Bad Memory Eraser: Episodes 5-6

by solstices

While our amnesiac hero finds his footing and puts his capable mind to work, a string of crises knocks his psychiatrist off balance. Matters of the heart prove to be more complicated than they seem — and perhaps love is the most difficult game of all.

 
EPISODES 5-6

Somehow, Joo-yeon bluffs her way out of her trespassing with a half-baked excuse. Since Gun keeps waltzing out of the hospital without a guardian accompanying him, Joo-yeon takes it upon herself to keep an eye on him. She follows him to the horse racing track, where Gun appeals to a potential investor for his newly-founded agency. Fibbing that Joo-yeon is the agency’s team doctor, Gun employs a spontaneous statistical analysis alongside Joo-yeon’s psychiatric evaluation to successfully predict the winning horse and earn the investor’s favor.

When Sae-yan presents souvenirs from Italy in the form of couple shirts, Joo-yeon seizes the opportunity to go all out. Decorating a hospital meeting room with balloons and candles — nevermind how unprofessional such behavior is — Joo-yeon prepares to surprise Teo, only to overhear him flirting with the junior researcher in a stairwell. It turns out Teo had promised to date Joo-yeon after she returned from her overseas trip, only to enter a secret relationship with someone else instead. (And he’s still stringing Joo-yeon along! Scum.)

Devastated, Joo-yeon rushes to put out the candles with a fire extinguisher before Teo sees. Gun walks in on the pathetic aftermath, and when Joo-yeon refuses to cry, he argues that she’s just deceiving herself in order to act tough and avoid her emotions. Stung, Joo-yeon snaps at him to stop being so clingy.

Later, Shin finds Joo-yeon crouching by the hospital’s curb, stifling her tears. Driving her back to her neighborhood, he buys her a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers to share. Shin demurs, explaining that sugary drinks keep him up at night, but he caves easily — and later that night, he can’t catch a wink of sleep, clutching his fluttering heart and squeeing adorably into his blanket. Aww.

Shin may be giddy on the burgeoning excitement of a new crush, but his past dalliances have caught up with him in the form of an affronted Sae-yan. Booking an entire movie theater to talk to her in private, Shin wears a nonchalant demeanor, dismissing Sae-yan’s concerns about her lost bracelet. She dropped it in his car? Whatever, he’ll give her money to buy her a new one. Except Sae-yan swiftly puts him in his place: “Then how much should I pay to hit you once?” Shin flinches, dropping the blasé act like a kicked puppy.

Acceding to her demands, Shin mails Sae-yan’s lost bracelet back to her house. Cue a flashback to the elementary school reunion, where Sae-yan had chased Shin all the way back to his car, scaring the living daylights out of him. How dare he dump her? Sae-yan pulls the flustered Shin into a kiss, declares that they’re dating again, then slaps him — “I’m the one who’s dumping you!” Then she storms away, as her bracelet falls off her wrist. Shin: “Save me…”

In the present, Sae-yan ties the bracelet back around her wrist, wishing upon it once more. It seems she’s hoping to find someone again, just as Gun wants to reunite with his first love — but is Sae-yan truly the little girl who saved him back then, or is there more to the story?

As for our dispirited psychiatrist, there’s more heartache in store. The hospital director is running interference, endeavoring to shift the research project’s focus away from psychiatry and over to neuroscience. That consists of ordering Teo to conduct undisclosed evaluations on Gun, as well as removing Joo-yeon from the research she’d pioneered.

Joo-yeon has barely any fight left in her, and she heads to Teo’s office to hand over the research materials. While she’s there, she clears his filthy desk for him, which leads to her discovering his research report and all the tests he’d run without her or Gun’s consent. Grabbing Teo by the lapels the moment he enters the room, Joo-yeon dumps the trash she’d cleared back onto his desk. Serves him right.

After trudging forlornly through the rain, a drenched Joo-yeon shows up on Gun’s doorstep. She declares that she’s accepting the team doctor position, then brazenly asks him for three months’ room and board at his new home office. (Forced cohabitation trope, here we come?) Turns out Joo-yeon turned the tables on Teo and the hospital director by appealing to the research investor, so she’s now supposed to observe Gun in his daily life outside the hospital.

However, Gun refuses to accept — it seems he’s resolved to keep his distance and quash his first love flutters. (Though he’s not doing a very good job of it.) Attempting to convince him, Joo-yeon raises a challenge. If she can convince Shi-on into staying with Gun’s agency and proceeding with physiotherapy, then Gun has to hire her. Alas, Joo-yeon barely even has a rudimentary understanding of tennis terms, causing her to completely misinterpret the exasperated Shi-on.

What Joo-yeon lacks in knowledge and professionalism, though, she makes up for in determination. Buckling down to study tennis with a whole stack of guides, Joo-yeon asks Shin to teach her the rules. Delighted, Shin opts for hands-on learning instead, beaming like a smitten puppy even when her ponytail smacks him in the face with every swing of the tennis racket. (I have no idea why or how Joo-yeon is doing this in heels, but Shin is too cute for me to complain.)

On the way home, Joo-yeon senses she’s being followed. Thankfully, Gun isn’t far behind, and he takes out the stalker before he can get too close. It’s Teo, who claims he just wanted to apologize to Joo-yeon. (By skulking around?) Teo backs off, but not without first instilling doubt in Gun. Is he truly certain that Joo-yeon is his first love? Can he remember how he met her?

Joo-yeon returns to an empty office, so she answers the doorbell when it rings — except it’s Shin, and the implications dawn on him just as Gun arrives. “That’s right, she’s my first love,” Gun declares.

I think this drama has a vague idea of the story it wants to tell, and the scenes it wants to feature, except it hasn’t quite bothered to work through the finer details. Unfortunately, it shows in both the execution and the plot coherency. Ethics are thrown out the window, work protocol is rarely upheld, and characters’ emotional trajectories feel disjointed. The show lacks polish, and its inconsistencies break immersion.

Still, I’m already growing invested in Shin and Sae-yan’s storyline — their petty bickering is hilariously endearing, especially since they broke up after just three dates. It has the potential to be a fun lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-again storyline, especially with how easily the whirlwind Sae-yan knocks Shin off-kilter. With her, perhaps he could find liberation from his rigid lifestyle. Though the Italian mafia connections that Sae-yan’s family seems to have are concerning, and the stalker that’s tailing Shin needs to be dealt with first.

Shin may have brushed off the photos of him and Sae-yan together, but there’s an alarming one he failed to notice, which captured the brothers’ confrontation. Contrary to Shin’s statement that he was a distance away when Gun jumped into the river, the photo clearly shows Shin grasping Gun’s lapels. I’m still giving Shin the benefit of the doubt, because this show likes to recontextualize past scenes with subversive reveals, though I can’t help but wonder — what is Shin hiding, and is it solely for Gun’s sake or is there more to it?

I wish the show would focus on the brothers more, because there’s so much to mine. Their relationship, fraught for years, has suddenly been mended overnight — except it’s still a festering wound underneath a flimsy band-aid. It’s endearing how Gun’s amnesia has him reverting to his past disposition, teasing Shin about his childhood clinginess and pranking him just like old times. I can only hope the drama doesn’t go down the weary love triangle route, because I’d hate to see the brothers torn apart over a lackluster heroine.

 
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