Again My Life: Episodes 2-4

by DaebakGrits

Like any good adventure story, our hero must first recruit his adventure party, and with new friends on his side, our time traveling lawyer begins laying the groundwork for his future battle with our Bad Guy. But before he can win the war, our hero finds himself fighting small battles that will ultimately change the future bit by bit.

Editor’s note: Drama coverage will continue with weecaps.
 
EPISODES 2-4 WEECAP

While I can’t say that I love everything about Again My Life, I’ll admit that it successfully surprised me a few times. Not only were there a couple of plot twists, but even when I knew the drama was lying to me, it had a way of drawing out certain scenes just long enough that I began to second guess myself.

For instance, I was pretty confident that Hee-woo’s parents would live through the accident (why cast veterans like Kim Hee-jung and Park Chul-min if you’re just going to kill them off in the second episode?), but when Hee-woo cried for Mom and Dad for an inordinately long time and we saw no sign of them, I started to worry.

Thankfully, they lived, but the drunk driver — Tae-sub’s son — was not as fortunate this time around. Hee-woo finally finds the answers to the questions that had been plaguing him all these years, and he realizes the sloppy investigation into their accident was all a cover-up to hide Tae-sub’s son’s drunken vehicular homicide. Hee-woo suspects this change in the timeline will cause Tae-sub to become more ruthless, but I have to say, Tae-sub seems remarkably unaffected by his son’s death.

The rest of Episode 2 is pretty much a systematic introduction to a large cast of characters — namely Hee-woo’s harem — I mean, his fellow Hanguk University students and future allies in the fight against Tae-sub.

First up is KIM GYU-RI (Hong Bi-ra), a top student who got a perfect score on her CSAT, but despite all her academic success, Hee-woo can’t remember ever seeing her in his past life after she collapsed from overexertion. He later discovers that her family fell on hard times, which prevented her from attending college.

KIM HAN-MI (Kim Jae-kyung) is another one of Hee-woo’s academy classmates. She hangs out with a group of thugs who dress like a wannabe idol group and beat up on Hee-woo (in his past life, before he learned MMA). But after Hee-woo rescues Han-mi from an attempted sexual assult, she decides to focus on her studies and receives tutoring from Hee-woo. Oh, and she’s also Seok-hoon’s illegitimate daughter.

Hee-woo is accepted into Hanguk University, where he meets LEE MIN-SOO (Jung Sang-hoon). Min-soo is something of a professional student, given that he’s bounced around a few majors and is currently starting over again as a law student. On the surface, he seems like an annoying slacker, but behind his affable personality is a keen intelligence and ability to read people.

And finally, Hee-woo meets KIM HEE-AH (Kim Ji-eun), a computer science do-gooder who delivers meals to the elderly and works part-time at a restaurant. She’s also secretly the daughter of a chaebol family, and the suspicious guy who’s been following her around is her bodyguard.

And speaking of creepy stalkers, Hee-woo has an unexpected encounter with Tae-sub’s hitman… who seems to know who Hee-woo is! And once again, I doubted what I thought I already knew about the rules of Hee-woo’s time traveling shenanigans. Did the hitman somehow follow Hee-woo to the past? It didn’t make sense to me, but the encounter led to an epic fight scene was abnormally long for to be just a dream… or so I thought.

After the hitman pushes Hee-woo off a bridge, Hee-woo wakes up from a nightmare that spurs him into reconnecting with his MMA instructor from his previous life. While he’s no longer starting as a novice, Hee-woo needs to kick his training into overdrive if he wants to one day defeat Tae-sub’s hitman.

While Episode 2 introduced us to Hee-woo’s personal Avengers squad, Episode 3 was all about setting the groundwork for Hee-woo’s future financial success — because he will also need a lot of money in addition to his butt-kicking skills.

He decides that the best way for him to make some cash is to invest in real estate. He begins attending court property auctions, but he’s not savvy enough to understand which properties to buy. So Hee-woo latches onto WOO YONG-SOO (Lee Soon-jae), who is a pro at buying up real estate at auction in order to resell them when the area undergoes redevelopment and their value skyrockets.

Yong-soo warns Hee-woo that real estate turns people greedy and causes them to do immoral things, like evicting tenants from his newly acquired properties. Hee-woo remembers that the Woman in Red warned that the path to defeat Tae-sub might mean becoming a bit of a monster himself, so Hee-woo readily agrees to be Yong-soo’s disciple, seemingly prepared to develop amoral attributes in order to enact his revenge.

It quickly becomes apparent, though, that this is more of a “know thy enemy” type of situation. He intends to learn all the Bad Guy tricks of the trade, but he will enact them justly and maintain his white knight virtue. Hee-woo even takes the skills he learned from Yong-soo to purchase Gyu-ri’s family home, which allows her to attend her classes again.

Hee-woo’s professional knowledge from his previous life makes him the star student at Hanguk University, and he’s invited to join a top secret club comprised of the supposed best-of-the-best among the law school’s students and alumni. Among the members are Hee-woo’s sunbae CHOI KANG-JIN (Kim Jin-woo), who was a prosecutor and piece of trash assemblyman in Hee-woo’s past life, and JANG IL-HYUN (Kim Hyung-mook), a successful alum of Hanguk University who’s currently still trying to make a name for himself in the prosecutor’s office.

It is through this club that Hee-woo finds out that Tae-sub is scheming to steal Yong-soo’s properties by forcing him to default on a bank loan, which would bankrupt Yong-soo. Hee-woo warns Yong-soo, and he’s able to sell all of his properties before Tae-sub can swoop in and ruin him. To repay Hee-woo’s kindness, Yong-soo gives Hee-woo his bankbook and asks him to manage and invest the money he earned selling his properties. (Well, that’s an awfully convenient way to set Hee-woo up for future financial stability and riches.)

And a potential first investment practically falls in Hee-woo’s lap when Min-soo introduces Hee-woo to his friend MOON SUNG-HWAN (Kim Do-kyung), who developed a program called Haha Talk. In Hee-woo’s past life, Sung-hwan lost his intellectual property case against the company that stole his program.

Turns out, he submitted his project to a contest being run by Chunha Group, the company owned by Hee-ah’s father Chairman KIM GEONG-YOUNG (Jeon Gook-hwan). Chunha’s CEO, who Geong-young hired at Tae-sub’s recommendation, saw the potential in the program, and with Tae-sub’s backing, plotted to defect to another company and steal Sung-hwan’s code. It was also this series of events that led to the downfall of Chunha group and Geong-young’s subsequent death in Hee-woo’s previous life.

Luckily, in this timeline, Sung-hwan met Hee-woo, who immediately concocts a plan to protect Sung-hwan’s intellectual property. Sung-hwan trusts Hee-woo and follows his advice to record his meeting with Chunha’s CEO, both because Hee-woo seemed like a fortune teller — and one must listen to fortune tellers — and because Min-soo vouched for him.

But there was also a third reason. The day he was set to meet the CEO he received a similar warning via an anonymous text. The text was traced back to a convenience store employee who loaned his phone out to a customer.

Hee-woo and crew take a peek at the convenience store’s security cameras, and it turns out their anonymous sender is the Woman in Red… who also happens to be Tae-sub’s right-hand woman HAN JI-HYUN (Cha Joo-young) in this timeline. And if she’s still alive, that must mean she died and became a reaper before Hee-woo fell to his own death. Dun dun dun!

Not going to lie, that twist got me, but it certainly makes it more understandable that a reaper would be invested in Tae-sub’s downfall. Although, now that the secret is out, I think it’s safe to assume she died because Tae-sub found out she was working against him.

In addition to some nice surprises and gratuitous fight scenes, I found that the pacing was better this week as the episodes became a bit more episodic and each covered a different mini case that was loosely connected to Tae-sub. Is it awfully convenient for the plot that Hee-woo just so happens to know the fate of all these people thanks to random news reports in his past life? Yeah… but I’m just going to go with it. When we’ve got grim reapers and timey-wimey stuff happening, who am I to quibble over Hee-woo’s photographic memory?

 
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