[ad_1]
The Interest of Love: Episodes 13-14
by Dramaddictally
We’ve got a mixed bag this week, from redemption arcs to some serious sand castle kicking. Just when I thought things were getting too clear cut, the drama does right by our second leads, giving us back the nuance we’ve come to know. As for our heroine, she’s at the center of the action, but it doesn’t mean we get any closer to understanding her behavior.
EPISODES 13-14 WEECAP
Let’s start by talking about this scheme Soo-young and Kyung-pil carry out to massacre the feelings of everyone around them. Soo-young gets the idea by hearing about Kyung-pil’s experience with Mi-kyung in college. Last week, it was hinted that the rumor about Kyung-pil sleeping around with all Mi-kyung’s friends wasn’t true. Except, we find out this week that he did in fact sleep with her best friend (Oops. Minor difference). He explains that Mi-kyung’s family kept pressuring him to cut it off with Mi-kyung, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So, he did something hurtful as a means to end it.
Soo-young decides that this is a great plan for ending her relationship with Jong-hyun too — giving them an “irrevocable” reason to separate. (Um, how about talking to the guy first?) She calls Kyung-pil to meet her in a hotel room and the two sit there and wait for Jong-hyun to call. When he does, Kyung-pil answers Soo-young’s phone and makes it clear that the two are together. When Jong-hyun asks to speak to Soo-young, she hangs up on him and turns off her phone.
All of this leads to where we ended last week: with Kyung-pil getting punched in the face. We move on to see Sang-soo take Kyung-pil outside the bank and ask if he really slept with Soo-young. Kyung-pil confirms it and plays a recording from the hotel room where Soo-young says she won’t regret what they’re doing. This gets Kyung-pil punched in the face a second time — this time by Sang-soo. (Poor guy. The second punch lands in the exact same spot as the first!)
Meanwhile, Jong-hyun goes back to the apartment that he shares with his cheater GF and starts wrecking his room. Soo-young gets home and looks surprised to see Jong-hyun is still there. (Where did you think he’d go, Soo-young? You do understand why he’s living with you, right?)
Jong-hyun asks her why she did it. She replies that he didn’t do anything to cause it and she’s sorry. He wants to know what happens to them now. She tells him to continue looking for a place to live and studying for his exam, and then he can find someone who is a better match for him and go on to live a good life. (Quick note: I hate her. More on that later.) Jong-hyun gets angry at her response and leaves.
The thing is, from what we see in the rest of the episodes, Soo-young and Kyung-pil did nothing in that hotel room but sit and talk. In terms of the action, it doesn’t matter whether they slept together or not, though, because the consequences are the same. Soo-young gets out of her relationship with Jong-hyun, and also does exactly what she told us she would do last week: “destroy the sand castle” with Sang-soo before anything begins.
Sang-soo doesn’t respond the way Soo-young had envisioned, though. The first time they run into each other after the big reveal (in an elevator — talk about tense), he simply asks how her interview went at headquarters. She then gets angry at him for being so indifferent and not questioning her like everyone else is. (I mean, pick a side, lady.) Sang-soo’s response is of course understandable. He’s afraid to ask questions because he doesn’t want to “lose her” (he’s holding onto an idea of her, as Kyung-pil points out).
While Soo-young is busy trying to destroy herself and taking everyone down with her, the drama ties up the threads with our second leads — allowing them to move into the background for next week and giving us some convincing redemption arcs.
Mi-kyung has been a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown for quite a few episodes. This week, the drama does a U-turn and gives us back the complicated character we started with. First, she learns the truth about why Kyung-pil did what he did to her, and starts to see him in a different light. (Just the fact that the drama gave her character depth by having her hurt this way was a step toward humanizing her.)
Second, after Sang-soo picks up Mi-kyung at the hospital, where she’s landed from too much stress, the two go to his place, cook some ramyun, and have an incredibly honest conversation. Or, at least, Sang-soo talks and she listens. He apologizes for being disrespectful from day one. When she said she was okay with him not being 100% into her, he used it as an excuse to act the way he did. Also, her background was a plus when he thought about his future.
He goes on: anyone can see she’s a great person, despite how she grew up. He thought he could reach 100% at some point, but he deceived them both. He pleads, “I don’t want you to hurt because of me. Please don’t hurt, Mi-kyung.” He’s bawling at this point.
She responds, “The ramen is cold now. I should go.” (Well if that isn’t a metaphor and a half!) He offers to take her home, but she sees the keys to the car she gave him and says no, she’ll go by herself, and take the car. It’s such a beautiful moment because we see how much both of them are learning. Sang-soo’s compassion seems to be hard-earned through getting crushed by Soo-young. And Mi-kyung is coming back to her senses thanks to his honesty.
Of course, when Mi-kyung gets to the car, she throws a brick at the windshield but I feel like that’s a healthy release — it’s her car now anyway. And later, she saves the day when her father calls Sang-soo over to discuss the benefits he’s going to get by marrying Mi-kyung. She arrives just at the right moment to say she’s not getting married, and even takes part of the blame — leaving Sang-soo free from her family’s repercussions. Afterward, she formally let’s go of Sang-soo, telling him, “Let’s break up.”
Jong-hyun doesn’t get as nice of a turnaround as Mi-kyung, but the absolute wrong that is done to him by Soo-young works as a redemption tool. After he moves out of the apartment, he goes back one night and asks Soo-young all the questions that I’d like to wring her neck and ask. Why did she go find him and ask him to move in? Why does she care about his police exam? Did she ever love him? Does she just pity him and find him pathetic?
She squirms out by asking if he was happy when they were together — he laughed more with other people than with her. He says that if this is about the girl he studies with, there is nothing between them. Soo-young says she knows, but then tries to downplay his feelings, saying what he felt for her wasn’t love. Jong-hyun disagrees and tells her not to use him as an excuse for her actions. It’s really an awful ending for these two, but Soo-young gets what she wants. She turns herself into the bad guy, so Jong-hyun will hate her and leave. Unfortunately, he can’t really hate her and spends a lot of time crying on the floor of the hotel room he’s now living in.
So, what is to become of Soo-young? After her final argument with Jong-hyun, she gets sick and Sang-soo comes over to nurse her through her fever. The next day, she wakes up feeling better and finds breakfast and a new plant for her balcony. At work, Soo-young learns that she is being transferred to another branch and invites Sang-soo out “to celebrate.” They meet at the same restaurant where they tried and failed to meet twice before — but this time they coincide.
Sang-soo tells her that if they had met up that very first time, his plan was to confess to her that night. Later, the discussion moves on to the show’s recurring theme of happiness and Soo-young says she’s going to pursue happiness in the future, rather than simply bearing her misfortunes. When the date ends, Sang-soo asks if he can still call her even though they won’t work together. She says he always calls or shows up anyway, even when she says no (which sounds worse on paper than it did when she said it).
Come Monday morning, we learn that Soo-young did not go to her new job. Instead, she’s resigned and moved out of her apartment. Sang-soo tries to call but finds her number is no longer in service.
If anyone is looking for a dissertation topic, this show’s got a lot to analyze. When we started our journey with these characters, it was a very sociological story about the nexus of class and love. Our heroine was so plagued by insecurity over her status in the social hierarchy, she made choices that hurt her and the man she loved while trying to protect herself. She didn’t want to be seen as beneath anyone. And so, she rejected Sang-soo before he could reject her.
All the characters were extremely well-motivated and when they acted in seemingly irrational ways, it still made sense. But over the past few episodes, the show has moved deeper into Soo-young’s damaged psyche and away from its social causes.
Rather than motivating her out of insecurity, the drama is trying to paint her as a martyr. Her father tells Sang-soo, “She’d rather get hurt than see others in pain.” And her colleague says, “Nothing is worth protecting at the expense of harming yourself” — and we are supposed to think that this is what Soo-young is doing. The problem is that she’s not protecting anyone and, while she may be hurting herself, she’s also hurting everyone around her.
For me, the premeditation of the cheating scheme is the reason I can’t get behind Soo-young. If she had actually slept with Kyung-pil, unintentionally, out of some deep subconscious defense mechanism, I could understand her character. And, story-wise, it would have the same outcomes. But she did it to hurt Jong-hyun — to make herself into the villain. And now we are supposed to believe that she thinks he’ll be better off without her? Where is this coming from?
If the drama doesn’t let us into Soo-young’s head in the next two episodes, it is going to lose me. I don’t care whether or not she and Sang-soo end up together (that’s how far removed from her I feel after these episodes), but I do want to understand her. I can’t square the way she treated Jong-hyun — neither the over-accommodating part nor the cruel ending. For someone good at knocking down sand castles, I feel like she could have just kicked that one over — not put it in the path of a hurricane.
More importantly, I’ll need to see some growth. Soo-young says that going forward, she is going to put her own happiness first, but she’s been doing whatever she wants since the beginning. In Week 1, Sang-soo told us that the woman he likes is a bitch. At the time, I thought it was way out of line. Now, I agree. The question is: does that make her someone I can’t root for? I hope the drama is ready to tell me no.
RELATED POSTS
[ad_2]
Source link
