The Golden Spoon: Episodes 15-16 (Final)

by solstices

At long last, our spoon boys join hands to take the evil spoon swapper down, piecing their information together to catch him off guard. The Golden Spoon does its best to tie up its narrative in a way that’s satisfying for its characters, but as a viewer, I’m left wanting more depth.

EPISODES 15-16 WEECAP

Devastatingly, Dad succumbs to his stab wound — and it’s the catalyst for a whole lot of upheaval. Both Stepmom and CEO Hwang cover up Joon-tae’s latest murder, though for different reasons entirely. Stepmom’s just trying to protect her son no matter the cost, whereas Doshin Group’s reputation is always at the forefront of CEO Hwang’s mind.

When Joon-tae fights with Seung-cheon, CEO Hwang intervenes with a gun to Joon-tae’s head. Though Joon-tae winds up holding the gun, the altercation ends with CEO Hwang having the upper hand, as always. He cruelly reveals the truth of Joon-tae’s parentage, exposing how Stepmom has been lying to him all this while.

Joon-tae confronts Stepmom, who refuses to admit the truth till the bitter end. Disillusioned and betrayed too many times to count, Joon-tae cocks the gun at her — then raises it to his own head. Before anyone can stop him, he pulls the trigger.

That’s the last we see of Joon-tae, and it’s quite the anticlimactic end. Though his death is a tragic one, he was never held accountable for his school shooting, or for the trauma he inflicted on Tae-yong. Given all the build-up to that plot point, it feels a little like the wind has been taken out of our sails.

On the other hand, Dad’s death spurs the Lee family into mustering up a fair bit of courage. Paying a visit to the opulent Hwang residence, Mom comments that CEO Hwang looks poor. He’s surrounded by all his riches, yet he’s never satisfied.

Casting her gaze upon the fancy art tools that CEO Hwang used to drive Dad’s poverty in, Mom picks up a pencil, musing that it suits a poor man like CEO Hwang. Then she snaps it in two, leaving CEO Hwang’s check of condolence money behind to cover the cost.

Losing Dad has been a harsh wake-up call for Seung-cheon, and he finally apologizes to Tae-yong for stealing his life. He offers to let Tae-yong reclaim his original place, but Tae-yong turns him down — he’d still rather live as “Seung-cheon.”

Seung-cheon’s change of heart is a cause of concern for CEO Hwang, who decides he needs to make the swap irreversible. That means Tae-yong nearly gets kidnapped by a group of hired thugs, though he’s saved in the nick of time by Seung-cheon and Moon-ki (the latter of whom basically takes the thugs out single-handedly).

Having found out that CEO Hwang conveniently found Yo-han after he supposedly committed suicide, Seung-cheon connects the dots and figures out that CEO Hwang was originally Kwon Yo-han. Yet again, CEO Hwang is trying to make a spoon swap permanent.

Seung-cheon attempts to put CEO Hwang behind bars, by handing a compiled list of CEO Hwang’s slush funds and financial crimes to the prosecution. He’s prepared to go down with him as penance for stealing others’ lives.

Instead, CEO Hwang pulls an uno reverse card — he’s also handed over evidence to the prosecution, incriminating “Tae-yong” for CEO Na’s murder. Through a flashback, we learn that CEO Na had threatened CEO Hwang with footage of him murdering “Yo-han,” leading to his own death at the hands of CEO Hwang.

While all this is going on, Tae-yong’s off on a mission of his own — which is to ask for a refund for his golden spoon, ha. The spoon granny is befuddled, having expected Seung-cheon instead. She mutters that Seung-cheon won’t get to hear the last rule of the spoon, since she only tells it to her spoon proteges on the last day of the ten-year period.

That nugget of information comes in handy later, when Tae-yong confronts CEO Hwang for framing Seung-cheon. CEO Hwang sneers that Seung-cheon will never revisit the spoon granny again, just like he never did. And that’s his mistake, because Tae-yong realizes it means CEO Hwang doesn’t know that others can access his memories by eating with his spoon.

Thus begins the hunt for CEO Hwang’s golden spoon! While an attempted heist at the Doshin building proves fruitless, Seung-cheon eventually realizes that CEO Hwang’s spoon is hiding in plain sight, displayed in Alex Boo’s art gallery. Seung-cheon eats with CEO Hwang’s golden spoon, and he finally learns the full extent of CEO Hwang’s murderous past.

So does Joo-hee, whose broadcast station colleagues have stumbled upon the CCTV footage that CEO Na threatened CEO Hwang with. Joo-hee enlists the help of popular influencer Yeo-jin to disseminate the video, and with that, the entire nation knows of CEO Hwang’s sordid crime.

At long last, CEO Hwang gets his comeuppance, and Stepmom gets her revenge for Joon-tae’s death by tipping the police off to his location. With Moon-ki’s help in digging up evidence, Seung-cheon is exonerated from CEO Na’s murder.

Still, it’s not over till it’s over. Seung-cheon returns to the Hwang residence to pack up his things, which provides a prime opportunity for him to get poisoned by a spiked drink. Joo-hee weeps over his conspicuously covered corpse, grieving all her happy memories with Seung-cheon.

Three years later. Tae-yong is now a successful manhwa author, having drawn the story of the golden spoon, heh. Thanking his parents for helping him come this far, Tae-yong says that he is the golden spoon; in other words, he’s rich just by having such wonderful parents.

Back at home, the Lee family watches Tae-yong’s interview in a spacious new apartment. Seung-ah calls her husband over to join them, and yay, it’s Moon-ki! It’s nice to see that the Lee family has finally escaped the clutches of poverty, and that Moon-ki is also a part of that happiness.

CEO Hwang gets released on a stay of execution, proving the corruption of the legal system, but it isn’t freedom that’s waiting for him beyond the prison walls. Instead, it’s a glass of the very same poison he fed Seung-cheon, courtesy of Stepmom. She isn’t out to kill him, though — all he gets is two diluted spoonfuls, just enough to keep him immobilized and invalid.

Trapped in his own body, CEO Hwang is barely more than a shadow of his former self. However, Stepmom’s revenge doesn’t end there — she reveals that Yo-han was Joon-tae’s father. As it sinks in that Joon-tae was his biological son, a single tear rolls down CEO Hwang’s cheek. For someone who was so greedy for power and control, he’s lost all of that now, unable to even properly grieve the son he killed.

Joo-hee’s job takes her to an interview with a philanthropic gardener, and she goes to meet the reclusive man on the beach. Lo and behold, it’s Seung-cheon. How is he still alive, you ask? Well, it turns out that the Hwang family gardener (cameo by Na In-woo) also had his own golden spoon, and his swap lasted all of three seconds before he drank the poisoned juice and died in Seung-cheon’s place.

It’s unclear how much Seung-cheon knows, since he left the Hwang residence with his golden spoon in his pocket. He’s also read Tae-yong’s manhwa, and he muses that he sympathizes with the protagonist. He, too, hopes that the people who love him would still recognize him, even with a different name and appearance.

It’s the exact wish Seung-cheon once made, and it seems to strike a chord in Joo-hee. Whether she recognizes him — and whether he knows the truth of his own identity — is left up to our interpretation. As the two gaze at the setting sun, content to bask in this moment together, Seung-cheon narrates:

This world is still unfair. But that dazzling, golden sunset is fair to everyone. I know how to cherish this sunset, and so I am rich.

With that, the drama ends on a hopeful note, wrapping all its twists and turns up in as neat of a bow as it can manage. Honestly, I still don’t know how I feel about the finale — technically, it hit the narrative beats it’s been setting up, but I’m still left feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

I get that it was supposed to come full circle, in that Joo-hee still recognised Seung-cheon as per his wish, but it fell flat because of how abruptly that last switch was shoehorned in. It felt like a deus ex machina to get Seung-cheon out of his predicament and give him a fresh start.

That’s a trend in this show, and it’s one of my issues with it — many characters, such as Alex Boo, existed simply for convenience. I wish the drama explained the spoon peddler’s motivations, instead of simply waving her off as a magical plot device. Why is she even selling the spoons in the first place? All those rules seem to suggest that she’s trying to teach greedy, money-hungry people a lesson, but at the end of the day she ruined many lives and took no responsibility for any of it.

The drama gave us a cast of such interestingly complex and morally gray characters, and then it threw them to the whims of its plot. I wanted to delve deeper into their moral dilemmas, not watch them run around in circles just to pull off yet another plot twist.

Though her machinations got tiring pretty quick, I thought Yeo-jin was a compelling character. Yeo-jin developed a protectiveness over Seung-cheon, because she felt like the pillar of support she never got to have herself. She likely conflated sympathy with love, since she’d never received genuine love her whole life.

It felt like Yeo-jin wanted to give Seung-cheon the affection that she always craved, going to great lengths for him in the unconscious hope that he’d do the same for her — which explains her deep hurt and betrayal when he didn’t reciprocate. Even though Seung-cheon has never given her any reason to fall for him, only manipulating her feelings when it served his needs, Yeo-jin still latched onto him because she was unconsciously projecting her past self onto him.

I wonder if the same also applies to Joo-hee, since Seung-cheon represented the independence that she dreamed of. She was initially attracted to Seung-cheon’s diligence, admiring how he provided for himself. He was who she wanted to be, and it was her escape from her stifling chaebol life. Perhaps this would explain how Joo-hee’s love for Seung-cheon lasted so long despite knowing him for all of one week?

As our main character, Seung-cheon is someone we’re supposed to root for, but I felt less and less invested in him as the drama went on. It felt like the writers weren’t quite sure what to do with his character, going from ruthless anti-hero one minute and sympathetic hero the next. Seung-cheon was a product of his circumstances, but many of his motivations were self-serving, despite his moments of concern for his family. By the time his realization and redemption arc came, I was already too detached to care all that much.

Till the very end, Tae-yong kept getting the short end of the narrative stick, and as a longtime fan of Lee Jong-won, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Tae-yong’s greatest act of agency was choosing to keep his swapped life, and even that was contingent on whether Seung-cheon would keep his promise and not visit the spoon granny at the last minute.

While I suppose one could argue that Tae-yong got the better end of the deal anyway, I wish he had more say in shaping his own fate. I cheered with so much excitement when he figured out CEO Hwang’s achilles heel, only for that strategy to end up being commandeered by Seung-cheon. Given how much CEO Hwang has tormented and abused Tae-yong, I wish Tae-yong got to play a larger and more active role in taking him down, rather than merely a couple of verbal spars.

The Golden Spoon raised many pertinent and relevant social issues, but I felt that the drama failed to capitalize on that. It was a rather shallow take on the dichotomy of rich versus poor, favoring dramatic stakes and shock value over insightful commentary. It’s such a shame, because the drama had so many avenues to expand further, but it never took them.

The very idea of the golden spoon itself is a commentary on how the poor are trapped in structures of inequality that prevent them from rising past their social class. This lack of class mobility means that the poor can never become rich; hence the only way out for Seung-cheon is to literally be the rich person by stealing his life.

That’s not to say that the drama didn’t try to talk about its social issues, of course. One example is the confrontation between Tae-yong and CEO Hwang this week; while the latter claims that wealth is unfair and talent ought to win out, Tae-yong declares that humans are the same regardless of social class or ability. CEO Hwang stands for meritocracy, but how fair can a meritocratic system really be when it is founded upon inequalities that create an uneven playing field? Tae-yong’s idealism is hopeful on an ideological level, but Seung-cheon’s pragmatism holds weight too.

Honestly, I did enjoy this drama — as much as I bemoaned the endless twists and turns, trying to keep up with its unpredictability each week did provide much fun and amusement. However, as someone who wants to care about my characters as more than just agents advancing a plot, I can’t help but feel disappointed by the drama’s wasted potential.

The drama shone most when it had its characters working in tandem, but those scenes were too little, too late. If one thing’s for sure, it’s that The Golden Spoon definitely takes the cake for the most — and the longest — time skips in a single drama.

 
RELATED POSTS

• Premiere Watch: The Empire, The Golden Spoon, One Dollar Lawyer
• Wealth determines rank in MBC’s The Golden Spoon
• Yook Sung-jae and Lee Jong-won swap lives in MBC’s Golden Spoon
• Yook Sung-jae and Lee Jong-won are prince and pauper in Golden Spoon
• Yook Sung-jae changes his fate with a Golden Spoon
• First script reading for MBC’s upcoming fantasy Golden Spoon