365: Repeat the Year: Episodes 3-4

by LollyPip

We get to know the rest of our travelers, who very quickly realize that this reset isn’t as innocent or well-meant as it seems. Their actions have consequences, and changing a bad moment in their past can lead to something worse down the line. But there’s something bigger going on, and if they don’t figure out the game and beat it, they may not survive the year.

  
EPISODE 3 RECAP

Shin tells the travelers that Young-gil, the deliveryman who went back in time with them, is dead. She says that when their bodies briefly lost consciousness so their future minds could enter their past bodies, Young-gil was driving. He veered out of his lane, was hit by a truck, and died instantly.

With a heavy voice, Shin says that she feels responsible for Young-gil’s death. She tells the other travelers to come to her if they have any questions or problems and she’ll do her best to help. She leaves, and Ga-hyun jumps up and runs after her.

The other travelers are understandably upset because Young-gil originally lived at least another year. The frizzy-haired gamer, JAE-YOUNG (Ahn Seung-gyun), doesn’t even look up from his phone to say in a bored voice, “Maybe his fate changed.” The older gentleman, NO-SEOB (Yoon Joo-sang), offers to host them at his cafe, but the security guard heads to work and the taciturn test-taker just walks out.

Meanwhile, Ga-hyun tells Shin privately that she found out something she didn’t know in the first timeline, and now it feels like everything is ruined. Shin says she thought Ga-hyun would be the happiest after the reset, but Ga-hyun admits that she only thought about avoiding her accident and didn’t take other changes into account.

Shin explains that having memories from the first timeline means making different decisions, and obviously those decisions have consequences. In the first timeline, Ga-hyun took Maru to the vet and came home on time, so that Woo-jin and Joo-young knew when to start acting normal.

But in the new timeline, Ga-hyun got sidetracked by Hyung-jo and missed the vet appointment, went home early, and caught them together. Shin assures Ga-hyun that she’s strong enough to get through this, and advises her to focus on how she’ll use the rest of the time she’s earned.

At No-seob’s cafe, he tells the others that his wife always wanted to own a cafe, so he used his reset to buy this place. The businessman, JUNG-SEOK (Jung Min-sung), says that he’s planning to move to Canada. SE-RIN (Lee Yoo-mi), tells the others that she’s going to get into Hankuk University this time around, and Hyung-jo says that he’s already accomplished what he came back to do.

The attractive engaged woman, YEON-SOO (Lee Shi-ah) says she’s jealous of the others, because she doesn’t have a set plan like they do. No-seob tells her that this can still be a good opportunity, but Jae-young mutters darkly, “Why do you all think that only good things will happen? Do you think it was a coincidence that the deliveryman died?”

Hyung-jo feels that Jae-young knows more than he’s telling, so he corners the kid outside. He takes the phone that Jae-young is always on and sees that he was snapping pictures of everyone while they had coffee, and he demands to know why.

Jae-young says the photos are like game items that he may need in case he has to fight. He says he’s trying to figure out the hidden rules, because he believes the deliveryman’s death was a teaser, and that the real game starts now: “We’ve been invited to play the Death Note Game.” ~shudder~ He asks Hyung-jo if he’s curious who will be the next victim — his guess is Ga-hyun.

After dark, Ga-hyun sits in a park with Maru and draws the people around her. Her drawings take on a dark, frightening tone — two people taking pictures becomes a person staring at a girl hanging dead from a tree… a man with his head in a woman’s lap turns into a gruesome picture of the woman stabbing the man in the heart.

Suddenly, Maru runs off, and Ga-hyun chases after him. He runs into the street, and when Ga-hyun follows him, she’s struck by a white car. Thankfully, Ga-hyun is only dreaming of the accident that stole her ability to walk. She realizes that today is the day, and vows to stay indoors all day this time around.

She sits to work on her webtoon, but she’s interrupted by Woo-jin at her door. She ignores him until he leaves, but he texts that he left her a gift. When she opens the door (it’s her favorite macarons), Maru slips out and takes off down the street.

Ga-hyun can’t catch him and soon he’s gone, so Ga-hyun calls Hyung-jo in a panic (aw, he’s so excited that she called him). He helps her look for Maru, but although they search for hours, he’s nowhere to be seen. At one point, Ga-hyun unexpectedly finds herself in the exact spot where her accident occurred, with a similar white car barreling down on her.

She falls to the ground unharmed, but for a second, she sees a white car hit someone and leave them bleeding in the street. Hyung-jo finds her there, and when she calms down, she tells him about her accident in the first timeline. She’s rattled because she was planning to stay indoors all day, but Maru still ran off and she nearly got hit again.

Hyung-jo says that it is possible to change things for the better, because he accomplished it. He tells her to go home and offers to keep looking for Maru, but Ga-hyun gets a call that he’s been found. Interestingly, Yeon-soo is the one who found him, and they meet up at No-seob’s cafe.

A man arrives to pick her up, and she introduces him as DAE-SUNG (Sung Hyuk), her fiance. She seems strangely uncomfortable and hurries out of the cafe, and when Ga-hyun and Hyung-jo leave, they notice Yeon-soo irritably yanking away from Dae-sung’s touch on the way to their car.

Hyung-jo walks Ga-hyun home, and she says she owes him again since Maru was found due to the collar Hyung-jo bought. As payment, Hyung-jo asks her to tell him the identity of the villain in her comic, but she chirps that she can’t say because she signed a contract.

Just in case, Hyung-jo advises Ga-hyun to stay inside for the rest of the day. She takes his advice and takes a good long nap, and doesn’t wake up until after dark, when her phone rings. It’s Joo-young, obviously drunk and insisting that she needs to talk to Ga-hyun in person.

Ga-hyun snaps at her not to come to her house: “How dare you come here? Listen to me. You’re a terrible person who stole your best friend’s fiance. I want you to disappear from my life… No, I want you to disappear from this world!”

She’s interrupted by a loud screeching noise, like wheels on asphalt, then a horrific *crunch*. Oh, no… Fearing the worst, Ga-hyun runs to where Joo-young said she was walking, very near the spot where Ga-hyun’s accident happened. She finds Joo-young crumpled on the pavement, unconscious and bleeding profusely.

Joo-young is rushed to the hospital, and Woo-jin arrives seconds later. Ga-hyun takes a taxi to Jian Clinic and begs Shin to return her to the time before the reset. She tells Shin that her friend got into the accident instead of her.

Shin explains that this is her first time taking others back in time with her, and that nothing like this ever happened when she reset alone. She believes Joo-young’s accident was the butterfly effect from Ga-hyun discovering the affair, but she doesn’t think this is fate making Joo-young take Ga-hyun’s place.

But Ga-hyun is still distraught, saying that Shin can’t be sure of that, and that it will be the same this time around — the hit-and-run driver won’t be caught. Shin says that since it happened at the same time and place, it should be the same person.

They go inside so that Shin can hypnotize Ga-hyun and search her memory of her own accident. Ga-hyun soon slips into a hypnotic state, where she floats through her memories until she finds the one of her accident. She watches as Maru runs into the street, then sees herself following him and getting hit by the car.

Shin guides her through what happened directly after — Ga-hyun saw someone wearing men’s shoes approach her, poke her with something, then leave when he thought she was dead. Ga-hyun tries to read the license plate, but she’s overcome by the fear and pain of the moment, so Shin wakes her.

Elsewhere, someone drives the white car to a junkyard and has it crushed.

EPISODE 4 RECAP”

Ga-hyun meets with Hyung-jo and tells him that she knows who the hit-and-run driver is. She’s recalled something damning from her hypnosis session… the “DS hearts YS” letters on the car’s bumper, which she’s seen before — on Yeon-soo’s fiance’s white car. Hyung-jo is reluctant to just take Ga-hyun’s word that Dae-sung is the culprit, especially since this is a different timeline, but Ga-hyun asks him to look into it.

Hyung-jo talks a friend in the traffic department into letting him see the accident records, though there’s not much information yet. Sun-ho catches him and accuses him of planning to transfer departments, but Hyung-jo says cutely that as much as he hates Sun-ho, he’s not going anywhere without him.

Meanwhile, Ga-hyun meets with Yeon-soo and tells her that Dae-sung is the hit-and-run driver from both accidents, and how she knows. Yeon-soo says that she remembers Dae-sung getting a new car right around this time, and that after they married, he began to change. She says he had nightmares and acted like he had a secret, and eventually he started hitting her.

She says that she agreed to the reset because she wanted to break off their engagement, which she did earlier today, so she was at home at the time of the accident. Ga-hyun wants to go talk to Dae-sung, but Yeon-soo begs her for one day to convince him to turn himself in.

Back at the ER, Woo-jin hasn’t heard any news about Joo-young yet. But a nurse runs in to take them to Joo-young’s side, because she’s coding. They watch in horror as Joo-young dies in front of their eyes, and Ga-hyun stumbles outside and collapses against the building.

Hyung-jo calls her to tell her what he’s learned, but Ga-hyun gasps, “My friend died…” He hurries to her side and just stays with her until she’s all cried out. Later, she tells Hyung-jo that the last thing she said to Joo-young was that she wanted her to disappear, and that even though she betrayed Ga-hyun, she can’t hate Joo-young because this is her fault.

Hyung-jo says that in the original timeline, his partner died because of him, so while he was able to use the reset to save Sun-ho’s life, he understands exactly how Ga-hyun feels. He says that it’s the culprits who should be feeling the pain, and he vows to help Ga-hyun find Joo-young’s killer.

He goes back to the station to dig into the hit-and-run some more, and he finds CCTV footage of Dae-sung’s car nearby, a few minutes before the accident. And despite Yeon-soo’s claim to be at home at the time, she can clearly be seen sitting in the passenger seat.

Hyung-jo tells Ga-hyun that Yeon-soo’s house is too far away for Dae-sung to have passed that camera, taken her home, and gone back to the site of the accident, which means she was in the car when it happened. Ga-hyun thinks back to her memory and looks closer, and this time she sees that the man who checked on her got into the passenger seat… and she can see Yeon-soo’s face in the driver’s side mirror.

Realizing that everything Yeon-soo said was a lie, and that Yeon-soo is the person who hit her and Joo-young, Ga-hyun goes to her apartment and starts pounding on her door. The neighbors call the police, so Hyung-jo flashes his badge, but they’re still asked to leave. Ga-hyun says that Yeon-soo was buying time to get rid of evidence, and she feels stupid for trusting her.

But Hyung-jo says they know their key suspects, they just need to find evidence, which is easier than having evidence and no suspect. The next day they start checking all the junkyards in the vicinity of the accident, and eventually they find one junkyard whose manager notices that all the records, including CCTV footage and transaction list, are gone for that day.

They learn that an employee recently quit, so Hyung-jo calls Soon-woo and asks him to pull up the call history for the employee’s phone number. Ga-hyun notices that the manager’s car has a black box camera, so they take a look at the footage from the night of the accident. Sure enough, there’s Dae-sung, clearly instructing the former employee to destroy the car.

When Hyung-jo goes to the station for the phone records, Sun-ho grabs his notebook and fusses at him again for working on a traffic department case. LOL, the whole team gangs up on him until he yelps that if they don’t stop, he really might transfer. He whines that he’s just helping a friend on his own time, and Team Leader Ho says that Hyung-jo’s “hunches” are just so good right now, they need him to stay.

After seeing the phone records, Hyung-jo talks to Dae-sung himself and asks how a doctor could leave someone dying in the street. Dae-sung is all wide-eyed innocence until Hyung-jo points out that he called the junkyard employee several times after he quit his job. Hyung-jo says he’ll find the witness and advises Dae-sung to tell Yeon-soo to turn herself in, because she won’t get away with it a second time.

Ga-hyun returns to Shin and angrily accuses her of knowing that Yeon-soo caused her paralysis in the original timeline. Shin says that she’d have nothing to gain from doing such a thing, and she promises to help Ga-hyun. Ga-hyun says that Yeon-soo will probably visit Shin soon, and to tell her she’ll pay for her crimes.

After Ga-hyun leaves, Yeon-soo steps into the room, having heard their entire conversation. She complains that she ended up in the same situation despite the reset, and asks Shin if it’s just her destiny. Shin says that her advice is always the same — until the next reset, survive no matter what.

On her way out of Joo-young’s funeral, Ga-hyun runs into No-seob, who says there’s been another traveler casualty. This time it was Kyung-man, the security guard, the one who was planning to win the lottery.

Most of the travelers (again, the test-taker is conspicuously absent), gather at Kyung-man’s funeral. Hyung-jo used his connections to find out that Kyung-man died of a heart attack. It was his last day at work, and he bought a lottery ticket then went out with his friends. On his way home, he just dropped dead.

Jae-young says that he called it — he’d predicted that the next to die would be either Ga-hyun or Kyung-man, and he’d told Hyung-jo that depending on which of them died, he’d know what the “rule” is. He says ominously that they won’t be the only ones to die, because this is a survival game.

Jung-seok asks what the rule is, so Jae-young says that the next person to die is the first who stands up. The first day they met at Jian Clinic, the deliveryman was the first to stand, and at their one-week meeting after the reset, Kyung-man was the first to stand (he’d thought it might be Ga-hyun because he wasn’t sure if it was the first person to leave the room, and she’d followed Shin out that day).

The others say they don’t believe him, but none of them is eager to be the first to stand up, either. Finally Ga-hyun gets to her feet, calling the theory absurd, and she tells Jae-young to be sure and be the last to stand.

Hyung-jo follows Ga-hyun to offer her a ride home, and she asks if he believes Jae-young’s ridiculous theory, but he says he doesn’t. He tells her that he met with Dae-sung today and could tell something was off. Ga-hyun thanks him, and with one last look towards Joo-young’s funeral room, she heads home alone.

She gets a text from Yeon-soo asking her to meet in the park. When she gets there, she accuses Yeon-soo of knowing all along that she was the victim in the first timeline, but Yeon-soo swears she didn’t. She says she suffered too, and that’s why she wanted to participate in the reset.

Ga-hyun asks why she didn’t avoid getting in the car this time around, but Yeon-soo says she tried. She claims that she went out with friends and got drunk, and that her friends, unaware she’d broken off the engagement, called Dae-sung to pick her up. According to Yeon-soo, she’d slumped over onto Dae-sung as he was driving, and while he was distracted by trying to wake her, he hit Joo-young.

Ga-hyun isn’t interested in excuses, and she tells Yeon-soo to tell the police what happened. Yeon-soo refuses, snapping that she did nothing wrong this time around. Ga-hyun says that Dae-sung will be arrested soon, and Yeon-soo will be considered complicit because she was in the car.

Scoffing, Yeon-soo asks if Ga-hyun has proof besides her hypnosis session. She tells Ga-hyun not to trust Shin, and Ga-hyun realizes that Yeon-soo knows more than she’s letting on. Yeon-soo says that even though Shin said she made random calls, the truth is that she came to Yeon-soo personally and brought them all together for a reason.

Later, everyone gets a text from Ga-hyun telling them to meet tomorrow at the cafe because she needs to tell them something. Hyung-jo is late, but Ga-hyun goes ahead and tells the others that Yeon-soo was the driver in her accident in the first timeline.

Hyung-jo bursts in looking furious, and he slams a photo down in front of Ga-hyun. It’s a still shot from CCTV footage of her and Yeon-soo talking last night, and Ga-hyun confirms that it’s her and Yeon-soo in the picture. Hyung-jo announces that Yeon-soo is dead, and that he’s taking Ga-hyun to the police station to question her.

  
COMMENTS

Oh boy, it’s just getting better and better and I’m so into it. 365 feels like a crossover of Nine: Nine Time Travels and Liar Game, which is high praise in my opinion because both of those dramas are incredible. I can see that this show is going to be quite twisty, and so far, I haven’t seen many of the twists coming. Yeon-soo’s connection to Ga-hyun especially came out of left field, and I think we still don’t know her whole story, because that conversation between her and Shin seemed to indicate that this isn’t the first group reset as Shin claims. But it’s so early, and it’s really too soon to settle on any theories.

And I have so many of them! There are clues that all of the travelers may be connected in some way, and that they weren’t chosen at random at all. At this point I think that Yeon-soo is at the center of it all, and I wonder if she and Shin have done this reset several times now, based on what Shin said about her advice to survive until the next reset always being the same. It might explain why these particular travelers were chosen — maybe they’re all connected to the hit-and-run in some way, but it happens differently in each reset, so each reset requires a different set of travelers. But I don’t know why they’re dying at such an alarming rate, or why Shin would allow this to happen over and over again. And I have no clue why, if Jae-young is correct, the people are dying in the order they stood up.

On a technical note (again), I absolutely love the visual aesthetic of this show. Scenes are shot in completely different visual styles depending on the tone of the scene, and I adore how colors are used to create extra impact. In Episode 1, the black-and-white scene that emphasized the brilliant red blood was so emotionally impactful, and I like how Shin’s transparent floor shines in colors that mirror her patient’s mood. Ga-hyun’s hypnosis scene was probably the best depiction of someone searching their memories that I’ve ever seen in a drama. The show is already amazing based on the story and acting, but the cinematography just puts it over the top.

It’s scary to see the ripples that happen when one little thing is changed. Just a slight adjustment in Ga-hyun’s schedule caused her to learn of her fiance and friend’s betrayal, and worse, because Ga-hyun tried to save herself from being paralyzed, Joo-young ended up dying instead. I don’t believe that Ga-hyun would go back to the original timeline if she could, but I don’t think she finds Joo-young’s life a fair trade for the use of her legs. But some things also feel inevitable — if Yeon-soo was telling the truth the second time, she wasn’t driving in this timeline but still ended up in the accident. And I don’t know why she died, if Jae-young’s theory about standing up is correct, but I’m sure that the reason will be shocking.

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