Descended from the Sun: Episode 2

by LollyPip

We get to the meat of the story in this episode, which is simple on the outside but seems deep with potential for conflict and heartbreak. If nothing else this is an absolutely gorgeous drama, in every possible way. We also get a better look at our leading characters in this episode, with Mo-yeon’s strong sense of justice and respect for life, and Shi-jin’s mischievous sense of humor combined with his fierce loyalty to home and country.

EPISODE 2 RECAP

With a promise to see her soon and one wistful look back, Shi-jin leaves Mo-yeon on the roof to join his team for a top-secret mission. Mo-yeon watches his helicopter take off, and she’s joined by her colleague SONG SANG-HYUN (Lee Seung-joon), who asks what she’s staring at.

She asks him almost distractedly if people in the Special Forces get helicopter escorts and sometimes get shot, and he says that really never happens. Mo-yeon wonders who exactly Shi-jin is, then.

Shi-jin is now in Afghanistan, on a mission to rescue two UN representatives who have been kidnapped by the Taliban. During a practice run, the Korean team’s rookie sets off a booby trap, causing both Shi-jin and Dae-young to holler at him.

An American(?) soldier throws his dagger into a box next to Shi-jin’s head and yells at them to go back home, and of course Shi-jin can’t let that go. He hurls the dagger right back, where it sticks into a box right between the other soldier’s legs.

Now it’s on, and Shi-jin and the other soldier fight viciously, seeming evenly matched. Dae-young holds the rookie back from getting involved, telling him that when Special Forces from different countries get together, something like this always happens. It’s a test to see if the other side is strong and trustworthy.

The fight is pretty awesome actually, between the American’s strength and Shi-jin’s quickness and agility (at one point he literally climbs the other guy). You get the sense that they could do this all day, but the captain finally breaks up the fight and orders them back to work.

Mo-yeon complains to her colleague DR. PYO about the position she’s applying for, apparently for the third time, and her friend is certain that she’ll be accepted this time. Another doctor comes in to make snarky comments to Mo-yeon, seeing as how she’s up for the same job and certain she’ll get it.

The two seem pretty antagonistic, and they end up in the same surgery room, where the snarky woman, Dr. Kim, happily chirps that there’s been a change in plans — she’s in charge, and Mo-yeon will be assisting her. They continue to trade barbs while operating, until something goes wrong and the patient starts to bleed out.

Some pretty slick editing switches us between Mo-yeon’s operation and Afghanistan, where the Special Forces are beginning the real mission. Shi-jin’s team infiltrates the building where the UN workers are being held, while Mo-yeon works fast to save the patient.

Things get ugly during the mission — a booby trap is set off and shots are fired, but Shi-jin and Dae-young manage to keep themselves and their team alive, for the moment. Shi-jin gets creative as he works his way to the heart of the building, and shoots the Taliban kidnappers just as they’re about to kill the hostages. The hostages are saved — mission complete.

At the same time, Mo-yeon stabilizes her patient and orders Dr. Kim to finish the surgery. Dr. Kim complies, but she’s not at all happy about Mo-yeon having to step in to save her surgery.

Mo-yeon could chew nails as she leaves the operating room, ranting about how that doctor nearly killed their patient, but a third doctor, DR. JANG, follows to tell her she did a good job, which calms her down. She pats Dr. Jang’s belly and tells her unborn baby that her mother did a good job too, and Dr. Jang is happy to announce that the father finally proposed.

The father just happens to be another doctor at the hospital, LEE CHI-HOON (SHINee’s Onew). He sidles up to Mo-yeon and makes faces until she catches on that he wants to talk to her privately, smiling way too brightly until Dr. Jang walks away. He admits to Mo-yeon that he lost his couple ring during surgery, and finally finds it in the scrub hamper next to them. He’s pretty adorable, but also seems like a giant doofus.

Mo-yeon wonders out loud to Dr. Pyo how Dr. Jang managed to get pregnant in the first place when they’re always working, and Dr. Pyo just says that it’s a big hospital, ha. She asks if Mo-yeon has heard from Shi-jin again, but she hasn’t, and Dr. Pyo wonders if he’s a spy. She catches Mo-yeon mooning at his X-ray; Mo-yeon says it’s the only picture she has of him, and it makes her grin widely.

Mo-yeon steps outside after an overnight shift for some fresh air, dressed in her sweats with her hair a mess. When she sees Shi-jin beaming at her from across the street she tries to hide her face, complaining that he’s two hours early for their date. Shi-jin just says that it felt good to have someone to wait for, which is so adorable but also a little sad.

He asks why she’s covering her face, and she says that she’s not wearing any makeup. Seeming completely honest, he tells her, “You’re pretty enough now.” Mo-yeon asks if she doesn’t need to take a shower then, and Shi-jin quickly offers to drive her home. HAHA.

She invites him in to wait while she gets ready, and asks if he minds ordering some food because she’s starving. Shi-jin pouts that he was going to take her out for a nice meal, but he’s mollified when Mo-yeon says that it’s the company that matters.

Mo-yeon’s water is cut off for non-payment right as she lathers her hair, but she pretends that everything is fine and goes back out to Shi-jin with her hair in a towel. It doesn’t fool him for a second and he holds up the shutoff notice, and Mo-yeon just quickly grabs some bottled water and runs back to the bathroom. Cute.

As they eat, Shi-jin asks if Mo-yeon thought of him while he was gone. She easily admits it and asks the same of him, and he says that he thought about her a lot. Then when she suggests they get coffee at the movie, he can’t resist teasing, “I should get a bottle of water…”

At the movies, Mo-yeon says that the most exciting part is right before they turn the lights off. Shi-jin leans over to whisper that this is the most exciting moment of his life, being with a beautiful woman right before they turn the lights off. He’s going to have me swooning a lot, isn’t he?

He brings up the fact that she spoke banmal just now, figuring that she saw his age on his chart, and asks how old she is. She skirts the question but says definitely his noona, and he jokes that he’ll need to see some ID to prove it.

Shi-jin gets another call from his commanding officer, and disappointment is written all over his face when he says he has to go. Mo-yeon is obviously upset as well, and she tells him she’ll stay and see the movie alone. He’s not happy about it but he has to leave, and says he’ll call her.

As soon as he’s gone Mo-yeon gets her own emergency call from Chi-hoon, and she runs back to the hospital to find out that she didn’t get the job, again. The snooty Dr. Kim was offered the position because of her family connections, even though the senior doctor had all but promised the job to Mo-yeon.

She’s tired of his excuses for not promoting her, wondering what the reason will be next time. Dr. Kim arrives and starts ordering Mo-yeon around immediately, and taking a lot of pleasure in it to boot. She tells Mo-yeon to cover for her on a television show the following day, because she’s got some schmoozing to do, and will be too hung over.

But Mo-yeon is a thousand percent done putting up with her crap, calls her a bitch, and says she’s sorry for the patients who get stuck with Dr. Kim. The other woman grabs Mo-yeon’s hair, Mo-yeon grabs back, and the others have to physically break up the fight.

Mo-yeon takes herself to a quiet hallway to cry it out, attempting to memorize the information for the TV show despite being unable to speak for sobbing, finally giving up and wailing.

Shi-jin and Dae-young return from their surprise mission, and thankfully nobody was hurt or killed. Their commanding officer rewards them for all their recent hard work with an eight-month break, which isn’t the vacation it sounds like. They’re being deployed, with only two weeks to visit with family before they leave.

Their team looks happy, since this means they will just be regular soldiers for eight months — no special missions, which for them is considered a break. But both Dae-young and Shi-jin take the news hard.

The next morning Shi-jin goes looking for Mo-yeon, and finds her just as she’s doing her live broadcast. He watches her on television, smiling with his heart in his eyes. He’s such a smitten kitten.

He waits at her house for her to come home, and the mood is tense as they go for coffee. Shi-jin apologizes for leaving Mo-yeon that way, but she says that what she really wants is an explanation. He says that he didn’t go far, but that’s all he’s allowed to say.

He can’t even confirm whether or not he’s a spy, and Mo-yeon admits that she thought of him a lot today. She wondered where he disappears to, and what he does, but then she can’t even get answers when she sees him. She tries to put the clues together on her own, and Shi-jin can only give her this sad look, as if he’d love nothing more than to tell her everything.

She asks if he kills people, and if they’re at least bad people, but meets with silence again. She says that her job is to fight for people’s life, and deduces that his job is to protect others by using death. Shi-jin gives the tiniest nod at that, and his only defense is that he’s a soldier, and soldiers follow orders. He doesn’t have the luxury of deciding what’s right or wrong.

He tells Mo-yeon that he’s lost three friends in combat, and that he believes that what he’s fighting for, at least, is peace and freedom. Mo-yeon counters that as a doctor, she believes that nothing is more important than life, and Shi-jin can’t argue with that. She tells him that this wasn’t quite the meeting she was hoping it would turn out to be, effectively ending their brief relationship. Shi-jin says he understands and lets her go, adding that it was nice meeting her.

Shi-jin broods in the shower, but not for long, as Dae-young joins him and they discuss their upcoming deployment. They each avoid talking about their respective love interests, preferring not to go into detail about why they’re not spending time with them before they leave.

Eight months later.

Still on deployment (in a fictional country named Uruk), Shi-jin takes a break while his men sweep a hillside for explosives, and everyone goes on alert when a live one is located. One of the bomb experts asks what they should do — if they report it they’ll be told to leave it alone until the U.S. troops arrive.

Noting the small crowd of children that are gathering, Shi-jin has the man repeat his personal motto: “Go easy and all will be well. Avoid hard work.” Hard work is defined as sending memos, which, ha. Basically, he’s prepared to handle this situation right now, on their own.

Cut to: Shi-jin and Dae-young pulled up in front of their commander, in big trouble for not reporting a live bomb. I just love Shi-jin’s dry sense of humor, as he says, “My second in command didn’t stop me.” And then he whines at Dae-young for not stopping him… doesn’t he know how much he loves sending memos? I feel bad for Dae-young, having to put up with Shi-jin all the time.

Shi-jin and Dae-young are punished to run in full gear, and aww, their entire platoon joins them in solidarity… for about three seconds, and then they run back to their barracks, giggling like fools. Boys.

As it turns out, Mo-yeon made such a good impression on her first live broadcast that she’s now a regular on the show, where she gives medical advice to viewers. It’s made her a bit of a celebrity, and she’s now in charge of some pretty high-profile VIP patients. Their complaints seem trivial to Mo-yeon — stress, DNA testing to determine paternity on illegitimate children, and even one businessman who can’t keep up sexually with his young girlfriend.

Her friend Sang-hyun teases her for being too important to mingle with the lowly surgeon peons lately, though Mo-yeon is aware that things could change on a dime again. It doesn’t stop her from clocking Dr. Kim’s snort of jealousy, though.

Dr. Kim snarks that if she’s not careful, people will start to think Mo-yeon is an actual doctor, and Mo-yeon shoots back that she’s hardly a doctor either — she’s just her father’s daughter. Oh burn. It’s obvious that Dr. Kim is jealous of Mo-yeon’s celebrity, and Mo-yeon isn’t above reminding her that she only got on the show because Dr. Kim thought she was too important to do it herself.

Mo-yeon goes to the roof that night, remembering how Shi-jin had asked her out here, then flown off in a helicopter. We see that when they’d eaten at her place that one time, she’d lit a candle and insisted he not move it, because she’d carefully calculated the best place for it to light her face perfectly. How much do I love that she just admits it?

He’d asked about her work, and she’d told him that she looks pretty sexy when suited up for surgery. She held her hands up to show how her mask accentuates her eyes, and Shi-jin joked that he wants to date that girl.

Still on deployment, Shi-jin finds a soldier digging a hole and awww, it’s Ki-bum, the thief that Dae-young took special interest in. Shi-jin starts to show him how to dig more efficiently when the shovel handle breaks, and Ki-bum laughs that that’s why he was digging carefully.

Shi-jin smiles just a bit when he sees that he’s cut his hand — it reminds him how Mo-yeon never believed him that he was injured “doing labor,” and now he actually has been. He realizes that Ki-bum is writing on his arm the same way he did to the kid (“injured shoveling,” heh), and orders him to attention.

When Dae-young finds them, Shi-jin asks why he brought this kid anyway, and Dae-young simply says, “I like him.” As it turns out, Ki-bum is a great cook, and he’s in charge of making dinner for their sergeant’s birthday today. With his trademark mischievous grin, Shi-jin offers to be in charge of procuring the wine.

They head to a bar, where they argue over who the pretty waitress was aiming her come-hither eyes at. A girl comes in to buy a gun from that same waitress, and for some reason she levels it at the guys. Shi-jin quickly takes it and points it back at her, then disassembles it, asking why she’s buying a gun if she doesn’t even know how to use it.

She retorts that she’s buying it not to kill, but for protection, taking her gun and leaving. Shi-jin asks the waitress who the girl was, but she lets him know firmly that she doesn’t sell information.

Coincidentally, Mo-yeon’s hospital has interests in Uruk as well, and is planning on building an eco-friendly power plant there. They’ve put a call out for volunteers, and Chi-hoon is the first to sign up. The hospital’s director asks Mo-yeon to have dinner with him that night, and with no other information, the doctors all assume it’s a date.

But Mo-yeon is taken aback when Director Han makes it clear that they’re spending the evening at his place, and not just for dinner. He even offers to let her shower first, the slimeball. That handbag to the face was well-deserved.

Mo-yeon wails to Dr. Pyo — what will she do now that she’s assaulted the hospital director? She has to sit through a meeting he’s running about the power plant, and finds herself voluntold for duty in retaliation. At least he made her team leader?

Shi-jin’s team is notified of which doctors will be coming over, so he knows that she’s arriving soon. Dae-young wonders if it’s fate, but Shi-jin just says that it’s a passing coincidence.

Slimeball Director Han calls Mo-yeon one last time as the team is waiting on the tarmac in Uruk for their UN escort, and offers her one last chance to come back — on his terms, of course. She basically calls him a lowlife right in front of everyone, reminding him that she has connections and has even been on television, so she’ll be tendering her resignation the moment she arrives back in Korea. Okay, I officially love her.

The team is relieved to see their escort arrive by helicopter, and who else could it be but Shi-jin and his platoon. Mo-yeon recognizes Shi-jin immediately and freezes, memories of their short time together rushing through her mind…

… and Shi-jin walks right past her.

COMMENTS

It was a strong first week for Descended from the Sun, both rating-wise and story-wise. I’ve been burned before by strong beginnings, but I hope against hope that the fact that it’s pre-produced means that we can expect this level of quality throughout the run of the drama. While the first episode didn’t do much beyond introducing the characters, I thought that this episode set up the central conflict and romance quite well, giving us lots of information and some really nice character moments but never feeling rushed. I feel like I know the characters already, what’s important to them both personally and professionally, and so far I just really like them all. It’s a great start.

While I’m normally one to pay attention to characterizations and relationships first and foremost in a drama, I can’t help but be super impressed with the way this drama is shot, so far. The benefits of pre-production shine brilliantly here, especially in the fight scenes, where interesting angles and creative lighting add as much to the action as the actual combat. I was especially charmed by the scene which had Shi-jin’s mission and Mo-yeon’s surgery weaving and intertwining with each other, setting off and highlighting how each of them finds themselves battling life and death, though in very different ways. The gorgeous way the two scenes switched back and forth was as beautiful as it was innovative, and it’s my hope that, having had the luxury of time to do it right, we get these sorts of treats throughout the drama.

That said, I have to agree with the criticisms about the music editing, because though I actually do like the OST songs quite a lot so far, the use of music is so heavy-handed in some scenes as to completely distract from what’s actually happening in the scene. When your audience can’t even enjoy the moment because they’re rolling their eyes at yet another loud, obvious musical cue, it’s time to find a new way to introduce dramatic tension. You’ve hired some of the best actors money can buy — let them do the work you hired them to do! We don’t need overwrought music to tell us when one character finds another character attractive (plus, we have eyes).

But it’s the characters that really draw me in and hold my attention, and I find myself already very invested in Shi-jin and Mo-yeon, and their growing relationship. It’s so refreshing to see a couple who not only admit their attraction to themselves, but to each other as well, and so early on in the run of the show. Their conflict of beliefs is one I look forward to seeing more of, as they struggle to reconcile their differing ideals regarding life and whether it’s okay to take one life in order to preserve another. The actors are more than capable of expressing these conflicts brilliantly — the scene where they realized that their values clash so profoundly was heartbreaking, and that’s before they’re even in love. Once they can’t deny their feelings anymore, I predict a lot of angst in their future. But for me, I prefer love stories in which the conflict keeping the lovebirds apart is internal rather than external — I’d much rather see a couple struggle against their belief systems, and try to find a way to love each other in spite of conflicting moral values, than the most evil mother-in-law you could imagine.

I’ve been burned too many times to let myself get too excited about Descended, but for the moment, I find the positives greatly outweighing the negatives. Like I said, I’m hoping that avoiding the live shoot system also means that we’ll avoid the many pitfalls that go along with it, and that the show will continue at this level consistently. The show has everything going for it at this point, and I’ll be cheering it on as we go forth into battle.

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