The 3rd episode of Beyond The Bar focuses on a complicated relationship between mother and child. In this episode, we also get a little bit more insight into the lives of our main lead pair, Seok-Hoon and Hyo-Min. The duo are now closer since their last rendezvous at the office at night. It seems they truly get each other, because their main focus is always work, not human relationships, etc. The 3rd episode puts smothering your child on the radar and examines the complications that come with being a lone mother. I think the one part the show blunders is the emphasis on the fact that the mother was all alone, in that she didn’t have any help from the father of the child, which made her both more lonely and obsessed. It’s truly sad how implicitly we expect women to look after their kids; we never truly understand how much it affects their mental health and their drive. But anyway, before I digress, let’s get straight into the recap of episode 3.
Spoiler Alert
What Happened to Hyo-Min as a Teen?
Hyo-Min was such an intelligent kid in school that she ended up skipping years, but the pressure put on her by her mother led her to develop (acquired) dyslexia. This apparently happens due to too much stress, and we already know her perfectionist, obsessesive mother certainly expected a lot from the girl. Additionally, with her sister being taken away from her and the workaholic parents, it obviously made her upset, lonely, and anxious. Fortunately, she had her two friends who are her roommates in the present day back then, and when Ji-Eun’s dad had trouble at work, Hyo-Min took up the role of a lawyer and helped him get the money he deserved, changing their lives for the better. So Ji-Eun is a major part of the reason Hyo-Min is an attorney now, especially because she didn’t want a “boring” job before she helped Ji-Eun’s dad. We also learn from the story of Hyo-Min trying to help a butterfly out of its cocoon that she is sensitive, but more importantly, she’s like a butterfly that struggled to get out of the cocoon but turned out extra special. I suppose you could say it’s a metaphor for what could’ve happened if she hadn’t endured.
What Happens In The Case?
The big case in episode 3 involves a little boy who nearly gets hit by a truck. I say nearly because the truck never touches the kid, Min-Guk, but his mother ends up filing a case against the driver. See, the kid doesn’t have any external injuries, but he’s somehow paralyzed from the waist down. How come? At the same time, the driver of the truck was given an “Irish coffee,” and he had no idea that meant there was alcohol in coffee. I didn’t realize a tiny drop of alcohol in your coffee could make such a difference, but he gets arrested for drunk driving. It looks like his friend did him dirty, and I’m not sure why he doesn’t get prosecuted for this, but anyway, a reminder to never take random drinks, even from close colleagues, apparently.
In the middle of all of this, Ko Seung-Chol’s son tells him to tell Seok-Hoon to remember his place and give him a warning, but instead, the man offers him the role of partner in the company. Seok-Hoon instantly rejects it because he knows he’s being used as a scapegoat on a sinking ship. Man’s certainly gutsy.
Hyo-Min and Seok-Hoon are on defending-the-driver duty, and she researches by going to the women who were present at the park in front of which this incident took place. She realizes that the mother’s reaction to the incident was much more extra than required, i.e., she overreacted, and this probably led to the kid’s current psychological state. While this seems entirely unlikely, it’s called a nocebo effect, when a person believes that something is going to cause harm, so the body physically acts as if it has.
The other thing is that Seong-Chan is the mother’s attorney, and he’s jealous of Hyo-Min’s skill and probably mad that she’s better than him despite having a “disabled” sister. In the first hearing, Hyo-Min does the talking and quickly calls for a psychiatric evaluation, which the judge agrees to. This leaves Seong-Chan especially sour. It’s actually Seol-A, Hyo-Min’s friend, who is a doctor at the same hospital that Min-Guk is a patient at, who tells her that the kid probably suffers from Munchausen, or is a hypochondriac. Seong-Chan tries to tell Hyo-Min that he knows he made a mistake by going on the blind date, but that he panicked after realizing his child might be born inheriting a disability. Now he claims he made a mistake, but Hyo-Min cuts him off and tells him not to embarrass her at work.
Later, she notices that her chipped plate is missing and finds out that her mother came to her house and messed with her things. She goes to her parents’ house and yells at her mom for touching her things. She uses it as a metaphor for sending her sister away and tells her mum about the break-up with Seong-Chan too. She finishes by telling her parents not to mess with her things or show up unannounced, but it’s obviously a little bit of everything that’s really bothering her here.
Ultimately, it’s determined that Min-Guk is psychologically enmeshed with his mother, and seeing her reaction to his fall makes him believe he was actually hit by the truck. Seok-Hoon takes it too far because he starts asking personal questions, forcing the mother to believe her son has a mental illness (i.e., making it look like a negative trait), and blaming it on her, but this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the case. Just by saying they were enmeshed, the answer was already there. He didn’t have to go further into it and make her feel terrible for being a mother who just cared too much. Of course, this is not to say she doesn’t need help, or that the kid doesn’t either, but Seok-Hoon could’ve handled it better, and Hyo-Min points this out too. She’s not happy that they won the case, specifically making the mother look so bad.
Why Is Seok-Hoon Affected By This Case?
At the end of Beyond The Bar episode 3, Hyo-Min has to go back to work for some paperwork, and she meets Seok-Hoon there. She asks him to make a special coffee from the Nespresso machine for her, too, because I guess they’re not allowed to have them. Seok-Hoon obliges, and she apologizes for overstepping. She also tells him that the words “humans are selfish to the point of cruelty” were comforting to her, because they made her think of her own situation. She even tells him about her twin sister and her own senior year dyslexia. Guess it helps her forgive her mother a little bit.
The scene then shifts to Seok-Hoon with his wife, the same one in the videos we saw last week. He notices a positive pregnancy test, but something doesn’t add up. She reminds him that they decided they’d be happy after marriage without kids, which means it must’ve been hard for her to conceive. Maybe the woman didn’t want kids, which is why Seok-Hoon said earlier that some women don’t want kids, while others are not meant to be mothers. I really hope the show handles this sensitive subject well; it certainly feels like it’s on a difficult line. On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure, but I think the last scene of the episode is Seok-Hoon’s dream scenario where he and his wife would’ve miraculously gotten pregnant and been happy forever. I’m not sure if it’s reality or not, but either way, he does get some time with Hash, and he resents his ex-wife, but we still don’t have the whole picture.
