Episodes 15-16 (Final) » Dramabeans MGG

Twinkling Watermelon: Episodes 15-16 (Final)

by Dramaddictally

It’s time to wave goodbye to 1995 and get back home to 2023. But tell that to our perfectionist hero. Time travel is easy; convincing him to go is not. Until justice is served and everyone’s fates have changed, he’ll sacrifice himself for his family — making me wonder just how much he’s learned on this journey.

 
EPISODES 15-16

My pleas for answered questions did not go through and I have more questions now than I did last week. But while I’m not the biggest fan of where the story went — or rather, where it didn’t go — these episodes are packed full of lovely moments.

We open with a flashback of Eun-ho and Eun-yoo at the hospital together in 2022. He’s recounting the story of Yi-chan’s accident back in 1995 and we learn what happened in the original timeline. Essentially, Hyun-yool (the ex-gang member/bassist) was the one injured by the falling stage lights during rehearsal and the band broke up after that. Yi-chan’s accident is entirely separate, when he’s hit by a drunk driver.

Then we jump back to where we left off last week with Eun-yoo telling Eun-gyeol the news that he didn’t actually save his dad yet. The real life-altering accident is going to happen tomorrow, so these two buddy up and make a plan to stop it. They realize that Yi-chan gets hit when he’s leaving Harabeoji’s music store. So, if he never goes there to show him his demo tape, he’ll never lose his hearing, right?

Wrong. What the drama has showed us more than once is that even when details change, certain big events have a way of correcting themselves toward the fated order. For example, Yoon Dong-jin is still going to be a famous rocker with Ma-joo as his manager, even though Eun-gyeol replaced him in the 1995 band. And we’re about to see that it’s the same for Yi-chan’s hearing loss.

But before their plan goes awry and the drama starts with the endless tugs at our tears, we get one of the most satisfying scenes of self-served justice that I can recall in recent history. Remember last week when Eun-gyeol rode in like a prince and rescued Chung-ah from her locked tower? Well, this week he rides in like a gangster and takes down the whole house.

It starts when he’s nabbed by some thugs that the chairwoman hired to ship him off somewhere. They force him to sign a confession that says he kidnapped Chung-ah, and it seems like they’ll get away with it until Chairman Yoon comes home. It’s clear the chairman knows about Chung-ah’s abuse and he’s on a rampage for evidence. Once he gets the key to the attic — which has been wallpapered to cover over twelve years of Chung-ah’s wall drawings — he tears the place apart.

When he discovers his daughter’s wall art (so recent there’s one of Watermelon Sugar), he decks the chairwoman across the face and fires the entire staff for keeping it a secret. Whoa. On one hand, it’s over the top, but on the other, I can’t feel bad for this lady after what we saw her do to Chung-ah.

Then comes our hero Eun-gyeol throwing open the living room doors and strutting through in slow motion. He faxed the chairman the info about Chung-ah, but that’s not all. He was rescued from the thugs by the family secretary — who now has evidence that the chairwoman was trying to do away with Eun-gyeol — and they have a slew of dirt on her from tax crimes to misappropriated funds. The chairman says she and her two kids are off the family registry and she’s fired too. Kapow! When Eun-gyeol says he’ll serve justice, the gloves comes off.

All of this leads to a heartwarming reunion between Chung-ah and her dad. She’s too afraid to face him at first and Yi-chan goes with her, taking the chairman for a sit-down chat in his office one on one. He hands Chairman Yoon his well-worn sign language dictionary and says that if he wants to communicate more, he only has to try.

And later, he does — asking Chung-ah to come along on a business trip abroad. He nervously tries to sign that they can go to art museums and she smiles at his attempts. He’s so happy to see her smile, he almost cries. Of course, we learn later that he plans to keep her abroad for good once she’s out of the country. This has to do with Yi-chan’s accident, so, back to that.

On the day the accident is supposed to occur, Eun-gyeol and Eun-yoo succeed in stopping Yi-chan from being hit by the drunk driver. They’re so excited, they plan to meet up (adorably, Eun-gyeol misses her). On her way, Eun-yoo stops by Haraboeji’s store and finds Se-kyung there. Se-kyung doesn’t see her, but Eun-yoo is very upset to see her mother — who ran away from home to seek out her biological father.

Eun-yoo reveals all this to Eun-gyeol and he realizes for the first time that this music shop owner is the Harabeoji he met as child in the future — his guitar teacher and mentor, whose passing was super hard on him. So, he runs off to see Harabeoji right then, given this opportunity to see him alive again.

He’s almost there when a car speeds at him — and Yi-chan pushes him out of the way and gets hit instead. Oof. If we thought Eun-gyeol had a lot of weight on his shoulders before, this kid goes stark raving mad after this, thinking it’s his fault. He’s so overcome with guilt, he almost chooses not to go back to 2023, which would mean he disappears from that timeline.

Part of his guilt is that it turns out the car’s driver was gunning for Eun-gyeol specifically. It’s the (ex-) chairwoman’s son, whom she’s blaming for them being off the family registry. And her son thinks killing Eun-gyeol will solve… something. He’s caught, so that’s good. But it doesn’t stop the fact that Yi-chan will never hear again after his head injury.

When Yi-chan wakes after surgery and realizes he can’t hear, everyone who loves him breaks down. The scene where Halmeoni comes to the hospital is almost unbearable it’s so fraught with pain — and Eun-gyeol actually has to leave the room because of it. Yi-chan is apologizing for not being perfect and she’s crying, saying she would do anything for him. But it’s painful because we know there’s nothing she can do.

Another part of Eun-gyeol’s guilt is that he truly believes that Yi-chan’s life is messed up because of him. He doesn’t seem to get that this is how things happened before he was ever there, and it’s likely the way it would keep going down. Now he’s the one who’s depressed and Eun-yoo gets to support him the way he did for her earlier.

He wishes he never even tried to change things and Eun-yoo tells him that his efforts weren’t for nothing. He saved her and Chung-ah, so he’s had success. Then she reveals why Eun-ho never told him about their dad’s accident: Eun-gyeol already had too much pressure on him. “Give up now,” Eun-yoo tells him. “It’s not your burden to carry.” (I love this because it’s another version of what he told her. “Surviving is enough.” Not everything has to be perfect — and it’s not always in your control.)

She convinces him to go to the time portal when the double moon appears the next night. And she’s ready to go too because she’s handled some unfinished business. The last time she saw Harabeoji (while posing as Se-kyung), she asked why he abandoned her. He cries, saying he never wanted to abandon her but didn’t know she existed until after she was adopted. Then, he thought she was living happily with her well-off parents.

Eun-yoo corrects the facts, telling him she was never happy — and if anyone who looks like her comes around asking the same question, make it known that he never meant to abandon her. She’s trying to change her mother’s fate, so Se-kyung can live a happier life. And when she stumbles on her run-away mom, she gives her a pep talk too, telling her to go ask Harabeoji some questions.

Then it’s time to return. Eun-gyeol and Eun-yoo go through separate portals, the same way they came in, and as Eun-gyeol is leaving, it’s revealed that Harabeoji is the Time Master. (I have a lot of questions.) None of the hows or whys are answered but the Time Master says, “Viva la vida.” He hopes Eun-gyeol will overcome the suffering of this cruel life, but also receive its hidden gifts eventually.

Back in the present, Eun-gyeol wakes up in a giant bedroom in the Jinsung family house. He’s changed the future in some important ways. For one, since Chung-ah kept a good relationship with her father, his whole family is rich. Chung-ah is the new chairwoman of the school and uses her public position to destigmatize sign language. Not only are Eun-gyeol’s parents no longer isolated and ignored, many people around them know and use sign language.

Yi-chan is living out his dream on stage with a guitar in a very different way than he planned, but it’s happening nonetheless. He’s the director of the guitar division at Jinsung and on the day Eun-gyeol arrives back, the whole family is at an event where Yi-chan unveils their latest guitar. Rather than be ashamed of his life story, like he used to be, he’s on stage communicating it to hundreds of people. Eun-gyeol’s guilt lessens watching his father play guitar.

As for Eun-gyeol himself, he’s still in a band, but this time his parents (mostly) approve, so long as he keeps his grades up. The band is already famous, about to go on tour, and chased by fangirls wherever they go. We see him perform, with his family in the crowd cheering, until he rushes off stage to chase after Eun-yoo. Outside, he’s happy to know she made it back, since her life has changed so much he couldn’t track her down in 2023. They kiss, and our tale comes to a close.

I’m not going to ask any questions. There are just too many things that are still unclear. My main concern is the message of the story because I feel like it slipped a bit in these last few episodes. Now that we know the Time Master is Harabeoji, I’m even less sure what the intentions were. He wanted Eun-gyeol and Eun-yoo to meet, but why in the past?

From what we gathered along the way, the purpose of their journeys was to learn to lighten up a little. Have fun. Think of themselves (not their parents). And most importantly: viva la vida — embrace life, as crappy as it can sometimes be. It seems that Eun-yoo finally got this message. She decides she wants to live and then, afterward, she thinks about how she can help her mother live better too. And from the little we saw in the new future, she may have succeeded. But whether or not Se-kyung changed, Eun-yoo had a clear character arc.

Eun-gyeol’s arc is not as clear. From start to finish, he’s living for his parents. His world is changed for the better in the future by virtue of changing theirs. Now that his parents are confident hotshots, he can stop feeling guilty and looking over them. Plus, being part of the Jinsung Instruments family, his parents now semi-approve of his musician lifestyle. But this never touches on the core of his overachieving perfectionism. He makes the circumstances around him change, so he doesn’t have to.

And if this is the point — to change his parents’ fates in order to change his own — then a bigger issue is that we don’t actually get to see how these changes play out for him. It’s off camera, in the distant future, at the next phase of Eun-gyeol’s life, which we won’t witness. He no longer has to be a savior, but we never get to see him not being one.

As a whole, I loved this story. It’s just, there was so much precision in the writing early on, especially to work in the trick with Eun-yoo/Se-kyung, that I feel like the objectives got a little sloppy at the end. The time travel bit was the backbone of the story, and was also the least developed part. Since the leads were given a purpose for going back in time (instead of it just being accidental), that purpose should have come through strong and stayed the same all the way through.

That being said, what a journey! We got great characters, a lot of heart, many different takes on what it means to be family, and some lovely romances. One of my favorite parts was the sign language, and I’m so glad it stayed true to its intentions there, anchoring it within the story and normalizing it as a way to tell the story. With some heavy themes, sound life advice, and an awesome young cast, I’m happy I went along for the ride. Even if it didn’t turn out exactly as I hoped, well, you know, that’s life. Viva la vida.

 
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