Race: Episodes 5-6

by missvictrix

With the hiring scandal quickly blowing out of proportion — and out of control — our heroine has a lot to face. But the good news is she’s got a lot of people on her side, and they’re rooting for her to show what she’s got.

 
EPISODES 5-6

Well, we didn’t make much (any?) headway in the friends-to-lovers dimension of this tale, but what it lacked in development there (much to my consternation) it made up for in other mysteries, which played out really great. It was obvious from the moment they met that Dong-hoon was into Yoon-jo, so there’s really not much to do there outside of have her be oblivious and have him falling fast, but it’s the rather opaque Jae-min storyline with Yi-jung that is quite interesting.

Once Yoon-jo’s hiring scandals blows up and hits the fan, there’s finally some sense knocked into the PR department by Seyong’s new CCO (a.k.a. Yi-jung). Jae-min does his best to dig for records to prove the legitimacy of Yoon-jo’s hire, but everything’s been conveniently buried. Seyong itself does practically nothing to quite the uproar, their statement only fuels it, and the hate comments are pouring in.

Worse still, the (terrible) Team Leader Song announces that as a solution, Yoon-jo will be relocated to Accounting in order to quiet the uproar. This is the final straw for practically everyone, and thankfully Yoon-jo knows how to stand up for herself and I love her for that (even Chul-joon later gapes, “That girl’s got balls!!”). But Jae-min can’t take it either at this point. He steps in to stand up for Yoon-jo, and after a rather dramatic cubicle-side wrist grab and a shouting match with Team Leader Song (what a scene), Yi-jung appears in their office and summons all of PR to a conference room to deal with the situation once and for all.

The meeting makes a couple of things obvious: the first, that Yi-jung is effective, fair, and pretty badass. The second, that Team Leader Song is a lying toad that will do anything to protect the fact that it was not a blind hire after all, and he’s the one who did the final selection. Still, Yi-jung decides to believe him, and thus Yoon-jo gains new ground. TEAM LEADER JI EUN-JUNG (Kim Jung) gives Yoon-jo her Celltics proposal project after all, along with some tough love (she’s great!), and Yi-jung clearly has her back too. She’s now positioned to shine. Go, Yoon-jo!

Our hero, on the other hand, is not faring as well. After standing up to Team Leader Song (the whole counter-shoving and voice-raising thing didn’t go over too well), he’s quickly moved to the rather lame Team 1, which doesn’t look like anything but moving his desk a few feet but is actually all but a demotion. He’s out of the running for a much-deserved promotion, and now he finds himself having to plan dinners for the executives.

I wonder if at this point anyone has caught on that Jae-min and Yoon-jo know each other? He’s gone from silently rooting for her to vocally defending her to physically protecting her… I’m loving it. I also loved their little tête-à-tête in the stairwell, even if it consisted of Jae-min lying to save Yoon-jo’s self-esteem. Still, a secret stairwell conversation is one of my favorite little storytelling nuggets, and this one was shot beautifully, with gentle pink light and emotions flying all over the place (aside: I think this PD likes stairwell conversations as much as I do!)

But Jae-min’s got secrets other than his long-standing friendship with Yoon-jo: he’s also got a little something going on with Yi-jung. WHAT IS IT? The drama is having so much fun hanging fire here; it’s torture, but I love it. We saw last week how shaken Jae-min was when he met Yi-jung at the new hire event, and this week, she summons him to her office when she’s investigating the Yoon-jo hiring scandal. We see two different slices of this scene; one very formal and tight, the other much more comfortable and honest, and throughout the rest of the episode, they interact quite comfortably. But is it too comfortably?

Jae-min gets utterly drunk, throws up in the street, and then winds up calling Yi-jung to meet. They chat at a swanky bar, and I’ve got all my senses dialed up to Level 11 to catch a hint of what’s going on here. Is she the woman he told Yoon-jo and Eun he fell madly in love with in Santiago? Or, is she his estranged mother after all? (It’s true we know zilch about his family.) Don’t ask me how the drama can balance both of these extremes so well, but they’re doing it, and I’m on the edge of my seat.

If the two prove to be ex-lovers, I actually would have to give the drama a handshake for doing something unexpected for a change (I mean, how many heroes have a cold and estranged mother walk back into their lives?). But also, how would this affect the ~changing~ relationship with Yoon-jo? I still love Jae-min X Yoon-jo, and they’ll never not be my end game. Dong-hoon is sweet, but at least right now, isn’t given anything to do except look competent and moon over Yoon-jo. He has a very small amount of scenes, and in relation to Yi-jung’s also pretty meager screen time, she tears it up when she’s on, while Dong-hoon just makes me want to pat his head and send him on his way.

Clearly the lovelines are my biggest concern here — sorry, not sorry — and the office politics only work for me in that they shape the trajectory of our characters. But in addition to all that, there are several other moving parts that are coming together on the sidelines that are worth mentioning now, since we’re already juggling red herrings and interconnectedness. We know that Team Leader Song is lying and going to get exposed eventually (right?); we also learned that the SNU graduate is the one who leaked the Yoon-jo “scandal,” and I wouldn’t mind her getting comeuppance as well.

On Yi-jung’s side, we also met her ex-husband ATTORNEY AHN (Kim Tae-hoon who literally always wins at playing the complicated husband character) and their daughter whom he raises. It looks like she is now in the same orbit as Yoon-jo’s brat of a younger sister, so if I’ve learned anything from dramaland, it means: chaos is coming. In the meantime, let’s all follow Yoon-jo’s fine example and do some hardcore stress-cleaning to ease our minds.

 
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