Oasis: Episodes 13-14

Oasis: Episodes 13-14

by Dramaddictally

With one week to go, the secrets are starting to pour out. Murderers are named, deaths are nullified, and this little invention called the DNA test is introduced. Plus, now that our hero is back in his homeland, he’s executing his plans to set things right — even if he has to do a lot of wrong to make it happen.

 
EPISODES 13-14

With Doo-hak back at the center of our story (where he should be!) we get some tearjerking scenes this week. First, Jung-shin learns the truth about the murder that sent Doo-hak to prison. Doo-hak tells her the basics, but then she reads his journal.

In it, he details the murder, the way he took the blame for Cheol-woong, and his feelings of inadequacy: how dare he have ambition when he’s the son of a servant? It’s so moving to hear Doo-hak’s story in his own voice, and to think about how far he’s come now, fighting for himself and what he believes is right.

The second majorly moving scene is when Doo-hak is finally reunited with his mother. I mean, buckets of tears. She’s one of the last people to find out he’s still alive and he’s a bawling mess as he kneels before her and apologizes.

He doesn’t go to his mom sooner because he’s been preparing his payback against Cheol-woong and his family. Doo-hak put a lot of pieces together in the time since everyone last saw him. He knows Cheol-woong set him up and he’s learned that Man-ok was behind his father’s death. But Doo-hak is no dummy and he understands that Man-ok is a hired hand. He reasons that it could have been Cheol-woong, Yeo-jin, or Choong-sung that gave the command — or they could all be working together. Knowing the secret about Cheol-woong’s murder gives them all a motive for killing Joong-ho.

After getting his old friends back together — both the forgery crew and the gang he worked with under Kwang-tak — Doo-hak moves in to strike from multiple angles. On one side, Poong-ho is leading the forgers in a real estate scam that’ll take Yeo-jin for all her money. After seeing Yeo-jin smack Doo-hak’s mom in the face last week, Poong-ho doesn’t just want Yeo-jin to go broke, he’d like to “slap the shit out of her” — which, lol, me too.

In another arm of the plan, Doo-hak aims to create doubt between Man-ok and his employers. To do this, he kidnaps Man-ok (and gets super violent with a baseball bat) and leads him to believe that Yeo-jin has hired someone to kill him. Doo-hak says he wants to kill Man-ok too because he knows he murdered his father, but it would be better if he and Man-ok can work together. Doo-hak will get what he wants (seeing Yeo-jin lose everything) and Man-ok will get to keep the money. Isn’t it a good deal?

Man-ok doesn’t totally believe Doo-hak that Yeo-jin has a hit out on him. But he can’t rule it out either. You see, in the middle of all this, Man-ok has learned the truth about Cheol-woong’s birth parents. When Man-ok killed Joong-ho, he found a letter in his pocket written to Cheol-woong detailing the facts. After reading it, Man-ok obtains some hair from both Cheol-woong and Choong-sung and has them compared using this new-fangled technology called a DNA test. He learns that the two men are not related — and he understands this was the real reason that Joong-ho was silenced.

Man-ok takes this information to Yeo-jin and asks to be reinstated in his old position next to Choong-sung — and he also wants 30% of her profits from the new real estate dealings she’s got going on with a chaebol construction company. Yeo-jin is literally quaking when she sees the DNA test and agrees to give him what he wants. In return, she wants all the copies of the letter and the test. Man-ok gets on his knees in front of Yeo-jin — in a way that’s too close and super threatening — and says all he wants is to serve their family. If she keeps him by her side, her life will have a happy ending. Soooo creepy!

Well, because of this interaction, Yeo-jin has to start defending Man-ok, which makes Cheol-woong super suspicious. He and Man-ok have it out, and Cheol-woong is clearly still terrified of Man-ok. It’s not just that Man-ok tortures and murders people, it’s also that he knows all of Cheol-woong’s secrets. In fact, he knows more about Cheol-woong than Cheol-woong knows about himself. But Man-ok only reveals his knowledge of the murder in high school (not about the birth parents).

The other piece of information Man-ok drops on Cheol-woong is that Joong-ho was killed by “the person closest to him.” Cheol-woong knows this is his mother. When he confronts her, she denies it — and Choong-sung says that Man-ok acted on his own accord because Joong-ho was threatening Yeo-jin. Cheol-woong doesn’t believe Man-ok would kill Joong-ho without orders, and finds it even harder to believe that Joong-ho was threatening Yeo-jin. We see the relationship between mother and son start to crumble.

And speaking of crumbling relationships, Jung-shin — at long last — starts to kick Cheol-woong out of her life. After she learns that Doo-hak was innocent all those years ago, she confronts Cheol-woong and lets him read Doo-hak’s journal. Cheol-woong is so grossly manipulative, he tells Jung-shin that the murder was her fault (because he killed the guy after he hit Jung-shin) and that he didn’t want to go to prison because he was afraid that he’d never see her again. Blech. Why has she kept him around this long?

After his altercation with Jung-shin — where she states that she doesn’t want to see him again — Cheol-woong goes home and gets drunk and then blames everything in his life on his mom. (It’s a cliché, but in this case, she deserves it.) He asks why she raised him the way she did. When he did something wrong, why wasn’t he punished? Why didn’t she make him pay the price for murder so he could grow up? He says that Doo-hak and Joong-ho died because of him and now he can never feel at peace.

True to character, the only information that Yeo-jin takes away from their conversation is that Jung-shin knows Cheol-woong murdered someone. She vows to shut Jung-shin up — which doesn’t seem to worry Cheol-woong as much as it should.

After Jung-shin and Doo-hak are reunited this week, they get back to trying to figure out their life together. Jung-shin wants Doo-hak to give up all his plans for revenge and just live peacefully with her. She even suggests (as if she heard my complaints last week) that they go live abroad and start over. But Doo-hak explains why he can’t do that: it’s tearing him up inside. And going to another country isn’t going to stop that. His fear is that he’ll end up transferring all that negativity to her.

We end our penultimate week with Cheol-woong learning that Doo-hak is alive when he sees him in front of Jung-shin’s house. However, he seems more upset about the fact that Jung-shin is back with Doo-hak than surprised by Doo-hak being back from the dead.

The show is really trying hard to make us feel something for Cheol-woong, but it’s not working for me. They’ve set up a false equivalency between the two male leads and it’s impossible to overlook it. On one hand, we have Doo-hak — the servant’s son who had nothing, but is loved. And on the other hand, we have Cheol-woong — the one who had everything but continues to get his heart broken. No matter how much the drama tries to convey the irony of their situations, I can’t sympathize with Cheol-woong for one teeny-tiny reason: he’s a bad person.

Although, these episodes try to demonstrate more than ever that Cheol-woong turned out that way because of how he was raised and the environment he grew up in. There are at least two scenes in these episodes where we see Cheol-woong act in a certain way with Jung-shin and then we see Yeo-jin act the exact same way with Cheol-woong. In the first, Cheol-woong vehemently denies that he murdered someone (and is doing it because he doesn’t want to lose Jung-shin). And later, Yeo-jin makes the same wild denial (and is doing it so she won’t lose Cheol-woong).

On the second occasion, Yeo-jin tells Cheol-woong she would do even worse things for him than she’s already done — and this is a repeat of a conversation a few episodes back between Jung-shin and Cheol-woong. Back then, Jung-shin didn’t know he was a murderer, but he was saying he would even kill for her.

The drama is getting back to this idea of how “nurture” (and not “nature”) has affected Cheol-woong’s character. And the way we see him acting out his “love” for Jung-shin is the way his mother shows her love for him. Still, even if it’s true, you won’t find me shedding tears for Cheol-woong any time soon.

 
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Oasis: Episodes 13-14
Source: Buzz Pinay Daily