Call It Love: Episodes 9-10

Call It Love: Episodes 9-10

by Dramaddictally

These episodes should come with a warning label: may cause swooning and/or tears. They’re just full of sweet moments, positive growth, and progression — but with some painful stumbling blocks along the way. Our fated pair is getting closer this week, delivering all the slow-burn feels, but with three weeks left to go, a tough-to-beat obstacle still stands in their way.

 
EPISODES 9-10

Let’s start with Dong-jin because I can’t contain myself. This is not the man we met a few weeks ago, and Kim Young-kwang is lovely to watch transform on screen. He’s smiling, opening up, saying goodbye to the past, and even deprioritizing work. And it’s all thanks to our heroine, Woo-joo.

Dong-jin and Woo-joo are so natural together now, it’s hard to believe how cold they once were to each other, not that long ago. A few things toss our leads together this week, starting with Woo-joo discovering where Ji-gu has been hiding out. She’s angry at first and goes to Dong-jin’s apartment with the intention of collecting Ji-gu’s things. This is why she’s there to cut off CEO Shin on the night Min-young hugs Dong-jin, which is where we ended last week.

The situation with CEO Shin is easily diffused for the moment, but the topic of Woo-joo getting Ji-gu’s things keeps coming up. Dong-jin apologizes for keeping Ji-gu’s whereabouts a secret, but seems excited for Woo-joo to come over and pick up her brother’s stuff. At the office, he asks when she’s coming and she tells him she’ll go after work. His bright face says everything, so when Woo-joo cancels at the end of the day, he’s disappointed and asks her to wait for him.

Woo-joo waits but she’s moody and starts taking her anger out on him. We know immediately it’s not about Ji-gu, but about her deepening feelings for Dong-jin. This time, marking a major change in our male lead, Dong-jin tells Woo-joo exactly how he feels. He’s upset and angry. She does little things for him (like fix a button when he didn’t ask) but then she shuts him out and turns a cold shoulder. She said she wanted him to live comfortably, but she’s the reason he’s uncomfortable right now. (Something about the delivery of these lines had me in a sudden state of swoons.)

Honestly though, it’s Woo-joo’s discomfort that comes across on the screen, without her saying a word. She’s tense and stone-faced, trying to look everywhere but directly at Dong-jin. When she speaks, she’s plain stubborn: “This is who I am,” she says, trying to justify her behavior. By the end, Dong-jin leaves, saying that Ji-gu should pick up his own things. Once he’s gone, we see all the fleeting and muddled emotions on Woo-joo’s face (brilliant and impossible to screencap).

After this highly affecting scene, Dong-jin avoids Woo-joo at the office and Woo-joo turns down the offer of a permanent position at Best Fairs. Her contract is up in less than a month and she plans to leave.

But alas, there’s another event to toss our leads together, and it has to do with CEO Shin. His company is crashing and burning but he’s more preoccupied with taking down Best Fairs than trying to save his own business. He balls up all his aggression and decides Min-young is the right target to chuck it at. One night, drunk, he finds her outside her apartment building and approaches her with a rock in his hand, ready to be used as a weapon.

Woo-joo, always in the right place at the right time, intervenes and ends up knocked across the brow bone with the rock. She’s mostly okay, but has to go to the hospital for stitches, and by the time Dong-jin arrives, she’s asleep in the hospital bed. He sits with her, putting his hand against her cheek, and she reaches up and clasps his hand. It’s a quiet, subtle, and incredibly moving moment, even when Woo-joo tries to push him away.

This scene leads to them leaving the hospital and going to get food together, where Woo-joo returns to the idea of going to get Ji-gu’s things. Can she go? Or should she send her brother? After a lengthy pause, Dong-jin says she doesn’t need to keep feeling people out. “If you want to come, you can come anytime.” (I’m not kidding, I cried at that line.) Woo-joo can hardly hide her happiness (but she does a decent job of it) and says she’ll call him when she’s ready to go. He’s beaming and almost unrecognizable as the same person from Week 1.

While Dong-jin is in full-fledged transformation mode, Woo-joo is creeping her way toward big changes too. Our OTP goes to lunch together while a client is waiting for Dong-jin at the office. It’s one of the clients that left Best Fairs to work with CEO Shin, but now that Shin’s company is failing, the client wants back in. Dong-jin admits he’s making the man wait because he had to wait for five hours for this same client before. Is it petty? No, not for Woo-joo. She suggests they fill five hours with coffee and walks before heading back.

Dong-jin is surprised she’s not criticizing him for having waited so long for clients in the past. She says it’s not his fault — showing a major crack in her façade. She also grabs him by the sleeve and tells him to only take back the client if it’s what he wants to do. We then see the client leaving in a huff, with Dong-jin confident of his decision.

To round all this out, Dong-jin asks Woo-joo to go camping with him and she accepts! They go for one night, to the campsite where Min-young broke up with him — which he’s avoided for three years. At first, I was a little like, “Why would he take her to the same spot? Is this the only campground in Korea?” But then he confides that it’s the place where he hated himself the most, and now he’s going back to face it. And he wanted to go there with Woo-joo. (These two are so good for each other, I can’t stand it!)

If all this emotion weren’t enough, the story that really kicked me in the gut this week belongs to Hye-sung. She’s out with her boyfriend, who tells her to stop pretending to like all the same things he does — to stop being so fake. She decides to disclose to him that she’s been taking meds ever since that awful incident at work (the one where her last boyfriend’s other girlfriend came in and pulled her by the hair). She was so ashamed afterward, she couldn’t sleep. He’s the first person she’s telling about the medication. She cries, he holds her hand across the table, and I’m a big sobbing mess.

I wish the story ended there, but later, as they’re having a nice dinner together, he takes a phone call outside and Hye-sung hears him telling his friend everything she just confessed to him. He says it as if it’s nothing and she leaves in a state of shock. As she’s drifting home, she sees Joon and runs to him in sobs. She hugs him, telling him why she’s humiliated, and he hugs her back and tries to comfort her. The camera lingers on her sobbing and it totally broke my heart.

To set us up for next week, another major obstacle rolls into town: the Shin siblings’ mom. She comes back to Seoul unannounced and only when she arrives to their old house does she learn it no longer belongs to them. She’s furious with her kids and doesn’t even want to be in the same room with them, so Joon has to explain to her what happened. They all seem somewhat afraid of her, or at least, they defer to her. And Woo-joo ends up leaving to get away from all the wild emotions flying around.

As she’s out by herself, she receives a message from Dong-jin thanking her for helping him put away his tent after all these years and escape the stronghold of the past. She begins to cry her eyes out.

This is my favorite set of episodes yet. I don’t even have much to say because it’s all so emotional. Watching Woo-joo help Dong-jin heal is not only satisfying in itself, it’s getting me more excited for how things are going to play out when it’s Woo-joo’s turn to finally heal.

The thing that keeps calling my attention in this drama is how realistically complicated the interactions are. There are layers of emotions, all occurring at once, that fold into explaining how the characters behave. I’m so impressed with how the seemingly simplistic story of Dong-jin and Min-young’s breakup has been building into a mess of feelings and motivations. Even as he’s saying he has no feelings for her, he’s tearing up and telling her to get help (he clearly still feels something — it just might not be love). And we’ve already seen that she had other reasons for ending things with him.

All I know is, as much as I want to see what happens next, I might need the week-long interlude to deal with everything that’s bubbling up from these episodes.

 
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Call It Love: Episodes 9-10
Source: Buzz Pinay Daily