Big: Episode 5

by javabeans

Whoa, THAT’s a twist I didn’t see coming. Episode 5 brings a game-changer, and after the initial surprise at the story turn, I’m finding myself liking it a lot. I was ready to say, before watching this episode, that I was finding myself curiously detached from Big; I enjoy it and find it funny and the story interesting, but for whatever reason, the drama hadn’t gotten its hooks into me.

Usually a Hong sisters drama is well in crack-addiction mode by this point of the show, so I wondered whether Big would be an experiment for them in more ways than one. Exploring a less frantic type of storytelling is something I welcome, but it would be a shame if the writing lost the heart that always comes with the crazy. This episode brought back that familiar feeling of excitement, though, and makes me anticipate what the next bend in the road will bring our characters.

SONG OF THE DAY

Hey – “Kiss Kiss Kiss” [ Download ]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 
EPISODE 5 RECAP

Da-ran confirms that her fiancé’s spare key belongs to bitchy Se-young, but just as the apartment door opens to reveal that truth face to face, Kyung-joon steps in. He slams the door shut and refuses to step aside, even as she cries for him to move out of her way.

He wrenches the key out of her hand and throws it down the hall. She runs after it and he kicks it back, then picks her up and carries her outside.

Kyung-joon lets Da-ran down outside, grabbing her when she starts to march back inside. She bites his arm to free herself and says, “If you know it hurts, don’t stop me.” He fires back, “If you know it hurts, don’t go.”

She tells him not to interfere, and he tells her to handle it properly then, handing her a large rock—toss it through the window, then speak her mind and warn Se-young she’ll beat her up next time she comes knocking on Yoon-jae’s door using tea as an excuse. Yay for tough love telling her to find her spine, which Da-ran desperately needs—both the tough love and the spine.

They see Se-young emerge from her building, looking around curiously. Kyung-joon watches intently as Da-ran considers the rock in her hand… then lets it fall with a sigh.

She trudges back to the hospital, head hanging, and Kyung-joon follows at a distance and leaves her sitting at his desk.

He finds his teenage self lying exactly as he has been, only his bedside is now decorated—enshrined might be a better word. There are photos of Mari plastered above the headboard, and a pillow with Mari’s face lying next to Kyung-joon’s face. I think I love this girl. So strange, so benignly persistent.

Big Kyung-joon removes the pillow from Little Kyung-joon’s side, only to get an indignant Mari storming in to complain. He pulls the doctor card, saying it’s unacceptable. Mari grudgingly complies and sets the pillow at Little Kyung-joon’s feet, noticing the fuzzy blue socks he wears and asking where she can buy a matching pair.

Big Kyung-joon recalls that those were part of a couple set bought by Da-ran for her honeymoon and tells her not to, which of course gets Mari growling, “I will. I’ll buy a hundred pairs and wear them every day.”

He argues with another made-up health concern (pointing to his jacket: “I’m a doctor!”) and Mari decides to remove them from Little Kyung-joon if they’re so bad. Big Kyung-joon backtracks immediately and offers to reinstate the pillow if she’ll leave Da-ran’s socks alone.

Mari complains that he’s a pain in the ass, and Kyung-joon agrees and says yes, Yoon-jae is.

Da-ran notices that the photo she’d stapled to Yoon-jae’s bulletin board—the one of them together—is missing, and starts looking around for it, not knowing that Se-young removed it. She stops at the Miracle book with the familiar (to us) cherub painting on the cover, and pulls out the paper sticking out of the top. It’s Yoon-jae’s plane ticket to LA. Oh crap.

Da-ran sees that he meant to take a solo trip before their wedding: “Yoon-jae-sshi had already split from me, but blindly, I didn’t know.” She cries.

Mari says goodnight to Little Kyung-joon, taking his arm affectionately and telling him to seek her out in his dreams. Just as Big Kyung-joon gets a text from Da-ran telling him she’s going home, Mari says, “Kyung-joon-ah, don’t go to Gil Da-ran.” That stops him in his tracks, even though she’s not talking to him, exactly.

Mari’s words sink in, though, as she reminds her Kyung-joon that the teacher likes another man, not him. Kyung-joon runs out anyway in search of Da-ran, while Mari keeps talking: “Even if you go after her, she won’t look at you. She won’t see you, so if your feelings keep going to her, you’ll end up hurt. Kyung-joon-ah, if you wake up, forget everything about the teacher.” Um… that’s not foreshadowing, right?

Kyung-joon tracks Da-ran down to her family’s mandoo restaurant, where she’s crying over soju. He urges her to come to her senses and stop crying, but she’s well and drunk and pleads for him—Yoon-jae—not to go away.

Kyung-joon sits there and pats her back for a while, and when she’s done crying and lies sleeping on the restaurant floor, he lies down to watch her sleep.

In the morning, Kyung-joon contemplates the newlyweds’ bedroom in his/Yoon-jae’s house, remembering Da-ran’s excitement about the bed. He passive-aggressively breaks the canopy, accidentally-on-purpose, over Yoon-jae’s side.

Kyung-joon irritatedly answers a call from Mari (whom he’s entered into his phone as “Jang X,” where the X is a stand-in for a swear word, heh), who asks him to bring Kyung-joon’s wallet to the hospital—it contains something very important. Kyung-joon does have the wallet, but he dismisses her with an “I dunno”

Mari takes that to mean the doctor has it, and calls Choong-shik for the newlyweds’ address. Then she calls Kyung-joon back to exclaim, “Kyung-joon has woken up! Ajusshi, come to the hospital right away!”

Kyung-joon runs out of his house in a hurry, and Mari darts inside. HA. Way to outsmart him. She asks for the wallet, while Kyung-joon’s more concerned about the evidence that he (his real self) lives here, like his racecar bed. He distracts her with questions about how well she thinks she knows Kyung-joon, and in a mad ploy to keep her from seeing that room, he bursts out, “Amy!”

That’s a name the doctor shouldn’t know, but he identifies Amy as Kyung-joon’s first kiss. Mari: “That was true? Amy wasn’t lying?” Poor girl, I actually feel sorry for her, even if she is a crazed stalker with the persistence of super glue.

Kyung-joon manages his way to the remote control and turns the bedroom glass opaque. Mari concedes that doctor ajusshi does in fact seem to know a lot about Kyung-joon, and adds that he must therefore know how important that drawing inside the wallet is—our miracle cherubs. She says seriously, “If the wallet’s lost, I have to find it, even if that means searching the whole hospital.”

At that, Kyung-joon takes out the wallet and shows her the picture. She’s relieved that it’s not lost, but he pulls the wallet out of her reach. So she summons a new tactic, offering to us one of her secrets that “only Kyung-joon doesn’t know.”

And she shoots her high heel into Kyung-joon’s groin. He falls in pain, and Mari grabs the wallet and runs out to the waiting taxi.

At school, lovestruck Teacher Hyo-sang sneaks a peek at Da-ran from a distance, and is caught by fellow teacher Ae-kyung. She crows over this discovery, having thought all this time that he avoided Da-ran out of dislike.

Hyo-sang frantically tries to shut her up, pinning Ae-kyung against a wall and whispering furiously into her ear, only to get a disapproving VP Kim clucking in dismay.

It’s a good thing she’s not wearing any pearls, or they’d have the lifeblood clutched out of them; she warns them to be careful because school is for educating youth. Ha, yes, VP Kim is uptight and pretentious, but is it her fault for wanting her teachers to act like grown-ups instead of horny teenagers?

Se-young calls Da-ran out to confront her about coming to her apartment last night. Da-ran retorts that Se-young is acting mighty righteous for someone in her position, and Se-young cautions Da-ran against coming on so fiercely: “Playing the weakling is how you got Yoon-jae.”

Se-young says Yoon-jae has always felt compassion for the saddest, most pathetic kids; he couldn’t stand to watch people being hurt. Ouch—that stings because it gnaws at Da-ran’s own insecurities. Se-young adds that at the wedding, Yoon-jae was leaving in a rush because she’d just told him she’d broken up with her boyfriend. She insinuates that Da-ran’s accident is the only reason Yoon-jae ended up with her instead of Se-young.

Se-young clocks Da-ran’s reaction and says, “You must feel uneasy about the wedding. If that’s the case, keep holding tight onto Yoon-jae—he’s so nice he’ll let himself keep being held.” Grrr. Can I slap her now?

Da-ran finds her spark, though, and drops to banmal to warn Se-young to watch her front windows. Using Kyung-joon’s words, she threatens to beat her up “till that black tea turns into green tea.” Yay!

Still, Da-ran intends to go through with her wedding photo shoot tomorrow, and asks Kyung-joon to show up. He calls her crazy, but she asks him to consider it a favor for his pitiful teacher.

Se-young asks her doctor friend for Yoon-jae’s parents’ number, because she has something important to tell them. Urg. Butt out, lady! She tells Mom about the accident, saying that she felt Mom should know even though Yoon-jae doesn’t seem concerned. Mom thanks her, then makes immediate preparations to fly to Korea.

Da-ran tells her mother that she has something to announce after tomorrow’s photo shoot. Mom worries that Da-ran isn’t looking healthy, and little bro offers that he thinks the couple is hiding something; he heard them arguing over whether to go to the hospital without raising suspicions. Oh… you’re not thinking…? HA.

Yes, indeed: Mom finds Da-ran’s extra-warm couple socks, so unnecessary in this weather, and puts two and two together. She gets five. Ha, wrong end of the skinship meter, Mom.

On to the photo shoot, kicked off by Kyung-joon’s requisite moment of slack-jawed admiration of the bride. As they proceed, Kyung-joon forces a Yoon-jae-like smile and half-heartedly goes through the motions; he doesn’t approve of her going forward with the wedding, and it shows on his face. Off to the side, Choong-shik complies with Mom’s instructions and grabs shots on his own camera.

Mari heads to a clothing shop to Da-ran-ify her look, noting that Da-ran dressed a lot in this brand (ha, way to go for smooth product placement—or at least as smooth as you can get in a drama context). She asks the sales clerk if she’d look like a teacher in this blazer, and the clerk praises, “You look like an adorable kindergarten teacher!” Mari frowns: “I have to look like a high school teacher.”

She gets a text from Choong-shik, who forwards wedding photos that make Mari huff, “I’m going to wear a prettier dress for my wedding.” So petty, so adorable.

And then she notices… the groom’s pose. Arms out, right leg up, looking to the side. It’s hardly like Kyung-joon’s got a trademark on one body pose, but Mari’s suspicions fire and she finds more photos of groom Yoon-jae standing and posing in exact replicas of Kyung-joon’s posture.

After the shoot wraps, Da-ran looks over sample photos from the photographer and thanks Kyung-joon for his help. She tells him this is as far as she’s going; there’ll be no wedding. Yoon-jae is too nice to dump her, so she’ll let him go. She releases Kyung-joon from any further Yoon-jae impersonation and hands over the plane ticket. It’s his get out of jail free card; staying here after she calls it off will just be a headache for him.

Kyung-joon is confused, asking why she’d bother with the shoot. Da-ran answers, “Because I can’t marry Yoon-jae. If I have these, at least I’ll have my memories.”

Kyung-joon says, “Looking at them, you only see Seo Yoon-jae, don’t you? Even though it was Kang Kyung-joon who spent all day holding you and running around, the memories you’ll be cherishing are all Seo Yoon-jae.” Da-ran promises not to use him that way again.

The photographer returns to grab one last photo, and as they pose, Kyung-joon asks, “Will such a weak memory suffice?”

He swoops in and kisses her, then asks defiantly, “But what can we do? This isn’t Seo Yoon-jae’s memory, but Kang Kyung-joon’s. Gil Teacher, treasure it. It’s Kang Kyung-joon’s first kiss.” So he WAS lying to Mari! Also, the boy sure is a quick study if he’s kissing like that on the first try.

Da-ran glares indignantly, but Kyung-joon says those hearts in her eyes have receded: “Now you see Kang Kyung-joon, don’t you?”

She moves to hit him, and he grabs one wrist, then the other. He shoots her a seriously sexy smolder, then runs away like a little boy. Such a mind-confuzzling mix of grown man and child.

At the photography studio, Da-ran requests the kiss photo deleted and pointedly tells Kyung-joon that it’s been erased from her memory as well. Choong-shik comes upon them with the plane ticket—found by a staffer in the groom’s clothing—just as Kyung-joon says it was a goodbye kiss before he leaves.

Choong-shik’s fury mounts as the groom tells noona that he’s gonna leave for good since the wedding is off so she’d better not beg him to stay, and he launches himself at the “bastard” and punches him. Oh, I love him. So dim, but devoted to his sister.

It takes the whole staff to pull Choong-shik off, and Kyung-joon escapes. He’s got a bloody lip and wounded feelings; he complains to Da-ran that this ajusshi was the one to do all these bad things and yet he’s got to suffer for them. Da-ran hands him the plane ticket and sighs that she’ll have to tell her parents earlier than expected.

It doesn’t sit well with Kyung-joon that she’s going to handle everything alone, and he urges her to tell them that the doctor cheated. She says she’s going to take the “I don’t want to get married anymore” line—not to protect the fiancé, but because it would hurt her parents to know her own failings led to her relationship falling apart. Her reasoning is a bit self-defeating, but I can understand the desire to spare her parents; it’ll hurt them less if she argues that she doesn’t want the marriage.

Choong-shik bursts into the house ready to drop the bomb, but stops short because relatives have dropped by. He figures he’ll have to wait before revealing his information, though Mom sing-songs that she already knows, already having jumped to the baby conclusion.

When Da-ran arrives home, Mom invites her to share the big news she’d alluded to yesterday. Da-ran says she’ll do it after the guests leave, but Choong-shik bursts in holding a cake, wild-eyed: “Noona! You’re PREGNANT?” (The cake reads, “Congratulations on the arrival of your baby.”) He’s near-tears in horror (love him), “Noona, you’re pregnant and brother-in-law still did that?!”

Dad slits his eyes suspiciously while flustered Da-ran insists to everybody that it’s not true. Mom just gives her the wink and says they already know, so she can just admit it. Choong-shik rages, “Noona, say it clearly. I’m gonna KILL THAT JERK!”

Da-ran can’t help it; the truth has to come out now. She says she won’t be marrying Yoon-jae.

She sits down with her family and assures them that she already called it off, that she changed her mind. They can’t understand, so she makes up the story that Yoon-jae plans to quit being a doctor, ignoring her demands to remain thusly employed: “I won’t marry Yoon-jae if he’s not a doctor.”

It’s a huge shock to everyone, and Mom staggers to her feet while holding her head. Dad starts in on a wise father lecture, but Choong-shik suddenly cries out to noona to RUN! In comes Mom, wielding a mop with deadly intent and a Kill Bill wind-in-her-hair slo-mo entrance. She declares, “Today, I take my daughter down. Nobody stop me!”

Mom swings wildly, breaking trinkets, growling that she married at 19 after her father practically tore out her hair in fury. That’s what she went through to win her love: “And you dare toy with love?!”

It’s the hair Mom goes for when she finally gets her hands on Da-ran, and Dad and Bro barely manage to pull her away.

Kyung-joon creeps into the front yard in time to hear the screams, and decides to creep right back out. Da-ran comes flying out the front door, and Kyung-joon explains coming because he was worried: “You’re managing well. I should go.” Haha.

Mom appears in the doorway and chucks her shoe at Da-ran’s head. Kyung-joon jumps in front of her to shield her, getting flip-flopped in the back instead. But this is an unexpected twist in the narrative, and the family wonders at it. With no other ideas, Kyung-joon cups his face in his hands and declares, “Surprise!” Okay, that got me. First time was silly, but at this moment? Hilarious.

The couple gets called to the carpet (literally) to explain. Dad tries to get the story straight: “So you visited a place you shouldn’t have, and got caught by Da-ran. Where is that place?” Da-ran shakes her head at Kyung-joon, the gesture for No explainy the cheaty, and Kyung-joon reaches into his pockets to take out… strip club cards?

What’s funnier, the fact that this is his excuse, or the image of Kyung-joon actually skipping off to strip clubs using his borrowed body? (I suppose he could have prepared the cards in advance, but I ignore that explanation; don’t kill my jokebuzz.)

But it’s an explanation that makes sense, and Mom commiserates with her poor daughter. Dad says they’re both adults, however, so the family won’t interfere. It’s up to them to decide whether to marry or not. Both parents leave heaving sighs, and Kyung-joon just bows his head and repeats, “I’m sorry.”

(Da-ran asks where he got the cards, and he says he picked them up from the street. A likely story.)

One hurdle has been jumped, and Da-ran tells Kyung-joon to go ahead and leave for a while. He wonders if his body will wake up by the time things settle down and he returns, and now he gives voice to that unspoken question they’ve ignored: “What if I don’t wake up for good, then what happens to me? Then do I have to keep living in Seo Yoon-jae’s shell?”

Yoon-jae’s mother calls at that moment, newly arrived in Seoul. Off they go to meet her, and she envelops Yoon-jae a hug immediately, seeming to clock his stiff response. Mom asks about the accident and Yoon-jae’s health in warm tones, then her voice gets icy as she all but accuses Da-ran of concealing this from her because she was obsessed with her wedding plans. Da-ran says they’ll be postponing the wedding, and Mom approves: “Yoon-jae, come back with me to the States.”

Okay, so bitchy Mom clearly doesn’t take the wedding seriously if she thinks the groom would rather spend the prep time with Mom in another country than the future wife. She should meet Se-young; I wonder if they’d get along like two peas in a pod, or tear each other’s hair out for dominance.

The encounter is enough to convince Kyung-joon that he can’t fake the Yoon-jae act in front of his mother. They worry over what to do next, and I LOVE Kyung-joon’s very 18-year-old response: “Gil Teacher, can you just marry me? Then I don’t have to go back with Mom.” Facepalm is right.

Da-ran argues that the only thing to do is wait, which is a frustrating answer to Kyung-joon. But barring staging another brink-of-death encounter—since one near-death caused the first soul-swap—there’s nothing they can do, and even then the likelihood of crashing back into their rightful bodies seems slim.

That night, Kyung-joon dreams of the accident—both Kyung-joons apparently, because the camera intercuts the scenes with Little Kyung-joon in the hospital, and Big Kyung-joon in his racecar bed. The latter jerks awake with An Idea. Uh-oh, I don’t have a good feeling about this…

Kyung-joon dons a doctor’s gown and takes his body from its bed, wheeling it out to his car. Mari gets there shortly afterward and asks where Kyung-joon went, eyes narrowing suspiciously to hear that the nice-looking doctor took him out in a wheelchair.

Mari calls Da-ran to demand the doctor’s whereabouts, and the news makes Da-ran recall Kyung-joon’s words last night about near-deaths.

Meanwhile, Kyung-joon drives along the same highway… swerves the car across his lane… straight for the guardrail… and screeches to a stop. He can’t do it. Oh phew.

At the hospital, Da-ran and Mari wait with Kyung-joon’s aunt and uncle, all of whom are growing upset with the doctor who took the boy without a word. Thankfully, Kyung-joon appears wheeling his body in and says, “I went out looking for a way to return [him/me].”

Without a better way to explain his behavior, Kyung-joon tells Yoon-jae’s mother that he lost his memory. He tells Da-ran that it was better to seem a little crazy with amnesia than to reveal the soul-swap and seem entirely crazy. He figures he has to go with Mom, who can look after him, but Da-ran tells him not to go, offering to look after him herself.

He asks how she’d do that. What, will she marry him in this state? Da-ran says firmly, “Let’s do it.” He points out that he can’t live as an 18-year-old adolescent, and neither can he live as a thirtysomething doctor: “I have to skip—the gap between Kang Kyung-joon and Seo Yoon-jae. I have to skip 12 years’ time.”

Thinking it over, it doesn’t seem terrible. He reasons that Yoon-jae’s already taken care of the troublesome bits: college entrance exams, army duty, finding employment. All he has to do is fill his brain, and that should be easy enough since he’s smart. Da-ran states the obvious truth: “Just filling your brain doesn’t make you an adult.”

But he disagrees, saying he’ll just skip the useless parts and come back. I suppose he means leave with Mom to fill in the blank bits of Yoon-jae’s past, so that when he comes back he’ll be up to speed with the body.

He says frankly, “When I get back, I’ll marry you. I think I like you. I’ll come back upgraded and marry you.” Oh, you’re adorable.

Stunned, Da-ran climbs up on the couch (which puts her just about even with his height) and smacks his head for being ridiculous. He points out that she just offered to marry him, and she says that was to give them an excuse for her to take care of him (as an adult, without suspicion), whereas he was considering the marriage as real.

She laughs at the absurdity of being proposed to by a high schooler, and it’s both enough to make you laugh along with her and feel a little pang when Kyung-joon asks, wide-eyed, “Is it so funny?” She says it is, calling him a baby (literally a blood clot).

Kyung-joon says, “I’m very sorry such a baby dared to confound you so much. Teacher. Goodbye.” Da-ran finally registers his seriousness as he fixes her with a fierce stare.

Kyung-joon packs his things and drops by the hospital for one last visit to his body. His uncle asks about moving Kyung-joon to a different facility, but Kyung-joon understands the motivation underlying such a question and asks Uncle, “You’re looking after Kyung-joon because of his mother’s inheritance, aren’t you? I understand that aside from his current assets, there’s a sizable trust fund Kyung-joon will receive when he turns 18.”

Uncle is stunned that the doctor would know this, and Kyung-joon adds that he’s the one who knows the password to access those funds. He requests Uncle take good care of the boy until Kyung-joon returns.

Kyung-joon finds Mari outside and demands the return of the wallet. He holds her still (with a firm hand to the head) and swipes it from her purse, saying, “I’ll take good care of this, so you take good care of this place. I’m trusting in you.”

With that he taps her head in a friendly gesture—another curious similarity that immediately reminds Mari of the time Kyung-joon tapped her head in a similar way. Mari hold her cheeks in disbelief: “Did I just blush? I must be crazy.”

Da-ran arrives at Kyung-joon’s house to find everything packed up and put away. She thinks back to an earlier conversation when Kyung-joon had asked whether the soul-swap would be okay despite a physical distance between the bodies—and would she be able to know if/when the bodies switched souls?

Da-ran finds a photo left out on a table, and flips it over to see the kiss from the photo shoot. “This is really Kang Kyung-joon,” she smiles.

Kyung-joon walks through the airport with Yoon-jae’s mother, looking around as though expecting, and hoping, for a visitor. But Da-ran is at home, explaining the decision to her family to call off the wedding.

And then, we come back a year later. (A year later?! Okay, just go with it. It’s early in the drama. We can handle this. Also, Kyung-joon is now almost legal, by Korean reckoning.)

Da-ran runs into a wedding hall, but today she’s a welcomed part of the bridal party and joins friends in photos. While teacher Ae-kyung gossips about the hotties in the groom’s family, Da-ran urges her to join her for lunch since she’s starving.

Da-ran heads to the elevator, and a tall figure joins her in waiting. It’s Kyung-joon (in Yoon-jae’s body), and she recognizes him right away, calling his name. “Kang Kyung-joon!” But he makes no move, and she furrows her brow: “Y-yoon-jae-sshi?” And at that, he turns to face her.

 
COMMENTS

Annnnnnd that’s how the drama took a mindfuck and twisted it into an even mindier-fuck. Booyah. I’m all for it, and was in fact worried the show would pull back on the whole identity-conflict—can a heroine fall for the minor? Is there even a viable romantic pairing in sight?—and end up steering back toward safer, more conventional waters. That it pushes us farther adrift into underexplored territory is something I can respect, and welcome.

So the ending’s a fakeout, right? It’s totally a fakeout. But a pretty great one, in that the first five episodes have been building to the point that boiled over in this episode, when Kyung-joon sincerely proposed and Da-ran laughed in his face, calling him a baby. She didn’t mean it maliciously, but that’s exactly the problem; she doesn’t view him as a grown-up and therefore there was no way his proposal was going to be seen as anything but a big joke. That crushed look in his eyes was a wonderful (heartbreaking) moment; it wasn’t an angry look or even injured, exactly—it was disillusioned, like he was seeing reality clearly.

I love how this time-skip sets us up for future episodes, because it blurs the already-muddy line between adult and minor, Kyung-joon and Yoon-jae, and therefore fantasy and reality. I do expect to get Yoon-jae’s real backstory at some point, but it’s not the point right now, and what matters is that Da-ran has been viewing her engagement through colored glasses. And just as her rosy memories turned out to be tainted by less-rosy secrets, I fully expect that her disillusionment of Yoon-jae also presents an incomplete picture. We’ve been seeing glimpses of Yoon-jae through unreliable narrators, because everyone sees different aspects of a person and some of those people see what they want to see. But whatever the reason, the end result was that she wasn’t ready to marry Yoon-jae, a man she barely knew.

Kyung-joon is the reality, in that he’s the guy who forces her to see things for what they are, who sees who she is because she’s not trying to impress him. And while 18-year-old boyish Kyung-joon was never a possibility in Da-ran’s mind, what about the newer, “upgraded” Kyung-joon who is only a year older in true age but has “filled the gap,” so to speak, to catch his body up to mind? It presents another interesting question of how old he “really” is, because part of age is life experience, and that you can’t force, but another part of age comes part and parcel with physical maturation. But can you say he’s a bona fide adult because now he’s matured into his body (rawr) and learned a few things?

So maybe he’s not just a kid who’s stuck in an adult body anymore; maybe he’s… somewhere in between. That’s what I find fascination, the quandary of the in-between.

The question is: Is that in-between good enough for Da-ran? And if the question he left her pondering is “Will you be able to immediately tell the difference between us?” and the answer is no, where does that take them?

I’ll miss the cheeky bantering and bickering of the old Kyung-joon, but that mild disappointment is more than made up for with the resetting of our game and the leveling of the playing field. Heck, from here on out we’re playing a different game entirely.

RELATED POSTS

• Big: Episode 4
• Big: Episode 3
• Big: Episode 2
• Big: Episode 1
• More Big