I Hear Your Voice: Episode 4

by girlfriday

I feel like a yo-yo after every episode of this show because I’ve been so wildly yanked from one extreme to the other—laughing out loud and then clutching my heart, sometimes in terror and other times from the giddy romance. But even though I feel spent, I’m a happy little yo-yo; yes I am.

 
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Every Single Day – “Dolphin” from the OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 4: “You, in my hazy memory”

Hye-sung inches toward the bedroom door, armed with a frying pan. (We need to get you a taser, or at least a hefty bat.) “I’ll Be There,” now the world’s scariest song—thanks for that, Show—rings from the mystery phone somewhere on the other side of that door, inside her apartment.

Su-ha gets waylaid by the punks who refuse to let him go without a fight. So they get one, and he limps away to get to Hye-sung.

She gets to the bedroom door and calls out, “Who’s there?” And thank ye gods, Su-ha gets to her front door in time to hear her. There’s no answer so in a panic he breaks down her door.

She’s startled to see him, and the first thing he hears is her thinking: “I’m scared.” Aw. He takes her outside to wait, and then reaches slowly for the door handle…

It opens, and when he flips on the lights, there’s no one there. Whew. All he finds is the cell phone, still ringing, “I’ll Be There.”

A short while later, the police are there, asking if the creepy stalker broke down her door and beat up the kid. They’re like, no… the kid broke down the door. Cop: Oh, so the kid broke down the door and fought off the stalker? Um.

Sigh. They’re clearly not going to get anywhere with this guy, and when she explains that the phone appeared in her apartment, Su-ha can read his thoughts loud and clear—that they’re a couple of nut jobs.

They just get the cursory, “We’ll do everything we can!” and tell her that beat cops circle this neighborhood often, so she’ll be fine. What. You people suck.

Su-ha chases the cop out to his car, and says he thinks he knows the person they should be looking for. It’s sweet that he doesn’t want say it in front of her because it’ll freak her out.

When he comes back upstairs she’s battling her front door that won’t close. He yanks it back into place and tells her to go sleep at a friend’s house for a few days. He starts to get woozy as he’s talking, and then suddenly he just collapses on her shoulder.

They fall and she’s got him propped up in her arms, and after her initial shock and annoyance, she realizes he’s fainted and reaches for her phone to call for help.

She’s just about to dial, when he starts to snore. HA.

A flashback to Little Su-ha shows him standing alone at his father’s memorial. His uncle comes to his side and says he’ll live with them now, but when Su-ha looks up at him, he can hear him fraught with worry about raising a fourth kid when things are already so tough.

And then a little while later, Uncle takes him to an amusement park, and Su-ha waves at him to say that he’s over here. But then he hears Uncle think: “Please, just disappear…” and then watches as Uncle lets go of the balloons he was bringing over, and walks away. *gasp*

You were abandoned at an amusement park? After watching your father bludgeoned to death by a killer? What is wrong with the world?

Big Su-ha stirs in his sleep at the memory. He’s now in Hye-sung’s bed (How did she get the sleeping giant in there?) and she’s sitting next to him, tending to his cuts and scrapes.

She sees him sweating and wincing, and feels his forehead to check his temperature against hers. That’s what he wakes up to, and it startles him.

He starts to get up, but she just pushes him back down (and ruffles his bangs, so cute) and finishes bandaging him up. He can hear her think that she should call his parents because they’ll be worried, and then wondering why he came here… and is he a gangster?

He rattles off answers: he has no parents to worry, he came because he had something to ask her, and he’s not a gangster. “I fell.” On your face?

She gets angry that he read her thoughts again without warning, and zips up her hoodie all the way until her whole head is covered. I love that she still keeps talking though, through the hood. She tells him to sleep here tonight and go to the hospital in the morning.

She remembers to ask what he came here for, and he thinks to himself, “Will you remember me?” Instead he says out loud, “Do you know my name?” She says no, but that there’s no need to know it since they’ll never see each other again.

He grabs her arm and says, “It’s Su-ha. Park Su-ha.” He pulls her close and unzips her hoodie (rawr) and looks up at her face so eagerly, hoping for a flicker of recognition…

“Park… Su-ha?” He waits for her to remember, but she just quips that for a temper like his, he sure has a normal-sounding name, and decides that Gum-wad is a much better fit. (I decided I liked gum-wad better than chewing gum—it’s closer to her intonation, and makes me chuckle.)

He sighs and tells himself that there’s no way she’d remember him from ten years ago. The name does ring a bell with her, but she just shrugs it off and goes to sleep.

As the lights go out, we see our killer Min Joon-gook standing in the street looking up at her rooftop, and holding one of Mom’s chicken shop posters. Ack, can Su-ha just move in?

At Do-yeon’s house, her father Judge Seo asks about the case she lost, and then picks at her wound by asking if she really lost to the public defender daughter of their old housekeeper. Blech, well now we know why you’re such a peach. Like father, like daughter.

She leaves the table to avoid discussing it further, and Mom warns Dad that people will start to talk, and say that they found Do-yeon under a bridge (meaning she isn’t theirs by birth). He says it’s true, so what does it matter? Hm.

Su-ha wakes up and checks his hair in the mirror before going out to the living room, and pauses to smile at the bandaid on his cheek, thinking of the moment Hye-sung put it there.

He opens the door, floating on the anticipation of his fantasy… only to be greeted by disheveled reality. There’s actually dried drool in the corner of her mouth. Nice touch. She sees the horror written all over his face and covers up her embarrassment by saying that playing coy would be wasted on him anyway.

She glugs water right out of the bottle and says, “You don’t know because you don’t have a noona, but ninety-nine percent of women have this hair and this face in the morning. So you should just break that fantasy now and accept reality.”

Ha, I think that bubble’s already been burst, and I’m pretty sure you got him there. The horror parade continues as he watches her make instant kimchi rice by shaking ingredients in a plastic container, and handing him a rice spatula to eat with.

He asks if this isn’t dog food, and wonders how she could possibly only have one spoon in her entire house. She says just as incredulously, “I live alone. Isn’t one spoon normal?”

He looks around her mess of an apartment and asks if she isn’t going to put it back the way it was, thinking that the killer turned the place upside-down looking for something. She looks around. “Mess? The suspect didn’t do that.”

Su-ha: “Well if he didn’t do it… then… … … You live like this??” Haha. As his gaze moves from one pile of trash to another, his grandiose description of his pretty and perfect first love plays in voiceover.

She launches into another fun fact: “Ninety-nine percent of women all live like this. Suzy and SNSD are no different. I bet they’re just like this at home too!” He slams his hand on the table and cuts her off: “Eat or talk—ONE at a time!” Lol.

At school that day, the lit teacher recites a poem about first love and how wonderful and beautiful it is, as Su-ha grows more and more agitated with each description. The teacher describes a first love that makes your heart race at the hope of meeting again someday. “Don’t you all have a first love like that in your hearts?”

Su-ha slams his hands down on his desk in the middle of class, startling everyone. “NO!”

Mom comes by to bring Hye-sung chicken to pass around the office, and tells her she’s set her up on a blind date with the jjimjilbang’s son, who’s also a lawyer.

Hye-sung turns it down, saying she’s changed her mind about getting married because she realized that she’s actually a blue chip lawyer and should really focus on her career. Pfft, she actually flips her hair while saying this. It’s priceless.

Mom smacks her upside the head, but doesn’t push the blind date, figuring that she should work when she wants to work, and marry when she wants to marry. Mom, I already loved you, but you’re kinda the bee’s knees right now.

As her coworkers dig into the chicken, Hye-sung gets her nails done by Sung-bin at her desk. That’s so cute. Hye-sung is all up on her high horse today, and tells Sung-bin she really lucked out with a lawyer as awesome as her. Lawyer Shin practically chokes.

Sung-bin says she knows, and even though she thought Hye-sung was terrible at first, she turned out to be cool and believed in her when no one else would. She asks why, and Hye-sung lies that she just had a feeling.

Sung-bin corrects herself to say that Su-ha believed in her too, and Hye-sung asks why Gum-wad didn’t come with her when he was supposed to.

That’s because he’s busy at the police station checking on the phone-stalker case. The cops say the phone was untraceable and that they checked on the recently released prisoner he asked about, and found that he’s living quietly and honorably, doing nothing wrong.

The cop won’t give Su-ha any information about the killer, but he asks leading questions and reads his mind to find out. And that’s how he finds Joon-gook working the soup kitchen line at a church.

Su-ha watches from a distance as Joon-gook smiles pleasantly at the elderly and gives them extra food like a decent human being. But all Su-ha can see is the man who killed his father and threatened Hye-sung, and he balls up his fist in anger.

And then he decides to walk right up to him. Eeek! Don’t do that! He goes up to him with a smile and says he wants to volunteer, and Joon-gook just pleasantly tells him how and asks his name. Su-ha hesitates and says, “Kim Choong-ki.”

Pretty the Paralegal gives Hye-sung a new case, and she totally smirks to see Do-yeon’s name on the prosecutor’s report. He tells her this is an interesting case—two brothers robbed a convenience store, and when the owner caught them in the act, one of them stabbed the man with a knife while his brother tried to stop him.

She thinks it’s pretty cut and dried, but there’s a catch: each brother is insisting he’s the guilty one who did the stabbing, and the security footage is of no use because they’re identical twins. Clever.

She goes to meet her client, Twin 2, who swears that he did the stabbing. Hyung has priors on his record, and so Hye-sung guesses right away that he’s trying to take the fall so that Twin 1 doesn’t end up with a much harsher sentence. He denies it, even when she reminds him that he could spend his life in prison for murder.

But he does ask her for a favor, and so she goes to his apartment, where she finds a puppy he had adopted before all this happened. His place is filled with stacks of books and academic awards, and there’s a picture with a girlfriend—not exactly glaring signs of a thief or a killer.

Kwan-woo goes bleary-eyed at his desk just trying to keep up with his cases. Hye-sung comes back to the office with the puppy and says she’s taking care of it during the trial, already convinced that Twin 2 is innocent, and that she’ll prove it.

But Pretty the Paralegal says there’s a hitch—both brothers will be tried at the same time, so her fight won’t just be against the prosecution, but also the other brother’s lawyer.

She asks who’s representing Twin 1, and he nods over at Kwan-woo, who’s passed out at his desk. Ha. Really? Something tells me she’s not worried in the least.

Meanwhile, Su-ha is volunteering at the church and finds an opportunity to prod Joon-gook for information. He says he’s been living and working here for about a month, and Su-ha asks if they know each other, because he seems familiar.

Joon-gook tries to brush it off, but Su-ha asks if maybe he saw him at the courthouse recently, and Joon-gook stops his radish-chopping and grips the kitchen knife in his hand.

Su-ha can hear him wonder if this kid saw him there, and why he seems familiar, but outwardly he doesn’t betray any reaction and just says it wasn’t him. Okay, we need some rules around here. No more provoking a killer while he’s holding a knife. My heart can’t take it.

Lawyer Shin finally starts to come around, and buys Hye-sung her coffee and even invites her to an office dinner for the first time. He says he’s on his way to watch Kwan-woo’s trial, so she goes with him, and finds Do-yeon there too. Oh is she checking out her competition?

It’s time for closing arguments for his hearing-impaired client who stole money, and when it’s his turn, Kwan-woo fumbles with the computer to get a presentation file open, and keeps opening embarrassing girl group videos.

The judge loses his patience and screams at Kwan-woo, which is exactly what he wanted. He makes a point that it only took the judge fifty seconds to get frustrated that Kwan-woo wasn’t listening to him, so how would it feel to live that way for fifty years?

He doesn’t argue that she didn’t commit a crime, but asks what might’ve happened if one person had listened to her in all that time. “What could’ve changed if just one person had heard her cry?” It’s a pretty cheesetastic moment, but Kwan-woo’s got that earnest heartfelt delivery on his side, and also he’s arguing for a lesser sentence, not for her to walk away guilt-free.

The question sticks with Hye-sung and she sits in the hall for a while contemplating it. Do-yeon sits down next to her (and Hye-sung scootches one seat over like a petty schoolgirl, ha) and says she came to check out Kwan-woo because of the twin case.

She admits to being a little worried about the competition, and Hye-sung naturally assumes she means her: “Are you complimenting me?” Do-yeon relishes the moment: “No. Not you. Cha Kwan-woo.” Hye-sung plays if off like she isn’t worried in the least, but it starts to niggle at her.

Joon-gook’s pastor asks if he knows the kid who volunteered yesterday, because he forgot to give him his signed timesheet for his hours, saying that kids take this stuff seriously to get into college.

Joon-gook doesn’t have his number, but he knows the kid’s name and school, and offers to deliver it. Oh crap. He goes to Su-ha’s school and sees him playing in the field with a bunch of other kids and happily calls out, “Kim Choong-ki!” There’s no answer. He grabs the nearest kid and asks him to get Su-ha’s attention, and it happens to be the basketball punk. “Who, Park Su-ha?” NOoooooooooOOOOoo.

Joon-gook doesn’t immediately register the name, and asks if that’s not Choong-ki. And then the real Choong-ki walks right up to say that’s his name. He looks over at Su-ha and then it all clicks—Park Su-ha, the little boy who got away. He turns to the other boys and asks if they have Su-ha’s phone number.

At dinner, Hye-sung watches Lawyer Shin warily and asks why he’s being nice all of a sudden, wondering if maybe he invited her along so that he could play favorites in front of her instead of just excluding her. Pffft. And you wonder why you have no friends. He says he may have judged her too soon and says she isn’t totally without merits. She scoffs… and then immediately asks him to tell her what they are. Hee. He says she’s got a good eye—she can see when her client is lying or telling the truth. That’s a bitter pill for her to swallow, so she asks what else.

Lawyer Shin: “Oh… um… other than that… um… there aren’t any. That’s it.” Four bottles of wine later, she’s drunkenly wailing, “I only have one? ONE good trait?!” Grumpy Boss and Pretty the Paralegal run for the hills, leaving Kwan-woo to deal with her alone.

He finds her mumbling to herself that it isn’t even her good trait and she can’t see anything straight, and then her headband falls over her eyes and she flips out, “I can’t see anything! I CAN’T SEE.” Hahahahaha. I’m dying.

He puts her headband back up and when she opens her eyes, this time she wails, “My eyes must be rotten. You look like a flower boy!” She clasps his cheeks and cries, while he just giggles at being called a pretty boy.

He piggybacks her out of the restaurant and she whines, “I can’t see straight. I need that Gum-wad!”

He asks where she lives but doesn’t get an answer, and meanwhile Su-ha is sitting outside their office wondering why she isn’t picking up her phone. He gapes to see her being piggybacked by Kwan-woo, and runs over.

He takes one sniff and scowls at her wine breath, and hears Kwan-woo wondering in his head where she lives and if he should put her down in their office for the night.

Su-ha offers to take her home and says he can go it alone, and Kwan-woo hesitates, wondering in his head if this kid can be trusted. Su-ha asks for his card and offers to call once she’s home safely, so he lets them go.

He piggybacks her up the stairs and groans, “How much did you eat at that dinner?” legs shaking the whole way. He grumbles at her broken doorknob, still jerry-rigged since the other night.

He puts her down on the couch and tucks her in, and then hears her mumble out loud in her sleep: “Gum-wad. Bring me Gum-wad. I need Gum-wad. I need him… next to me. My eyes are rotten.” Aw, how is he NOT supposed to be in love with you now?

She wakes up in the morning still in yesterday’s clothes, and Mom calls to yell at her for not answering her phone, only to turn to tender loving care when Hye-sung sounds sick. She asks Mom if maybe she should meet jjimjilbang’s son after all.

Mom reminds her that she’s the one dating the law or whatever, and Hye-sung sighs that the law broke up with her. Heh.

Kwan-woo catches up to her in the street on her way to work, and leans in close: “How do I look today? Still a flower boy?” She clasps his face again and snaps: “Get it together! Are you still drunk?” She runs to the bathroom in a daze. “I’m crazy. My eyes are crazy. I’m sober, and he’s wearing his glasses, and he’s still handsome.” She clasps her own face. Hee.

Paralegal asks Kwan-woo if anything happened last night, and he says that Park Su-ha came to take Hye-sung home. Paralegal says that guy is always dropping her off and picking her up. “Is he a bodyguard?”

Lawyer Shin remembers to ask about that man Min Joon-gook, and Hye-sung steps into the office just as he says the name. She stops cold and asks how he knows that man, and Lawyer Shin conveys the only thing he knows—he shared a cell with a friend of his, and said he owed a debt to a public defender. And the worst part: that he got released a month ago.

The fear settles in, and she starts to get skittish on her way home that night, avoiding contact with anyone on the bus, and jumping every time someone bumps into her in the street. She looks at the “I’ll be there” texts which have continued all this time, and wonders if it’s possible they were from the killer. Su-ha has taken it upon himself to fix her broken door, though he’s not exactly handy. He hammers his thumb and it bleeds.

She comes home to find him there without warning, and tells him brusquely to go home and she’ll handle it herself. He says it’s fine, but she gets angry and screams at him to go and never come back.

He’s startled at her change and zeroes in on her thoughts: “He might be in league with Min Joon-gook.” Aw, I know you’re scared, but not Su-ha! He can’t say a word and just stands there, his thumb dripping with blood.

His phone rings on his way home, and it’s Joon-gook. All he says at first is, “It’s me. You remember my voice, right?” Su-ha pretends to remember him from the church and asks how he got his number. Joon-gook: “I went to your school. Park Su-ha.”

Su-ha demands to know where he is, and Joon-gook happily meets him. But instead of speaking to Su-ha, he thinks everything on purpose, musing that he could read his mind back then, so he can probably do it now. Angry tears well up in Su-ha’s eyes and he tells the killer to speak, not think. But he continues.

Su-ha accuses Joon-gook of pulling the cell phone stunt, and he scoffs that he shouldn’t be afraid of something so little as that—he hasn’t even gotten started yet. Joon-gook thinks at him not to worry, since he was never after Su-ha in the first place, not back then, and not now.

Su-ha clenches his fists. “If not me, then who?” Joon-gook thinks: “She became a lawyer… that bitch.” Su-ha snaps. He goes after Joon-gook in a rage, punching his face in, and screaming bloody murder. Joon-gook just screams for help, not even fighting back. Damn, he provoked you on purpose.

Hye-sung lies awake on her couch, and aw yeah—she got a bat AND a taser! Now we’re talkin’. She gets a call from the police station that sends her running out of the house.

When she gets there the cop who handled her phone incident tells her that they have Su-ha in custody because he beat a guy up, and there’s security footage to prove it. Su-ha doesn’t have parents and his teacher wasn’t answering their calls, so they called her.

He says the victim of the assault didn’t press charges and just went on his way, and guesses that he probably didn’t want to be connected to anything that might raise a red flag since he just recently got released from prison. But that raises a red flag with her, and she asks the victim’s name. She freezes at the answer: “Min Joon-gook.”

She starts to panic, and asks to see the CCTV footage. She asks the cops why Su-ha attacked Joon-gook, and they don’t know either—it was totally one-sided because Joon-gook literally doesn’t say a word.

She sees the footage and asks what Su-ha is saying. The cop who was at the scene remembers: “He kept saying, ‘Speak, don’t think, speak.'” As he tells her the rest, we hear it straight out of Su-ha’s mouth in flashback:

Su-ha: Listen up. Without that person, I would’ve died at your hands ten years ago. So I’m going to count my life as one that wasn’t supposed to exist, and I’m going to protect her. I’m going to protect her with my life, so don’t you dare do anything stupid, or I will kill you. I’ll kill you!

The cop relays how frightening the warning was that he’d kill him if he touched that woman, and it all starts to sink in. The other cop takes out a hammer from Su-ha’s bag and says he’s one scary dude, but she’s already lost in thought.

She puts it all together—the accident, the little boy who told her he’d protect her, the way he broke down her door the other night and ran to her rescue when she was so frightened and alone. After Little Su-ha had said he’d protect her, Hye-sung had wiped away her tears and asked, “Hey kid, what’s your name?” “Su-ha. Park Su-ha.”

Back in the present, Hye-sung says she’ll sign as Su-ha’s guardian and asks where he is. He’s currently handcuffed and screaming at the cops that they have to do something about Min Joon-gook because he’s dangerous.

But the cops say he’s living a reformed life now, and there’s no proof of anything that Su-ha is saying. He darts up: “I have proof. I heard him… His mind…” Ack, don’t say it!

Hye-sung’s voice cuts him off and tells him to stop. He whirls around, and she thinks at him not to say anything stupid or else he’ll end up ridiculed just like in that courtroom ten years ago.

“Park Su-ha, I remember your name now.”

 
COMMENTS

She remembers! She remembers! The payoffs in this drama are so great. I was fully prepared to have them to drag out Hye-sung being in the dark about both Joon-gook and Su-ha for a while, but this is so much better. My heart sank when she told Su-ha to get lost, not that I blame her for being terrified of everyone and everything. It’s just that I’m okay with him being misunderstood as anything except someone who’s going to harm her, because he’s devoted his life to protecting her.

It was a great setup to have him tell her his name hoping for a reaction, only to get his heart crushed, and THEN have her come around and remember him (not to mention that she gets to do the big rescue yet again). I really like the constant theme of his first love being broken down with every interaction, only to get built up again when she does something to make him swoon. It’s like the wildest pendulum swing, from shattered dreams to fluttery butterflies, and I love every bit of it. Fantasy vs. reality is a great way to set up his romance (which I think of as separate from Hye-sung’s romantic arc, in which she’ll eventually choose between the two boys).

Speaking of which, I’m not sure I buy that one wine bender and piggyback ride later Kwan-woo suddenly seems swoony in her eyes, but I’m reading it as her being moved by his speech in court, which is a much more interesting development. I like a slow progression for Kwan-woo, because there’s more merit to her begrudging acceptance of him and her seeing past his dorky exterior to the good man underneath. Also, they make me laugh out loud when they misunderstand each other, which I don’t want to end. I look forward to their battle in court, because he’s going to change her for the better, win or lose.

Plotwise I think we’re in a great place. A killer who kills is scary, sure. But a killer who builds a cover life as a saint is far creepier. From a story point of view it’s great to have Joon-gook be such a smart adversary, because it corners our leads, even with the law on their side. It rips me up when we see Su-ha in the exact same position he was in ten years ago—powerless even with a superpower, scared to death and furious that nobody will listen to him. And even though it’s simple and obvious that Hye-sung saves him both times, it still gets me, right in the heart.

 
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