Jinxed at First: Episodes 3-4

by mistyisles

Our heroine starts acclimating to the real world, reveling in her newfound freedom. And as she does, our hero finds his bad luck beginning to work in reverse.

EPISODES 3-4 WEECAP

We pick back up in the alleyway where a gang of thugs have cornered Su-kwang and Seul-bi. Seul-bi isn’t worried, though. Instructing Su-kwang to throw a brick on her signal, she reaches for each thug’s hand in turn to catch a glimpse of their immediate futures.

As we saw with her mother during the big escape, Seul-bi’s powers seem to extend beyond just seeing the future, allowing her suggestions to sway their thoughts. For example, the simple phrase “gas fire” makes the gang’s leader whip out his phone and call his mother in fear, seemingly already knowing he’s about to learn their house is fire.

While they’re all distracted, Seul-bi signals Su-kwang. He hurls the brick, which smashes onto the window of an unmarked police car that happens to be passing by. And, as luck would have it, the cops recognize the thugs and arrest them.

Seul-bi and Su-kwang accompany the police to the station to give their statements, but of course the police can’t find anything on Seul-bi in their system (she claims she was living abroad this whole time and lost all her memories prior to showing up at Su-kwang’s fish shop).

With the only places for her to stay being a homeless shelter or Su-kwang’s apartment, back to the apartment they go, for now. But Su-kwang has one more thread to pull on to try and find her family: Chairman Sun’s hotel.

He has the bright idea to walk right up to the front desk and ask if any young, female guests have gone missing, which of course gets him pointed out to the security team who are searching for any sign of Seul-bi. As they chase him through the hotel, he runs smack into Min-joon, who lets him out a back exit and directs the guards elsewhere.

It’s pretty clear at this point that Seul-bi isn’t telling him everything, and Su-kwang finally wheedles out of her that she ran away. He figures she must be a spoiled chaebol who’s been waited on hand and foot her whole life, but something about the way she tearfully pleads with him not to send her back gives him pause.

Agreeing to let her stay with him for the time being, he sets about teaching her how to do basic cooking and cleaning tasks. Except, he really just gives her a crash course on all the appliances in the apartment, and then wakes up to literally everything turned on, food burning, and a flooded laundry room.

Despite her general ineptitude, though, Seul-bi wants to help him out, promising to turn his bad luck into good. And though it takes a bit of time to set in motion, she appears to do just that.

First, she keeps her promise to the loan shark by giving him the information he’ll need to “coincidentally” meet a specialist who can treat his son’s eye cancer. In return, he agrees to write off Su-kwang’s overdue interest.

Then, when the shouty ahjumma who owns another nearby fish shop picks a fight, Seul-bi earns her friendship by helping her stop her husband from dragging a whole group of shop owners into a crypto scam.

Suddenly, Su-kwang is the center of positive attentive from all the other shop owners. And somewhere along the way, everyone – including Su-kwang, on occasion – has taken to referring to Seul-bi as his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, Seul-bi’s mother is either putting on a desperate act, or she’s severely declining mentally and emotionally. At times she acts just as childlike as Seul-bi herself; at other times, she breaks down in tears, begging Chairman Sun not to look for Seul-bi.

We also learn who Seul-bi’s father is, and thank goodness it’s not Chairman Sun. Rather, it’s a man who once helped Seul-bi’s mother escape, during which time Seul-bi was conceived. Presumably, they were caught, and he’s spent the last 20 years in prison.

Perhaps Chairman Sun once loved Seul-bi’s mother, or perhaps he just always saw her as belonging to him, but either way, he’s now haunted by nightmares about her. As he should be.

And that brings me to Min-joon, who remains easily the most interesting character. After the encounter at the hotel, he seeks Su-kwang out again. Su-kwang, understandably, has no desire to talk to him, believing Min-joon had deliberately refused to help when he lost everything. Min-joon tries to explain that he was locked in his room, but Su-kwang isn’t interested in hearing him out.

Neither Min-joon nor Seul-bi lets on to Su-kwang that they know each other, but they do speak privately long enough for Min-joon to assure her he’ll do his best to keep his father from finding and hurting Su-kwang, asking in return that she “come home” soon. I’m still worried he’ll turn possessive eventually, but at least for now, he seems to want her to return of her own volition instead of being forced.

Still, Seul-bi doesn’t actually make any promises to him, and when Su-kwang later asks her to go back to his apartment instead of hanging around the market, she brightly but firmly says she’ll go where she pleases, thank you very much.

Another thing we learn this week is that Min-joon is engaged. But his fiancée has been studying abroad, and as soon as she’s back, he calls it off. He doesn’t think it would be fair to lie to her about Seul-bi, and he’s definitely not going to just keep Seul-bi secret and locked away the whole rest of her life. He doesn’t explicitly say it, but it’s not hard to guess that what he really wants is to marry Seul-bi.

The fiancée doesn’t seem too surprised at his request to break up, saying breezily that this frees up more time for her to focus on writing. She lays out two conditions: they keep the breakup a secret for now, and she gets to interview him as character inspiration for her novel. By the look on her face, though, I’m guessing she was hoping that would be too steep a demand and he’d go through with the wedding after all.

As she leaves, she spots Su-kwang on a delivery. And yikes – the way the news that he’s alive immediately spreads through their chaebol friend group makes me wonder how Chairman Sun’s men haven’t managed to find him or Seul-bi yet.

Blissfully unaware that Su-kwang’s cover is all but compromised, Su-kwang and Seul-bi are in the early stages of a quickly blooming romance, replete with bike rides, piggyback shenanigans, and a drunken kiss that Seul-bi may or may not remember planting on Su-kwang – but that Su-kwang cannot stop thinking about with a giddy grin.

The kiss triggers a vision that involves going to Busan, so when the opportunity arises to deliver a puppy to her owner there, Su-kwang parrots what Seul-bi said during her vision, volunteering to make the delivery almost before he realizes what he’s saying. Time for a road trip!

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Jinxed at First: Episodes 3-4