Heavenly Ever After: Episodes 5-6

by lovepark

One mistake leads our heroine to hell where she must be weighed for her sins. However, her husband refuses to let her leave and will do anything to get her back because there is no point in heaven without her. As fire and brimstone threaten to separate our couple once more, it won’t just be our heroine who is tested.

 
EPISODES 5-6

Hae-sook only needs one more grape before her time in heaven is cut short, and for our fiery heroine, it’s not a matter of if but when. Despite Nak-jun wanting her to stay put, Hae-sook continues her daily treks to the church where she strikes up a friendship with the pastor. They even have lunch together, and she learns that he only lived to five (guess that means children can choose any age, too).

She pities the young man who never got to experience life, but when she mentions his parents, the pastor bristles. He tells her to pass along a message to his parents when she goes to hell, but Hae-sook only sighs at his cruel jab, more worried that he left mid-meal.

On her way home, Hae-sook stops by a vending machine to buy Som-yi a drink and shows her how good deeds are used as currency here. Unfortunately, Hae-sook is all out of money now, and when she angrily smacks the machine with a rock demanding her drink, her last grape falls from the sky.

Storm clouds, blaring sirens, and a ramshackle train announce her divine punishment, and though Nak-jun comes running to save her, it’s too late. Hae-sook is carted off to hell, and unlike heaven where everyone gets to choose their age, here, people stay as they are. King Yeomra – who looks identical to the center president – waltzes in with an ominous greeting, and the crowd silences when a worker puts a disruptor in his place by slicing his legs and mouth.

As the dead get sorted one by one into their respective circle of hell, Hae-sook comes up as unclassified and gets taken to a backroom where she meets Young-ae. While they try to make sense of their situation, King Yeomra enters to explain their system and tells them that they fall into two categories: (1) they aren’t dead yet or (2) the weight of their sins is inconclusive. In the case of the former, they’ll get a quick tour of their facility and be on their way, but for the latter, they will be weighed at the end to determine their fate.

The first stop on their tour is the monitoring room (which looks similar to heaven’s) and apparently, the workers here can intervene in the living world by cutting some people’s lives short. Next is the boiling cauldron which used to be reserved for bystanders but now punishes heinous felons like child abusers and murderers. Then comes the tongue-pulling and scorching hells which deal with liars, and after all that heat, the dead are taken to the blisters hell where they’re kept frozen in containers. The group then reaches the crushing and screaming hells, but amongst the frightened people and bubbling lava, a familiar looking dog looks up.

After Hae-sook was taken, Nak-jun went to the center president, begging for his wife back, but the president firmly told him that she had her chance and lost it. He reminded him of the escapee, but rather than get scared off, it only strengthened his resolve to be with Hae-sook no matter what. Thus, Nak-jun took the subway, and when it arrived at hell, he got off to find her – not knowing that the stowaway stray followed him as well.

Using his nose, the stray runs into his past owner (the one who abused and abandoned him), and like he planned, the stray eagerly waits to relish in his pain. However, as he watches his owner get burned alive, he can’t do the same thing the cruel man did to him and pulls him out of the fire. Realizing that revenge isn’t what he truly wanted, the stray returns to heaven with the scars of his adventure on his back.

Meanwhile, Nak-jun roams around hell, screaming for his wife, and King Yeomra finally pays him a visit after dealing with the trolls in new hell. He threatens to destroy Nak-jun from existence, but when the devoted husband begs for his wife, the king offers another solution: if Nak-jun endures all of hell, then he will spare Hae-sook. He assumes Nak-jun will back down, but without a moment’s hesitation, our steadfast hero jumps into the fiery pit to save his love.

As he braces for impact, Nak-jun lands in a grassy field rather than molten lava and realizes that he’s back in heaven. At home, Hae-sook and Young-ae are also safe and sound, having returned from their hellish trip, and we learn what happened at the end of their tour. While the two strangers weighed nothing – meaning that they were not dead – our heroine weighed exactly 50 kg which destined her for hell.

Watching Young-ae cry on her behalf, Hae-sook shed a single tear, and that miniscule piece of water tipped the scale in her favor, much to King Yeomra’s displeasure. Then, when it was Young-ae’s turn, the scale stayed at zero despite the huge thud she made, and Hae-sook pleaded for another chance to atone for her sins. While I assumed Young-ae’s weight would have meant she was still alive, the guardians of hell send her along to heaven with Hae-sook, instead.

Still under the impression that Som-yi is Young-ae, Hae-sook is shocked to learn that her young ward only recently got into an accident which landed her in hell. Hae-sook interprets this as Som-yi lying to her, and when they can’t find her at home, she assumes the worst. With the real Young-ae by her side, Hae-sook goes out to find her, but her attitude loosens when they see Som-yi arguing with the center workers to let her take Hae-sook’s place in hell.

Once home, they clear the air, and Hae-sook allows Som-yi to stay until she recovers her memories. Their meeting, though, is cut short when Nak-jun comes back sighing – practically begging for attention – and Hae-sook wonders why he’s sulking in bed. He tells her that he was suspended for going to hell to find her, and without his job, he feels useless like he did in the past.

Seeing her husband so down, Hae-sook meets with the center president to ask for some leniency, but the president tells her that the suspension was him cutting the couple some slack. He even had to ask Yeomra for a favor, and Hae-sook thanks him for helping them out. As their conversation continues, she mentions her lack of funds, and the president informs her of dormant good deeds which should be listed on the tablet she received at orientation.

The tablet Hae-sook mistook for a piece of junk is luckily still at home, but even after turning it on, neither Hae-sook nor Young-ae can make heads or tails of it. Right then, a young man stops by for a visit and introduces himself as the borrower who died in episode one. He thought about taking his life back then, but since Hae-sook always brought him food like steamed corn to eat the next day, he kept living. He thanks her for caring about someone like him, and the image of the corn in her tablet disappears.

Having figured out how the tablet works, Hae-sook and Young-ae look for their biggest ticketed item: a white ribbon worth two million won. When they reach the person’s house, Hae-sook recognizes her as the debtor with the unclaimed funeral that they paid for. She even got other borrowers to come as guests in exchange for one-week payments, and that rotten, unlucky day turned out to be not so awful at all as the debtor bows in thanks for her kindness.

With her funds a bit fuller, Hae-sook stops collecting for the day and pays a visit to her friend instead. The pastor greets her eagerly, having waited for her return, and like old times, she falls asleep in the pews as he begins his sermon. Rather than get mad, he chuckles to himself and pulls out a puzzle, but without his boring sermon to keep her asleep, Hae-sook wakes up and invites him out to lunch.

They arrive at a rice paddy field to collect freshwater snails, and Hae-sook turns it into a game to see who can catch the most. They laugh and play in the mud until they collect enough for a meal, and Hae-sook asks the pastor to pray for the snails to move on to a better place. (Now that the show has mentioned it, how does food work here?)

As their bickering relationship blossoms into a genuine friendship, they open up a little to each other, but neither is ready to share everything completely just yet. Hae-sook comments on how life is just a collection of connections – both good and bad – and for the pastor, it seems Hae-sook is his first good one. When they get up to leave, he offers to piggyback her, and the two squabble good-naturedly with the soft glow of the sunset lighting their way home.

Meanwhile, Nak-jun decides to do something about his predicament and meets with the center president to get his job back. At the center, the president makes comics acting as messages from the dead to the living (original artist keykney), and he tells Nak-jun that their job is to make sure those left behind move on without regrets. As long as he still wants to help people, he is willing to reinstate him, and for his first task, the president sends him to the living world to meet with two siblings.

Interrupting a crying bride, Nak-jun hands a brother and sister an envelope containing two bank accounts – the same ones from episode one – along with a hug from their mom, thanking them for growing up into fine adults and apologizing. With the message delivered, the wedding continues without a hitch, and their mom visits in spirit, watching over them with tears in her eyes.

Since Young-ae’s arrival, Som-yi has been relegated to the sidelines, so she asks Nak-jun if she can accompany him. She wants to feel useful, and maybe visiting the living world will help her remember her past. Though he hems and haws, he eventually allows her to tag along, but when he learns that his usual contact has been hospitalized, he tells Som-yi to stay put while he runs off to do his own thing. In his haste, however, he fails to notice Som-yi’s odd behavior as she stares intently at a t-shirt. It reminds her of a dream she had recently, and Som-yi starts to hyperventilate as images of a sunset beach and a woman dancing flash in front of her.

Well, that was a terrifying yet wholesome set of episodes this week. I knew hell would be scary, but I didn’t expect the show to make it so gruesome and visually violent. Personally, I think the show’s portrayal of heaven is a lot more creative and fun while hell is clearly based on religious and cultural depictions, making it feel more familiar and less unique. I am, however, intrigued by the interactions between the two worlds since we saw Nak-jun bumping into a hell worker while on the job, possibly suggesting that they were once human, too. In addition, I’m curious as to why King Yeomra and the center president share a face, and how they fit into the overall cosmology. Is there a reason for their identical appearance, and are they really separate entities?

Besides the thousands of questions the show hasn’t answered, it was nice to see how loved Hae-sook is by those around her. There’s Nak-jun who willingly jumped into hell to save her (the look Sohn Seok-gu has in this scene absolutely killed me), and then there’s Young-ae who cries on her behalf begging her not to go. She also has two new connections who have been charmed by her warmth, and as seen by the tablet, her thoughtfulness and compassion have moved many hearts. While it may seem crazy that Nak-jun would endure hell to get Hae-sook back, his actions make sense because that’s exactly what she did for him and, I would argue, what she would do if put in his situation. Hae-sook is the type of person who does good without expecting anything in return, which is what makes her such a likable heroine, flaws and all.

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