Familiar Wife: Episode 8

by LollyPip

It’s time for Joo-hyuk to grow up, stop thinking of himself first, and make a decision that will affect a lot of people for a long time to come. He’s feeling deep regret for the selfish choice he made, and he realizes that he needs to think of others, and not just himself anymore. It’s not an easy choice, but Joo-hyuk does his best to do the right thing, even if it means not getting what his own heart wants.

 
EPISODE 8: “Forever”

Joo-hyuk sees what looks like Jong-hoo kissing Woo-jin in the car, and when he gets back to town, he heads to the bank in the hopes of finding a coin made in 2006. He finds one, and drives back to the road where the mysterious toll booth was both times he went back to the past. But no matter how many times he drives past the spot, it’s not there.

He gives up and heads back to the subway station where he last saw the doomsayer, and after scaring several homeless men, he finally finds the doomsayer sleeping in a men’s room stall. He tells the man that he heard him talking about the star turning into a black hole and creating a wormhole in time, but the doomsayer refuses to wake up.

Joo-hyuk kneels and apologizes for turning Woo-jin into a miserable monster while thinking that he was the one doing all the work. He confesses that he ignored her needs, and he starts to cry when he thinks about how he promised to love Woo-jin for the rest of his life, but didn’t live up to that promise.

He asks the doomsayer if he can go back, sobbing and begging for an answer, but the doomsayer just complains about the noise he’s making. He calls Joo-hyuk crazy, and Joo-hyuk wails that he is crazy, but he needs to know how to save himself.

Suddenly the doomsayer’s voice changes, becoming deep and booming. He says to Joo-hyuk, “You slacker. What’s done is done. How can you stop something you’ve already done? You were so desperate back then. Does it hurt? Does your heart hurt?”

Seeing Joo-hyuk’s desperation, the doomsayer gently takes his hand and tells him that it was fate for him to make the wrong decision and end up here. He tells Joo-hyuk to wish Woo-jin happiness like a real man, then he lies down and goes back to sleep.

Bereft, Joo-hyuk ends up on a bridge overlooking the river, seeing Woo-jin’s young, happy face all around him. Although it looks like it kills him, he thinks about the doomsayer’s advice to wish Woo-jin happiness, and he throws his 2006 coin into the water.

The next morning, Hye-won finds Joo-hyuk up early, cheerfully cleaning the house. She asks what he’s so happy about, and he chirps that he’s decided to live diligently and responsibly. That earns him some happy snuggles as a reward for his new positive attitude.

Woo-jin heads to work, leaving Mom staring longingly at an old photo of her father. She tells Mom’s carer that she’s got the day off tomorrow (for her father’s memorial day). She’s surprised to see Jong-hoo outside, and he insists on taking her to work in a taxi since she’s still recovering from her fever.

Joo-hyuk is still in a great mood when he gets to the bank, and he goes in throwing shadow punches at Hwan. Hwan shows him how it’s really done, impressing Hyang-sook, who admits that he actually looked pretty manly. Joo-hyuk isn’t fazed when Jong-hoo and Woo-jin arrive together, not even when Hye-jong mentions that they come in together a lot and asks if they’re dating.

Jong-hoo stammers, and Woo-jin says nervously that they keep running into each other on their way in. Hwan says her terrible acting makes him even more suspicious, so Joo-hyuk distracts him by mentioning that he’s noticed that Hwan always follows Hyang-sook when she leaves work. He squints at Hyang-sook when she denies (a little too vehemently) that anything is going on, and the distraction works.

Woo-jin follows Joo-hyuk into the vault later, where he tells her that yep, she was pretty obvious back there. He asks if she’s feeling better, and she explains that she always gets a high fever when she’s coming down with a cold.

Again, Joo-hyuk accidentally blurts out, “I know,” then hurriedly says he meant “I thought so.” Steeling himself a bit, he sincerely wishes Woo-jin luck with Jong-hoo, even playfully offering to beat him up if he’s ever mean to her.

He says that her friendship with Joo-eun makes her like a little sister, and Woo-jin smiles, saying that she’s lucky to have found a boyfriend and an oppa at the same time. But as Joo-hyuk walks away congratulating himself on being mature about all this, Woo-jin’s smile fades.

Back in the office, both Manager Byun and Team Leader Jang learn through a chat room that a new company vice-president has been chosen. Team Leader Jang posts that it might be a branch manager getting promoted, but someone else replies that the new VP was hired from overseas.

There’s also a rumor that the new vice-president may secretly inspect the branches before they officially start the job. Team Leader Jang posts a bunch of rapid-fire questions before Manager Byun can type a single sentence, making him growl in frustration.

He blows up at her, demanding she give him a chance to post something, but she just snaps at him to type faster, ha. Branch Manager Cha walks in and asks what the fight is about, and again Team Leader Jang talks over Manager Byun, saying that the new vice president is coming to do a secret inspection.

Hye-won heads to the gym again, hoping to see Hyun-soo there. She even asks one of the employees if they’ve seen him lately, and she’s told that he hasn’t been in for a while. She turns down an offer to give her Hyun-soo’s number, and she worries that he’s not coming to the gym because he promised to stay away from her.

Everyone at the bank is on their best behavior due to the rumors of the new vice-president doing a secret inspection. A man in a sharp suit comes in followed by his secretary, making the bank employees snap to attention, and they listen surreptitiously as he asks Hye-jong some banking questions.

Woo-jin is in the restroom when a woman dressed like a cleaning lady comes in. She shares her hand lotion when she sees that the woman has run out, and the lady tells her she’s very kind. Wanna bet this is actually the new vice-president?

Out in the lobby, everyone is either standing in a circle around the suited man, or staring at him from their desks, which looks incredibly awkward. The all ignore the cleaning lady, so she goes to Woo-jin’s desk to ask her advice on some accounts, and Woo-jin gives her usual excellent customer service.

After work, everyone talks about the suited man, sure that he was the new vice-president, congratulating themselves on the great service they gave him. Team Leader Jang reminds Woo-jin that she’s off tomorrow, and Joo-hyuk asks Jong-hoo why. Jong-hoo says it’s for her father’s memorial day, and Joo-hyuk is shocked that he forgot.

But when Jong-hoo complains that they’re working late, so Woo-jin will have to shop for groceries for her father’s offerings when she’s tired, Joo-hyuk tells him to go shopping with her. Jong-hoo is thrilled by Joo-hyuk’s support, grudging though it is, and he happily hugs Joo-hyuk in thanks.

While Joo-hyuk stays late getting their work done, Jong-hoo and Woo-jin go shopping together. Joo-hyuk gets up to refill his coffee, and on his way back, he trips over his computer cord, unplugging the machine and losing hours of work… oh noooo. The poor guy can only wail in frustration and start all over again.

He heads to Sang-shik’s when he’s finally finished, where he finds Sang-shik and Joo-eun working on social media advertising for the bar. Joo-hyuk softly complains that he’s hungry while they fight over which photos to post, and they don’t even notice when he eventually gets up and leaves.

The next morning, Woo-jin wakes up alone in bed. She grows worried when she realizes that Mom left the house alone again, even leaving her father’s photo behind.

Branch Manager Cha announces that the new vice-president’s secretary called to say they made a very good impression yesterday, and the vice-president is on their way to the bank now. Hwan finds information on the company website, which names the new VP as Kang Eun-seon, and Joo-hyuk notes that “Eun-seon” is usually a woman’s name.

The vice-president arrives, and sure enough, it’s the woman that Woo-jin met in the restroom. HA, I knew it! She gives Branch Manager Cha some money to take the team out for a nice dinner, and asks why the nice girl who helped her yesterday isn’t there. She’s told that Woo-jin is taking a personal day, and she’s disappointed, having hoped to thank Woo-jin personally for being so sincere and kind.

After Vice-President Kang leaves, the managers all look sheepish about their misconception. Jong-hoo laments that the bank feels empty without Woo-jin there, and he and Joo-hyuk go up to the roof for a quick break.

Jong-hoo can’t stop talking about Woo-jin — how much he misses her and wishes he could see her tonight. He says he’ll visit his mom instead, and when Joo-hyuk calls him a bad son for only seeing his mother when his lady is busy, he snaps that Joo-hyuk has no room to criticize. One point to Jong-hoo.

He tries to call Woo-jin, and when she doesn’t answer, he gets concerned. She doesn’t have her phone because she’s running around the neighborhood looking for Mom, but Mom isn’t at any of her regular haunts. Woo-jin even goes to the columbarium where her father’s ashes are, but Mom isn’t there, either.

At the end of the day, the bank employees want to go out to dinner with the money from Vice-President Kang. Jong-hoo points out that they shouldn’t celebrate without Woo-jin, whom Vice-President Kang most wanted to thank. Joo-hyuk backs him up and everyone reluctantly agrees, but they all turn puppydog eyes on Joo-hyuk, begging him to change his mind.

He relents, so they all end up at dinner anyway, making lame excuses why it was okay to do this without Woo-jin. Branch Manager Cha even promises to give Woo-jin a separate reward later, and they make a toast to her in her absence. Only Jong-hoo and Joo-hyuk look uncomfortable with this whole thing.

Hwan and Hyang-sook get into another bickering fight when Hwan tries to wipe the sauce off Hyang-sook’s face, and she gets annoyed. She asks why he’s so critical of her lately, and Hwan just pouts as everyone tells them to simmer down and eat.

Branch Manager Cha brags about his daughter, who just won a scholarship, and he passes around a picture so everyone can see how pretty she is. LOL, they struggle to think of compliments for a girl who is doubtless beautiful to her daddy, but in reality, not so much. She happens to call, so Branch Manager Cha leaves the table, and everyone reaches for a drink, heh.

Joo-hyuk runs into Jong-hoo by the restrooms, staring worriedly at his phone. Jong-hoo says that Woo-jin still hasn’t called him even after all of his calls to her, and she hasn’t even read his texts. He mentions that he saw Mom cleaning Woo-jin’s father’s photo when we dropped off Woo-jin last night, and it made him feel bad. He sighs that he just wants to hear Woo-jin’s voice, and he asks Joo-hyuk if he’ll seem to clingy if he keeps calling her. Joo-hyuk says that yeah, he’ll seem clingy.

Team Leader Jang finds Manager Byun outside sitting on the curb, trying to call his ex-wife, who lives in Canada. He whines drunkenly that his ex-wife is too harsh, not letting him talk to his daughter, and even calls her by a Western name instead of the beautiful name he gave her. Team Leader Jang pulls him to his feet and takes him back inside, threatening to drop him when he tells her never to get married.

On the taxi ride home, Joo-hyuk recalls this same day in 2014, when he’d chosen to attend a work dinner and missed Woo-jin’s father’s memorial day yet again. This time Woo-jin had said curtly that she didn’t expect him to show up since he missed it last year, too. Ouch, but true.

He’d missed it again in 2015 due to work, and Woo-jin, cradling her hugely pregnant belly, had snapped that he shouldn’t have promised to be there. And in 2016, when he’d showed up late yet again, Woo-jin had thrown a towel at him and yelled that she’d begged him not to disappoint Mom this time. Joo-hyuk had argued back that his boss had emergency surgery, but Woo-jin had screamed and thrown whatever she could find at him, ordering him to get out.

Joo-hyuk goes to Woo-jin’s house and leaves a gift at the gate. He apologizes to Woo-jin’s father for being late, and asks him to comfort Woo-jin and Mom. He bows respectfully, sighs a heavy sigh, then rings the doorbell and retreats to a safe distance.

But instead of Woo-jin opening the door, she walks right past him on the street, looking dazed and out of it. She starts to cry when Joo-hyuk asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him that she’s been looking for Mom all day but can’t find her anywhere. She’s extra worried because Mom wasn’t wearing her ID necklace, and she doesn’t know Woo-jin’s phone number.

Joo-hyuk takes Woo-jin to the police station to report Mom missing. The detective kindly agrees to let Woo-jin wait at the station, and she tells Joo-hyuk to go on home. He steps away to take a call from Hye-won, who thinks he’s still at his team dinner, and he fibs that a coworker lost their mother, and he and his bosses have to go to the funeral in Sangju, several hours from Seoul.

Knowing that Woo-jin hasn’t eaten all day, Joo-hyuk runs to the store for some food, but when he gets back to the station, she’s fallen asleep sitting up. He sits with her for a while, wondering what he can do to help, when he suddenly remembers Sang-shik and Joo-eun posting messages on social media. Sang-shik had mentioned that it even works for finding missing dogs, so Joo-hyuk calls Sang-shik for his social media account information, then takes Woo-jin’s phone and copies a photo of her and Mom.

Woo-jin wakes in the morning to find Joo-hyuk next to her, nodding off with his arm stretched out and his hand cushioning her head. Awww, sweet. He wakes up and pulls his hand back, and when she asks why he didn’t go home, he just says vaguely that he explained things to his wife.

He checks the post he made last night about Mom being missing, and finds a message that someone thinks they saw her at a bus terminal. He and Woo-jin rush to the terminal, but it’s only someone who looks a bit like Mom. Woo-jin starts to cry again, saying that Mom’s never been missing this long before and scared she’ll never find her.

Another report comes in, this time from a food bank for homeless people. Woo-jin can tell from the posted photo that this time it really is Mom, and the best part is that when they get there, Mom is actually volunteering, ha. Woo-jin grabs her, wailing about how scared she was, then Joo-hyuk also hugs Mom, relieved.

They take Mom home, where Woo-jin explains to Joo-hyuk that when her father was alive, he and Mom used to volunteer a lot. She insists on walking Joo-hyuk back to his car, which reminds Joo-hyuk of when they were young and Woo-jin would insist on holding his sleeve while they walked this same alley.

He remembers a later time after they started dating, when Woo-jin had pouted that she didn’t want to go home yet. Joo-hyuk had agreed that he didn’t want to part from her, and she’d half-joked that they should just get married. Joo-hyuk had teasingly proposed, and Woo-jin had chirped a happy “yes!”

In the present, Woo-jin thanks Joo-hyuk for posting online about Mom and staying with her, saying that she felt reassured by his presence. She admits that she tries her best, but she can’t fill the void left in Mom’s life when her dad died.

She says that Mom deeply loved Dad, and Joo-hyuk asks, “Like the number zero? It’s the absolute power that turns every number into zero in multiplication, but has no power when it comes to addition because it loves addition more.” He’s repeating Woo-jin’s own idea, and she asks how he knew that.

Joo-hyuk says that he heard it somewhere, but he only now understands what it means. He tells Woo-jin, “After she disappeared… after that person left me, I regretted that I couldn’t be better, and why I didn’t know how precious she was. I regretted, felt sorry, and missed her.” Woo-jin asks if he’s telling her his old love story.

Joo-hyuk just says with a sad smile, “I’m sorry, really. I wanted to say that… to her.” He continues that he won’t be able to see that person again, and Woo-jin tells him that he hopes she gets his apology. Joo-hyuk says that his words won’t ever reach her, so he’ll just wish for her happiness with all his heart.

Looking moved, Woo-jin says that she’s not good at wishing others happiness, and just says what’s on her mind. But she says she won’t this time, because she wants to be different, like an adult. “This time,” she says, “I’ll wish only with my heart, like you said. This time.”

She holds out a hand, and Joo-hyuk shakes it, holding on until Woo-jin lets go first. She cheerfully says she’ll see him tomorrow, but when she turns to go home, something in her expression looks infinitely sad, like she senses that something important just happened.

When Joo-hyuk finally gets home, he finds Hye-won in a snit, annoyed that he was gone all night. Joo-hyuk makes up excuses on the fly, like that his boss insisted they stay for the whole funeral, and that he had to wear his inappropriately bright tie because he couldn’t find a store to buy a darker one.

Woo-jin had put Mom to bed and gone to sleep next to her, and after a while, Mom wakes up with a start. She looks down at where Woo-jin is still sleeping, and sneakily picks up her phone.

While Joo-hyuk is in the shower, Hye-won hears his phone ringing from his pants pocket. She sees Woo-jin’s name on caller ID and answers, wondering what she wants. She hears Mom’s voice, who thinks she’s talking to Joo-hyuk, calling him “Cha Son-in-Law” and asking why he left without eating first.

Hye-won says that she’s Joo-hyuk’s wife and asks why Mom is calling him her son-in-law, but Mom just hangs up. Suspicious now, Hye-won goes through Joo-hyuk’s clothes and finds the police detective’s business card, then she goes out to his car to check his GPS for the most recent location searches, and realizes that he never went to Sangju as he claimed.

Truly confused now, Hye-won plays the audio from the car’s black box, and she hears Woo-jin’s voice asking whether filing a police report will help find Mom. Fast-forwarding, she also hears Woo-jin’s breathless voice again, and Joo-hyuk assuring her that his intuition is telling him that they’ll find Mom.

Hye-won stomps upstairs to their bedroom, where Joo-hyuk has just climbed into bed to get some sleep. She tosses something into his lap, demanding an explanation, and Joo-hyuk picks up the item she threw. It’s the memory chip from the black box, and he realizes that Hye-won must have heard that he was with Woo-jin last night.

COMMENTS

Honestly, as much as I sense that things are about to get very bad for Joo-hyuk, I’m kind of glad that he got caught so quickly. Despite all of the positive things I’m about to say about Joo-hyuk and his growth and newfound maturity, I’m very uncomfortable with how much he’s been lying to Hye-won lately. If he’s decided to let Woo-jin go and be a good husband to Hye-won, then that means he needs to either be honest with Hye-won when he’s with Woo-jin, or better yet, actually stop hanging around Woo-jin so much. The fact that he’s doing the right thing with Woo-jin doesn’t excuse all the lies to Hye-won, and just proves that he may have done a lot of maturing, but he’s still got a long way to go.

That said, I really applaud Joo-hyuk’s sincere attempt to accept his decision to change his life and wish Woo-jin well in hers. In a lot of ways, he really did improve both of their lives by changing the past, because even though they’re no longer with the person they were meant to love, they’re both in more stable situations. Joo-hyuk has a beautiful wife, a lovely home, respect at work, and he doesn’t need to worry about money anymore, and Woo-jin is (mostly) happily single with a stable career, has a great relationship with her mother, is dating a great guy who really likes her, and is free to be herself. There’s a strong argument to be made that Joo-hyuk could leave well enough alone, accept the situation as it is, and be content that that he’s responsible for improving both their lives. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that, I think.

But he can’t help the way he feels, and the reminder that Woo-jin’s father’s memorial day snuck up on him again was a huge kick in the teeth. Joo-hyuk should have remembered it just because it’s an important day to Woo-jin, and not only that, he’d already been reminded and felt guilty for blowing it off in the past. And to make it worse, we saw that he missed her father’s memorial day several years in a row, consistently prioritizing work over Woo-jin’s feelings. No wonder she was screaming and throwing things at him by the end. For Joo-hyuk to forget it again in this timeline, after everything that’s happened and after his deep regret and sorrow at throwing away their life together, is pretty inexcusable.

I didn’t really understand the “power of zero” analogy when Woo-jin first mentioned it, but like Joo-hyuk, I think I get it now. It means that even something (or more importantly, someone) that seems so strong in some situations, can be reduced to absolute powerlessness in the face of real love. It’s the way Woo-jin always felt for Joo-hyuk, loving him so much that she even gave up her sense of self by being married to him, and never left him and saved herself because of that love. Sadly, Joo-hyuk didn’t feel the same way about Woo-jin — though I believe he did genuinely love her — because he always prioritized his own wishes and needs above hers.

Now that he understands what the power of zero means, he’s realizing that he does love Woo-jin that much, enough to be powerless to that love. Until recently, he was still putting his own desires first, wanting to go back to the timeline where she was miserable just because he misses her. But now Joo-hyuk realizes that if he truly, genuinely loves Woo-jin, he has to let her go, so that she can live a happy life even if that means not being with her himself. It’s a hard lesson, but it’s one that Joo-hyuk needed to learn — that sometimes, the best way to love someone is to watch them be happy from a distance.

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