In Your Radiant Season: Episodes 10-11
by DaebakGrits
Our drama has officially entered its angst era, as the secrets at the heart of the story unravel one by one and the characters struggle with the emotional consequences. In some cases, the truth proves far less devastating than expected, but it wouldn’t be a K-drama without at least one inevitable forced separation arc.
Episodes 10-11
When we last left our OTP, Ha-ran was having a polite exchange with Soo-jin — completely unaware that the doctor she coincidentally met in the hospital lobby had an affair with her deceased boyfriend. Chan stumbles upon them, and his rush to extract Ha-ran is oddly abrupt and more than a little suspicious, especially since he breaks Soo-jin’s bracelet and is uncharacteristically unapologetic.
Ha-ran is too shaken by the revelation that shrapnel is lodged in Chan’s brain to dwell on his abrupt behavior, though, and her brief encounter with the doctor quickly slips her mind when Chan redirects her attention to something more immediate: his birthday. Refusing to let a hospital visit dampen the mood, he insists on celebrating. It may not be the elegant dinner Ha-ran had planned, but the quiet moment they share over a simple convenience store cake serves as a welcome distraction — for now. The weight of Chan’s guilt lingers, growing heavier by the minute, until he realizes he should stop making excuses for why he has not told Ha-ran the truth. Even with gaps in his memory, he resolves to tell her what he remembers during their next date.
Although Chan’s diagnosis gives Ha-ran a lot to worry about, she resolves to move forward and finally enter her emotional spring — which also results in some spring cleaning. As she dusts and organizes her small attic hidey-hole, she stumbles upon an unopened letter from Hyeok-chan, mailed a month after he arrived in Boston. In the letter, he mentions his aloof Korean roommate, Chan, but Ha-ran doesn’t make the connection (yet).
Instead, she goes on her date with Chan, but their trip to the movies becomes more eventful than anticipated when a discarded lithium battery ignites a trashcan fire and temporarily separates Chan and Ha-ran in the chaos. Luckily, neither of them is harmed during the evacuation, but the fear that Chan might have been harmed — and the unanswered questions about how the shrapnel ended up in his head — lingers when Ha-ran returns home.
Na-na comforts her and explains that Chan probably doesn’t want to burden her with his pain, and Man-jae offers up a similar interpretation for Chan’s guarded nature. However, he promises that when Chan is ready, he will explain his situation honestly. She just needs to trust him and wait for him to be ready. Whether Ha-ran realizes it or not, it appears as though everyone around Ha-ran is gently preparing her to be more understanding of Chan’s circumstances once he reveals the secrets he’s been withholding. Unfortunately, as a viewer, this made me naively optimistic that Ha-ran would navigate the future fallout better than previously expected — but more on that later because Ha-ran and her sisters discover that Na-na has been struggling with memory loss and intends to check herself in a retirement center without telling them.
The reveal begins with Ha-young accidentally spilling a drink on Na-na’s desk, and while cleaning up the mess, she finds the sticky notes Na-na has been using to remind herself of important details she cannot let herself forget — such as the location to the key that opens the wardrobe in her office. Now, I don’t know what I expected Ha-young to find in the wardrobe, but it definitely wasn’t the emotional gutpunch of three gorgeously handmade wedding dresses that Na-na sewed for her granddaughters.
Ha-dam reads the sticky notes and realizes Yoo-gyum has known all along that Na-na’s memory has been declining, and (one phone call later), she and her sisters arrive at the hospital in time to tearfully hug her before she’s called away for more testing. While they’re waiting, Ha-dam visits Yoo-gyum, and he visibly braces himself for her anger, but she instead hugs and thanks him for being so thoughtfully kind to her grandmother.
Contrastingly, Ha-young’s emotions cause her to lash out at Tae-suk and unfairly blame him for not noticing Na-na’s declining health. Ha-young almost instantly apologizes, recognizing that she’s lashing out unfairly and telling him what she wanted to tell herself, but the damage is done. Poor Tae-suk, who already unjustly carries the guilt of her parents’ deaths, feels he’s (once again) failed the family he so dearly cherishes. Not even the happy news that Na-na’s declining memory is actually a treatable (with surgery) condition stirs him from his self-induced funk.
With Na-na’s storyline finally taking a turn for the better, it’s only a matter of time before the proverbial other shoe drops — and it will surprise absolutely no one that Chan doesn’t get the chance to tell Ha-ran the truth before she discovers it on her own. What is surprising, however, is that Soo-jin — who definitely isn’t thrilled about seeing Chan so happy and cozy with Hyeok-chan’s former girlfriend — doesn’t take matters into her own hands and spill the truth first.
Instead, while Chan races to the hospital hoping to intercept Ha-ran before she can return Soo-jin’s lost bracelet bead, Ha-ran ends up returning the cardigan she borrowed…and finds the journal where he’s been chronicling his recovered memories. The journal, combined with all the little breadcrumbs Chan has inadvertently dropped since they’ve first met, are enough for Ha-ran to piece together the truth, and – suffice it to say — she ain’t happy.
The hurt outweighs the anger as she comes to terms with how much of her past was a lie and how the lies contributed to her pain for the last seven years. So many of the memories she clung to — their conversations about rain, the pen, etc — were unrelated to Hyeok-chan, the person she mourned so passionally and to the detriment of her mental health. Chan tries to apologize, but the hurt and realization that she finally opened her heart to someone who was deceiving her is crushing. In her words, she feels like an experiment.
Chan makes several attempts to hand Ha-ran his tablet, where he’s recorded his side of the story, but she refuses to look at it. After all, the tablet’s contents won’t change the fact that Chan impersonated Hyeok-chan or that he kept their connection a secret throughout their relationship. (Girl, are you not even remotely a little bit curious? I know I would be!) She walks away from him, and with her back turned, she doesn’t notice him flinch from a loud noise or drop the tablet in the street, where a Truck of Doom runs over and crushes the device. (Whomp, whomp.)
While Chan is effing around and finding out the hard way that there is no “perfect” time to reveal a harsh truth, Ha-ran disappears in the middle of the night. Concerned, Ha-young calls Chan, who deduces from her last conversation with Ha-young that Ha-ran must have driven to the spot where they’d gone stargazing together. Even though it’s the middle of the night and he’s running a fever — a bad combination for someone who’s not the best driver under normal circumstances — Chan hops in the car and hits the highway.
Predictably, in his current state, he inevitably runs off the road after being blinded by oncoming headlights, but in the process he regains more of his memories from the day of the explosion — the day he told Hyeok-chan that he’d continued conversing with Ha-ran while their laptops were swapped. Hyeok-chan responded negatively and accused Chan of being pethetically excited over having someone pay him attention. In response to the insult, Chan had punched Hyeok-chan, who’s fallen to the floor and knocked a container of chemicals to the floor along with him.
These new memories prompt Chan to abandon his previous objective of finding Ha-ran and seek out Soo-jin for confirmation. Did he cause the explosion? Although Soo-jin blames Chan for the explosion because he tried to “steal” Hyeok-chan’s girlfriend (uh, hypocritical much?), I suspect there is still more to this story that maybe even she is unaware of because, according to the snippets of flashbacks we’ve seen, she left the laboratory through a second door right before the explosion. And, last time I checked, chemicals don’t spontaneously explode without a catalyst — you know, something like the lighter that Hyeok-chan carried around.
Sadly, the writers are saving the full story behind the explosion for our final episode, and — based on the last few minutes of Episode 11 — we are in for a small time skip. This week’s episodes end with the revelation that the season has changed and it’s now spring. Chan has been missing since the night he regained more of his memories and left an “End of Trial” note on Ha-ran’s car. However, given that the doctors at Soo-jin’s hospital are discussing his patient file — namely the shrapnel in his brain — it’s only a short matter of time before he returns to Seoul (if he ever left in the first place). Meanwhile, Chan’s tablet has found its way into Ha-ran’s hands (likely Man-jae’s doing), and she’s seen the comic he drew to explain their shared history from his point of view.
Personally, I feel like we have more than an episode’s worth of loose ends to wrap up, and I see the remainder of our story playing out one of two ways. First scenario: details like Na-na’s surgery, Yoo-gyum’s injury, and Tae-suk’s guilt will be resolved off camera during the time skip, so when we resume our story, everyone but Ha-ran is happy. As a result, the bulk of the episode will focus on Ha-ran pining for Chan and then forgiving him for his lies as soon as she discovers he’s undergoing a surgery to remove the shrapnel from his brain.
The second scenario is the opposite of the aforementioned prediction in that we will flashback to before the timeskip and see Na-na, Ha-young, and Ha-dam’s respective story arcs resolve happily and in detail. When the timeline catches up to spring, there will be ten minutes left in the drama, during which time Chan will show up post-surgery and reconnect with Ha-ran. She will be so happy he’s alive that she’ll forgive and forget his lies. Personally, as someone who ships Ha-young and Tae-suk more than our OTP, I’m hoping for whatever option gives them maximum screen time.
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