Forecasting Love and Weather: Episodes 5-6 Open Thread

by missvictrix

Despite being happy together and pretty darn compatible, our couple soon learns that their all-too-recent relationship wounds might come back to haunt them anew. But as we dig more into our leads and their pasts, what seemed to draw a line between them just might unite them even more.

EPISODES 5-6 WEECAP

Our couple is looking way too comfortable on Ha-kyung’s sumptuous sofa — pretty soon they wake up, though, and Ha-kung realizes they’ll be late for work. As we’ve inferred, she’s 10/10 for conscientiousness (as a major personality trait), and so she has no issues kneeing Shi-woo in the gut as she jumps up to get ready for work lol.

Whenever these two are together in her apartment, I’m all for their relationship and watching where it goes. It’s at work where things get complicated — what with their boss/employee relationship, and the not-so-secret tête-à-têtes with their exes. But there’s another layer that complicates things this week, and it starts out by way of an angry phone call of Shi-woo’s, which Ha-kyung overhears.

One mystery phone call doesn’t seem like a big deal, but what’s big about it is Shi-woo’s unwillingness to be honest about it. It’s the tiniest moment, but it’s the first of several triggers for Ha-kyung — triggers that make her realize she’s still got some baggage from her terrible breakup with Ki-joon, and rightly so. Ha-kyung jumped into her next relationship in a way that seemed abrupt and unlike her, so it’s refreshingly realistic to see her dealing with her breakup aftermath now. And points for her — I give her an A for emotional intelligence: she knows what she’s feeling, why, and also what to do about it.

Before Ha-kyung gets there, though, there’s a bit more to happen. The phone call that acted as the first trigger is echoed later when Shi-woo has a private conversation with Yoo-jin and is equally tight-lipped about it. Then, this growing discomfort on Ha-kyung’s side of things comes to a climax when she sees Shi-woo leaving a motel late one night. And not only is he leaving, but the owner treats him a little too comfortably.

Granted, Ha-kyung couldn’t see Shi-woo at a midnight motel if she wasn’t there herself: she’s actually dropping off homeless and drunken Dong-han, whom she’s taken pity on (you and me both, girl). Ha-kyung tries to clear up her reasons for being there, but Shi-woo is again unwilling to clarify. In voiceover, Ha-kyung says that old wounds she thought had healed were actually infected. The unseasonably heavy summer rain that’s been plaguing the city pours down. Things ain’t looking so good.

This is where things come to a head for Ha-kyung. After a run, she meets with Shi-woo and tells him they need to “rethink” their relationship. Shi-woo does his best to come clean, but I love what Ha-kyung says here: I know you’re telling me the truth, but I can’t trust you. Rather than dump her issues on Shi-woo, she’s woman enough to know that she has to deal with her own emotional baggage.

To be fair to Shi-woo, he was only holding back the truth from Ha-kyung because he’s got a heck of a terrible father (cameo by Jeon Bae-Soo). He’s a shameless gambler who has no qualms about taking money from his hard-working son — or begging for it from his son’s ex-girlfriend — or finding out about Ha-kyung and practically blackmailing her at her own workplace. The drama is quite clear: he sucks, he’s terrible to his son and has been for a long time, and Shi-woo needs to stop giving him money, as the cycle seems to know no end.

While Ha-kyung is dealing with Shi-woo’s father, Shi-woo answers Ha-kyung’s phone back in the situation room and learns that her mother’s been rushed to the ER. Ha-kyung thought her mother and sister were just crying wolf to get her back home, but her sister insists their mother is dying.

Though Ha-kyung is distraught, she insists on staying to finish their overnight shift… until Dong-han hands her her purse, and Shi-woo puts it in her hand, and they tell her the weather will be stable overnight and she needs to go. I know I said she was 10/10 for conscientiousness, but this is taking it a bit far.

Shi-woo is understandably ashamed and trying to keep the truth about his father from Ha-kyung, even at the risk of the wall that’s growing between them. But when he finds out that his father approached her for money, he nearly loses it. It’s the push he needed to be honest with her, though, and — yay Ha-kyung — she shares her vulnerability with Shi-woo. They swap father stories, and we learn that Ha-kyung’s committed suicide when deeply in debt, and that she was the one who found him as a child.

Oof, that’s harsh, Show. There might have been a lighter way to illustrate Ha-kyung’s issues, but we’ll have to take what they give us — and it does fit. Ha-kyung is scared of being in the same position a third time: with a man who keeps her in the dark, and then leaves her. This has a lot of emotional resonance, and really fits with what we know of Ha-kyung.

She’s softened towards Shi-woo again, as one does when in the presence of a wounded puppy, and she asks him to make a promise – basically that if something is wrong or he doesn’t love her anymore, that he will tell her first and be honest with her. With the promise made, Ha-kyung asks him to move in with her, and our episode comes to a close.

I kinda expected this, since Shi-woo is getting kicked out of his dorm housing, and since Ha-kyung has this gorgeous meant-for-a-couple apartment that needs living in. But also, there are future hijinks on the horizon, because no one has realized yet that someone else on their team lives in the same building a floor beneath Ha-kyung.

Speaking of the team and workplace, even though we have a relationship-centric pair of episodes this week, we do see more of the office conflicts. From Dong-han leaving home, to OH MYUNG -JOO (Yoon Sa-bong) struggling as a working mom and seeing her husband humiliated at work — gosh, these tertiary characters make me feel things!

But you know who doesn’t make me feel things? Ki-joon and Yoo-jin. While Yoo-jin is wavering as the pair are set to register their marriage, Ki-joon just proves again that he’s a feckless and immature man that can’t really do anything without Ha-kyung. He’s in for a rude awakening at some point, but right now he’s just played for the love-to-hate antagonist jerk.

Finally, Forecasting also did what I asked of it last week and leaned into Ha-kyung’s struggles as a leader. She gets defensive and ornery, and her staff takes the brunt of it often. It’s the exact opposite of Dong-han, who takes ownership of any mistakes the team made — even when that means possibly having lost lives on his conscience. I like Dong-han more and more as we go (he’s definitely my favorite character), and I hope his leadership skills start to rub off on Ha-kyung. Methinks they will.

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Forecasting Love and Weather: Episodes 5-6 Open Thread