Heart to Heart: Episode 6

by LollyPip

A whole lot of changes happen in this episode, for all three of our leads. Yi-seok and Doo-soo continue to clash antlers over Hong-do’s honor, while she’s left shaking her head at these confusing men and their odd behavior. Yi-seok figures out that this thing between him and Hong-do might be more than just physical attraction, but it might be too late as a serious breach of trust has Hong-do rethinking their whole arrangement.

EPISODE 6 RECAP

A fire truck races through the streets, sirens wailing, with Hong-do on her scooter following close behind. She zips around a corner, leading them to Yi-seok’s hospital, which is billowing smoke out of every window. But the fire truck doesn’t even stop, leaving Hong-do to enter the building alone. She runs into the office, screaming Yi-seok’s name into the thickening smoke, but he’s nowhere to be found.

We go back to where we left them earlier, with Hong-do touching Yi-seok’s face and both of them admitting they enjoyed that night together. Suddenly Hong-do pulls back, saying that their bodies get along well. I’ll say. She jokes that sex is important for marriage, making Yi-seok counter that she doesn’t know anything about it. But Hong-do points out that she spent a lot of time shut up at home alone — what did he think she was doing? Oooohhh, naughty girl.

She says that she wasn’t just reading porn, that she also read his book, but got the mistaken impression that he was a nice doctor. HA. She says he’s more like alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs: something bad and addictive. Yi-seok pretends to take offense and knocks the chair out from under her, tossing her over his shoulder. He spins her around the room and dumps her on the couch while she shrieks, then lies on top of her to squish her.

This is when Doo-soo walks in, and sees them playing and laughing like the closest of friends. He excuses himself with this hurt look on his face, and Hong-do wiggles out from under Yi-seok to follow him outside. She stops when he sees her, pulling back into the shadow of the building, but for once doesn’t hide her face.

A bit more composed, Doo-soo gives a tiny little smile and says he’s glad to see that she’s okay after not being able to reach her. Hong-do steps out into the sunlight as he says that Yi-seok must be a good doctor because this is the first time he’s heard her laugh. He says that he hopes her treatment works and starts to invite her to tell him if there’s good news, but stops himself and just wishes her well. Oof, that sounds like goodbye.

Yi-seok finally reads Hong-do’s journal, but it reads more like a to-do list, until he gets to the part that just repeats, “I want to do it… I want to do it…” He gets frustrated, but when Hong-do comes back in looking devastated, he just asks what Doo-soo wanted. He gripes that Doo-soo is confused, not wanting her himself but not wanting anyone else to have her, which frankly says a lot more about how Yi-seok feels about Hong-do.

Hong-do asks what he’s talking about and he admits that he told Doo-soo they slept together, telling her that he didn’t come here because he likes her but because he’s angry with Yi-seok. She’s not listening though, because she’s too busy dying on the inside, and asks him again what he just said.

Instead of answering, Yi-seok starts screaming about cockroaches under his desk, throwing books on the floor and yelling at her to come help kill them. She rolls up her journal as a weapon, but goes after Yi-seok instead, HAHA. She whaps him upside the head repeatedly and screams at him for telling her secret so easily, and runs out.

Doo-soo and Yang do some sparring, but visions of Yi-seok and Hong-do being comfortable together run through Doo-soo’s mind, and he gets a little too aggressive. He thinks of his own moments with Hong-do and how she’s always so skittish and afraid around him, and it distracts him enough for Yang to get the upper hand, hurting his arm.

Doo-soo arrives home to see Hong-do crouched by the wall outside his apartment, and hurt, he nearly walks past her. But he stops and approaches just close enough to talk. He asks if she has anything to say to him, and Hong-do looks like she desperately wants to, but in the end she can’t make a sound.

For the first time looking guarded, Doo-soo thanks her for the mittens, and asks her for a favor. He asks her to be careful, and to cherish herself more. She manages to squeak out a tiny, “I’m sorry,” but Doo-soo says there’s nothing to be sorry about. He heads inside, stopping at his doorway to wait… but Hong-do still doesn’t speak.

Yi-seok can’t sleep and finally gets up to pedal listlessly on his stationary bike. He thinks back to his night with Hong-do, where we see that he’d started to leave after she fell asleep like he usually does, but instead he’d gotten back in bed and ended up staying all night.

In the morning, Hong-do dresses as Madam Oh and waits for the bus, and she sees Doo-soo in his car across the street. He sees her too, but doesn’t acknowledge her, and just drives away.

She goes to work and finds Chairman Go in his library (after giving Yi-seok’s portrait a long, suspicious glare) and finds him looking at old photo albums. He says he wants to make a book from all these old memories, and again she uses Butler Ahn’s advice by exclaiming over pictures of him as a young man, then basically telling him what his book should be about. Hee, he laps it up like a cat with a bowl of cream.

Looking very different in casual clothes and a baseball cap, Doo-soo’s fiancee Da-young meets him in a cafe, and says they should reconsider their marriage. Apparently she was pressured by his very large family to come to his hometown and help out at the family memorial, and those obligations were a lot more overwhelming than she expected. He apologizes for not stepping in and stopping it, but Da-young admits that she’s more upset by the fact that he never called her to offer moral support.

Da-young asks if Doo-soo has ever really been in love, saying that if she’d felt love from him she wouldn’t be balking at marrying him. At first she thought he was just that way, but now she knows he doesn’t love her. Doo-soo doesn’t have anything to say to this — she’s not wrong.

Later, Yi-seok calls Doo-soo while he’s at work and asks him out to talk. Doo-soo isn’t happy to find out the only reason Yi-seok is here is to get Hong-do’s address. Doo-soo refuses, grabbing him and ordering him to stay away from Hong-do.

Yi-seok isn’t helping things when he needles Doo-soo by asking when his wedding is, and saying he’s thinking of attending with Hong-do. He smirks, saying that Doo-soo is only mad that Yi-seok got to her first after trying unsuccessfully for seven years — dude, being right may not be worth the ass-whooping you’re about to get.

He tips his hand a bit by saying it’s none of Doo-soo’s business what he and Hong-do do, even if he takes her in and lives with her. But Doo-soo is too angry to see how much this reveals about Yi-seok’s feelings, and says she’s not a toy to play with and throw away.

Yi-seok blows him off, and now Doo-soo is enraged and he screams in Yi-seok’s face to leave her alone. He threatens to kill Yi-seok if he wrongs Hong-do, and goes back inside before things get out of hand. But when the vending machine eats his coin he finally loses his temper and nearly smashes it, and Yang has to pull him away.

Hong-do is still ignoring Yi-seok’s calls, but he finally leaves a voicemail so she listens. In it, he criticizes her again for not showing up to work and threatens to knock on every door in her neighborhood until he finds her. He says he went to Doo-soo for her address and dares her to come out and fight with him, which works brilliantly.

Hong-do bursts into Yi-seok’s office looking like a woman on the warpath, yelling at Yi-seok for going to Doo-soo yet again. He looks genuinely contrite, but ruins it by saying he’ll stop talking to him if she gives him her address. HA. She starts to leave and he calls after her, “Why did you sleep with me?” He says that neither of them knows, they just bonded and it happened, but she screams at him to stop.

He gets this hangdog look on his face that just kills me, and says that telling Doo-soo about them was the same — he didn’t plan it, it just happened. Hong-do is in no mood to hear it, and Yi-seok apologizes over and over, saying he should have thought about how she felt instead of just himself, meaning every word. He’s more sincere than he’s ever been, but Hong-do says she doesn’t know what to trust anymore, and she’ll have to think about it.

Yi-seok arrives at work the next morning to find Hong-do’s chair empty, but his is occupied by a schoolgirl who says she’s here for counseling. She tells him Dr. Uhm is boring, so she wants to switch to him. She starts to tell him a story about her exams, but his ears start their painful ringing and he orders her out. She refuses and he’s forced to leave the room himself.

Yi-seok bursts into Dr. Uhm’s office to complain about the girl, but Dr. Uhm just gripes that he attracts so many women, ha. He pouts that he’s been paying his dues here long enough, but all she has to do is remind him that he still can’t see patients without Hong-do in the room, to prove he’s not ready. He asks about the girl in his office and Dr. Uhm admits that she’s her friend’s daughter.

When Yi-seok gets back to his office he can’t hide a tiny smile to see Hong-do there, though he gruffly orders her to take her helmet off. He asks the girl why she doesn’t like Dr. Uhm, and she goes off on a rant that reveals that she’s probably been in treatment for a long time, because she knows what all the questions and answers would reveal about her. She says she’s just here to kill time and he orders her out again, but Hong-do pipes up to tell him to treat the girl. Poor guy got ganged-up on.

Se-ro is doing yoga when Yi-seok confronts her about being carried home drunk the other day. He threatens to ship her off to America if she doesn’t behave, but she says she’s just getting life experience. She knows now that she can’t trust the police.

Hong-do-as-Madam-Oh watches Chairman Go repair an antique bicycle, marveling that the bike is so old it’s an elder. They chat about the bike’s history, while the housekeeper hilariously finds reasons to sloooowly wander back and forth in front of the doors to glare at them. Someone’s jealous!

The chairman reveals something interesting about Yi-seok — that ever since he was young, once he started on a project he never stopped until it was finished, and he never throws anything away. The chairman is shocked that Hong-do never learned to ride a bike, and she’s all, “Yeah, well, you can’t use a smartphone.” Hee.

Dr. Uhm comes to the house for a session with Yi-seok’s mother, but she’s in another manic phase and Yi-seok took her out instead. Butler Ahn catches her swearing at Yi-seok, but he’s gentleman enough to ignore it. She’s mystified at his insistence on making her a cup of hand-drip coffee, but shudders when he scratches his butt on his way to the kitchen. Okay, so maybe he’s not all that swoony.

Hong-do excuses herself at the end of the day, passing the glaring housekeeper on her way out of the chairman’s library. She hides at the top of the stairs when she hears Yi-seok talking to his father, telling him not to take Mom out tonight, because she’s in a fragile state right now.

Jerk Dad says Yi-seok only became a doctor because he wanted to help his mother (as if that’s a bad thing?) but says she’s not getting any better anyway. Yi-seok wonders when he started to care, and Dad just says he has no idea, then Mom arrives dressed to the nines and his parents head out.

Yi-seok sees Hong-do walking to the bus stop, still in character, and stops to offer her a ride. She averts her face and tries to refuse, but when she slips on the ice he jumps out to physically steer her to his car. She at least manages to get in the back seat where she can better hide, and keeps her head down as they drive.

Yi-seok is so cutely deferential to what he thinks is a little old lady, making small talk and playing music for her. He tries to take her home but she’s vague about where she lives, and jumps out when he’s distracted by a call from Se-ro saying that his mother is upset and hysterical. He rushes home, but Se-ro says their father isn’t even there, having left Mom alone in a hotel room. Really, Dad?

Hong-do can’t help but check her phone repeatedly, telling herself that she’s worried about Yi-seok’s mother. She caves and calls him, and he says in this small voice that he wants to see her. She meets him in a park, and he asks if she’s thought about whether she’ll keep meeting with him or not. She says she does trust him as a doctor, but not as a man.

He invites her into his car but she stubbornly takes a seat in the back, calling it a consultation. She closes her eyes and talks about her family, how her mother gave her over to her grandmother when she was five years old to get remarried and start a new life, then died in an accident.

She says she was bullied a lot in high school, so she eventually quit. One day her grandmother collapsed, and her last words to her grandmother were that she’d be right back, the morning she passed away. And that’s it. She says all this woodenly, as if she were reading a shopping list, which is so sad.

Yi-seok asks how she felt when she couldn’t be with her grandmother, and Hong-do says she was sad, then angry. Angry because her grandmother knew she couldn’t do things for herself, but she didn’t take her with her. She starts to cry as she adds that she was also so sorry that her body felt like it was ripping apart. She says the thing she remembers most are her grandmother’s coarse hands, from working so hard to take care of her.

Hong-do says that’s all, and asks what else Yi-seok wants to know. He surprises her by asking if she wants to date him, saying that she must feel the same thing between them that he feels, and asks if she’s curious about it. He says that earlier he felt like there were bombs and fireworks in his head, but with her he feels fine, and he’s curious if it’s love or something else.

Hong-do listens to all this, then just blurts out, “I don’t want to!” She jumps out of the car and takes off on her scooter, insisting she’s not at all curious and there’s nothing between them. She sure is upset about something that doesn’t exist, hee.

Evidently Doo-soo’s grandfather passed out from the announcement of his broken engagement, and never woke up. Doo-soo drives home alone and dazed that night after getting the news.

Hong-do comes to work a week later still angry with Yi-seok, and his student patient (her name is Eun-ho) overhears him protest that she rejected him, so she shouldn’t be the angry one. Eun-ho wilts when her mother appears, and she’s one of those ladies who’s polished from tip to toe and all about appearances. She asks about Hong-do, who Yi-seok explains away as a sort of security camera.

Eun-ho’s mother says that during their last consultation, she saw that her daughter downloaded a movie to her phone instead, and Yi-seok agrees that she’s a pretty rude kid. Mom gets politely fed up with his flippant attitude and stands to leave, but she hears Yi-seok mutter that mother and daughter are exactly alike. He asks if she knows why Eun-ho acts out, and she haughtily says she knows her daughter better than he does, and nearly gets out the door before Hong-do slams her book onto her desk and scares her. HA, she blames the cockroaches.

Doo-soo arrives home, looking from his clothing as if he came from his grandfather’s funeral. He stops before he gets to his door, thinks a moment, then starts running. He runs all the way to Hong-do’s house, and stops outside her front porch to say, “I’m a bit late. Sleep well, Hong-do-sshi,” with a giant grin. He turns to go, and we see that inside, she’s sleeping peacefully.

In the morning she’s woken up by a text from Doo-soo, asking her to meet him at the bakery. She gets ready in a hurry and takes a call from Yi-seok, who’s coughing so badly he can barely speak, and tells her the hospital is on fire. She thinks he’s joking but he begs her to hurry, and the line goes dead.

She still thinks he’s kidding, but on her way to the bakery she’s passed by the emergency vehicles heading to the hospital, and realizes he’s telling the truth. She follows the truck, going right by the bakery where Doo-soo sees her pass without stopping.

She tries to direct the truck to the hospital but they don’t stop, leaving Hong-do to run into the building herself to find Yi-seok. She calls his name frantically, but the smoke forces her back outside — only to see him standing cockily by his car, waving at her and grinning. YOU JERK, that is not funny.

He laughs at how worried she was, and admits the smoke is just an insecticide to kill the roaches. Yi-seok gloats that her reaction to thinking he was in danger is proof that she has feelings for him, rubbing it in her face while she stares at him in disbelief. Hong-do runs at him and starts to choke him, ready to kill him for playing a bad joke and making her miss her date with Doo-soo.

COMMENTS

Okay, that was not cool, Yi-seok. Not cool at all. It’s going to take all your puppy-dog-eyed pouting powers to worm your way out of this one. You sit there and think about what you did, and I’ll get back to you in a minute.

I’m not one to succumb to Second Lead Syndrome very often, and as much as I love Doo-soo, I haven’t in this drama either. But I can’t help but ache for his situation. I discussed before about how lonely he seems, and the more we learn about him the sadder I feel. We know that he comes from a very old, very traditional family, and that he bucked tradition to become a cop. I think he agreed to the arranged marriage in the hopes of soothing those hard feelings, and it’s absolutely terrible that his grandfather actually died from the shock of his broken engagement. Even though we know it’s not Doo-soo’s fault, and that Da-young actually broke it off after having to deal with his family’s intense pressure to conform to their expectations, he’s almost certainly going to blame himself anyway.

Which makes it interesting that, instead of giving in to it, Doo-soo instead went even further and has apparently decided to pursue Hong-do for real. Who knew our rule-following cop was such a rebel? I like this side of him, the one that makes his own decisions and goes for what he wants, because I bet that expectation of following the family’s wishes has a lot to do with why he’s let this thing with Hong-do go on in limbo for seven years. I’m looking forward to seeing the proactive Doo-soo, rather than the passive Doo-soo we’ve seen so far.

But Yi-seok — I agree with Hong-do, I could strangle him right now. I know he’s an immature man-child pulling her pigtails — but come on, that wasn’t funny on any level. I have no doubt that was a bit of retaliation for rejecting him, to make her scared he was dying in a burning building, but no amount of “It was just a joke” is going to make it better. We saw how good he is at a sincere apology when he wants to be, so he’d better start practicing his very best bent-knee begging if he wants Hong-do to ever speak to him again. If she’s smart, she’ll make him really work for it.

I do love it when the man falls in love first, and even though he’s just realized it, I think Yi-seok is more than halfway in love with Hong-do already. I’m glad that he’s not afraid to admit that he feels something between himself and Hong-do. I find it amusing that, once he finally admitted it, it’s almost like he can’t stop admitting it because he keeps talking about it ad nauseum. He’s like a dog with a bone, and he’s not going to stop until Hong-do agrees to date him. Even if she has to give in just to make him stop pestering her, I’m fine with that, because I just adore how honest Hong-do gets when she’s really annoyed with Yi-seok. He brings out the best-worst in her, and I love it.

 
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