Spooky in Love: Episodes 9-10
by DaebakGrits
With our OTP now firmly established, this drama’s penultimate episodes deliver plenty of cutesy fanservice. But with the ghosts temporarily on hiatus, our living, breathing villains continue to stand in the way of our favorite couple’s happily ever after.
EPISODES 9-10
Yeo-ri and Kang-wook’s big day is here, and after confessing their true feelings for one another — and sharing a super romantic kiss before the ceremony — their engagement moves forward without a hitch — or any groom-spooking hauntings. Friends and family are all present, and given Kang-wook’s awkward personality, I’m sure none of the guests noticed his painstakenly slow technique for placing the ring on Yeo-ri’s finger. Just kidding. Everyone noticed. (C’mon, man! She’s wearing gloves!)
All jokes aside, the engagement party was a huge success, but behind the scenes, Min-hwan is lurking in the proverbial shadows, where he witnesses two events that will send him down a path towards either alcoholism or murder — or both. The first incident was Yeo-ri and Kang-wook’s kiss — because of course our not-so-beloved second male lead has to witness our OTP embracing at the peak of their happiness and feel his green-eyed monster get kicked in the gonads. And second, he spotted his own mother suspiciously observing the engagement festivities from afar. Even worse, when he called her to see if she’d arrived in Seoul, she lied to him about her whereabouts, which prompted Min-hwan to initiate an investigation into her reasons for being present at the engagement party.
While Min-hwan nurses a glass of whiskey and plots evil things to the tune of a sinister piano soundtrack, Yeo-ri and Kang-wook continue to bask in their recently-engaged glow. They enjoy a nice walk together, and the atmosphere is reminiscent of the night Kang-wook first held her hand. Yeo-ri acknowledges how hard it must have been to be suddenly thrust into a world of ghosts, but he denies any hardship, choosing to view it as a blessing that brought them together. (Daww! If this man keeps throwing up any more green flags, I’m going to think St. Patrick’s Day came early!)
When asked how the night could be made more magical, Yeo-ri confesses that she’d like to hold his hand again. Kang-wook freely extends his palms for her to grab, but she rejects his offer. She’s not ready yet, and she’d prefer to find a solution to her ability rather than pass it on to him. There’s just one problem: her memories of the yachting accident are fuzzy, and she assumes that whatever happened that day was so scary she subconsciously opted to forget. Now that she has a stronger motivation for remembering, methinks it’s only a matter of time before those suppressed memories are awakened. (Plus, this is the penultimate week, so the writers are running out of time.)
In the meantime, though, Yeo-ri’s successful engagement has made Siena Hall, the wedding venue her father built for her mother, trend on social media. Yeo-ri and Kyung-ja celebrate the successful turn, but Gye-hee looks like she bit into a lemon — that is, until she gets a phone call from one of Reina Group’s most influential shareholders. Thanks to a little nudging from Min-hwan, who’s defected to the dark side because he handles rejection worse than Anakin Skywalker, the shareholder aligns himself with Gye-hee, and she immediately calls a meeting to have Yeo-ri removed from her position as Reina Hotel CEO.
Unfortunately for Team Yeo-ri, they are currently short on company shares and unlikely to win the vote at the shareholders meeting, and while this would seem like an opportune time to reveal Gye-hee has been laundering money, Yeo-ri hesitates to pull the trigger. She doesn’t have any hard evidence proving Gye-hee’s illegal activities, so publicizing her suspicions now would be a risky gamble that could easily backfire. Instead, Yeo-ri and her staff focus on meeting with shareholders, hoping they can convince enough of them to vote in her favor.
As you can imagine, Yeo-ri has had to work overtime during this professional crisis, which has affected her ability to see her new fiancé. She’s been so distracted and unintentionally unforthcoming with what’s going on at work, that he started to worry her unavailability had something to do with him. So what does he do? He shows up to Reina Hotel, of course, and I absolutely adore the way he swapped places with Secretary BONG JI-WOOK (Lee Jun-hyuk) and was standing in his place when she turned around to give her phone to her secretary. She absolutely lights up when she sees Kang-wook.
Once they’re alone in her office, Yeo-ri apologizes for her absence and updates Kang-wook on the family business, and when it looks like she’ll be pulling an all-nighter, he immediately offers to stay and do coffee runs. Later, after they’ve settled into a pile of paperwork about the company shareholders, Kang-wook encourages her to get comfortable and remove her gloves. He promises to be careful, but after the gloves come off the mood is set for some office kisses — make that attempted kisses. Secretary Bong really needs to learn to wait for permission to enter after knocking.
Alas, it looks like it will be a hot minute before our OTP shares another kiss because Yeo-ri flies to Singapore to meet with a shareholder, HAN SE-IN (Noh Susanna), who will be attending a hotelier conference that Yeo-ri conveniently has an invitation to as well — And, much to Kang-wook’s annoyance, so does Min-hwan. (LOL Not Kang-wook trying desperately to find a way to get the prosecution office to send him to Singapore for work!)
Unfortunately, by the time she’s able to meet with Se-in, someone has already offered her double the market price for her shares. Yeo-ri proposes an alternative deal that would make Se-in more money in the long run, but Se-in is only interested in short-term profits. Undaunted, Yeo-ri hopes to corner Se-in at the conference reception later that night and try again, but something unexpected happens.
While standing next to the pool, her eyes combing the crowd for Se-in, Yeo-ri watches someone jump into the water, and the sound of the splash unlocks some of her memories from the yachting accident and recalls Ji-hwan giving her his necklace. She’d hesitated to accept the gift after hearing his grandmother’s superstitious belief that it would protect him, but he’d told her he’d rather have the necklace protect her and die in her place. Welp, that suave line turned out to be the most fast-acting bit of foreshadowing in cinema history because, shortly thereafter, he and Yeo-ri fell overboard — but not together. Ji-hwan was next to Min-hwan when the boat hit a rock and tilted violently.
With some of her memories regained, Yeo-ri asks Min-hwan about the current whereabouts of the necklace, but he plays dumb and suggests she may have lost it when she fell into the ocean. The fact that he’s currently in possession of the necklace isn’t the only secret he’s keeping from her, though. Come to find out, he’s also the person who offered to buy Se-in’s company shares. So while Yeo-ri has been fighting to keep her position, he’s been actively plotting against her in a move that feels right out of Min Jung-woo’s playbook, If I Can’t Have Her, No One Can: A Guide to Getting Revenge After Rejection.
When he’s not shadily working behind the scenes to block Yeo-ri’s bid for more shares, Min-hwan takes another step towards alcoholism, nursing his liquor and wallowing in memories of the yachting accident. Sometime between giving Yeo-ri his necklace and falling overboard, Ji-hwan figured out Min-hwan also had a crush on Yeo-ri and had tried to lead him astray with his courtship plans. Min-hwan had tried to avoid the confrontation, his inferiority complex leading him to believe he’d already lost the argument with the golden child before it even began. Ji-hwan, however, had pressed on, following Min-hwan on deck, and when the yacht hit a rock in the shallow waters, he’d accidentally fell overboard. (Color me surprised. I definitely thought Min-hwan pushed Ji-hwan, but because I strongly dislike our second male lead, I’m still not ruling out a Scar x Mufasa moment.)
Completely unaware of just how poorly Min-hwan has taken her rejection, Yeo-ri turns to her main squeeze for help. The ever-eager-to-please Kang-wook bribes Hyeong-min with all-he-can-eat takeout, and together they stay up all night, scouring Se-in’s social media accounts in hopes of tracking her down and finding a new angle they can use to convince her to vote in Yeo-ri’s favor. With a plan formulating, Kang-wook takes a three day leave of absence and hops on a plane to Singapore. Yeo-ri is pleasantly surprised that he came to Singapore, but even more touching than his traveling all this way to be with her is the fact that he donned a pair of gloves so she could feel more at ease holding his hand.
Together, they meet with Se-in, and this time Yeo-ri reveals she wants to remain CEO in order to protect her beloved Siena Hall. Like Yeo-ri, Se-in is attempting to protect a building designed by her father, which is at risk of being sold to cover her brother’s debts. Yeo-ri and Kang-wook found a way to have the building designated a nationally registered cultural heritage site, meaning no one will be able to damage the property. After it’s designated as a heritage site — and assuming Yeo-ri maintains her CEO position — Reina will buy it, conserve it, and turn it into an art and cultural space for Se-in to manage. It’s a tempting offer, but Se-in needs time to think it through.
In the meantime, Kang-wook needs to buy some gifts for his coworkers and thank them for their assistance, so he and Yeo-ri go on a touristy date and shopping spree. I’ve seen a lot of K-drama dating montages, but this is one of my favorites. They are just so darn cute, and it’s so wonderful to see Yeo-ri relax and have fun — so much that she feels compelled to thank Kang-wook for being, well, so gosh darn amazing. But as she looks down at their hands she still worries that the glove-on-glove contact is not enough to prevent him from seeing ghosts. “All I see is you,” he says. (**swoons**)
At the end of the evening, Kang-wook escorts Yeo-ri back to her hotel room, and he’s adorably nervous, playing the role of gentleman while obviously hoping for an invitation to come inside and extend the evening. He gets the greenlight, and over tea, Yeo-ri tells him about the flashes of memory she now recalls from the yachting accident. He advises her not to force the memories and encourages her to focus on the win of confirming that they are safe to hold hands as long as there’s a barrier.
Once again, though, he tries to hold her bare hand. As with every attempt before, Yeo-ri pulls away. He doesn’t mind seeing ghosts, he explains, so long as it means he can be with her, but she doesn’t want to see him suffer because of her. So instead of holding her hand, Kang-wook goes in for a kiss. The drama-logic of an intimate kiss somehow being safer than hand-holding continues to amuse me — especially when the resulting kiss makes forces them into the most uncomfortable kissing position while Kang-wook tries to keep his hands at a respectable distance. I sincerely hope the writers will provide an explanation for this extremely inconvenient rule that came as an unwelcome bonus to her ghost-seeing ability.
Yeo-ri and Kang-wook return to Seoul, and the writers — bless their hearts — tried their darndest to make the shareholder meeting suspenseful, but after Yeo-ri’s last meeting with Se-in, the outcome was obvious. Yeo-ri wins by a mere 1%, and Gye-hee masks her bitterness fairly well. Min-hwan, on the other hand, is outwardly far less pleased with the outcome. While the logic behind his actions remains a mystery, we can only assume — based on an earlier drunken conversation with Ha-ri — that his machinations are a desperate means of somehow entrapping Yeo-ri and forcing her to become “his.”
And while we’re on the topic of people who’d like to see Yeo-ri and Kang-wook break up, we can now add Myo-soon to that list. While Kang-wook was in Singapore, Myo-soo found out from Ji-hwan and Min-hwan’s mother that Yeo-ri was born in the Year of the Black Monkey, so when Kang-wook returns home, he has to face off against his angry grandmother. Lovestruck male lead that he is, he doesn’t believe in the shaman’s prediction that a bond with someone born in the same year of his heart’s donor would cut his life short, so he keeps on dating Yeo-ri without telling her that Myo-soo is threatening to call off their engagement.
He even sneaks out of his house in the middle of the night to hang out with Yeo-ri in her comfy looking pillow fort and discuss their future together. He’s so optimistic it’s infectious — but also worrisome. We all know the drama gods like to do our characters dirty right when they’ve reached peak happiness, and Kang-wook sharing that he would like to time travel to the future to see how happy they are together reeks of ironic foreshadowing.
Yeo-ri, on the other hand, would travel to the past if given the option. She’d revisit the yachting accident and try to figure out a way to break her curse, which she suspects lies with Ji-hwan’s necklace. Unfortunately, there’s no record of it listed among either her or Ji-hwan’s belongings following the accident. With Kang-wook’s help, though, she tracks down one of the paramedics who responded to their distress call and discovers that someone claiming to be a family member took the necklace. (Come on, Yeo-ri. You’ve almost figured it out!)
While Yeo-ri is distracted by the past, Min-hwan makes his move and teams up with Gye-hee to pin her money laundering on Yeo-ri — because nothing says “I love you” quite like framing the object of your affection for her sworn enemy’s crime — and take advantage of the company’s tanking reputation and buy up Reina stocks. Min-hwan also pulls some strings so Kang-wook is accepted into a training program overseas, a move that has both Kang-wook and Seo-yeon — who is surprisingly copacetic with Kang-wook’s engagement — suspicious that someone’s pulling strings to chase him out of Seoul.
For now, Min-hwan remains off Kang-wook’s radar, but while Kang-wook’s distracted by his recent transfer and desire to ensure Yeo-ri doesn’t take the blame for her aunt’s crimes, Myo-soon makes her move. She shows up at Reina Hotel, and explains her concerns with Yeo-ri’s zodiac. Although Yeo-ri doesn’t want to believe in Myo-soon’s superstitions, she can’t deny that Kang-wook has had quite a number of near-death experiences since he met her. (Oh no. I see where this is going…)
Yes, when Kang-wook finally tracks Yeo-ri outside Siena Hall, she has the look of a woman who has made up her mind. Instinctively, Kang-wook knows something is wrong, but he pitifully assumes he’s somehow at fault, like a dog being surrendered to an animal shelter. (Ugh, my heart!) Instead, Yeo-ri enters her noble idiot era and suggests that they call off their engagement.
Sigh…How many dramas are going to do this to us? I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired of writers ruining our final moments with their characters by having them go through a (hopefully) temporary breakup. In this case, I’m playing it’s a false alarm, and Kang-wook refuses to accept the breakup and convinces her that they should overcome their obstacles together. Because if I’m deprived of Yeo-ri x Kang-wook cuteness and have to sit though their angst for more than fifteen minutes — well, I may just have to riot.
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