Woori the Virgin: Episodes 5-6

by DaebakGrits

Just when you thought this drama couldn’t get any crazier, it ups the ante — but the baby mama drama takes a back seat this week as we focus on daddies. One enthusiastically tries to insert himself into his newfound daughter’s life but fails to see her discomfort, while our daddy-to-be is still caught in his wife’s clutches and is displeased when his own father sides against him.

 
EPISODES 5-6 WEECAP

Woori reacts to Sung-il’s paternity declaration ( a.k.a. his “Darth Vader impression,” as I’m referring to it in my head) with disbelief, but the longer Eun-ran remains silent, the guiltier she appears. Slowly, as the validity of Sung-il’s claim grows, Woori’s anger increases, and we flashback to see the extent of Eun-ran’s lies. Not only did Eun-ran claim Woori’s father died, but she also painted a picture-perfect image of her deceased father — one we, the audience, understand to be too fantastical to have been Sung-il. Unable to face Eun-ran, Woori packs her bags and goes to sleep at the office.

While Woori escapes her mother, Ma-ri returns home to hers after Raphael served her with divorce papers for the second time. Mi-ja is not happy that Ma-ri didn’t stand her ground, so she punches Ma-ri in the eye and tells her to report Raphael for domestic abuse. Once again, Ma-ri does as her mother instructed, and when she arrives at Raphael’s office sporting a bruised eye, she’s accompanied by police officers.

Once Raphael is released from police custody, he threatens to sue her in retaliation, but Ma-ri counters with, “What happens if Woori finds out about this?” Raphael, feeling backed into a corner, drops the issue. Poor guy. Prior to these scenes, I found Ma-ri to be a dumb, amusing pawn in her mother’s gold-digging, but the way she blackmailed Raphael and accused him of domestic abuse was downright disgusting. She may act like a simpering fool around her mother, but when she’s given the opportunity to flex her own villainous ways, it’s clear she enjoys having the upper hand.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, the other father figure in our telenovela-drama (Sung-il) has decided to make up for lost time. In his eagerness, however, he fails to read Woori’s body language, which clearly indicates she’s uncomfortable with his enthusiastic attempts to be a part of her life. She hesitates to accept his invitation to dinner, but after he stares at her hopefully for an excessively long time, she agrees.

The private candlelit dinner is awkwardly intimate and reminded me of the Beast’s courtship of Belle in Disney’s animated retailing of the fairy tale. Except… instead of being gauche because he’s a hideous creature with no social skills, Sung-il bumbles his way through fatherhood, likely defaulting to romantic gestures because his only relationships with women have been intimate, not paternal.

Over dinner, Woori is disappointed to learn that Sung-il is nothing like the father Eun-ran described. Sung-il wasn’t good at basketball or skilled in mathematics, and his “good looks” — which have helped Sung-il earn the most Instagram followers among his peers — are the result of plastic surgery. He also gives Woori a laptop, and she reluctantly accepts it after he repeatedly rejects her protestations.

Eun-ran is not happy that Sung-il is inserting himself into Woori’s life, but he’s eager to be a father now that he’s aware of her existence. He insists that he has a right to know the mysterious circumstances of Woori’s pregnancy, and Eun-ran finally lets him in on the secret of Woori’s non-miraculous conception.

He’s outraged and immediately storms into Jin-hee’s office to air his grievances — as her “uncle,” of course. Unfortunately, he interrupted Jin-hee while she was with a patient (and confirming the patient’s identity for the umpteenth time), and the patient secretly recorded Sung-il’s outburst on her phone. But more on that later…

Before he faces the consequences of his public tirade, he shows up at Woori’s office… with flowers, which does nothing to dispel Ye-ri’s belief that he’s courting Woori. Sung-il may have had the social awareness to hand Ye-ri the flowers at the last minute, but when he pouts that Woori hasn’t used the laptop he gifted her, he unintentionally fuels Ye-ri’s belief that they’re secretly dating. Ye-ri, not wanting to be a third wheel, turns down his invitation to join them for lunch.

Sung-il uses their private meal as an opportunity to discuss Woori’s “situation,” and he offers his unsolicited advice: you should get an abortion. Woori does not appreciate his assumption that being her biological father now grants him the right to advise her on such personal matters. His opinion also dredges up insecurities, and so she asks him what he felt the moment Eun-ran lied that she’d gotten an abortion. He admits that he was “relieved,” and Woori draws a firm line between them.

On top of her own father issues, Woori finds out her baby daddy also may have some problems of his own. Namely a penchant for abusing his seemingly sweet and loving wife, who would still like to make the marriage work. Woori is disgusted by this revelation until Raphael shows her the amount of evidence he has to prove Ma-ri is a crazy-pants adulteress.

He even found a witness — the sweet cleaning lady at Diamond Medical — who can vouch that she saw Ma-ri with a black eye before she met with Raphael. He understands that Woori wants a pair of loving parents to raise the little gummy bear, but even if he tried to reconcile with Ma-ri, it wouldn’t right all of the wrongs.

Woori is affected by Raphael’s earnestness and admires his determination to be a single father. She’s also reminded of her own upbringing and the single mother who raised her — with some help from Grandma, of course. The absence of her father may have been noticeable at events like choir recitals, where having a tall father would have made it easier to spot her family in the audience, but she did not grow up without love.

Although he missed her childhood, Sung-il’s (ham-handed) affection and attempts to make up for lost time appear to be genuine, and according to Eun-ran, he’s always been someone authentically sincere. It wasn’t him that actively pushed for Eun-ran to get an abortion. It was his scary, intimidating mother who dragged Eun-ran to the clinic.

After the video of Sung-il yelling at Jin-hee goes viral, a reporter catches him privately meeting with Woori, and Sung-il agrees to an exclusive interview in exchange for Woori’s anonymity. News that he has a secret love child causes his reputation — and number of Instagram followers — to tank, but he pretends that he is fine when Woori calls to check on him.

Sung-il isn’t the only one going to bat for Woori, though. Raphael meets with Jin-hee to tell her, “You created this giant mess, so you should be the one to clean it up.” And so, Jin-hee posts a video explaining the context of Sung-il’s rant, and his number of Instagram followers skyrockets again.

While all of this craziness has been going on, one person is noticeably absent in Woori’s support group: Gang-jae. KIM MI-YOUNG (Yoo Chae-eun) has been identified as the killer in the Diamond Medical Foundation murder, and Gang-jae is determined to prove that she is somehow connected to Chairman Kim. But all his investigative work and stakeouts have cut into his ability to be there for Woori.

So when Raphael arranges for Woori and her family — Sung-il included — to have a private screening of Eun-ran and Grandma’s home movie of Woori’s choir recital, Gang-jae is late, arriving just in time to see everyone walking out of the building — laughing, smiling, and seemingly not missing his presence. Cue: Gang-jae fading into the shadows as a wave of negative emotions crashes over him. (Dun… Dun… DUN!)

It comes as no surprise that he begins to show his jealous side, but Woori almost instantly picks up on his darkening mood. She holds his hand and shows him affection, even while the rest of her family pays Raphael accolades.

The one person Raphael hasn’t managed to charm, however, is his own father. Duk-bae is keen to overlook all of Ma-ri’s faults and rewards her for her atrocious behavior by putting the title of a building in her name! Duk-bae’s acceptance of Ma-ri is massively inappropriate, so much so that even Raphael is like, “You take her.”

The fact that Duk-bae — who’s already an established cradle robber — seemed to consider the idea was a bit ick, but am I weird for shipping the two of them, if only because it gets Ma-ri out of Raphael’s way of being with Woori?

And just when you think Ma-ri and her dear mama have reached peak train-wreck-that-you-cannot-look-away-from, enter PARK DOO-PAL (Kim Sa-kwon), Ma-ri’s ex-lover, ex-boyfriend, ex-husband who’s still legally married to her. As with all of Ma-ri’s exes, he’s a real winner. I mean that with every ounce of sarcasm I possess, buuuuuut I cannot say that he and Ma-ri aren’t deserving of each other.

As we learn about Ma-ri’s connection to Doo-pal, we also confirm what we’ve already suspected: Mi-ja is into some shady sh!t. A flashback reveals that she was (is?) some sort of gang leader. After having her men beat Doo-pal to a pulp — while Ma-ri watched, btw — he got in a car and drove over Mi-ja, causing the injury that put her in a wheelchair.

Now that Doo-pal is out of prison and aware of the little gold digging scam Ma-ri and Mi-ja have going on, he shows up at Mi-ja’s house to blackmail her and Ma-ri. He wants money in exchange for his silence. Ma-ri puts up a fight, but Doo-pal knocks her out. Mi-ja looks on helplessly while Doo-pal picks up a knife and looms over Ma-ri’s unconscious form with a murderous gleam in his eye, until…

Whack! A picture comes down over Doo-pal’s head, causing him to pass out. And who swung the picture? That’s right, it was Mi-ja, and she’s standing! On her own! Because apparently she’s been faking her injury this whole time, and not even her own daughter is aware of it.

Meanwhile, Woori and Gang-jae go on a glamping trip together to try and rekindle their relationship, which has been on the rocks ever since she was accidentally artificially inseminated. Even though they have to eat raw ramyeon and the rain causes their tent to collapse, all the little setbacks lead to bonding, and through a series of flashbacks, we see how a similar mishap brought them together. And it’s definitely not the meet-cute I was expecting. It was way better.

I assumed that Woori and Gang-jae met through church, but they actually first met when Gang-jae mistook her for a thief he and his partner were tracking down. Startled, Woori dropped Grandma’s giant knife on the ground, and Gang-jae panicked when he saw the potential weapon. So he tased her.

Inexplicably, both of them were immediately smitten with each other, but neither of them did anything about it for two whole years. It wasn’t until Gang-jae heard a false rumor that Woori was signing up to become a nun that he found the gumption to confess. And the rest, you could say, was history.

Their relationship appears to be on the mend, but there is one small problem: Gang-jae is still keeping the fact that he knew Ma-ri was an adulteress a secret from Woori. And when Woori finds out, she’s devastated, but not for the reason we’d expect. Instead, she feels guilty for having to put him in a position where he felt the need to lie.

And speaking of liars, Ma-ri and Mi-ja don’t know what to do with Doo-pal now that they have him tied up in the living room. They’re trying to figure out their next steps when Raphael shows up on the doorstep, having followed Ma-ri to her mother’s house to try and get her to sign the divorce papers. Doo-pal starts crying for help, and Ma-ri is so desperate to keep Raphael from investigating the noise that she signs the papers and grants him a divorce. Woo! Finally!

Raphael’s newfound marital freedom has him extra excited to be a father, so much so that he’s eager to show Woori the nursery he’s built for the gummy bear. He proudly tells her that he personally picked out everything in the room, and if Woori had any lingering doubts that he would be a good father, they were eradicated. I mean, who can resist that proud papa face of his? Not me, that’s for sure.

Sung-il, on the other hand, has moved on from trying to win over his daughter to trying to woo Eun-ran. At first, she appears receptive to his attention, but she has second thoughts. As she explains to Sung-il, she doesn’t have any long-term dating experience, and her own track record makes her wary of trying to rekindle a relationship with him. If they break up, they wouldn’t be the only ones affected, and Eun-ran doesn’t want Woori to get hurt as a consequence.

Eun-ran’s rejection of Sung-il transitions into Woori and Gang-jae getting dressed up to take couple photos together. Although it is something Woori has always wanted to do with her boyfriend, she is faking her enthusiasm, and Gang-jae is not as intuitive to her feelings as she is to his. He fails to see that her eyes are brimming with tears and that her smile is forced until the cameraman points it out.

Woori rushes out of the photography studio, and when Gang-jae stops her, she tells him that she wants to break up — not only because of his lies, but because she has also complicated his life with her unplanned pregnancy. (And the fact that she told him she wouldn’t hang out with Raphael on her own, but then she did and lied to him about it. She fails to mention that in her break-up speech, though.)

He doesn’t believe she’s being sincere, and so he demands that she looks him in the eye when she breaks up with him. As the rain starts to dramatically pour around them, she returns the engagement ring and meets his eyes. Then she runs off, leaving him to look after her pitifully.

As a member of Team Raphael, I would be lying if I said that the break-up made me sad. Instead, all I can think about is how both Raphael and Woori are free to date each other! Woo hoo! Gang-jae certainly has his moments where he appears to be a sweet and doting boyfriend, and those sides of him were pretty heavily emphasized this week. And yet, despite the intentional time given to them as a couple, I find myself in this odd position where I somehow dislike them as a couple even more than before.

Although their meet-cute and courtship is both hilarious and sweet, it’s also a subversion of the typical rom-com romance, which usually tends to feature the build-up to an official relationship, while overlooking what happens after.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a sucker for those types of stories and try not to look too deeply beneath the surface (where’s the fun in that?), but as we see this week, Woori and Gang-jae’s fairy tale courtship is rife with communication issues, and still is. Both of them sat on their feelings for two years, and it took fear (and a misunderstanding) to prompt Gang-jae into action. And after three years of dating, they are only now sharing their version of events with each other.

Their breakup is just as dramatic as the rest of their fairy tale, and I’m curious to see what happens next. I doubt this is the end for either of our mismatched couples, but I’m weirdly invested in seeing Gang-jae spiral into darkness.

As much as I want this drama to be a wacky romance story between Woori and Raphael, I also want it to be Gang-jae’s villainous origin story. And if the literal shadows that keep crossing his face are any indication, I think I’m going to get exactly what I want.

(P.S. I’m sorry for the delayed weecap, Beanies, but I took a little trip to see Monsta X in concert! The experience was awesome, but it also involved a very long round-trip train ride with no wifi. *cries in Millennial*)

 
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