Jinxed at First: Episodes 7-8

by mistyisles

When secrets come out, our heroine will have to make a choice: give in to one of the many people trying to tell her what to do, or decide to take charge of her own life?

EPISODES 7-8 WEECAP

This week opens with lots of fluffy, romantic giddiness and Su-kwang making preparations to propose, so you know what that means – a subsequent plunge into angst, tears, and one excessively dramatic reveal after another.

It all starts when Chairman Sun’s people arrive at the market to search for Seul-bi. The shop owners make themselves useful for once by helping distract the men and alert Su-kwang and Seul-bi so they can flee.

As the two make their escape, they come face-to-face with Min-joon. Once again, he lets them go, but this time Su-kwang clocks the look that passes between Min-joon and Seul-bi.

Back at home, he confronts her for the whole truth. When she gives it, he storms out of the apartment, enraged and heartbroken to finally know for sure who was behind his mother’s death. He keeps saying it’s not Seul-bi’s fault, but he also doesn’t want to even look at her right now – and regrets bringing her home back then.

Then he goes straight to the hotel to confront Chairman Sun, too. Min-joon tries to calm him down, but practically the whole hotel has heard his outburst by now, and it’s not long before Su-kwang is standing before a stunned Chairman Sun.

Chairman Sun keeps saying he wasn’t behind the death of Su-kwang’s mother or the murder attempt on Su-kwang, but neither Su-kwang nor Min-joon (nor I) believe him. After venting his grievances, Su-kwang leaves, and Min-joon follows him out to emphasize that he’ll protect Seul-bi… because she’s “his woman.” (Nooo I was rooting for you!)

Following the confrontation, each of the three parties involved – Chairman Sun, Su-kwang, and Min-joon, that is – decides that Seul-bi needs to be protected from everyone else, and that the way to do that is to have her move to a new house.

Of course, they each want to be the one to choose said house, never mind where she wants to live, and to be the only one who knows where she is.

So it’s little wonder that, after being told by three different people to pack her things and wait for them to tell her where to go, Seul-bi leaves to find her own place to live. For the first night, she crashes in Yoon-ho’s office, and when he finds her the next morning, she asks to borrow enough cash to get an apartment and start earning her own keep.

Instead, Yoon-ho heads out to find Su-kwang, who’d called him in a panic the night before looking for Seul-bi. While he’s gone, Seul-bi leaves again, inspired by Dae-sik’s suggestion that she try earning money by fortune-telling.

The local shaman (who previously met her and recognized her amazing gift) happily takes her on, and soon all the shopkeepers are lining up to have their futures read. Most of her advice is cryptic and not immediately useful, but she is able to alert them to a nearby murder-suicide attempt, saving multiple people at once.

That, of course, is how Su-kwang finds out where she is. He angrily drags her out of there, saying this is no different than what she did as Chairman Sun’s prisoner, so why both to run away in the first place?

Which makes no sense, because – while I get that there’s a stigma involved – one life was forced upon her from birth, and the other is something she chose as a means to support herself and also help people she considers friends.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Remember that kindly fisherman who rescued Su-kwang from drowning and gave him his deceased son’s identity? Turns out, he and Seul-bi’s parents have history – and not the good kind. In fact, while they were out from under Chairman Sun’s thumb, the fisherman tried to kill Seul-bi’s father, only stopping because Seul-bi’s mother used her powers on him.

With some prodding and threatening, he gets Seul-bi’s father to admit that Min-joon’s uncle is backing him and that he’s agreed to hand Seul-bi over in exchange for a reward. He fails, partly because he keeps stalling for more time with her, and partly because Seul-bi decides to return to her mother – and Min-joon – of her own accord.

Speaking of Min-joon, when he and his ex-fiancée aren’t obsessing over Seul-bi, they actually have pretty good chemistry with each other. Their verbal sparring could almost be banter if they’d let it, and she at least has admitted to harboring feelings for him.

Now that Seul-bi’s back at the hotel, Min-joon sets out to prove that he’s different from his father. He gives Seul-bi free rein to decorate her quarters, open windows, and have full kitchen access. (So generous!) Every time she offers a future reading, or even extends her hand to him, he declines, insisting he doesn’t want to use her powers.

Well-intentioned as that may be, Seul-bi deflates just a little each time. It’s a stark contrast to all the hand-holding she got used to with Su-kwang, and it certainly doesn’t make their dynamic any less stifling than it was before she left.

Chairman Sun, meanwhile, is not pleased to have her back. He now wants to keep her away from Min-joon, calling her a witch and acting more paranoid and confusing than ever before. We get a bit more background on what happened with Seul-bi’s mother, but even that really just brings up more questions instead of answers.

In his early adulthood, Chairman Sun had promised to free Seul-bi’s mother from her confinement for good, but as more time passed and he kept finding excuses not to cross his father, her frustration grew. That’s why she ran away with Seul-bi’s father. But the vagueness with which she answers Seul-bi’s questions about him makes me start to worry that there may be a few more birth secrets left in store…

Regardless, the show seems determined to set Chairman Sun’s father up as the real villain and to make Chairman Sun himself a victim of his own cowardice. Through his repeated nightmares, we learn that Seul-bi’s mother once tried to kill the evil elderly chairman – only for her own mother to jump in front of the bullet.

But said mother isn’t dead, and shows up at Su-kwang’s fish shop out of the blue, asking about Seul-bi.

As for Su-kwang himself, thanks to Seul-bi’s predictions putting him at the center of marketplace action, he’s now been officially re-branded as lucky instead of unlucky. And he’s also reclaimed his real name, officially closing his own missing person case.

I really don’t know where the story is going from here. But honestly, I wish Seul-bi could just leave everyone behind and go live her life however she pleases. Maybe she could travel the world and bring Yoon-ho and his son along just for fun.

But the real question I took away from these episodes is: where can I find multiple people determined to buy me a house?

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Jinxed at First: Episodes 7-8