Moon in the Day: Episodes 11-12

by lovepark

Two enemies fell in love, but they would soon learn that their feelings for each other would not be enough to overcome the obstacles in their lives. After 1,500 years, our couple finds themselves, once again, in a similar situation, but will the past repeat itself or can their love alter their tragic fate? Though our heroine thinks their future is written in stone, our hero still believes change is possible.

 
EPISODES 11-12

The truth is out, and try as they might, our main couple cannot ignore the cause of Do Ha’s death forever. Just as it is impossible to cover the sky with your hands, neither Young-hwa nor Do Ha can shield the other from the pain of their past, and in order to move on — both emotionally and physically — they need to face each other honestly.

While Young-hwa grapples with these newfound revelations, Do Ha finds her aimlessly walking the streets and pulls her to safety when a car comes barreling towards her. Though she puts on a brave face in front of him, Do Ha knows that something is bothering her and wishes to protect her from any and all harm.

He takes her to his place, and Young-hwa musters up the courage to ask about his scar. She wonders if it hurt when he died, and he tells her that the pain was immeasurable. Even after 1,500 years, he cannot forget. Hearing his answer, a new wave of guilt hits Young-hwa as she questions her role in all his pain.

Returning to the past, Do Ha’s father gifted Ri-ta a chance to kill her family’s nemesis and ordered her to poison Do Ha on their wedding night. In his hubris, Do Ha’s father believed her revenge outweighed any flimsy affections she harbored towards his adoptive son, but that night, he found himself the victim to his own folly.

As the poison hindered his senses, Do Ha’s father sneered at Ri-ta who entered his chambers to free Do Ha from this hell. With her blade piercing through him, Do Ha’s father vowed to return and find her no matter how many times it took. While Ri-ta stumbled away from the deceased man, a servant came by and witnessed it all.

Sensing something off, Do Ha woke up only to find his father dead and his wife arrested. The soldiers demanded retribution, but Do Ha tossed aside all decorum and roared at everyone that she was his wife. As the new head of the household, he chose to spare her life, but his decision was met with resistance. The soldiers, still loyal to their previous master, drew their swords, but Do Ha easily slayed two before threatening to kill them all.

As they retreated to the woods, Do Ha asked why she acted so recklessly, and Ri-ta told him that it was the only way to save his life. Her plan never involved his intervention, but Do Ha corrected her: “I was already entangled the moment I met you and fell in love.” Grabbing her in the hug, Do Ha apologized for making her do something he should have done himself and promised to fix everything.

While Ri-ta slept, Do Ha marched back to his father’s house, and in order to protect her, he slaughtered all the soldiers there. The news of his rampage became the talk of the town the following morning, and Ri-ta watched with a pained expression as the fallen soldiers’ families mourned their losses. Despite her efforts to save his soul, it appears that her actions damned him, instead.

With Do Ha now willing to even kill children if it meant protecting his love, Ri-ta realized that she turned him into a monster. She wished to free him from hell, but rather, she dragged them both to a worse fate. She begged him to stop, but Do Ha wanted to live and start over again with her. As he got up to kill their pursuers, Ri-ta knew what must be done, and with tears in her eyes, she told Do Ha that she loved him before slashing his throat.

Young-hwa jerks awake in that moment and weeps as she remembers what she did. Finding Do Ha, she apologizes for killing him and admits that it was foolish of her to think she could save him. Though he tells her that he would live in hell as long as it was with her, Young-hwa believes love means not wanting the other person to suffer.

Since her presence is a reminder of his pain, she leaves, but Do Ha chases after her. He once thought his curse stemmed from resentment, but now he knows that he became a spirit in order to learn her true feelings. He promises that his love for her will not change, but their conversation gets interrupted by some interlopers: Young-hwa’s roommate and Chul-hwan.

While Do Ha chases after the other spirit, Young-hwa stays behind with her friend. Unfortunately, Chul-hwan’s intentions were to separate the pair from the start, and during Do Ha’s absence, an unhinged Yi-seul appears and pushes Young-hwa into an oncoming truck-of-doom. However, Chul-hwan’s plans are thwarted again when Young-hwa’s friend throws her out of harm’s way and gets hit in her stead.

Though her friend survived the crash, Young-hwa blames herself for what happened, which only worsens when Chul-hwan approaches her. He attempts to kill her with his own two hands, but earlier that day, she found a second lotus seed bracelet her father made. The artifact protects her physically from the malevolent spirit, but his words cut deep: as long as she lives, the tragic cycle shall continue.

Once Do Ha discovers his father’s return, he thinks they can stop the curse, but his assurances do little to ease Young-hwa’s doubts. She is afraid that more people will die because of them and says that she made the right choice in the past because their end is destined to be tragic. He asks why he waited so long for her then, but Young-hwa has become too weary to continue.

Vowing to protect Young-hwa this time, Do Ha finds Chul-hwan and asks his father why he continues to torture him after all these years. Chul-hwan pretends to have forgotten rather than confess his own envy towards the son who outshone him, and he derides Do Ha for being a fool who cannot understand his woman’s heart. Even if he killed him, Chul-hwan claims that there are plenty of evil people in the world willing to harm her, including Young-hwa, herself.

As Chul-hwan predicted, Young-hwa goes around saying her last goodbyes to the people in her life and then sits by the river where she first saved Jun-oh. Despite her fears, she prepares to end it all until Do Ha stops her. Having received her message, he knew she would be here and tells her not to fall for the enemy’s trap.

Turning to face him, Young-hwa says that this time will be different because it will be her choice. Do Ha disagrees because the woman he loves values life too much to choose death willingly. He tells her that meeting her was the luckiest misfortune he had and makes a bet: will she be okay leaving him behind like this?

Mirroring the event from their past, Do Ha hugs her from behind, and Young-hwa cries in his arms. She admits that she loves him too much and wants to live, so Do Ha tells her that they should. He swears to change their fate, and pulls Young-hwa into a kiss.

On paper, the premise of their love story is poetically tragic. She wanted to save him, but in the end, she was the one who killed him. He wanted to save her, but in the end, he was the one who gave her no choice other than to die. In a way, they were two monsters — products of their surroundings and consequences of others’ greed — and the terrible choices they made led them to their demise. Unless she stopped him, their union would bring pain and ruin everywhere they went. Thus, she loved him too much to let him descend into madness for her sake, so she took his life with her own two hands.

While on a purely story-level standpoint I understand what the show is trying to accomplish, I’m not quite sure if the execution was convincing. So much of their fate could have been avoided if either Ri-ta or Do Ha actually talked to the other, but alas, communication is neither of their strong points. Her decision to kill Do Ha’s father was, indeed, reckless, and his plan to save her was even more so. Maybe if the characters were depicted as more crazed (there were hints of it, but the show never fully embraced it), it would have helped the narrative and emphasized how her final decision was the result of an avalanche of events that snowballed out of her control. Hence, the only way for them to feel a semblance of agency in all this mayhem was to end it on their own terms.

Even in the present, communication continues to be an issue, and I wish Young-hwa didn’t unilaterally decide what was best for them, especially because she wasn’t thinking logically. How would her ending her life break the curse? It seems Young-hwa believes all of this is happening because of cosmic karma, but was her sin truly that great compared to everyone else’s?

I’m assuming that she was riddled with guilt, and as a result, easily influenced by Chul-hwan’s taunts. She’s also the type of person who risks her own life to save others, so it’s not unbelievable that she feels responsible for causing other people pain even if that connection requires a bit of mental gymnastics to get there. At least our main couple has finally confessed to each other without holding back anymore secrets, and hopefully, going forward, they’ll start working together rather than apart.

 
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