Mental Coach Jegal: Episodes 11-12
by missvictrix
Relationships get complicated this week in the wake of new challenges, and already confusing emotions get even more so. How true are our emotions? Can we trust our feelings? How can we tell what our heart truly wants?
EPISODES 11-12 WEECAP
There’s just way too much going on in this drama, and not in a good way. While I love the quick dips into stories of other athletes, it’s just too much to track our main characters and add all these single-episode side characters in there too. Even though the plot doesn’t feel rushed, it feels out of focus. I forget who I’m supposed to care about most, or whose story this really is.
Confusing emotions are the name of the game, though, for many of our characters this week. After her giggly hallway confession and Gil’s obvious distress, Mu-gyeol wrist-grabs Ga-eul and drags her off scene. I greatly sympathized with his, “Yah! Cha Ga-eul!” — half betrayed since her heart was supposed to be for him, and half horrified that she’s fallen for the old man mental coach (or just thinks she has?).
Gil tries to explain — rationally — what is going on in her emotions, and we get a whole lot of concerned chatter between him and Dr. Park, and him and Ga-eul about emotional transference. And later, counter-transference. Whomp whomp!
For Ga-eul to put all her positive emotions and gratefulness towards Gil and mistake it for affection makes sense for me, and I can ride out this little plot line all right. Except is that what’s going on? I cannot tell where the drama is taking this “romance,” and that worries me.
For all of Gil’s distress and balking over her attachment to him, he doesn’t seem to be able to detach himself either, despite trying to be a rational adult. This comes to a head when Ga-eul hits a major crisis (more on that later) and he literally runs off like a lunatic to find and embrace her, worried about always being too late to save people in his life, and thinking that this is the moment he’s been getting premonitions of. But not so. Instead, Ga-eul says she’s okay now that he’s near, and they share an embrace.
Dr. Park watches from afar and holds Gil accountable for his mixed signals to Ga-eul which, to his credit, he’s good for. It was counter-transference, he explains. And sure enough, we saw flashbacks of his most vulnerable moments as a child and how he displaced those emotions onto Ga-eul and thus ran to protect her (like he had wanted to be able to do for himself). That’s all well and good, but this crush is still not resolved, and Ga-eul insists at every turn that she’s so happy and she’ll just continue to like him from afar and have her feelings for herself.
That would be okay, I guess (?), but she’s a giggley schoolgirl in front of him and not only glomps him when he appears at the rink, but plants a kiss on him too. It’s innocent enough, but there are two things going on here: what the heck is with his reaction, and of course the kiss is secretly captured by a nasty teammate of Ga-eul.
While this uncomfortable display of affection is going on, it’s played against a similarly confused dynamic between Mu-gyeol and skating sunbae HAN YEO-WOON (Kim Shi-eun), who has been so forgettably tangential that I haven’t had much to say about her.
Yeo-woon has a long-standing friendship with Mu-gyeol, but now he’s confused about his feelings since it’s made clear that Yeo-woon feels more for him, but he says he likes Ga-eul. And yet — as Ga-eul so fearlessly points out to him — when the two girls had an accident on the ice, which one did he run to first?
Mu-gyeol is confused about his heart, so he runs to our favorite mental coach, who gives good advice… but also, he seems confused about his own heart too. And so is Dr. Park, who seems to like Gil. And then there’s Tae-man, who seems to like Dr. Park. But, the weird part is, all of these attractions and crushes are a bit undermined by the how-do-I-trust-my-heart vibes, so it’s hard to get fully behind any of it, frankly. At least for now.
Also, the fact that the Mu-gyeol/Yeo-woon romance makes so much sense (and I quite like them together even if the sunbae seems so poorly miscast) worries me, because it suggests that the Ga-eul crush on Gil will materialize into an actual relationship. This is the last place I wanted the drama to go — for multiple reasons — and I’m hopping as they tease it out we won’t end up with them as a couple. Because I might have to resort to my own flying sidekick.
In addition to all of the confused hearts this week, we have all the side plots, which (as I mentioned before) are just too much. There’s the national fairy gymnast who’s ostracized and miserable and wants to quit her sport. Even with Gil’s counsel she can’t find a way out, and winds up purposefully falling during a routine to get herself out of the hell she’s in. Oof.
Then there’s the taekwondo athlete who’s the son of one of the No Medal Clubbers, and in his match, Gil has major flashbacks of his own totally unfair ruling years ago with Tae-man. All the plot beats — the gymnast who gets blatantly favored, the taekwondo athlete who wins after bribing the ref, Coach Oh’s endless match rigging, and even Moo-tae’s betrayal — point to the same corruption that we started this story with. It’s getting to the point where it all feels hopeless. Every sport seems rigged, every athlete pressured and manipulated, and the athletes suffer while the sponsors and politicians and leaders play their cards and win their games.
Where is it all going to end? Getting rid of Coach Oh and Tae-man and even the assemblyman is no longer enough, so I’m wondering where the drama is going to take all this, with only two more weeks to go. Surely noping out of professional athletics and joining the No Medal Club isn’t the only way to be a real victor.
So where do we stand at the end of the episodes? Gil has quit his job in a fury, and also to protect Ga-eul since the photographs of their rink-side kiss have been captured and sent straight to Tae-man. Gil seems pushed to the brink, and he challenges Tae-man to a rematch.
As for Ga-eul, her heart is confused (or is it?), but she’s had a lot of healing with her past. The infamous night from four years ago, we learn, was heading in the assault direction (disgusting!). Coach Oh made a move, but Ga-eul took off, and then bad was made worse when Yeo-woon turned her eye to it, as she says. In the present-day, when Yeo-woon gets her cancer diagnosis and decides to leave the national team to focus on treatment, it also serves as a healing moment between her and Ga-eul. This was sorely needed, since Ga-eul had lost everyone and is now gaining them back. And I actually really liked this storyline for Yeo-woon, I just don’t know why I find her character so unlikeable.
Anyway, in the end I’m flummoxed. I don’t know what the drama is trying to do with their message and most of all with these love lines and transference crushes. I want to keep faith that the drama will stay true to the inner healing it’s been about, but I just don’t know how they’re going to pull it all together. There’s still a lot of healing to go for all of our characters.
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Tags: Jung Woo, Kwon Yul, Lee Yumi, Mental Coach Jegal, Moon Yoo-kang, Park Se-young
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1 Reply1988 -❣️Mother Bean❣️
October 19, 2022 at 1:37 PM
@missvictrix thank you for the weecap. I agree this week there were multiple reasons to do a flying kick:
I can’t accept that Mutae has willingly gone to the dark side because he has decided to adopt the -if you can’t beat them join them mentality. I couldn’t believe he was trying to use his friendship as a lever to stop Gil undermining their plans. He has clearly forgotten he broke Gil’s heart with his betrayal. So I was with Gil in fighting it out.
The dodgy mentor/mentee ‘relationship’ was just not the way to go. The violation of personal space being treated as a game with Gil chasing her on the ice was wrong on so many levels. Now Gil is paying the price as the situation is being made to look like he uses grooming as a way to ‘build rapport’ with his female clients.
Yeowoon has a terrible attitude towards her hoobaes so I am not sure how Mugyeol was able to see her softer side as it is hidden so deeeeeeeep within. Their hospital scenes provided the bulk of the limited warm elements this week. The highlight was Yeowoon needing to use Mugyeol’s lap as a pillow in order to sleep.
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2 Kurama
October 19, 2022 at 1:46 PM
Those episodes were a feelings maelstrom!
I really don't want a romance between Ga-Eul and Gil, all the mental coach thing would loose its purpose. I would prefer a relationship between Gil and Dr Park.
My favourite character for now is Mu-Gyeol, he's just a giant marshmallow. I like his friendship with Yeo-Woon but I don't see them as a couple neither. The fact she was angry against Ga-Eul for years when she was the one who didn't help was ridiculous. She felt guilty and never assumed.
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3 scully
October 20, 2022 at 2:43 AM
Let me just preface by saying I really don't want the show to go in the direction of a Gil-Ga-eul romance. But I still have faith the writer won't take this path since I think Gil's behaviour so far towards Ga-eul, while affectionate, is also platonic. His heroic interventions on Ga-eul's behalf can be interpreted through a romantic lens (Ga-eul) or one based on friendship and justice one (Gil, because of his history as a helpless child and taekwondo athlete who was the victim of injustice). I was cheering when he finally laid it out clearly before Ga-eul that he doesn't think of her romantically even though he knew she would be hurt. I have nothing but empathy for his indecision before that. He wants so much to show her that he's on her side and it took him a long time to earn that trust, so it's understandable why he kept a distance and delayed giving a direct answer to her confessions, because he didn't want to lead her on or hurt her. Thus, I see his reaction after the ice rink kiss as being more confused rather than offended. Yes, he's trying to set boundaries. But I also see what Ga-eul did as a spur of the moment thing, rather than any intention to take advantage of him or violate his personal space. Her growth so far has been about learning not to suppress her feelings, so her decision to live in the moment and continue to like Gil whether it's reasonable/viable or not, is in line with that. But not gonna lie, the chase made me feel uneasy as it seemed like the show is trying to put a romantic spin on it.
One theme which piqued my interest was Tae Man's line about people of privilege always getting their favours (read: orders) met, but people like him having to beg. Dr Park needed to hear that, and to her credit, she didn't hesitate to reframe her request as begging. Up til this point, she thinks that she has done everything by the book, but with Tae Man's line, I think it's beginning to dawn on her that even if she doesn't actively participate in getting her hands dirty like Tae Man, she still reaps the benefits of her upper social class status.
Aside from that, I share @missvictrix's concerns about whether two weeks is enough time to satisfactorily conclude the major dilemmas and tie up the loose ends. I appreciate how the drama is taking its time to explore various themes and show the characters' various dilemmas and growth (lack of growth in Coach Oh and Tae Man's case). I hope we as viewers will get an ending we can truly support.
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Reply1988 -❣️Mother Bean❣️
October 20, 2022 at 3:14 AM
Thanks for sharing these thoughtful reflections. I like how you have phrased this fine balance when talking about unsolicited affection when thinking about power differentials and for me it was the serious implications are all on Gil even if it was innocent and that needed to be highlighted to Gaeul.
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scully
October 20, 2022 at 4:48 AM
I agree. Ga-eul definitely didn't think far enough about the possible implications of her actions and Tae Man is determined to make Gil bear the brunt of it (I got the impression Tae Man would also use it if he could to blackmail/threaten Ga-eul too). I like how the show presented this part of the plot, because it shows that depending on how a situation is framed, so-called facts can be spun to tell very different stories. Meta-wise, in a rom-com, the kiss and Gil's reaction would be framed as heart-fluttering sweet innocence. But in a darker drama, it could be framed as grooming of a minor.
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4 pickleddragon
October 20, 2022 at 5:25 AM
My reaction was very similar to everyone else's this week - what was humming along as a decent enough sports drama touching upon a wide variety of issues, suddenly turned completely weird, leaving me mostly aghast. I had loved episode 9 last week, which I thought was an excellent standalone episode of any drama, and was looking forward to this week's installment. But whoa, it went somewhere else completely. Jegal should have walked away ages ago, and Dr Park should have taken over. On a side note, I still question Jegal's fundamental qualifications to do the job he's doing, besides the general fact that he has tons of personal baggage that is yet unresolved.
There was a moment when I empathised with Ga-eul (what a fine actress though!) and her loneliness, and thought that all she needed was a real solid friend beside her, not romantic, not a mentor, just a regular buddy of any gender. Much like what Mu-kyeol and Yeo-woon have going (is there romance there? Show, come on, seriously?).
I was going to sell this show to others as a decent sports drama with no romance and just a show about challenging yourself and finding where your personal limits lie. But now, unless the drama rights the mess it created this week, I'm downvoting this many times over.
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scully
October 21, 2022 at 10:55 PM
I agree that the tone for these two episodes seemed discordant with how the show has been going before that, especially with regards to hints (red herrings?) of Gil returning Ga-eul's feelings. It's not enough to break the immersion for me yet, but I hope the show doesn't continue down this path. I generally have an aversion to watching romance unless it's plausibly premised, and right now, the possibility of romance between the two leads is hitting all the wrong notes for me.
As an aside, this is my first time watching Lee Yumi, and I'm enjoying her interpretation of Ga-eul a lot.
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