Lovely Runner: Episodes 1-2

by Dramaddictally

Squeeing straight out the gate, Lovely Runner is off to a cute, funny, fresh start that I can only say good things about. Our resident fangirl and her idol crush turn out to be more than meets the eye in this time-slip drama, which has perfect casting, solid storytelling, and enough pretty to sustain us on dopamine hits alone for the next eight weeks. If you’re not already watching, run to it!

 
EPISODES 1-2

With one of our leads a manic mess and the other a flustered flirt, this show is pulling up my happiness capacity to new levels. Kim Hye-yoon and Byun Woo-seok play off each other in the most hilarious and heartbreaking ways that I really can’t imagine anyone else in these roles. (And with Byun Woo-seok on my screen, why would I want to?)

The drama starts on the serious side, with one character coming to terms with the loss of her ability to walk and the other settled on suicide, but the honey-sweet storytelling is already cradling us toward a happier ending. With the amount of heart clutching happening on my side, I have no idea how I’ll make it until next Monday.

We start in July 2009 in the depths of despair with IM SOL (Kim Hye-yoon) in the hospital following an accident that will confine her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. On the radio, a new idol group called Eclipse is being interviewed, and they’re calling one lucky fan who will get to speak to the members.

RYU SUN-JAE (Byun Woo-seok) is the lead vocalist (and visual, omo) of Eclipse and he’s calling Sol’s phone from the radio show. She picks up, but she’s never heard of the group and is irate that such happy people exist in the world when there are people like her who are suffering so much.

However, it’s pretty obvious that Sun-jae already knows her somehow. “Thank you for being alive,” he says. “Stay alive. Because it’s so nice outside.” To which Sol responds by sobbing her little heart out.

We then skip to New Year’s Eve 2022, where Sol has adjusted to her new life on wheels and become an ardent Eclipse fan with an expensive Sun-jae bias. Her whole room is decked out in merch — including a life-size Sun-jae cutout, which she sends kisses to on her way out the door to see him in person at her first-ever Eclipse concert.

En route to the show, we get a little exposition about the past. Before she was an Eclipse fangirl, Sol had a crush on some other boy back in high school — and didn’t even realize that Sun-jae freakin’ lived across the street! WHAT?! But now she’s trying to make up for lost time by looking at Sun-jae’s high school yearbook pictures (to which she has the appropriate response: “Eeeeee! Omo, omo, omo, omo.” Yes, girl. Yes.)

But all this happiness and optimism is about to come skittering down when a string of rough events befall our heroine right in a row. First, she gets called for an internship interview that she’s been waiting for — and even leaves the pre-concert events to attend — only to be told that the facilities aren’t wheelchair accessible and so they won’t hire her.

Still, our live-wire leading lady doesn’t let it get her down. She returns to the concert, ready to perk up her spirits, but realizes she’s lost her ticket and can’t get inside the venue. And yet, this girl still puts on her Sun-jae headband and parties outside by herself while the music plays inside.

And inside, Sun-jae and the boys put on a show that contains so many outfit changes and sweat-dampened dimples I’m about to drop dead. If this drama aims to speak straight to the fangirl heart, it sure knows what it’s doing.

After the show, the bad luck continues. Sol’s phone drops on the ground and cracks and then her wheelchair runs out of battery while she’s trying to cross a crazy-long bridge — alone, in the freezing-cold snow. I mean, this day could not get any worse. And so, she cries.

But just then, Sun-jae is driving by and sees her. He gets out of his van in the most idol-y way possible, with an umbrella that he holds over her head against the elements. She looks up in disbelief and he coolly asks what she’s doing. “Is your wheelchair broken?” (How he’s able to make even a line like that sound flirtatious is beyond me, but he pulls it off.)

Sol is still crying but this time it’s happy tears. She’s smiling and stuttering out that she’s a fan, and she wants to say how grateful she is for what he said to her all those years ago on the radio — he made her want to live again. But she doesn’t say it (and he doesn’t know the impression he made on her life).

He offers her a ride just as her friend rolls up to offer her a ride too (ugh, timing), and so she goes with her friend (in the world’s most questionable decision ever) — but gives Sun-jae a small jar of something that she knows he likes. In the moment, it’s not clear exactly what she gave him, but it’s a clue that we need to hold onto for later.

We then move on to darker terrain. We learned before the concert that Sun-jae wants to retire as an idol but everyone around him is angry for it and trying to stop him. When we see him after he parts with Sol, there are bottles of pills scattered around his hotel room and he’s standing on the balcony looking ready to jump. There’s a splash in the hotel pool, and the next thing we know uri Sun-jae is being pronounced dead on January 1, 2023.

Sol is one of the first to receive the news and she goes out to try to find him at the hospital. On her way, she drops the watch she’s been wearing — which once belonged to Sun-jae (and she paid heaping money for). To retrieve it from the water where it fell, she throws herself out of her wheelchair and pulls her body along to get to it. There on the wet ground, sobbing and screaming to Sun-jae at his time of death, the watch goes haywire and Sol suddenly wakes up in 2008, in her high school classroom.

Everything is just as it was back then. Her legs work. She’s in uniform at an all girl’s school. And Sun-jae is alive and well — and on the swim team at the boy’s school just across the way. (Oh I love this.) At first, Sol thinks she’s dreaming — so, why stay in class! She runs over to find Sun-jae at his swim meet and cries happy tears when she sees him, “Sun-jae-ah!” Sprinting, she grabs his wet, half-naked body in a hug and can’t be pushed away even when he tries. “It must have been so hard for you. I didn’t know how much pain you were in.” Then she looks at his face and tells him she loves him.

And well, that gets her dragged out by security.

The thing is, she can’t figure out why she’s not waking up. Maybe she’s actually dead? She settles on that idea and when she sees Sun-jae again later in the street, she thinks he’s a ghost too. “Let’s live together!” she yells, meaning “let’s stay alive together,” but he thinks she means “let’s move in together” and calls for a taxi to high-tail it out of there.

And here we have our push-pull setup that just keeps getting funnier. Each time Sol tries to get close to Sun-jae, she does something to repel him (and there’s a hilarious graphic on the screen to show how far away he’s getting from her every time she messes up). But Sol can’t be deterred because she’s decided to stick by Sun-jae’s side and stop him from thinking bad thoughts in order to prevent his death.

After we see them stealing glances at each other in a rainy doorway (squee-level feels!) and squabbling back and forth about one thing after another, we learn one rule of this time-skip world: there’s no talking about the future. Each time Sol tries to tell Sun-jae about what will happen to him, the whole world stops around her and no one hears what she says. She’ll have to develop other means.

Sol realizes that Sun-jae loves swimming, but she knows that he stopped after a shoulder injury in high school. She thinks that if she can prevent him from competing until his shoulder is healed, she can keep him on the team, and maybe make him happy and save his life. She goes to great lengths (like hiding in the locker room hamper — and getting caught!) to stop him from competing, but can’t seem to get through to him.

Sun-jae is getting all the more perplexed and upset by Sol following him around, but we can also see her fangirling is not one-sided. When she runs into the guy that used to be her crush back in high school, KIM TAE-SUNG (Song Geon-hee) — the guy she was so busy chasing around that she didn’t notice Sun-jae — the older and wiser Sol can’t understand what she saw in Tae-sung back then (“I used to think you were so hot, but you’re such a dork!”). But that does not stop Sun-jae from being jealous.

So what is really up with Sun-jae? Everything becomes clear in a flashback near the end, after Sun-jae pulls Sol out of the way of oncoming traffic. She’s traumatized from the accident that hasn’t even happened yet in this timeline, and she collapses in his arms — in an incredibly beautiful shot where he hugs her in the rain (water is a big recurring theme in this drama, from rain to pools).

It turns out that the first time Sun-jae ever saw Sol, it was raining, and she’s the one that put the umbrella over his head (Nice touch. I love this). She also gave him a couple of candies — the same ones that are in the jar she gives him in the future.

That is to say, Sun-jae started liking those candies because she gave them to him. And all those years later, as a fangirl, she knows he likes them, but has no idea it’s because of her. He’s been harboring a crush on this girl since high school — before she was even a fan — and called her on the phone that day from the radio station because he was legit happy she was alive. Can I fill the rest of this page with nothing but hearts, please?

Given that this boy is crushing so hard — and Sol has been ignoring him up until the point she goes back in time — it makes sense that he’s confused and so reluctant to show any interest. He doesn’t want to get his heart broken!

And so, we’ve got a conflict. Sol wants to get through to Sun-jae, to save his life the same way he saved hers, and she has no idea how to do it, given that she can’t tell him what will happen in the future. What methods will she devise? The last image of Episode 2 is a clue.

We see the scene of Sun-jae’s hotel room after his death. Next to the jar of candy that Sol gave him, a photo suddenly appears of our two leads together. It looks like the easiest way for Sol to change the future is to simply be by his side. Of course, she’s not going to realize that for a while — overthinking how to save him, instead of seeing that she herself is the answer. And our hero will do what heroes do and wait it out until she remembers him. This has the makings of an epic love story and we’re only in Week 1!

I will just lay out my adoration for this drama right here. I love everything about it. Everything! The leads are cute, funny, beautiful, and amazingly well-suited to play off each other. The story is intricate and well-weaved. The shots are lovely. The rain scenes are heart-melting. And I just can’t wait to see more of all of it.

I thought this was mostly going to be about putting the audience in the shoes of a fangirl so we could all live out our dreams of meeting Byun Woo-seok, but it’s a lot deeper than that and it knows just how to hit the heart buttons by switching from funny fangirling to serious subjects in a split second. More please!

 
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