The mystery keeps unfolding as childhood memories cause a rift between our main couple. And much like Secretary Kim, the viewers are left at the end of the episode wondering which way is up.

You’re scary when you’re mad

Mi So takes Young Joon’s rejection of their kiss in stride and gets right back to work. Pwahahaha. He WISHES that happened. Instead, she activates that superpower that all enraged women possess – the ability to mess with a man’s mind. I’m not sure if it’s possible to calmly storm out of a room, but she somehow does it, informing her boss that she is taking tomorrow off! The poor guy knows he’s in the doghouse but he’s just not sure how to get out of there. He makes a valiant start by sending the second apology of his life via text.  “I’m sorry” means so much more coming from him, but that’s not enough for Mi So. She plays dumb with a why-should-I-be-mad-I-don’t know-what-you-mean response, sends a male secretary to his house the next morning to tie his tie, and even turns the poor cow doll to the wall. When this girl gets mad, she gets petty. Mi So spends the next day meandering around her neighborhood and silently stewing until her boss shows up outside her door. She proceeds to torture him with city bus rides and pig skin cooking, but Young Joon gamely sticks by her side until she is smiling again. She never utters the words she forgives him, but it’s written on her face as she stands there watching him get in the car to leave.

The Claw!

This may be the cruelest thing Mi So did when she introduced her boss to the claw machine. He probably would have stayed there all night if he hadn’t run out of cash. But he got more money and came back the next day. How can you hate a guy in a pinstripe suit, squatting in front of a game, and enduring the insults of school children, just to win you a prize? Although his motives may not have been entirely altruistic. This guy IS competitive. Still, he persevered and won Mi So a stuffed doll which he took great pleasure in presenting. (I wonder how many different expressions of rapture and disgust Park Seo Joon came up with in those scenes. He was too, too cute.)

Nice to see you again

Mi So gets a shock when she hears from her reporter blind date that it was the son of Yumyung group that was kidnapped all those years ago. She puts the pieces together of Young Joon’s nightmares and the scar on his ankle and concludes that he was the caring oppa that fed her caramels and comforted her when she was trapped. Mi So proceeds to confuse the mess out of Young Joon by weepily smiling, scrambling to fulfill his slightest whim, and practically levitating off the ground whenever she sees him. Our adorable narcissist decides that she must have really fallen hard for him on their impromptu date together.

Your lips are moving so . . .

Somebody’s lying. And the important part of any convincing lie is including at least a tiny bit of truth.  Now we hear Seung Yeon’s side of the story as he says his brother was the one who stole his friends and picked on him in fourth grade. He also claims that Young Joon brought him to the redevelopment and abandoned him, where he was then kidnapped. The part about the fourth grade bullies is eerily similar to the story Young Joon told Mi So in a rare moment of openness. Just the victim changes. But neither brother’s story explains why they both have cobweb house nightmares as if they were there. I don’t think Mi So fully believes it yet. But the news that Seung Yeon is the adored oppa from her childhood doesn’t fill her with the same joy as when she thought it was Young Joon. Seriously, the girl was glowing then. She takes the time to check with her somber boss that his brother was kidnapped and he confirms it. His hurt seems genuine as he points out her affectionate attitude that day was because she thought he was someone else, and he refuses to tell her where he got the scar on his ankle. This is something that bothers me about his character. He keeps trying to get closer to Mi So, but whenever she tries to ask him a personal question he shuts her out. His family. His past. Off limits! If he wants this to work, he needs to start sharing both the perfect and the ugly parts of himself. But just for the record, when it comes to who’s story to believe, I’m still on cute, but deadly’s side

What’s in a name? Take 2

One of my favorite parts of the first episode was when Young Joon recognized the difference between Kim Bi Saw (Secretary Kim) and Kim Mi So. Now it looks like that recognition started from the first moment he met her. Mi So finds a folder in the Vice President’s library that contains the resumes for all the people that applied to be his secretary nine years earlier. (Let’s suspend our disbelief that he would have kept such a thing for almost a decade. It’s important to the story.) Mi So cringes at a picture of the gauche, younger version of herself and reads the paltry, high school achievements that she listed as assets. When she compares them to the rest of the applicants in the book, she realizes how severely lacking she was back then. She asks herself the same question we’re all thinking. Why did Young Joon pick her? Thankfully, he chooses that time to wander in and provides the answer. He picked her because . . . she was Kim Mi So. I’m not even sure what that means, but I’m swooning anyway. This seems like a possible callback to their childhood, because the boy with the caramels called her by name. But even if it isn’t, I just love the fact that Young Joon constantly recognizes Mi So as an individual. The self-absorbed perfectionist saw something in her all those years ago that he thought was worthwhile, and he remained patient with her early mistakes because he looked past the rough edges and saw the diamond that she was.

This episode took a little detour into melancholy town and didn’t give me that same happy, fuzzy feeling as usual. But a story needs both light and shadow to be truly meaningful. Even in its sadder moments it still leaves us with what I like the most – Young Joon taking one more step closer to the only woman that matters to him.

Until next time. Keep the k-love alive!

Dramarookie

Dramas With a Side of Kimchi