Woohoo Waikiki 2: Episode 5

by LollyPip

Living with your best friends can be a lot of fun, or it can be a nightmare — and sometimes, it’s even both at the same time. It’s inevitable that close quarters can cause annoyance and hard feelings, and our housemates are no exception. But at least what’s miserable for them is entertaining for us, amirite?

 
EPISODE 5: Crying Fist/Dreams Come True

Joon-ki and Ki-bong watch a mixed martial arts fight on TV, annoying Yu-ri, who’s trying to read a book. She grumbles that she doesn’t get what men see in fighting, so they explain that it’s fun and exciting. They brag that neither of them has ever lost a fight, so Yu-ri asks which of them would win in a fight against each other.

She thinks Ki-bong would win due to his height and build, but Jung-eun argues that Joon-ki is a black belt in taekwondo. Joon-ki says there’s no winning or losing between friends, but the guys make faces at each other, each convinced he would be the winner.

Woo-shik is upstairs playing angsty “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the piano, still upset with himself after learning that he was Soo-yeon’s first love back in high school. He tells Yu-ri about Soo-yeon’s revelation when she comes up to complain about the noise, whining that he was a fool for ten years and misunderstanding when he could have been marrying Soo-yeon and making a family.

Practical-minded Yu-ri tells him to just do those things now, but Woo-shik says that Soo-yeon doesn’t seem interested in him. Yu-ri counters that Soo-yeon has no reason to tell him the truth now… unless she wanted to clear up the misunderstanding and start over.

Just then, Soo-yeon texts Woo-shik to say she wants to talk. Yu-ri gets Woo-shik’s hopes up by saying that she thinks Soo-yeon wants to tell him she has feelings for him, and it certainly looks that way when the first thing Soo-yeon asks if if he’s dating anyone. But she’s actually setting him up with a friend of hers, Da-young (cameo by Park Ah-in), and Woo-shik kicks himself for being an idiot all over again.

Yu-ri decides that Soo-yeon must be testing him, and that setting him up with a friend was her way of finding out if he likes her or not. She talks Woo-shik into telling Soo-yeon that he’s going to go out with Da-young, guaranteeing him that it will make Soo-yeon crazy.

After he’s gone, Ki-bong returns from a workout, and Yu-ri notices that he’s gotten very fit recently. She asks again if he could beat Joon-ki in a fight, and he brags that if Joon-ki is an elementary student, then he’s like Mike Tyson, ha. When Joon-ki hears from Jung-eun that Ki-bong thinks he can beat him in a fight, he says that such things aren’t important between friends — but that he’s much nimbler than Ki-bong.

Soo-yeon is passing out flyers for a new jokbal restaurant. Da-young works there, too, and she thanks Soo-yeon for setting her up with Woo-shik. Someone pushes Soo-yeon and she accidentally steps on Da-young’s toe, and suddenly the girl’s entire attitude changes.

She yells at Soo-yeon and calls her names, and even kicks her when she tries to clean her shoe. Da-young says that she’s not angry because of her shoes, and rips one apart with her hands and teeth to prove that she doesn’t care if they’re wrecked.

Woo-shik shows up to take Da-young on a date, and he notices that Soo-yeon seems nervous and eagerly awaits her reason why. Soo-yeon doesn’t get a chance to warn him before Da-young comes out and gives her a look like, You have nothing to tell him, RIGHT??

Soo-yeon follows them on their date, and at one point he leaves the table to answer a call from Yu-ri. Soo-yeon tries to follow him, but Da-young stops her and says they should order some food, because she gets angry when she’s hungry. She loudly objects to everything poor Soo-yeon suggests, sneering that Soo-yeon is slim so she can eat whatever she wants.

She blows up again and says that since she’s such a fattie, she’ll just eat the menu — and then she does. This girl is a nightmare.

Yu-ri interprets Soo-yeon tagging along on their date as interest in Woo-shik. He notices Soo-yeon’s nervous expression, but he can’t see Da-young from his angle, so he believes Yu-ri when she says that Soo-yeon is nervous that he and Da-young will get along. He does think she looks more horrified than nervous, but he badly wants to believe his sister’s version of the story.

At the guesthouse, when they run into each other, they get all puffed up and accuse each other of being delusional about their fighting skills. Ki-bong mentions something called “The Rice Cake Skewer Battle,” and we flash back to his high school days.

He’d seen his nerdy friend being shaken down by a bully for money to buy rice cake skewers. The bully was huge and was wearing a taekwondo uniform, and had called in reinforcements, but Ki-bong hadn’t hesitated to defend his friend.

HA, it’s like a bad kung fu movie, with each swing of Ki-bong’s arm throwing several attackers impossibly high into the air. Joon-ki calls BS on the outlandish story, so Ki-bong says that the point is that he’s big, but he’s also quick.

Joon-ki tells his own story, “The Legend of the 1-18 Match,” in which he once witnessed a bully (in a baseball uniform, hee) trying to steal a valuable baseball card from a little kid. Joon-ki had fought the bully and his entire team, saving the day. Ki-bong doesn’t believe this tale either, but Joon-ki says that even though he’s small, the baseball players were no match for him.

After dinner, Da-young ducks back into the restaurant for her forgotten phone, and Soo-yeon sees her chance. She asks Woo-shik if he really wants to date Da-young, and Woo-shik thinks that she’s jealous. He cutely asks her why he shouldn’t date her friend, but he interrupts her explanation and says he understands what she wants to say. He takes Da-young up on her offer of coffee without Soo-yeon, and tells Soo-yeon to go on home and he’ll take care of everything.

Joon-ki and Ki-bong work out in their room, trying to intimidate each other with their strength and speed. They finally call it a night and jump into bed, then get into a competitive tug-of-war for the blanket. Frustrated, Joon-ki says that Ki-bong always hogs the covers, and threatens to do something if Ki-bong keeps it up.

They end up snarling in each other’s faces, which is how Jung-eun finds them. They decide to settle the covers issue once and for all, and take it outside.

After coffee, Da-young asks Woo-shik out again, but he says he needs to tell her something. He gets another call and runs off for a minute, and Da-young’s sweet smile drops as she gets angry that he keeps taking phone calls in the middle of his sentences. (Can’t blame her on this one.)

It’s Yu-ri on the phone again, and Woo-shik tells her that Soo-yeon asked him not to date Da-young. Yu-ri says that he has to confess to Soo-yeon now, to make it official.

Woo-shik goes back to Da-young, who calms herself after angrily kicking dents in a metal trash can. He tells her that he likes someone else, but that he agreed to the blind date because he was in a situation, and she goes nuts again. She screams insults at him in banmal, then flips back to jondae and says she’ll give him one more chance to explain what his situation was.

Terrified now, Woo-shik says he can’t tell her, so she hands him her purse and starts looking for a weapon. She finds a metal folding chair by the trash can and swings it down on his head.

Joon-ki and Ki-bong are down by the Han River, preparing to fight it out for ownership of the blanket. They square up, dodging and weaving and throwing shadow punches, then run at each other — and a passing teenager asks them for some money because he’s hungry. Joon-ki get an idea to “take care of” the kid for having the nerve to demands money from strangers, and they advance on the boy with their best intimidating faces on.

Yu-ri talks Soo-yeon into going for a walk despite the freezing weather. She tells Soo-yeon indulgently that she knows why she set Woo-shik up on a blind date and why she was anxious about it. She says that Soo-yeon should have told Woo-shik the truth from the beginning, but Soo-yeon says that she didn’t know Da-young was such a psycho.

Finally figuring things out, Yu-ri asks if that’s the only reason Soo-yeon was anxious. Suddenly, the park lights up and romantic music plays, and Yu-ri looks nervous and says they should go. But she’s too late — Woo-shik comes into sight, carrying a huge bouquet of flowers and ignoring his bloody nose. Oh noooo, this is so embarrassing.

Yu-ri stammers that he’s just working part-time selling flowers, and she tries to stop his approach. He misreads her signal and starts to confess to Soo-yeon. Yu-ri yells, “No!!” and does the backspin elbow move she saw in the mixed martial arts fight, knocking poor Woo-shik unconscious.

Later, Joon-ki and Ki-bong shuffle home, having been completely destroyed by the kid at the river. Jung-eun asks who won the blanket, and they stammer that it was a draw. The boy’s father comes looking for them, followed by the student, having found the guys’ wallets in his son’s backpack. Jung-eun asks how the kid got them, so Joon-ki fibs that they gave him their money to buy snacks, and the wallets were a gift.

Soo-yeon asks about their IDs and credit cards, but their excuses wear thin and she correctly guesses that they got beat up. The kid protests that they tried to hit him first, and Joon-ki and Ki-bong bicker all over again, each claiming that the other got the worse beating (“You called him ‘hyung’ first!” LOL).

Poor Woo-shik is in a neck brace and can’t close his mouth after Yu-ri’s attack, and he’s angry that he trusted her. She asks how she can make it up to him, and he goes after her with a broom.

In the morning, Ki-bong wakes to find Joon-ki having a weird dream. He kicks Joon-ki out of bed, only for Joon-ki to toss his undies in Ki-bong’s face. Joon-ki tells his housemates at breakfast that he had a fascinating dream — he was climbing a mountain, then went swimming in a lake at its summit. He was joined in the lake by “Chairman Kim from the north” (obviously meant to be N. Korean leader Kim Jong-un).

Yu-ri says that it’s good luck to dream of someone famous, but Joon-ki says that’s just superstition. So Ki-bong asks Joon-ki to sell his dream to him, because he needs the luck, and Joon-ki agrees. It seems to work, as Ki-bong has a great practice later, then learns that the major league team’s coach needs a replacement so will be coming to scout them.

Joon-ki uses his dream money to buy pizza for dinner, though nearly everyone feels bad that Woo-shik still can’t manage solids. Jung-eun has to leave soon for another part-time job, so Joon-ki asks if she’s given up on acting. Soo-yeon didn’t know that Jung-eun and Joon-ki majored in theatre together and that she used to be in movies and dramas with him, and she asks why Jung-eun quit, but Jung-eun just stammers that she had a situation and leaves the table.

Ki-bong is all excited about the possibility of moving back up to the major leagues, and he credits Joon-ki’s dream. Joon-ki decides he wants his dream back, but Ki-bong refuses to give up his good luck.

The next morning, Ki-bong eats his regular good-luck breakfast of spoiled kimbap in preparation for the scouting, but he continues to deny Joon-ki’s wish to buy his dream back. When he gets to practice, Ki-bong’s belly starts to rumble just like it did the day he pitched a shutout, and he knows it’s going to be a good day.

He’s taken aback when he gets to the locker room and finds that the other guys also have their own superstitious rituals, like wearing pantyhose, attaching a talisman to their backs, or his teammate Ha-ni’s (cameo by In Gyo-jin) habit of doing everything four times in a row.

Ki-bong takes his jacket off, and his friend finds money taped to his back with a note that says “for the dream.” HA, Joon-ki bought his dream back without permission. Coach announces that the scout had to reschedule to tomorrow, and Ki-bong blames this bad turn of luck (and his bad turn of tummy) on Joon-ki.

Meanwhile, Joon-ki gets a call for an audition and chalks it up to his lucky dream. He talks Yu-ri into helping him run lines, but when she balks at saying “I love you,” they give up. Joon-ki asks Jung-eun to help him instead, but she refuses.

Ki-bong is sick as a dog and blaming it on Joon-ki, and he insists that Joon-ki give the dream back. Joon-ki skips away giggling and Ki-bong tries to hobble after him, but his stomach hurts too much after eating that kimbap. Yu-ri tells him to just go to the bathroom, but he says that he can’t because he didn’t use the bathroom on the day he pitched his shutout.

He even does a handstand to keep his bowels in place. He chases Joon-ki around the house walking on his hands, insisting that Joon-ki give back the dream, but Joon-ki argues with Ki-bong’s feet that it was his dream in the first place.

Jung-eun takes a break at her job cleaning a sauna, and wistfully swipes through pictures on her phone of herself working in theatre. She accidentally nods off, and when she wakes up, there’s a naked man just outside. But she’s late for her next job so she sneaks out of the sauna, and she leaps like a dolphin into the pool to avoid another naked man.

The next morning at practice, Ki-bong is still valiantly trying to hold in his upset tummy (even sitting on a baseball bat handle, ouch and HAHA) and cursing Joon-ki out under his breath. It’s finally his turn to show off his pitching, so he gives himself a pep talk that it’s almost over. But he finds out that he’s pitching against Ha-ni, who’s still doing everything four times, and he despairs.

He clutches his rear in pain as he watches Ha-ni prance up to the plate four times, adjust his glove four times, and wind up the bat four times. Ki-bong throws one strike against Ha-ni, who then twirls four times on the plate, hee. Ki-bong waits while Ha-ni readies himself four more times, then throws another strike. He has to sit on his ankle to keep from having an accident, but he manages to wait until it’s his turn to throw one more pitch…

Joon-ki and Ki-bong run into each other on their way home, both of them looking very downcast. Ki-bong tells Joon-ki angrily that he failed the scout test because his batter hit a home run, and he grabs Joon-ki and blames him for taking his dream back and causing his failure.

But Joon-ki says that he failed his audition, too, because when he confidently opened the door on his way in, he knocked out the director. Oops. They conclude that it was just a stupid dream, after all, and they decide to soak away their disappointment at the sauna.

Joon-ki lowers himself into the pool, wondering what that weird dream was about, anyway. He splashes around until a hand grabs his shoulder, just like in his dream — and it’s Jung-eun, who’s still stranded in the water. She begs Joon-ki to help her out, but he suddenly realizes that this is his dream — he’s under a mural of mountains, swimming with Kim Jung-eun. LOL.

When they get back home, Yu-ri and Ki-bong are highly entertained by the real meaning of Joon-ki’s dream. Joon-ki complains that Jung-eun is useless, and asks why she’s so obsessed with money that she works so many jobs. Jung-eun storms off, angry, and Joon-ki follows her to apologize, but he says that this happened because she’s working too hard.

Jung-eun says it’s not about the money — she works constantly to keep herself from being tempted to go back into acting. She tells Joon-ki that she doesn’t have much talent so she gave up on it, because the fear of failure made her scared and anxious.

But Joon-ki points out that she feels worse now that she’s given up, not better. He agrees that it’s hard for him, too, going to auditions and mostly getting roles with no lines. But he says he doesn’t give up because he knows that it will be a hundred times harder to do something he doesn’t want to do, and that if it’s going to be tough either way, then ihe’d rather suffer while doing what he loves.

In the morning, Joon-ki is on his way out to some auditions when Jung-eun asks to join him. She admits that what he said about suffering doing something you love made a lot of sense, and Joon-ki beams at her. But a look at her resume has him cringing at her cheesy, old-fashioned photos, so she beats him up in retaliation.

 
COMMENTS

The show really feels like it’s settling into its rhythm, now that the characters and their lives and relationships are firmly established. We’re back to the two-problems-per-episode format of the first season, which a lot of people really enjoyed, because it keeps issues from being dragged out for too long. There are the large over-arcing themes, like Woo-shik’s love for Soo-yeon and Joon-ki’s quest to become a famous actor, but the silly little thirty minute vignettes allow us to learn more about the housemates while highlighting how ridiculous life can be, so that it doesn’t get bogged down in the more serious stuff. But the show always ends with some heartwarming moments between the friends, which I just love to pieces.

Speaking of which, I’ve been wondering, like Joon-ki, why Jung-eun works so many jobs, and her real reason really hit me in the feels. I’ve been exactly where she is — I also gave up an acting career because I felt I wasn’t talented enough. It’s painful, and I don’t blame her for trying to keep herself so busy that she doesn’t even have time to think about it. But I also think that this story line could go to some really fun places if Joon-ki gets involved. Instead of another entire season of watching him try to be a successful actor, I’d love to see him putting his energy into helping Jung-eun succeed at her dream, and who knows, maybe his true talent is in managing (plus I think they’d make a cute couple and I’m kind of shipping it already).

One of my favorite things in the Waikiki Guesthouse is when the housemates get on each other’s nerves, because it feels so relatable to anyone who’s had to share their home with someone else. Nobody gets along all the time, so their bickering and fighting feels realistic, especially the guys who have to share one tiny room and even a bed, in Ki-bong and Joon-ki’s case. It’s no wonder they rub each other the wrong way so often, because you can’t keep secrets from the people you’re living in such close quarters with. But I like how they have such a long history together, so they know each other in and out already, and they seem very willing to let things go. I have to admit that I think I like this group of housemates even more than the originals… I adored them, too, but something about this sextet just seems to mesh together a bit better.

I do have one small complaint — I originally expected Yu-ri to be more deliberately evil, based on her behavior when she first entered the house and the guys’ reaction to her, so I’m a bit disappointed that she’s been watered down a lot since her initial, manipulative entrance into the house. She’s still a disaster, but she’s less deliberate and more accidental than she was first made out to be. It’s still funny, because she acts so confident as she hands out frankly terrible advice, especially to her little brother Woo-shik, so I don’t blame him for not wanting her around. But it’s hardly as dramatic as they all made it out to be, and to be honest, Woo-shik at least should know better by now than the trust anything Yu-ri says, so I see his bad luck in regard to courting Soo-yeon to be at least half his own fault.

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