Bad Memory Eraser: Episodes 13-14

by solstices

Our wounded brothers finally acknowledge their pain and face their trauma, extending an empathetic hand to each other. One family heals, while another fractures apart — sometimes all we want is for our cries to be heard.

 
EPISODES 13-14

In yet another instance of confusingly abrupt editing, the blackmail photos of the bridge incident suddenly go viral across social media. The public works itself up into a frenzy speculating about Shin’s “attempted murder” of his own brother, while Shin cuts off all contact and goes into hiding.

As for Gun, he’s managed to obtain footage of the fall. He leaves a voicemail urging Shin to return since he’s found out the truth, and Shin recalls that fateful confrontation. Asking if Gun thinks he’s the only one who’s made sacrifices, Shin pushes Gun’s buttons until he accuses Shin of wanting to steal everything he has. In response, Shin calls Gun out for his self-pity and inferiority complex, and Gun punches him.

The two brothers fight, and Shin finally snaps — has Gun ever considered how suffocating it is to live as someone’s replacement? Gun tells him to live his own life, then, and stop whining about all that he basks in — Shin is nothing but a copycat. The words carve themselves into Shin’s heart, and when Gun turns back, he sees Shin sitting on the bridge’s railing with a heartrendingly tranquil look on his face. “I’m tired, too,” Shin says. “Now, I just want to rest.” Then he leans back, and falls off the bridge.

Gun manages to catch Shin’s hand in time — with his ailing hand! — and Shin wistfully wonders if it’s the first time Gun has held his hand since his injury. “If I die, at least I’ll be able to breathe easily.” Unwilling to lose his brother, Gun latches on with both hands, and Shin panics, yelling at Gun to let go before he falls over too. “Even if I could rewind time, I’d still choose to save you,” Gun asserts. But Shin’s hand slips out of Gun’s grasp — and Gun immediately dives in after him, hitting his head on the way down. Ever since then, Shin has blamed himself for Gun’s condition.

Alas, our runaway brother ends up losing all his money when his too-kind heart has him giving his padded jacket to a pair of teenage boys, wallet and all. With only mere pennies left, a shivering Shin caves and calls Joo-yeon on a public payphone. He doesn’t say anything substantial, but the call allows her to search up the payphone’s location.

Joo-yeon finds Shin struggling to camp in a little tent — he’s hilariously ill-suited to the wild outdoors — and while fishing, he finally opens up to her. Shin had started self-harming at the age of twelve to cope with the pressure, and he’d burned Gun’s emotion diary not out of vindictiveness, but out of fear that his own history might be written inside. When Gun told him to stop living as his copycat, Shin realized that he hadn’t once thought about what else lay ahead of him. Simply wanting to give up on anything, he’d tried to take the plunge — but seeing Gun grab onto him with his ailing hand had only multiplied Shin’s guilt tenfold. Gun had chosen his brother over himself, once again.

Now that he’s run away, Shin wants to sort his thoughts out before returning, since he’s only followed others’ words all this while. Joo-yeon gently encourages him to start small; he can take it one step at a time. Moved, Shin confesses that he fell for her because she draws out the emotions he’s been repressing all his life. “When I’m with you, I become myself. Not someone who wears the false mask of his hyung, but simply, fully, Lee Shin.”

The weight of his confession lingers, pushing Joo-yeon to awkwardly suggest taking a walk — and that’s when she spots Gun. He’d tracked Shin down using a photo the teenagers uploaded. Jumping to conclusions, Gun stalks off in yet another misunderstanding. (Um, are you suddenly not worried about your brother anymore?)

When she catches up, Gun lashes out with sharp words, but Joo-yeon calls him on the lie. Trying to drive her away, Gun goes way too far: “I’m sick and tired of you. Isn’t that why your father left you, too?” Ugh, low blow. Joo-yeon slaps him, and he storms off. They both end up walking aimlessly through the night, overwhelmed by tears, while a worried Shin follows silently behind Joo-yeon.

Meanwhile, Teo has been snooping around in an attempt to wrest control of the clinical trial and net himself a promotion. He tricks Dr. Han into spilling information, then threatens to reveal it all to Gun if they don’t allow him to proceed with a trial that resets the bad-memory erasing.

When Joo-yeon learns of this through a panicked phone call, her worry for Gun sends her into a panic. It serves as a moment of clarity for Shin, who realizes what he must do. Borrowing the teenagers’ scooter, Shin takes Joo-yeon back to the city, where he watches her rush back to Gun’s office. From afar, Shin bids her goodbye, as if coming to terms with his unrequited feelings.

After a desperate search, Joo-yeon finds Gun at the hospital’s tennis court. Her concern is painfully evident, and Gun finally recognizes the sincerity she’d masked under a layer of feigned indifference. He pulls Joo-yeon into a reconciliatory kiss, then walks her home giddy on their reaffirmed feelings.

Circling back to our errant brother, Shin returns home and clears his name with the police. Then he tells his parents that he’ll be taking a break from tennis for a year. As usual, Mom starts yelling up a storm, and Dad begins guilt-tripping him with all that Mom has sacrificed for his sake. Even as it tugs at his guilt, Shin is adamant on pursuing his own path from now on.

In typical brotherly fashion, Gun brushes off the bridge incident, and Shin apologizes by offering Gun a chewing gum with “I’m sorry” printed on its wrapper. Gun takes the “Let’s be happy” gum instead, hee. Then Gun encourages Shin on his quest to self-discovery, reaffirming his courage and urging him to live his own life well.

One family may be on the way to making amends, but another is approaching a crisis point. Sae-yan’s diligent calls to her hometown villagers finally pay off when one claims to know her father, but the man can’t bear to keep up the ruse when faced with her sincere tears. Sae-yan’s overbearing mother had paid him to deceive her daughter, and she’d even submitted a resignation on Sae-yan’s behalf.

Heartbroken by her mother’s heavy-handed methods, Sae-yan resumes her search and finally manages to find a newspaper photo of her biological father. Her mother doubles down, packing her bags to force her back to Italy, but a scooter blocks the car’s path and helps Sae-yan escape. Once they’re safe, the man removes his helmet — it’s the man from the newspaper article. It’s her dad.

Sae-yan is overcome with joy, and the two spend a blissful day enjoying a long-overdue father-daughter date. When a passerby accidentally bumps into Sae-yan, though, her father excuses himself to make a call. Then he chases after the passerby and raises a brick against him. We don’t see the aftermath, but when Sae-yan’s father returns, he cradles her close in an awfully creepy manner.

Elsewhere, Joo-yeon is racing against time to resolve the side effects of Gun mistaking her as his first love, before Teo can proceed with the reset procedure. Her team finally succeeds — but at the cost of Joo-yeon cutting Sae-yan’s phone call short. When Gun tracks down the blackmailer through the saliva used to lick the envelope adhesive, the police find a match in their system. It’s Sae-yan’s bio dad AHN HYO-MYUNG (Ahn Nae-sang), an ex-convict with six prior counts of stalking and murder.

Back in Hyo-myung’s car center, he enters a secret underground room unbeknownst to an oblivious Sae-yan. He’s been keeping tabs on Sae-yan all this while, judging by his board full of stalker photos — and it seems like his current target is Shin.

Gun rushes to the hospital to inform Joo-yeon about the danger Sae-yan is in, but he runs right into Teo’s trap. Cruelly exposing the full truth of the clinical trial, Teo sends Gun spiraling into an excruciating migraine. Dr. Han learns that the lab rat which underwent the reset surgery eventually died, but he arrives too late to extricate Gun from the grasp of Teo’s manipulation. Betrayed, Gun ends up going under the knife.

This drama’s strongest aspect is its familial relationships, and it shows in how compelling this week started out. Both the Lee brothers’ raw anguish atop that bridge and Sae-yan’s unbridled tears of joy when meeting her (fake) father were such heart-wrenching moments, and I wish the show gave its full attention to its families.

Just imagine what this show could have been, if it cut out its unnecessary meandering and focused on the familial conflicts that gave rise to trauma. On Shin’s end: the incessant comparisons to his brother, the suffocating expectations of others, the endless days of wearing his body down to its bones. On Gun’s end: the shadow his brother’s spotlight casts on him, the grief of a shattered dream, the futility of slogging through a tunnel with no end in sight. Both have been hurting because of the other, through no fault of their own save their unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Their trajectory, bogged down with superfluous conflict and an unnecessary love triangle, would have been so much more effective and affecting if given a sharper focus. The core of their conflict has always been the interplay between guilt and indignation, and the nuance of their parallel love and resentment for each other holds so much potential. Now that Shin’s hiatus has caused yet another rift between parents and son, I’m hoping that the drama will afford their reconciliation sufficient time and substance.

It’s seeming increasingly likely that Sae-yan’s father murdered Joo-yeon’s, creating a bad memory that Joo-yeon unconsciously repressed and that both families are protecting their daughters from. I understand the mothers’ fear of retraumatizing their children, but obstinately obscuring the truth is doing no one any favors — and as Shin demonstrated, acknowledging one’s trauma is the only way to properly heal from it. Even if it’s a slow process that must be taken one step at a time.

 
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