Still Shining: Episodes 9-10 (Final)
by Dramaddictally
Full of warm goodbyes and a few new beginnings, we’re sending off some beautifully flawed characters who have finally come to terms with who they are — and learned to accept each other for it. Whether or not you see it as a happy ending will depend, but I can’t imagine anything happier than coming full circle to find yourself changed, even as you make the same decisions.
EPISODES 9-10
This is a drama that we could dissect for weeks. I won’t do it. But I will say that the writer and director are a successful pair because of all that’s left unsaid and all that’s filled in by the long visual sequences. If you recall, we ended last week with a heart-wrenching breakup — yet again on the phone.
This week, we’re living in the aftermath of that breakup as our characters are faced with a repeat of ten years ago, and finding that — as much as they regret it — they kind of have to make the same choices. Tae-seo is down in the dumps about his decision to end things. And he’s spending a lot of time with IM AH-SOL (Park Se-hyun) — the lady driver from last week who’s also had a crush on him for more than a decade.
She’s a client of his framing business, which is the pretext for all the times she’s at his apartment/workshop. On one occasion, she’s there when his brother calls to say that Halmeoni is very likely waking up. Tae-seo doesn’t believe it, but Ah-sol convinces him to head home, and the next thing we know they’re in the car together again as she snoops into his breakup history.
When Halmeoni does indeed wake up, the family is ecstatic and Ah-sol is there to witness it. Tae-seo thanks her for convincing him to come, and this seems to give her a little courage. The next time they see each other, she asks if he would enact a breakup with her. She’s never had one and she wants her first one to be warm. With him, she knows it will be, and she already knows how she wants the whole scene to play out. For one, it has to be in person and not on the phone. And so, they set a date for breaking up from the relationship they never had.
On the planned evening, Ah-sol is there, dressed up with hair done, and Tae-seo has forgotten it was supposed to happen. He’s just come from Eun-ah’s guesthouse to find that she’s gone. All he heard was that she’s with her “mom,” which he imagines is the biological mother whose whereabouts she’s never known. From that vantage, when Ah-sol insists that they continue with the “breakup,” he’s not in a good headspace for handling it.
They go ahead with the script, where he takes her hand and they’re both supposed to say what they’re thankful for in the relationship. She starts by thanking him for all he’s achieved and being an inspiration to her. She names all of his accomplishments, and mentions that seeing his grandmother wake up will stay with her forever.
At this point, Tae-seo pulls away and says he really can’t do this today. He walks across the room and turns his back on her, in tears. She cries too and then follows his footsteps until she’s gripping the back of his sweater. “Let’s date for real,” she says, before backtracking and saying, “maybe just until Christmas.” As she sputters, Tae-seo finally says, “let’s do it” and she’s shocked. (Oh this poor girl.)
Okay, so what’s really going on with Eun-ah? Well, her “mom” in this case is So-hyun, who visited Eun-ah’s guesthouse where they finally had a heart to heart. So-hyun has tried for years to win over Eun-ah, but Eun-ah would not open up to her. This time, when So-hyun says she’s returning to Hawaii to care for her dying mother, she invites Eun-ah to join her. At first, Eun-ah says no. But then she thinks about the great time she had in Hawaii before, and by the time they’re hugging goodbye, Eun-ah changes her mind. She wants to wrap up things at home first and join later, but we see that she’s accepting So-hyun as a mom and maybe realizing that without Dad, she and So-hyun only have each other.
So, when Tae-seo goes to the guesthouse, before his breakup enactment with Ah-sol, he’s there because he feels like shit about what happened between them. He’s the one who broke it off, but he can’t accept it — just like Eun-ah couldn’t accept it ten years ago when it was her turn. Now, with Eun-ah planning to go to Hawaii again (the very place she went after their first breakup) and Tae-seo going through the motions of dating Ah-sol, it seems like our leads are done. And it’s happening in very much the same way as before.
But not all is the same. This time, both of them seem determined to see each other and say goodbye. On one attempt, Tae-seo finds Eun-ah by the side of the road in their town, where she’s hoping to run into him. But this conversation is foiled when Ah-sol arrives with Tae-seo’s friend and they drag our boy away, depressed as he looks to see Eun-ah disappear.
After that, they run into each other at the school where they first met as teens. She tells him she’s going to live with So-hyun, looking at him and speaking slowly, while he can barely glance in her direction. She says the goodbye she’d wanted to say, and then rides off on her bike. He rides behind her until they hit a fork in the road and go separate ways, where she turns to look back at him, but he doesn’t do the same.
Later, he calls. And this is where the real communication begins. He wants to know if she had any trouble with Seong-chan that night after he drove away from the guesthouse. Eun-ah begins to cry, telling him he doesn’t need to worry about her. And so, he goes on, talking about how she’s leaving the place she poured her heart into, and saying he feels she’s always being forced to leave places in order to not feel trapped.
She seems to hear what he’s saying — that he understands her — and when he tells her that he went to see her at the guesthouse again, she replies, “We missed each other. We’re good at that.” That line is painful for both of them, but he’s getting a call from Ah-sol, who’s also at the door. When Eun-ah hears the bell, she cuts the call quickly, even though the conversation isn’t finished.
There are a few more missed attempts to conclude what they have to say, but finally, they end up at her old house, getting it off their chests. The script is sparse in all the right ways as she tells him that she’s thankful to him for helping her make decisions. She doesn’t plan to come back from Hawaii, she has housing and a job lined up, but still, she regrets the last time she left and how things might have been different between them.
She points out how they’re both worried about each other right now, even as they’re ending things. And Tae-seo says that’s because between the two of them, they can’t make things hard for each other, no matter where they are. (All the love is packed in these little lines.)
Tae-seo looks at a photo on the shelf in front of them, where Eun-ah is happy in Hawaii. “Will you smile like that if you go?” But Eun-ah doesn’t like that girl — the young, smiling version of herself that has no idea about the pain to come. “I like her,” Tae-seo says, and the words ring between them, filled with pain, regret, and a need to not hurt each other, even as they sit in the impossibility of that need.
We get two more warm goodbyes to send off our second leads, as Eun-ah and Seong-chan end (on a phone call) on happier terms and Tae-seo calls it quits with Ah-sol. In the first, Seong-chan has calmed down after the night at the guesthouse and reiterates how Eun-ah lit up his life and pushed him forward. Things feel empty without her, but he wants her to go be with So-hyun.
In the second case, Ah-sol enters Tae-seo’s apartment to wait for him and finds a half-open drawer with mementos from Eun-ah. She feels heartbroken and doesn’t want to meet up with Tae-seo, but circumstances keep her there until he arrives. When she takes a call and has to rush off to her ill father, it’s the first time we see her not completely composed in front of this man she’s mad about. When she returns, Tae-seo wants to know if she’s okay, but it reads as politeness rather than real care. They finally go through with that breakup ceremony, and he thanks her for showing him what a warm breakup looks like.
When Eun-ah is scheduled to leave, Tae-seo decides he wants to say goodbye in person. He sees her off by riding the train to the airport with her, where they sit across from each other and send texts. He writes that he wants her to have a great life. And if she ever thinks about a future with him in it, she should let him know. At the airport, they hug and he tells her that he loves her. And then they let each other go.
A year goes by and Tae-seo is now driving long-distance trains, rather than the city subway. He receives some photos via text from Eun-ah. We see him preparing her house for her return. And it looks like they may be in the same place on the planet again very soon.
I loved this ending. No one is saying they end up together and no one is saying they won’t. The possibility exists, and neither of them had to give up who they are, fundamentally, in order to get there. It does justice to their complicated history without trying to force either of them into unnecessary changes.
And it got me thinking a lot about character growth and how we gauge when the leads have grown. Usually, they find themselves in a similar situation as one they faced at the beginning, but the second time, they make a different decision — and that’s how we know they’ve changed. But here, they find themselves in a similar situation and they make the same decision. Have they grown? Yes. But their growth is in understanding themselves well enough this time to know why they’re making the decision and why it’s best for both of them.
The first time around, they were unsure of their own actions, but also unsure how the other one felt. This time, there’s no question that what they feel is mutual. So, yes, there’s pain. But it’s from a place of understanding.
And I especially like this coupled with how we see Tae-seo treat Ah-sol. She was a side character that I thought would never fully come into being, but in these episodes she finally gets some flesh. And it’s brutal to put yourself in her position — feeling strongly for Tae-seo for longer than he’s known Eun-ah — and accepted as a dating partner only to fill the void that Eun-ah left. That kind of pain cuts deeper than mutual love that’s just a bad fit.
This is also why I liked the handling of Seong-chan’s relationship with Eun-ah because it’s incredibly difficult to disentangle all the years they spent together and the emotions that passed back and forth. Neither he nor Ah-sol are typical second leads that are obviously all wrong for the protagonists. It’s messy. And the fact that Eun-ah and Tae-seo aren’t necessarily end game either just speaks to how messy this whole human-love thing is — and how much this story wanted to capture a tiny, pretty, painful piece of that mess.
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