365: Repeat the Year: Episodes 9-10

by LollyPip

Our travelers are slowly getting closer to discovering who might want them dead, though they still don’t have any idea why. But they’re all still keeping secrets from one another, which isn’t helping their survival rate. If they want to live through this year a second time, they’re all going to have to get honest with each other no matter how difficult or painful that might be.

  
EPISODE 9 RECAP

A flower basket is delivered to Jian Clinic while the travelers are discussing the death, and Hyung-jo reads the card which says, “It’s you this time.” Shin seems as confused as the rest of them as to why the flowers would be delivered there, so Ga-hyun explains that every traveler who’s died got a flower basket a couple of days beforehand.

Jae-young says that they need to find out who delivered the flowers before another traveler dies. Shin thinks she’s the target since it was delivered to her place, but Se-rim believes she’s next since she saw the flowers first. She’s so afraid that she passes out and has to be taken to the hospital.

In private, Shin asks Hyung-jo to find out who’s sending the flowers. He says it must be someone who knows about the reset, and he asks Shin if there’s anyone besides her and the ten travelers. Shin says that the only way would be if one of them told someone outside their immediate circle.

After Hyung-jo leaves, Jung-tae goes in to see Shin. He comes right back out and approaches Hyung-jo and Ga-hyun, and Hyung-jo asks him when he last saw Jung-seok before he supposedly committed suicide. Jung-tae just says he’s sad Jung-seok died before he could extort more money out of him, but he stops smiling when Ga-hyun reminds him that he’s in danger, too.

She asks if he saw anyone delivering flowers while he was spying on the travelers, but Jung-tae wants payment for the information. He edges past them and leaves, and doesn’t seem to notice Jae-young following him.

Ga-hyun wonders out loud if there’s really a killer sending flowers to his victims, but Hyung-jo finds it unlikely that a killer would leave such evidence. Ga-hyun leaves alone, saying that she needs to check something and that she’ll get back to Hyung-jo with her findings.

Meanwhile, Shin also asks her assistant, Ji-hyun to look into things. She says she doesn’t quite trust Hyung-jo’s findings since he suspects her as being involved in the deaths.

Following up on the delivery company, Hyung-jo quickly finds the man who delivered the flowers to Jian Clinic. He has a voice recording of a man telling him to pick up the flower basket from a park bench and take it to the clinic, but when Hyung-jo calls the number that the voicemail came from, it no longer exists.

Instead, Hyung-jo researches the pressed flower card that came with the basket. LOL, the dramatic music screeches to a halt when Sun-ho asks Hyung-jo what he’s up to. His teammates tease that he must be dating since he’s on his phone all the time, and Hyung-jo turns it back on Soon-woo, who definitely has a crush on Sa-kyung.

Hyung-jo finds something and hurries off (calling back to Soon-woo that Sa-kyung likes iced Americanos, hee), and he learns that one flower shop that sells those pressed flower cards happens to be next door to No-seob’s cafe.

Ga-hyun visits flower shops to try and find who makes that particular basket. Se-rim calls her, so she goes to the hospital, and Se-rim says that she’s lonely there because her parents won’t visit her. She tells Ga-hyun that her older sister died in a car accident while saving Se-rim, and that her parents always say that Se-rim should have died instead.

She says that her sister was perfect, but she’s always been sickly and disappointing, and her life feels cursed since her sister died. She wonders if it’s her turn, and if she dies, whether her parents will feel sad. But Ga-hyun reminds Se-rim that she has a boyfriend who loves her, and Se-rim beams at the thought of Young-woong, “my hero.”

When Hyung-jo goes to check out the flower shop, the owner shows him CCTV footage of a young man buying a flower basket. He says that the man brought him a picture and told him to make a basket exactly like it, and Hyung-jo recognizes the young man’s headphones — the exact headphones that Jae-young wears.

He goes looking for Jae-young and demands to know why he sent the flower basket to Jian Clinic. Jae-young says that he wanted to see everyone’s reactions to determine who’s really sending the flowers, and that the only person in the room who didn’t look shocked was Ga-hyun, who just looked suspicious of them.

In addition, he points out that Ga-hyun is the only person who’s seen the flower baskets in person — everyone else has only seen her pictures of them. Hyung-jo sees his point, but he also says that Jae-young could be lying about his basket being fake. He’s already come up with several incorrect theories, as well, so Hyung-jo growls at him to stop confusing people.

Ga-hyun calls Hyung-jo and says that she’s also figured out that the last flowers seem different… the message was a clear threat, while the message sent with Kyung-man’s flowers was vague: I hope the sun’s power gives you energy, and the moon’s power gives you rest. Hyung-jo has the report from Jung-seok’s death, which shows that his card said The gleaming golden glory of the light will be with you.

He tells Ga-hyun that the most recent flower basket was fake, adding indignantly that Jae-young didn’t trust her. HAHA, he overacts and Ga-hyun figures out that he checked up on her just in case. They’re both confused about Shin’s reaction, and they decide they should trust each other, if nobody else.

Elsewhere, Shin enters a child’s room and straightens a toy train that’s been flung haphazardly onto the bed.

Ga-hyun finishes up another episode of her webtoon, and she decides at the last minute to plant an easter egg. She erases a note from the stalker to his victim that says Only I can make you perfect, and replaces it with The gleaming golden glory of the light will be with you.. She offers an autographed book to the person whose guess as to the identity of the stalker gets the most “likes”.

Hyung-jo goes back to the delivery of the flower basket to Jung-seok, and he follows the CCTV videos of the man who delivered them until he gets in his car. He looks up the license plate and finds the man’s home, and while he’s asking him about the delivery, he peeks inside the apartment.

Meanwhile, Ga-hyun continues checking flower shops for one that carries lily of the valley, and eventually she finds a shop named “Flower” that does, but the cards they sell don’t match the ones delivered to the travelers. On her way out, Ga-hyun sees a framed article on the wall, and the picture of the shop’s owner stops her in her tracks — it’s Hye-in, the pregnant woman who decided not to take the reset.

Hyung-jo arrives at Flower and they run into each other, and Hyung-jo tells Ga-hyun that he discovered that the flower baskets came from here, and that the delivery man is Hye-in’s husband. Ga-hyun finds it strange, since Hye-in didn’t reset and shouldn’t even know of them in this timeline.

She and Hyung-jo think that the person sending the flowers chose Hye-in’s store on purpose. This means the person sending the flowers knows what happened in the original timeline, and that Hye-in was invited… and the only people who know that are the other travelers.

EPISODE 10 RECAP

At the prison, Hyung-jo questions Yeon-soo’s fiance Dae-sung to ask if Yeon-soo got any flowers before she died. Dae-sung says she did, and we see that her card said Let the rainbow of the soul be in your garden.

Ga-hyun checks the comments on her recent Hidden Killer episode. One comment stands out to her, saying that the quote sounds like song lyrics. She tells No-seob and Se-rim what Jae-young did and what they’ve discovered about the messages on the cards. No-seob says they look like lines from poems, but probably not the same poem.

Jae-young has been paying Jung-tae to help him look for something or someone, but Jung-tae hasn’t found anything, though he seems to take the threat of the flower baskets seriously. Jae-young tells him that it’s not his turn yet, but he won’t say how he knows until Jung-tae gets the information he wants.

One of the commenters on Hidden Killer recognizes the quote from a book called Pieces of Destiny. Ga-hyun finds the book at the library and locates the quote in it, and when she also finds the quote from Kyung-nam’s flowers on another page, she realizes she’s onto something.

She and Hyung-jo go to Flower and find Hye-in there this time. Hye-in confirms that she made the flower basket that was sent to Jung-seok’s apartment, and two identical ones before that, but she refuses to tell them anything else without a warrant. She closes the shop, and Ga-hyun says it’s strange that they know Hye-in, but they’re strangers to her.

Hye-in makes a call, maybe to Shin, and Shin says to the person she’s talking to that she expected this and to proceed as planned.

Ga-hyun shows Hyung-jo the book, and how she noticed that the paintings next to each quote seem to correlate to the way the traveler died. Kyung-man’s quote leads to a painting of Cupid shooting an arrow into someone’s heart, and he died of a heart attack. The painting near Yeon-soo’s quote is of Icarus’s fall, and Yeon-soo suffered a deadly fall.

Lastly, Jung-seok’s quote is next to a picture of Van Gogh’s “The Sower” – Van Gogh committed suicide. Hyung-jo doesn’t see how the sender of the flowers could know how the recipients would die, but Ga-hyun firmly believes that the flowers are a message.

Shin enters the child’s bedroom again, and this time she opens a closet door to find an adorable little girl hiding inside. The girl is Shin’s daughter Young, and the two play with a small train set as they talk. Shin asks Young if she wants anything besides toy trains, and Young says that she wants to ride a real train with Mommy.

Ga-hyun watches Hye-in’s shop until Hye-in leaves, then follows her to a cafe. She loiters as Hye-in meets with a woman selling a supplement that’s supposed to guarantee pregnancy, and she recalls that in her original timeline, a scammer was arrested for selling fake medicine claiming to cure infertility.

She takes a selfie with the woman in the background and sends it to Hyung-jo, and he identifies her as someone on the Most Wanted list. Ga-hyun stops Hye-in from buying the supplement by pretending to be desperate for a baby and offering to pay more for it.

She’s really making a scene when Hyung-jo shows up, and she catches him laughing at her, lol. He hurries in and arrests the seller, and after giving her statement at the police station, Hye-in approaches them.

She asks why they want to know about the flowers so badly, so Ga-hyun fibs that the recipients are her friends who are upset by the strange messages and lack of sender. Hye-in reveals that the buyers of the flowers were all high school students who brought the cards themselves, and that she was texted the delivery addresses later.

Hyung-jo and Ga-hyun go to dinner with Sun-ho, who admits that he’s become a fan of Hidden Identity because Hyung-jo is such a fanboy (Hyung-jo: “I’m not a fanboy!” HA, liar). Hyung-jo whines that traveling through time is so hard and that Sun-ho would be dead if not for him, forcing Ga-hyun to pretend he’s just drunk.

As they walk home, Ga-hyun sighs that she wishes she had a friend like Hyung-jo who would travel through time to save her. Oof, the way Hyung-jo looks at her as she says it is so telling, but he just says that she has many fans who would be disappointed if anything happened to her. Ga-hyun says she still has time to make at least one friend like that, and there goes Hyung-jo with the puppy eyes again.

Hye-in calls Hyung-jo — she’s had another student come in with a card and a flower basket order. She gives Ga-hyun the card and tells them the girl’s name and school, and Hyung-jo asks her to call when she gets the text with the delivery address.

Ga-hyun checks Pieces of Destiny for the quote on the latest card (You will become the captain of your life, challenging your fate). She finds it under a painting depicting a horse and carriage accident.

Meanwhile, Hyung-jo finds the student who ordered the flowers at a noraebang. She tells him that she saw an ad offering good money just to deliver a card and place a flower order, and that she picked up the card from a subway locker. CCTV shows that the card was put in the locker by a foreign man.

Ga-hyun and Hyung-jo discuss whether to tell the others what they’ve found, but they’re worried because of the risk that one of them might be sending the flowers. They decide to tell, and of course Jae-young is the first to scoff at their theory about the paintings representing the deaths.

Se-rim reveals that she witnessed Jae-young plotting something with Jung-tae and recorded it, and she accuses him of being a spy. He refuses to say why he’s meeting Jung-tae and storms out, but Hyung-jo follows and tells him to prove it if he’s innocent.

Jung-tae prints something, then he goes to see Shin. He hands her an envelope and smirks that knowing about his client is part of his business. He guesses that this is the reason Shin went through the reset, and not wishing to share her good fortune as she claimed.

But Shin just says that this makes things simple, because she also knows Jung-tae’s real reason for going through the reset. She asks him if he still wants to blackmail her, or simply ask her for a favor.

Hyung-jo has Jae-young use his hacking skills to pinpoint where the text messages to Hye-in are coming from. He ends up at a hospital, where security checks the camera feeds and sees a woman being approached by a man hiding his face. She’s a volunteer at a clinic for undocumented foreigners, so Hyung-jo goes straight there, and he recognizes the man who put the card in the locker sitting in the waiting room.

The man tells Hyung-jo that “the doctor” gave him the card to deliver, and points her out. Hyung-jo can’t see her face as she leaves the room, but she wears her hair in a long ponytail just like Shin’s. He chases her out of the building and tails her in his car, all the way to Jian Clinic.

The gates are closed by the time Hyung-jo catches up, but before he can do anything, he gets a call from Hye-in. She says that she got the text message with the delivery address, and Hyung-jo jumps back in his car to race to the flower shop.

On the way, he contacts Ga-hyun, who drops what she’s doing and hurries to Hye-in’s shop. Ga-hyun gets there first, just seconds before Hyung-jo, but as she’s crossing the street to the shop he yells out her name.

Ga-hyun stops and whirls to face him… and behind her, Hye-in’s flower shop explodes in a huge fireball. We’re shown that when Hye-in called Hyung-jo, she’d asked him fearfully, “The address… is my shop. What does it mean?”

In her office, Shin watches her hourglass run out of sand just as the flower shop is destroyed. On her desk is a copy of the book Pieces of Destiny.

  
COMMENTS

With the reveal of Shin’s daughter, I’m pretty sure now that the reason Shin called these people to participate in the reset has something to do with her child. It seems likely that something happened to her daughter, and that these people were all connected to it somehow. It’s possible that Shin might be getting rid of them one by one in an attempt to save her daughter’s life in this timeline — and it might not even be the first time, or even the first time with these travelers. Shin has said things before that make me think that she’s just reliving this year over and over, trying to accomplish something but not quite succeeding yet.

Here’s my theory — remember the train accident that Shin referenced in the first timeline, to prove to the travelers that she knew what was going to happen ahead of time? Her daughter loves trains, and she asked for a train ride with her Mommy. I think that, in the very first timeline (which could have been who-knows-how-many resets ago), Shin took Young on that train, which crashed and killed her daughter. I believe that soon after, Shin discovered her ability to reset one year, and has been repeatedly going back and trying to save her daughter’s life but failing each time.

It could be that somehow, these eleven travelers are connected to that train crash, and that Shin has brought them along in an effort to save her daughter. What’s unclear is what she’s trying to do with them now that she’s brought them back. It’s possible that they’re responsible somehow and Shin is methodically killing them to try and prevent the accident. Another option is that Shin is telling the truth and she isn’t involved in the deaths, but that she brought these people back because one or all of them is needed to save her daughter. It could be that someone knows this and is killing the travelers so that the accident still happens, and that Shin is trying her hardest to find the culprit and stop them as well — there’s just no way to know for sure yet.

At least Ga-hyun and Hyung-jo have narrowed the list of suspects down to one of the travelers, including Shin. Hye-in’s involvement in the murders, even if only tangential by using her shop to send the warning flowers, proves that whoever is arranging these deaths knows that she was invited to travel, even though she she declined and has no knowledge of it in this timeline. I wonder why Hye-in was killed, though, since she didn’t end up resetting with the others? And her death is extra sad because she chose not to reset because of her baby, yet this time she died before even becoming pregnant, so it didn’t save her baby in the long run.

After this episode, and that conversation between Hyung-jo and Ga-hyun about how Ga-hyun wishes she had a friend who would do for her what Hyung-jo did for Sun-ho, I’m fully on board with a loveline between them. I think that Ga-hyun is just too intensely focused on solving the mystery to see Hyung-jo as anything more than an assistant who conveniently happens to be a detective,but the way Hyung-jo looks at her when she’s not paying attention just hurts my heart. He may not know it yet, but he’s in love, and I’m scared that he will be asked to risk his life for Ga-hyun before this is all over.

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