. It was not her father who had an affair, but her mother. All this time, she has been hating her father — and blaming him for her brother’s death — but it was a terrible misunderstanding. Her father was trying to cover for her mother and get her out of legal trouble (because the man she had an affair with was also married). Soo-young saw her dad at the wrong moment, and misinterpreted the situation, and her parents never set her straight.

To the drama’s credit, there was some very well-executed misdirection for us viewers. Early on, I had the suspicion that Soo-young was wrong about her father. But two weeks ago, when she asks why he had an affair, he seemingly admits to it. On a rewatch of that scene, he simply replies, “Once you start loving someone it can’t be stopped.” In retrospect, he could be speaking on her mother’s behalf, or he could be talking about the way he feels about her mother — he couldn’t stop loving her, and that’s why he came back. Either way, I, along with Soo-young, thought he was talking about his love for another woman.

Soo-young tells her dad she knows the truth, but doesn’t confront her mother, whom she still loves. She seems to be conflicted about the fact that she feels the same for her mom even after knowing what she did. Walking along the beach (maybe questioning everything else she’s been wrong about), she sees a sand castle — and then Sang-soo’s shadow falls across it. (Yep. He’s taken a long, drunken ride from Seoul. And he’s skipped work to do it.)

After the initial shock that he’s found her, he tries to convince her to come back to work at her new position. He’s helped make it seem like she’s on vacation (her resignation hasn’t been processed), and he’s even brought her new lanyard ID. He tells her it’s not too late. To which she replies that nothing ever becomes too late because she throws things away before they can be. (Hmm, just when I thought Soo-young was questioning her beliefs, she doubles down on her internal rules.)

Then she throws the lanyard into the sea, and Sang-soo runs in — winter coat and all — to retrieve it. The two then spend the rest of the day together, as she shows him around her town. They talk about how happy they were as kids (they both loved hide-and-seek, though she was good at hiding and he was good at seeking. Go figure). She takes him to all the tourist spots (cue rom-com montage). And then she drops him off at a lodge for the night — only to return with soju.

They sit against the wall of his darkened room and drink. Sang-soo asks why she ran away and she admits she was afraid. She kept pushing him away and he kept coming back — every time she ran away, he found her. She was afraid it might really work out between them. He wants to know why she doesn’t just let it happen then. She repeats something that her father said to her when he was explaining why he stayed with her mother after the affair. If Soo-young were to be with Sang-soo, she would have to hate him when she’s angry, to deal with it when things got tough, and to stay with him even when she didn’t understand him. She says she didn’t have the confidence for that.

When she asks Sang-soo why he hesitated that time before their date (all the way back Episode 1), he says he also lacked confidence, but it’s not for the reasons she thought (like her lack of a college degree). He was wondering if he could really be responsible for another person. He always thinks far ahead to prepare for any misfortunes. She asks, “Was I a misfortune to you?” And he responds, “No. Just a variable.” (This is a play on terms. The word sang-soo means “a constant” — his name describes his character. But he’s calling her the opposite — something he couldn’t control.)

Soo-young kisses him, saying she’s introducing a real variable. They continue to kiss for a while, and then he’s outside smoking a cigarette (I’ll let everyone else be the judge of that). The next day, they say goodbye at the bus station as Sang-soo leaves. Soo-young apologizes for disappearing without a word and thanks him for coming to find her. She is supposed to get in touch with him soon, when she’s back in Seoul. But as they stand and stare, Sang-soo says in voiceover, “That was my last moment with Ahn Soo-young.”

Then we get a time skip. It’s 2027 — four years since our leads’ last encounter—and Sang-soo has just been promoted. He and Kyung-pil are friends again. Jong-hyun is a police officer now. Mi-kyung is back from her stint in the U.S. and working at headquarters. And, as we come to learn, Soo-young is also back in Seoul, running a café that doubles as a space for drawing and painting (which was always her passion). The café is located — wouldn’t you know it — right near the bank branch that Sang-soo is about to transfer to. And guess what else? Soo-young needs a loan to keep her café open.

Sang-soo winds up in charge of her loan case and goes to visit her café, which is called Future Happiness (the name of the plant that Sang-soo gave her when she was sick). She named the café in search of her own future happiness and says she’s been working toward that happiness these past few years. Sang-soo says he’s tried to be happy too, but when he says it, I feel like there’s an implied, “but couldn’t without you.”

After their meeting, Sang-soo is nerve-wracked and drinking while Soo-young tells her friend that she didn’t feel anything when she saw him. When he comes back to the café to finalize the loan paperwork, he stays to paint. But when he’s done, he simply takes his painting and leaves, and they wish each other a happy life.

One night, they randomly run into each other and go for coffee. They decide to meet again, this time to go eat the pork cutlets Sang-soo has been telling her about for years. To get there, they have to walk up a steep hill, and it gives them lots of time to talk. Everything they say is in the past tense.

Both Sang-soo and Soo-young run through a list of things they wish they did differently as far as the other is concerned. Sang-soo says he wishes he had told her not to run away again. She says she wishes she was honest. By the end of their lists, it’s clear that both were afraid and holding back their feelings, waiting for a sign from the other to know it was safe. But since neither was providing the safety sign, both of them remained too afraid to make a brave move.

They discuss how their lives might be different if they had acted as their ideal selves (rather than their real selves). Soo-young says maybe they’d be married — and even divorced. But Sang-soo counters that there’s the possibility they could have lived happily ever after. Both are finally being open and honest (now that the intensity of their feelings are gone).

We end with the two continuing to walk up the incline, thinking back to when they were a part of each other’s lives, and asking, “Were we actually in love, or were we blinded by the interest?”

I found this last sequence poignant, heartbreaking, and spot on. While I haven’t been sold on every step of the story, this feels like the right ending. It seems like what’s done is done and they missed their chance. It’s in line with what we learned about these characters in the beginning, which is that love wasn’t really their goal.

Soo-young wanted to work toward her happiness and, after the time skip, she certainly looks the happiest we’ve seen her. She got out of that horrible work environment (so glad she didn’t follow Sang-soo’s advice and go back to the bank) and she pursued what she always wanted to do, which was art. Ultimately, she wanted to be okay with herself (class background and all) — and she wasn’t going to get that from moving up at work or from being in a relationship.

We never see Soo-young move past her running and hiding phase, making me think she would never be able to commit (to Sang-soo or Jong-hyun or anyone else). But I also don’t think this is necessary for her character’s growth. I asked for the drama to make me understand her without making me like her, and I feel like it delivered. Soo-young doesn’t go through a metamorphosis, but learns how to live a life closer to the one she wants within the constricts of what she’s comfortable with (which might be as good as it gets).

Sang-soo goes through an obvious change over the course of the show. He starts out terrified of instability and being out of control due to his father’s death and the way he and his mother had to live afterward. He thinks a million steps ahead and doesn’t want to act until he knows what the outcome of any decision will be. Mi-kyung is the obvious choice to continue down his stable path, but he gives her up and chooses Soo-young: the unpredictable variable.

And when he does this, his worst fears come true. Soo-young doesn’t reciprocate and the risk he took leaves him devastated. He ends up without either Mi-kyung or Soo-young. And yet, at the end, he’s still questioning if what they felt was really love. While I’m not sure he’ll ever totally be over Soo-young, he’s definitely matured a lot.

As I wrote last week, I’m a little disappointed that the show began to steer away from the structural issues that kept the leads apart and instead made everything about individual happiness. But overall, I love what this drama tried to do. It gave us broken characters — all influenced in different ways by their distinct upbringings — and showed us how badly they all wanted to just be okay. They were mostly well-motivated and understandable in their behaviors. And I think the one misstep was the dynamic between Soo-young and Jong-hyun, where Soo-young’s intentions weren’t fully fleshed out.

There’s some brilliant writing here, with lots of layered meanings (and I’m very curious about the novel this is based on). The drama manages to say something about social class, gender norms in the workplace, and even trauma without giving us an easy resolution to any of it. At the same time, it’s entirely palatable and not too depressing — which is quite a feat to pull off.

This week’s episodes bend around the theme that not all love has to be realized. And, in fact, if you want to hold onto the good feelings about love, it’s better not to enter fully into a relationship — otherwise you end up with all the bad stuff that comes with it. It’s a nice idea, but as we saw, no one in this show skipped out on any pain by not being together. They went through a lot of bad to end up looking back fondly on the memories of their unrealized love.

I do like the idea, though, that our characters got caught up in what love could bring them. All of them thought it would bring them happiness only to find out that they needed to pursue other avenues in order to be happy. There are still parts of this show that did not get resolved for me, but rather than continue to question them, I’ll just shrug it off with the only answer I can think of to explain erratic behavior: people do crazy things when it’s in the interest of love.

 
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