Jinxed at First: Episodes 11-12

by mistyisles

New revelations burst out left and right, overturning many of our characters’ beliefs about both past and present – and informing their carefully-laid plans for the future.

EPISODES 11-12 WEECAP

Per Seul-bi’s instructions, Yoon-ho swipes a USB from his former gang boss’s abandoned possessions and delivers it straight to Su-kwang. The video file it contains shows the real person who ordered the hit on Su-kwang – not Chairman Sun, but his brother, Il-joong.

But that’s not all. The person tasked with the murder itself was none other than the fisherman who saved Su-kwang, whom he now considers a father figure. So why didn’t he follow through, and why did he help Su-kwang start over with a new identity?

Well, that ties into a whole slew of confessions about what actually went down 22 years ago. Basically, everything we were led to believe is wrong. And to go along with all the topsy-turvy twists, our characters’ motivations and responses are all turned upside-down and backwards, too.

Now Min-joon is the one trying to control Seul-bi’s every move, and his father is the one trying to listen to what Seul-bi and her mother actually want. Su-kwang is the one trying to find and stay with Seul-bi no matter what, while Seul-bi tries to convince him to go back home.

The reveals tumble out gradually over the course of both episodes, so that by the end I’m not fully sure who knows exactly how much, but the gist of the story is as follows.

As Seul-bi hinted last week, Hyun-tae, the man who believes he’s her father, isn’t actually her father. (Three guesses who is.) Upon becoming pregnant, Seul-bi’s mother Mi-su hypnotized Hyun-tae into believing they were in love and expecting a child together so he would help her run away. While on the run, they briefly stayed with Su-kwang and his mother before a call from Chairman Sun’s father convinced Hyun-tae to turn Mi-su over in exchange for cash.

But it was a trap, as the then-chairman ordered the fisherman to intercept them and kill Hyun-tae. Mi-su stopped him by reading the future – Su-kwang’s tragic future, to be exact – and giving him two instructions: go home right now and stop his son from burning the house down, and then repay her 20 years later by saving the young man he would be ordered to murder.

Now, seeing a change in Chairman Sun’s actions and attitudes, Mi-su confesses to him that Seul-bi is his daughter. But if Seul-bi also knows, it doesn’t change her hostility toward him one bit.

While he tries to be as nice to her as possible, she deflects his gestures with biting sarcasm and pointed comparisons about him and his brother – all rather refreshing, except that it feels like the show is trying to make us believe Chairman Sun was never evil, only misunderstood and misled.

The whole half-siblings thing makes Min-joon’s obsession with Seul-bi even more frustrating and uncomfortable, but apparently nobody thinks it important information for him to know. Instead, Mi-su gives him vague warnings that he and Seul-bi can never be together. (After all, if Min-joon knew the reason, we’d have to find some other source of conflict, wouldn’t we?)

So Min-joon continues pursuing Seul-bi. Following up on a request he made before, he asks to be her boyfriend and tries to lean in for a kiss. To his small credit, he sees that she’s not happy and immediately stops, apologizes, and promises not to try again if she doesn’t want him to.

Oddly enough, my favorite scene of the week did involve Min-joon, though. He and his fiancée shared a sweet moment at his mother’s grave where they reminisced on shared memories of her, and it felt like a genuinely touching bit of connection between two real people.

Meanwhile, having learned who really tried to kill him, Su-kwang embarks on a plan to take Il-joong down, with the help of not only Yoon-ho, but also Mi-su and Chairman Sun. To that end, Chairman Sun hires him as his new assistant, and Su-kwang takes Mi-su to visit Hyun-tae so she can finally set him free of the hypnotism she put on him all those years ago.

They also visit Ok-jin, who again warns of Seul-bi’s imminent and dire fate, adding that the only way to break the cursed cycle of the shamans is to destroy Geumhwa Group and cut off the chain completely.

And they’d better hurry, because Seul-bi is showing the first signs of becoming a witch. When Il-joong takes her to his father in the mental hospital, wanting to know when the patriarch will die and how he can get his hands on Geumhwa Group as his inheritance, Seul-bi suddenly turns dark and ominous, announcing that one of the former chairman’s descendants will take the curse for her.

Later, in a wild, uncontrollable fit of tears and laughter, she lunges at Min-joon, declaring him the one doomed to bear her curse. Yikes.

Su-kwang is there to hold her back, and comforts her after she returns to herself. Then they finally address where they stand: she’s trying to find a way to protect him, herself, and her mother once and for all; he asks her not to put herself in more danger than necessary just for his sake.

Having made up, they share tender kisses that Min-joon sees through the crack in the door. He looks more hurt than angry, and slowly turns away.

But now, onto the plotting, because our lead players are cooking up a bunch of schemes to engineer (hopefully) happy endings for themselves and their friends.

Twice, Seul-bi calls in favors from the marketplace shopkeepers to do what they do best: be loud, annoying distractions and keep Il-joong from getting his hands on important people and information.

Then, using one of Seul-bi’s visions, the team has Ok-jin approach Il-joong and convince him to invest in a company that’s about to have its assets frozen. Il-joong and Dong-sik are subsequently plunged into debt and legal troubles, meaning they’ll likely be forced to sell their shares in Geumhwa Group. So much for their big plans of taking over the company.

But what Chairman Sun doesn’t realize is that Su-kwang, Seul-bi, and co. haven’t saved Geumhwa Group – they’re setting events in motion to bring it crumbling to its knees forever.

It’s a bit hard to see something as boring and seemingly tangential as preventing corporate takeovers being the key to saving Seul-bi from her own magical powers, but given all the time we continue to spend with the shopkeepers, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Still, I’d like a bit more clarity on why Seul-bi can’t – for example – find a priest of her own to break her necklace. Why wouldn’t the last remaining descendent of the shaman line renouncing her powers in that way effectively “cut off the chain,” as Ok-jin described it?

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Jinxed at First: Episodes 11-12