Moon in the Day: Episodes 7-8

by lovepark

The clock is ticking for our 1,500-year-old ghost, and if he wants to free himself from this unending curse, he needs to quickly get to the bottom of his tragic past. Unfortunately, the key to this mystery lies in the hands of his reincarnated love, and even though she wants to help, memories are a fickle thing. To complicate matters, another angry spirit prowls behind them, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice and ruin our vengeful ghost’s plans to leave this world once and for all.

 
EPISODES 7-8

Do Ha’s secret is out in the open, and quite a few people have figured out his true identity — including Young-hwa. Though she accepts his tall tale after some convincing, her reaction to the 1,500-year-old stalker is (understandably) hostile. She was traumatized by Do Ha as a child, so his requests to end his torment sound like whining to her ears. She tells him that she is not Han Ri-ta and gives him some advice: move on already.

Despite Young-hwa’s declaration to cut ties with Do Ha, the dreams continue. The night Do Ha helped Ri-ta escape, the two of them were surrounded, and he ended up shielding her with his body. When Do Ha woke up, his father (note: I’ve been incorrectly calling him stepfather when he is technically Do Ha’s adoptive father) gave him a chance to repent by killing the Gaya general’s daughter with his own two hands.

When Do Ha refused, his father swung his sword… and killed the servants in the room. Now only the three of them knew Ri-ta’s true identity, and Daddy Dearest ordered Do Ha to marry Ri-ta. The forbidden lovers would now become each other’s shackle, and though they both knew living this way would be hell on earth, they decided to walk down that path together.

Young-hwa wakes up from her dream with an ache in her heart and feels guilty for lashing out at Do Ha the other day. While a part of her still wants to run away and reveal everything to Min-oh, she gives Do Ha another chance. After apologizing to him for speaking too harshly, she agrees to help him because she is also curious about how his story with Ri-ta will end.

However, the moment Young-hwa joins team Do Ha, the dreams stop. She thinks a few more months or even years should not be an issue for a spirit as old as him, but Do Ha tells her that he needs to lift this curse quickly for her sake. Before he can explain, Yi-seul interrupts their conversation, and as usual, Do Ha finds her overbearing and Young-hwa gets a little jealous seeing the fake couple get cozy.

While another dreamless night passes, Young-hwa’s thirtieth birthday approaches, and her firefighter colleagues gift her two tickets to the amusement park. Though she plans to enjoy her present with her sister, Do Ha crashes her party and tags along with his manager. With a string of ominous events occurring around them (more on this later), Do Ha is concerned for Young-hwa’s safety, and his promise to not let anyone else kill her this time hints at a different danger lurking in the shadows.

Given Jun-oh’s top star status, Do Ha wears a bunny mask to hide his face, much to his disgruntlement, and spends most of the day chasing after Young-hwa. She wants to go on all the rides, but Do Ha finds none of these dangerous contraptions amusing. After a few roller coasters, he eventually gives up on “protecting” Young-hwa and storms out of the park.

However, Do Ha underestimates Jun-oh’s popularity, and the moment he walks around without his mask, a mob of fans crowd him. As he looks around helplessly, Young-hwa rushes to his side and grabs his hand. The two of them run throughout the park and end up hiding in a haunted house where Do Ha (AKA the 1,500-year-old ghost) gets scared by the fake ghosts inside.

As Young-hwa and Do Ha scream and laugh all the way to the exit, this brief moment of happiness overwhelms him for a moment. Turning silent, Do Ha stares at Young-hwa and asks what life would have been like if they were both ordinary. Young-hwa understands the weight of his words and watches him in silence, unable to answer.

While our leads grow closer to the truth as well as to each other, their enemy has also been busy with his own plans. Chul-hwan, who is most likely possessed by Do Ha’s adoptive father, is pulling the strings in the present and ruining multiple people’s lives. His first sacrificial pawn is Tae-ju who gets tricked into writing a suicide note and then gets run over by Min-oh’s attorney. Though poor Tae-ju survived the crash, Chul-hwan convinces the attorney to dispose of the body, and days later, the police discover his corpse on the shore.

All these machinations are merely a setup to catch a bigger fish: Min-oh. With the attorney’s help, Chul-hwan meets with his target and plants a seed of doubt in him. Already growing suspicious of his younger brother, Min-oh readily follows Chul-hwan’s instructions to quiz Do Ha, and when the latter fails, his misgivings turn into certainty: the current Jun-oh is not the little brother he used to know.

When Min-oh hears back from the hospital that no treatment is available for Jun-oh’s cancer, he becomes desperate to save his brother. Though he scoffed at Chul-hwan’s claims that Jun-oh was possessed by an evil spirit, this nonsensical explanation is now his last hope. Walking into the lion’s den, Min-oh asks what he should do, and Chul-hwan tells him to kill Young-hwa.

On the ride home from the amusement park, Do Ha and Young-hwa sleep in the back, and their heads touch as they remember their wedding night. The newlyweds wore somber expressions as they prepared to consummate their marriage, and he asked if she was ready to call him her husband. Cupping his face, she told him to smile rather than look so sad when asking her such things.

Out of all the new developments, the addition of a deadline is my favorite. It adds some real tension to the present-day story and explains why Do Ha has been “stuck” for so long. It seems Ri-ta and all her reincarnations have also been cursed alongside Do Ha, and there’s something poetic about two lovers forever separated like the faces of a coin — always together but on opposite ends. While he is forced to live by his love’s side, she is forced to move on and possibly repeat the death of that fateful night over and over again. I’m not quite sure why Do Ha and Ri-ta are in this predicament in the first place, but hopefully as Young-hwa remembers their past, the show will reveal how they ended up where they did.

I do wonder, however, if the previous reincarnations all died at thirty because if they did, the math seems strange. Maybe reincarnations don’t occur immediately after death, or maybe hitting thirty holds some other significance besides dying? Either way, something major is about to happen very soon, and hopefully, we will also get some answers about our vengeful ghost and what exactly he wants to do in the present because right now, I’m about as confused as he is.

 
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