* How AWESOME is misterX’s banner for his Korean translation of his eps. 5-8 review? Inspired by this part in the original review:
It wasn’t a selfish instinct of possession (defending the woman he loved), not quite yet. He was selflessly defending someone going through what he had once experienced, protecting the woman who loved him. It was like the clock of innocence going back in time, tick tocking its way towards the past and showing him what he used to be, like the most beautiful and cruelly painful of mirrors. So he clasped Eun-Gi, gripping her with the passion of a wounded beast protecting its offspring.
I really do think there’s very little he can’t do… I’d be intimidated but when it becomes the norm…
* Of the dozen reviews I’ve read (and enjoyed) on episode 7, the most interesting revolved around the question ‘why did they batter SJK’s eyesight for the last scene?’. And the reviewer’s own interpretation was that Kang Maru needed to be half-blind to regain clarity on the present. It’s no secret that the main reason Maru struggled to close the door on Jae-Hee were his memories of who she used to be, whether it was the young girl who took refuge in his home or the young woman who was the light of his life when his future seemed brighter than ever, his difficulty to reconcile their past with who she had become. And while his mind told him otherwise, those memories kept getting in the way of severing that umbilical cord.
But what the reviewer pointed out was that when you lose vision in one eye, you lose the ability to see the distance, and with that perspective out of the way, Maru was finally able to focus on the present JH and see her for who she truly was. (And as the reviewer pointed out, it’s the height of irony it’s JH who made that happen by siccing those thugs on him.)
What I like (even more) about that analysis is that it can be extended to episode 8 as well. With his eyesight back, once again he’s haunted by the past. (And JH made sure he’d be.)
But when he finally, finally realizes the depth of her emotional manipulations and the monster she’s become and faces it, he no longer sees the JH of yesteryear any more, not even with both his eyes. And I thought it was incredibly interesting that the first thing he did, on returning to the living room, was to raise her face and take it all in.
There’s something truly remarkable about how the key moments in this drama, the highlights, are played very low-key. No histrionics, no (dare I say it) melodrama, no squeezing every ounce of emotion from the scene…
These people truly understand the concept of “less is more.”
