Trolley: Episodes 13-14

by missvictrix

The only way to describe the penultimate week of our drama is: harrowing. From new revelations to an utterly shocking inversion of what we thought we knew, this week delivers a mix of chills, thrills, and a river of tears. Can I go home now?

 
EPISODES 13-14 WEECAP

Though Trolley has been drama that consistently builds tension as it progresses, this week it reached a zenith that feels almost impossible. Despite being full of dramatic and mature themes from the start, there is something in the way that Trolley gracefully doles out information that makes it land with so much more impact than if things were smashed or voices were raised.

And so, we open with Hye-joo confronting Joong-do over where he really was the night Ji-hoon died, and before he opens his mouth, Joong-do’s bomb swallow says it all. Hye-joo asks him to clarify, since she can’t put all the pieces together but knows he lied about something, and he refuses to answer. This shatters Hye-joo.

Before they can even get to the bottom of this mess, though, Seung-hee finally snaps and writes a post telling the story of the past incident from the eyes of her (lying) mother. It goes viral, and now the TV appearance is even more necessary. Joong-do presses Hye-joo to make a public statement again, but it’s not until Yoon-seo — her only flesh and blood — starts to question her mother’s side of the story that she agrees to do it. Of the truckload of heartbreaks and betrayals this drama has offered us thus far, I think seeing Yoon-seo question her mother was one of the worst.

In a move he’ll likely come to regret forever, Joong-do decides they should wait a day before the TV appearance to let the “wildfire” go crazy a little more. Woo-jae cautions that his wife will suffer all the more, but Joong-do’s go-to answer remains steady: yeah but it’s for the greater good.

However, in the space of the following day, all hell breaks loose. In an amazing feat of writing, the drama inverts everything we thought we saw, believed, and experienced in Episode 1 of our drama (what feels like ten years ago after everything they’ve been through since then).

To start, Hye-joo meets up with her doctor acquaintance who decides to break her doctor-patient confidentiality to tell Hye-joo some important truths. Hye-joo learns what we did over the last few episodes, plus a few more tidbits: that Soo-bin had a miscarriage, that she was impregnated while Ji-hoon was in prison so it couldn’t be his child, and that she also wasn’t raped.

Hye-joo is in a self-described “living hell” at this point, with Joong-do refusing to answer her questions. “Do you know how it feels when the husband I love is hiding something from me? I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” (Girl, just wait!) Finally, Joong-do decides to confess that he met Ji-hoon that night. And, as we have come to expect from this drama, there’s always a convincing response or reaction that takes things down a notch from the crazy to the understandable — I felt guilty over scolding him, I didn’t want you to know, blah blah blah. And so, as Joong-do pleads his side of the story again, and our couple is (mostly) reconciled.

Hye-joo wakes late in the night to pouring rain, which sends her to her studio to tend to the dehumidifier. Then, in the pouring rain, umbrella to umbrella, she meets Soo-bin. Soo-bin has next-level information to drop. We learned, sadly and slowly, that Joong-do is a lying lizard, but Soo-bin now blurts out the truth she’s long been hiding: that Joong-do and Yeo-jin are having an affair. It’s a heck of a cliffhanger, but our next episode digs into this more, with all the dialogue and flashbacks and proof you need to believe this is the truth.

Soo-bin says that on the night he died, Ji-hoon was going to confront his dad about the affair (and this is also what Soo-bin was blackmailing Joong-do over when we saw that jump-cut to their van conversation).

Turns out Ji-hoon was embroiled with Soo-bin’s drug-dealer boyfriend JUNG-DAE (of the “JD” red herring), but when we see Ji-hoon and Soo-bin in what was technically Episode 1, he’s more a warm-hearted kid caught up with a bad crowd than anything else. He takes Soo-bin to his house, knowing his mom will take her in and help her while she’s trying to get away from the crazy JD. But what they find is that the “JD” at home is even worse than the JD they are hiding from. The two overhear an argument between Joong-do and Yeo-jin that’s incredibly vague, but definitely suggests they’re having an affair.

I had my doubts, since the drama has employed so much sleight of hand with its reveals… but to make sure we’re sure, we see Ji-hoon five years in the past witnessing said “relations” first hand. He throws up in horror and I’m just as horrified; it’s so painfully obvious that this moment, and the betrayal of his father, is what turned him into the troubled boy we thought we knew.

I love love love how the drama took the “problem child” paradigm and totally turned it on its head, taking the hero (Joong-do) and villain (Ji-hoon) and effectively switching their roles. Now, Ji-hoon is the heroic one, standing up for his mother, confronting his father, etc., and Joong-do is the true scoundrel. I also like how this perspective makes every single thing Soo-bin did while staying in the house make sense — from her sympathy for Hye-joo, to her rancor towards Yeo-jin and Joong-do, to the sense that there was more going on than we were privy to.

True to the woman we’ve come to know, Hye-joo doesn’t sit on this information too long. She goes into Joong-do’s study, asks a few probing questions, and then drops the bomb: “Did Ji-hoon try to blackmail you like Soo-bin did, threatening to expose your affair?” *OMONA*

This scene is incredibly tense, mostly because Hye-joo is so calm and her voice is so gentle, while Joong-do quickly plays his usual cards. In a particularly biting line, Hye-joo asks ironically, “Was I fooled by Soo-bin again?” It’s clear that Hye-joo doesn’t trust a word he says anymore; it’s also clear that Soo-bin has been telling the truth, and Joong-do is the one that’s long been busy undermining that truth.

He denies any affair, of course, and Hye-joo says she’ll just go ask Yeo-jin… who happens to be standing at the door when she opens it. Joong-do and Yeo-jin go back and forth, and for every time Joong-do says, “It’s not true,” Yeo-jin says, “It is true.” She so clearly wants to escape this situation that she doesn’t care anymore.

I don’t think there’s a word to explain Hye-joo’s emotional state at this point. We have seen her sucked into this steady downward spiral since the drama opened, and now, everything has been ripped away from her. As she says to Yeo-jin, she and Joong-do were the only family she knew. “How could you do this to me?” Yeo-jin doesn’t answer; Hye-joo asks her to leave the house.

Meanwhile, Joong-do’s marriage and family life might be in a heap at his feet, but all he can think about is the TV appearance they’ve scheduled and whether it’s enough to turn the public opinion in favor of his amendment. Hye-joo stonily refuses the interview, and really, who can blame her. She has nothing more to lose. Then, Seung-hee barges into the studio, furious with Hye-joo and more gaslit than ever — despite Ki-young (please be a good man) telling her the truth. Then, to top it off, Yoon-seo calls her mom angrily, telling her how she’s being bullied at school.

Something shifts in Hye-joo as a consequence of these things, and in the next scene, we see the pair doing the live TV interview. Hye-joo calmly tells her story of the assault and all the subsequent hardship, but then our episode ends. I’m putting all (all!) my money on Hye-joo using that interview to take Joong-do down for the lying cheating snake that he has proven himself to be.

I keep reminding myself, though, that this is not a revenge drama — and it’s interesting, because what a revenge drama would have used for mere setup of the vengeance to come has been the full content of this entire drama. All the harrowing and wrongful things that happen to our heroine are not prologue to a satisfying revenge; instead, we’re experiencing them with her live, and seeing her world crumble around her. Which then begs the question: Where do we go from here?

The other thread the drama is pulling is how Ji-hoon actually died. Soo-bin is suspicious of Joong-do, and rightly so. Hye-joo also becomes suspicious, but Joong-do tells his side of what happened that night, and it checks out against what we saw in the first episode.

What is filled in for us, though, is what Woo-jae was doing during that time. And in another gush of the chills, Joong-do turns ominously to Woo-jae and all but asks him outright if he murdered his son. Woo-jae denies, and even shares blackbox footage of Ji-hoon slipping in the river and likely drowning. (Still, this is Trolley, and it’s vague enough that there’s room for a fuller narrative later).

While our TV interview is being broadcast, we see Seung-hee and her mother watching it, and we see Yeo-jin taking a mouthful of pills. This is all bad enough, right? We don’t need anything else horrific, right? Right! But then, we get a short flashback to one of Yeo-jin and Woo-jae’s meetings, and we hear her tell him that five years ago, Joong-do raped her.

I have to hand it to this drama. Just when I think I know where it’s going, it flips the tables on me. It’s been doing it all along, and I thought I got wise, but it continues to flip the narrative in surprising ways as it goes. And honestly, it has flipped so many times I don’t even know where we stand. What is the drama truly trying to say about marriage, family, politics, ethics, etc.? I don’t know yet, but I also love that it’s making us wait till the bitter end to see where we’re actually going.

I love Trolley for its skillful storytelling, but I also can’t wait for the stress and suspense to be over — it’s become such a different kind of story than I was expecting, and even so different from the one we were first sold so many weeks ago. What started as a woman hiding her past to protect herself and her family actually devolved into this truly unsettling story about (at least right now) how much deception — and self-deception — people are capable of. It’s more shuddery and disturbing than I expected it to be, and I’m going to need a serious dose of rom-com once this thing is over.

 
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