Individualist Ji-young: Episode 2 (Final)

by LollyPip

Sometimes, all it takes is a tiny crack in someone’s armor, and before they know it, their defenses have been blown wide open. Byuk-soo’s loneliness and honesty turns out to be his secret weapon against Ji-young’s lifelong vow of solitude, giving him a chance to change both of their lives for the better. But they both have a lot to learn before they’re ready for real love, and it’s going to take a lot of strength and courage for them to admit that they both need to change.

Note: The election banners in the screenshots were unavoidable, sorry!

 
FINAL EPISODE RECAP

Ji-young is indeed inviting Byuk-soo into her bed for more than just hugs. It takes him a few moments to process the situation, torn between his attraction to her and his desire to be a gentleman.

When he starts to leave, Ji-young grabs his hand and asks him not to go. She says that on rare occasions, she doesn’t want to be alone, and Byuk-soo is convinced. He hesitantly leans in, but Ji-young slaps him and threatens to bite him if he kisses her.

Byuk-soo decides he’s okay with that, so he starts to lift her shirt instead. She smacks his hands away too, saying they can take their own clothes off. While they undress, Byuk-soo helpfully tells Ji-young not to be so prickly with people who only want to get closer to her.

Smiling his cute little smile, he says that she’s a lot nicer than she seems. Ji-young just tells him to shut up and get undressed. Always the people-pleaser, Byuk-soo wisely does as he’s told.

Ji-young wakes up later to find a naked Byuk-soo draped all over her. She kicks him out, but he’s not at all upset by her grumpy silent dismissal. He grins at her door and says that she’s just shy.

Ji-young cleans her apartment of all evidence of Byuk-soo, telling herself that it was just the drugs causing a momentary bout of loneliness. She wonders if what they did was a good idea, as Byuk-soo adorably meows at her through their shared wall. He’s too cute.

The next morning, Ji-young starts to close the elevator door in Byuk-soo’s face as usual, but he catches the door just in time. She spots the couple ring he’s still wearing and it puts her in a bad (well, worse) mood, while Byuk-soo is as giddy as a schoolgirl.

He says coyly that he’s not sure what to do now, since he’s never started a relationship backwards like this. Ji-young informs him that last night was just a one-time event since she’s not interested in easy men.

Byuk-soo gets all flustered, and just to hammer her point home, Ji-young tells him not to speak in banmal with her. After a moment of staggering confusion, Byuk-soo follows her out of the building to insist that it wasn’t that good for him, either.

Byuk-soo tells his work friend what happened, confused by Ji-young’s sudden rejection. His friend sees Byuk-soo’s couple ring and calls him an idiot, and Byuk-soo panics, wanting a chance to explain. His friend gets an idea and asks if Byuk-soo knows a pretty girl who would do him a favor.

Ji-young is haunted by Byuk-soo’s image all day, waving his couple ring in her face and crowing that he only slept with her because she asked, not because he actually likes her or anything. He pops up everywhere to shoot her down with the worst possible answers to her thoughts.

After work, Ji-young recalls Byuk-soo saying that people just want to approach her. She takes his advice and invites herself out for drinks with her coworkers. They’re surprised, but they let her come along.

At the end of the night, the woman who wanted to switch schedules on Christmas approaches Ji-young, admitting that that wasn’t the only reason she wanted to talk to Ji-young that day. Ji-young hesitantly asks about her daughter, so her coworker shows her a picture.

She says that she’ll tell her daughter the truth about Santa soon enough, but Ji-young changes her tune and says she should believe in him as long as she can. Her coworker says in an awed voice that Ji-young is nicer than she thought. When she’s dropped off at her building, Ji-young flops her hand in the woman’s general direction as if she has no idea how to wave properly.

She admits to herself that being social is a lot easier than she thought. But her bad mood comes rushing back when she sees Byuk-soo being dropped off by a pretty girl, who invites him to move in with her for two weeks until his new apartment is ready.

Byuk-soo catches up to Ji-young and smells alcohol on her. She plans to tell him she was drinking with a guy, but he abruptly changes the subject to ask about the cat he saw in her picture. She snaps that it died, salty about the fact that he’s not asking about her drinking partner the one time she can honestly say she was with a friend.

But he’s more interested in talking about cats and how he’s thinking of getting another one. Ji-young barely speaks, annoyed that Byuk-soo doesn’t seem interested in her at all when she’s been thinking of him all day.

When he asks if she cried when her cat died, Ji-young says that she doesn’t like to waste emotions. He asks if there’s anything she does like, which has Ji-young turning to look up at him for a long moment. But she just says that she likes herself before running off.

In the elevator, Ji-young asks if Byuk-soo is moving out soon. He says that he is, and she’s all, Oh, that’s great, good for you in a voice dripping with sarcasm. Byuk-soo starts to give her his number but changes his mind, stammering that she won’t call him anyway.

Soon after, Ji-young leaves for work one day to see Byuk-soo supervising the movers. She walks past without a word (he doesn’t look at her, but he has a strange half-smile on his face… is he up to something?). She walks home slowly that night, with nothing to look forward to.

As she’s letting herself in she sees Byuk-soo leaving his place, and she actually smiles. But he doesn’t see her there and goes, leaving her now-recovered plant behind. Ji-young stays up late, furiously typing her frustrations into her diary, until her doorbell rings after midnight.

She smiles again when she sees Byuk-soo through the peephole, and he says he needs to talk to her. Ji-young rushes around, straightening up, then opens the door. Byuk-soo looks a bit sick as he says that he’s been waiting for her outside for hours, wanting to say goodbye.

Ji-young slams the door in his face, but a second later she invites him in. When he demurs on the grounds that she’s a single woman, she snaps that he can live with that woman for two weeks, but he won’t come into her place for a few minutes.

Byuk-soo confesses that his friend got back together with her ex, so now he has no place to stay for two weeks. In a sad little voice, he pouts that he’ll stay at a sauna, then shuffles off coughing and sniffling. Why do I have a feeling this whole thing is a setup?

He gets all the way to the elevator, but Ji-young stops the doors just before they shut. She notices that he’s not wearing his couple ring anymore, and she says that she’s just coincidentally working night shifts for the next two weeks. She suggests that he use her place at night, and she’ll sleep there during the day.

Byuk-soo declines her generous offer (coughing and wheezing the whole time, ha), but Ji-young figures that as long as they don’t see each other, it should be fine. She makes him a bed on the floor then says she’s off to work. Byuk-soo points out that she just got home, but at her sharp glance, he just smiles and thanks her.

Once she’s gone, Byuk-soo calls his work friend to squeal that their plan worked. I knew it! He’s so happy, hugging her plant and swearing that this time, he’ll hold himself back and not smother the girl he likes.

Ji-young asks her coworker to switch shifts for the next two weeks, which her new friend is more than happy to do. She arrives back home the next morning to find Byuk-soo gone, though he’s left her a nice meal, which, awww. The next night, Byuk-soo gets home from work to find Ji-young still sleeping. He crouches to watch her for a moment, all kinds of sweetness on his face.

They hardly see each other for those two weeks, meeting only in passing. Ji-young is taken aback one night when she runs into Byuk-soo outside the building, and he bundles her up in his scarf before sending her on to work. She narrates that during that time, she started to think that sharing herself with someone might be possible.

She struggles to think of what to say when she meets Byuk-soo on her way home one morning, coming up with the painfully clever, “Hello.” She tries the common greeting of asking if he’s eaten, but ends up blurting that she hasn’t eaten, though she recovers and asks if he wants to go eat together.

Byuk-soo is so happy that he barely touches a bite himself, since he’s just thrilled to watch Ji-young. He teases that she’s gaining weight while piling food on her spoon just to get a look at her grumpy face.

They decide to see a movie, and Ji-young nearly bails when she sees the theater half-full, but Byuk-soo grabs her hand and smiles at her encouragingly. Ji-young sneaks peeks at Byuk-soo all during the movie, while he sits there grinning like a doofus just to be here with her.

A day or so later they go grocery shopping together, but when Ji-young mentions Monday’s dinner, Byuk-soo reminds her that he’s moving out this weekend. He reaches past her for something and she sees his couple ring on his finger again, and her temper flares. She grabs his hand, yanks off the ring, and throws it across the store.

This is exactly the opening Byuk-soo has been waiting for. He follows her out of the store and stops her, grinning at her obvious anger, then leans down to kiss her. But as she promised, she bites his lip, and he demands to know why she did that.

Feeling rejected, Byuk-soo says that he’s leaving and tells her not to stop him, no really, she better not even try to stop him. He turns away then turns right back, upset that she didn’t try to stop him, and this time, he walks away for real.

Kicking herself, Ji-young heads toward home, but Byuk-soo comes running back. He confesses that this whole two weeks has been part of his plan to move in with her, and that he has no new apartment waiting. He confesses that he lied because he didn’t want to get hurt again.

He yells that if she won’t open her heart, then he’ll just have to barge in, and he asks plaintively if it’s that hard for her to ask him not to go. Ji-young asks what happens if she does, and he leaves anyway.

She wants to know if he really likes her or if he just needs a place to stay, and Byuk-soo gives her this look and asks if she really doesn’t know. She asks what he likes about her, so Byuk-soo says that unlike everyone else who smiles but is cold on the inside, she’s cold on the outside but warm inside.

Ji-young warns him that she might hurt him again, but Byuk-soo counters that if that scared him, he would never have talked to her in the first place. He adds that if being hurt is the price of getting closer to her, then he’s not afraid.

Ji-young asks if it’s okay that she’s never going to change, but Byuk-soo says that he’ll come to her. All she has to do is tell him if he can.

After a long moment Ji-young reaches out, touches Byuk-soo over his heart, and murmurs something under her breath. Byuk-soo asks what she said, and she yells, “I clicked ‘like!’” in his face. Okay, that is the cutest thing ever.

Byuk-soo breaks out in a huge smile of relief and pulls Ji-young close for a hug. He asks if this means he doesn’t have to move out, and Ji-young nods. They decide to go back to speaking banmal, then just as Byuk-so is about to try kissing Ji-young again, he peeks around and asks if he should wait until they get home.

Ji-young takes a peek of her own then shakes her head no. Byuk-soo finally gets the kiss he’s been waiting for, and he takes full advantage, drawing the moment out for as long as possible. In fact, they’re there for quite some time.

Time passes, and Ji-young and Byuk-soo settle into their new relationship. Ji-young starts to think that she can erase her painful past and become a new person. They’re just precious, taking every opportunity to cuddle and canoodle together as Ji-young comes out of her shell, smiling and laughing easily now.

One day, while they’re playing hide-and-seek in the grocery store (because of course they are), Ji-young gets another “I miss you” text from the same man who made her ex, Yeon-seok, so jealous. All of the spark drains out of her, and she stands frozen.

Another day, Byuk-soo accidentally knocks Ji-young’s laptop onto the floor, so he takes it in for repair. When he goes to work, he’s offered a year-long assignment abroad, which he turns down for fear of losing Ji-young.

He picks up the fixed laptop later, and he’s surprised to see that it was left unlocked. A file marked “diary” catches his eye, and he can only resist for a few seconds before he opens it. Oh no.

He reads about Ji-young’s estranged relationship with her mother, and that she refuses to cry for her dying father. Crying himself, Byuk-soo looks up the psychiatrist mentioned in the diary and goes to talk to Soo-kyung.

He tells her that he read Ji-young’s diary, and that he realizes she’s not as strong as he thought. He tells Soo-kyung that he wants their relationship to grow deeper, but Ji-young won’t let him in.

Soo-kyung says honestly that it will be a lot harder than most other relationships, and that he might as well break up now if he can’t handle it. But Byuk-soo just asks her what he can do to help Ji-young. Her advice is to do something to bring Ji-young towards him and to be her safe place, the steel to protect her brittle ice.

That night, Byuk-soo broaches the subject of Ji-young’s parents, asking if they ever remarried. She says they didn’t, then lies that she talks to them all the time. Looking for an opening, Byuk-soo asks if she was hurt when he left her plant behind, but she says that she doesn’t get hurt so easily.

Remembering Soo-kyung’s advice, Byuk-soo hugs Ji-young and says that whether she’s thin ice or steel, he will laugh and cry for her. He has her close her eyes, and when she opens them again, he’s holding a small fluffy kitten that looks just like the cats they both used to have.

Ji-young looks stricken as Byuk-soo asks what she wants to name the kitten. For a few seconds it seems as though she’ll reject the tiny ball of fluff, but then she softens and names it Bo-ri.

Ji-young takes quince jelly to her coworkers, but her day takes a turn for the worse when he mother shows up unannounced. Ji-young offers her money to go away again, yelling that they’re not family just because her mother gave birth to her. Her mother sneers that Ji-young wouldn’t exist without her, and Ji-young fires back, “Then you shouldn’t have had me.”

Furious that she let herself get hurt again, Ji-young goes to the locker room and throws away all the jars of quince jelly she gave her coworkers. She goes home, walking right past her new friends when they greet her, the cold mask back in place.

Byuk-soo comes to the hospital just as a nurse is telling Ji-young’s mother that her daughter went home. He watches as her mother sweetly asks for her address, only to turn abusive in an instant when the nurse hesitates.

Ji-young opens a window for some fresh air and fires up her computer. She gasps when she sees that it’s not locked, and all of Byuk-soo’s questions about her parents go through her mind. She suddenly realizes that he must have read her diary.

She gets a call and goes to meet him, but she grows angry when she realizes that she’s been tricked into coming to her father’s funeral, and that her mother is with Byuk-soo at the hospital. Byuk-soo tries to get her inside to see her father, but she stands firm and asks if he read her diary, all of it. Byuk-soo’s smile falters, proving that he read even the parts about himself, though he smiles again bravely.

Ji-young snatches her hand away and starts to leave, but Byuk-soo follows and stops her. She whirls around, slapping him hard across the face before asking who he thinks he is to be doing all this. Byuk-soo says that her mother told him she couldn’t reach Ji-young, so he thought she didn’t know about her father.

Ji-young blows up at Byuk-soo referring to her mom as “Mother,” and she screams at him, “Why is that woman your mother?” She tells him that she’s been ignoring her mother’s calls for a reason and asks why he’s trying to dig up information on her. Without waiting for an answer, she jumps into a taxi and speeds off.

The taxi driver skids to a stop in front of her building, grumbling that he thinks he hit an animal. Ji-young rushes upstairs to find Bo-ri gone, and the window still wide open. Oh no.

Byuk-soo comes home and tells Ji-young that he’s been asked by his company to go abroad for a year. He admits that he turned it down because he worried their relationship couldn’t withstand the separation, and decided instead to focus on getting closer to her.

Ji-young only hears his betrayal and she orders him out of her home. They go to a coffee shop to talk, and Byuk-soo’s words sound familiar as he asks her reason for ending things. He says that he didn’t mean to read her diary but adds that he was hurt to learn that she’s been hiding things from him.

He says that she’s just pretending to be strong to avoid being hurt. Ji-young thinks that she shouldn’t have to get hurt just to be in a relationship, and Byuk-soo says that’s just how these things work. Ji-young snaps that that’s why she doesn’t want it.

She says he had no right to ignore boundaries and read her diary, but Byuk-soo asks why she’s the only one who gets to decide where those boundaries lie. He says that he realizes now that she’s only shown him half of herself, and she retorts that his relationships always fail because he doesn’t know how to maintain distance.

Byuk-soo angrily says that hers fail because she keeps too much distance. Ji-young goes on the attack, listing every one of his weaknesses, like his immaturity and his inability to be independent. She says that she hates that about him, adding that a person should be complete on their own.

Byuk-soo asks what it says about her maturity that she wouldn’t even go to her father’s funeral, but he immediately regrets his words and apologizes. Ji-young coldly assures him that she wasn’t hurt by what he said.

She continues that she never believed him when he said he liked her, and that she knows he just needed a place to live. She says that she’s never loved anyone, and Byuk-soo looks like something inside of him is breaking. Ji-young confirms that everything she’s said to him were lies, because she thought that if she said them enough, she’d start to feel them. But she never did.

Byuk-soo refuses to believe that she’s that broken, and when the waitress says the shop is closing, he smiles and says they should go home. But Ji-young yanks her hand away from his, and something in Byuk-soo snaps.

He stands and yells at her never to date again, get married, or have children. He says that if she’s so determined to be miserable, then she should be miserable alone. He asks how she can live without love, and when she says it’s comfortable, he scoffs that she must be very happy without ever loving, trusting, or liking anyone. With that, he walks out, and Ji-young immediately deletes every trace of him from her phone, even his number.

The next day, she throws away everything in her apartment that reminds her of Byuk-soo, even her plant. The only good thing is that Bo-ri comes home safe and sound, but Ji-young is so determined to erase Byuk-soo from her life that she takes the kitten back to the pet store.

She’s sullen and angry at work, snapping at patients, but one girl strikes a nerve when she says to Ji-young that she never should have been born. She says that no matter what she does, nobody loves her, and Ji-young freezes with tears streaming down her face.

She runs to the break room to call Byuk-soo, but his phone has been disconnected. Her friendly coworker finds her and wraps her in a hug, letting Ji-young cry out her sorrow on her shoulder.

Ji-young gets Bo-ri back, then goes to see Soo-kyung. She tells her that she once tried to stop her parents from fighting, and her mother had screamed that she should have gotten an abortion instead of having her. Damn.

We see years’ worth of Ji-young witnessing her parents’ fights, her face growing harder as she grew older. Once, she even saw her father on the street with another woman, but she’d walked past without acknowledging him. Crying, Ji-young confesses that she pretended to be okay but she never was, not for one single moment of her life.

She says that every time she gets close to someone, everything hurts, so she pushes them away. But then Byuk-soo came, and before she knew it, she was feeling happiness for the first time. She admits that seeing him again would be difficult, nearly unbearable, but she misses him, and she wants to be happy.

A series of pictures of Byuk-soo flash across the screen, moving from past to present and into the future. He and Ji-young pose for couple photos, then wedding photos, then family photos with the cutest baby girl you’ve ever seen. They look happy and in love with their gorgeous daughter.

Months pass, and eventually Ji-young goes to visit her father’s final resting place. She opens up to others, making the effort to make friends, while Bo-ri grows from a fluffy kitten into a beautiful cat. Ji-young even starts accepting her mother’s calls.

Then one day she looks out her apartment window and sees a familiar-looking man standing outside the building. She runs down, but the man is gone.

She takes a gift to Soo-kyung, who says that she should be giving gifts to someone else, like the person who just came to ask about Ji-young. She tells Ji-young that she doesn’t have to pay for today since it’s her last session, and Ji-young runs out the door.

Out in the street, she sees someone who resembles Byuk-soo entering the train station. She follows and spots the person on the other side of the track. He looks up just before the train arrives, and yes, it’s him!

Ji-young races as fast as she can over the bridge to the other side, but the train pulls out, and he’s nowhere to be seen. She barely notices tripping and losing a shoe, too upset to have come so close and missed him.

Just as she’s giving up hope, Ji-young hears a voice behind her, calling her name. She turns to see Byuk-soo, holding her shoe. He gives her that beautiful smile of his, and this time, she runs to him.

 
COMMENTS

Such a sweet, refreshing, wonderful little show! I really enjoyed how lived-in the characters and their world felt, even with only two episodes to tell their story. I loved Ji-young and Byuk-soo so much that I wish the show had been longer, so we could have seen more of them. But then again, it’s probably the brevity of the plot that kept things on track and moving smoothly, since there was no extra time to fill with side-plots and distractions. I also adored that the story treated its characters as adults, not shying away from the subject of sex but also not making it into some big forbidden thing. It was just a fact of life that these two young, attractive people would be drawn to each other in that way.

I didn’t realize the positive aspects of Ji-young and Byuk-soo’s extreme personalities until this episode, when we got to see how their most crippling weaknesses could also be their greatest strengths when fine-tuned in just the right way. Ji-young may be shut off and isolated, but the positive aspect of that is that she never lets anyone push her around or control her. She knows how to stand firm in her own beliefs, despite what others may think of her. And though Byuk-soo appears to be weak and helpless in the face of his loneliness and need for human companionship, he’s also capable of great loyalty and steadfast commitment. His capacity for love is limitless, as is his ability to withstand any obstacles once he bestows that love on someone.

And just as I hoped, they were each able to take the best of the other and learn from it. Byuk-soo had to learn about respecting boundaries even when his intentions are good, and that getting closer to Ji-young could have been accomplished without violating her privacy. And Ji-young learned from Byuk-soo how to bend and be flexible, and that loving someone isn’t a weakness but an incredible strength, if she only has the courage to let them in. They both very nearly lost everything when they forgot those lessons in their fear of being hurt yet again, but thankfully they were able to find their way back to each other, hopefully smarter this time.

What I loved most is that Ji-young and Byuk-soo didn’t just learn to relax with each other — they had such an effect on each other that it changed the way they interacted with everyone. Ji-young in particular was able to branch out and connect with her coworkers, even letting her friend comfort her when she needed to lose control and cry her heart out. This is the reason why I said I hoped that Ji-young and Byuk-soo didn’t just fill in each other’s gaps, because I wanted them to teach the other to be their own, whole person. But that’s not the entire answer either, because while a person can and should be complete on their own, they also can’t live in a vacuum, never interacting with anyone else. The biggest lesson that Ji-young and Byuk-soo had to learn was that even though a person can and should be able to stand on their own two feet, it makes them even stronger to have the courage to lean on each other.

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