Episodes 7 and 8 of Dear X are as intense as the show can be. So far, we’ve seen Kim You-Jung’s chemistry with Young-Dae and Do-Hoon, but it’s even better with In-Yeop. The vibe with each man has been different, and I guess it’s her massive experience doing all the work for her. We’ve always known she’s an excellent actress, but I do wonder what pushed her to take on such a role. Guess when you’re so beloved, it’s okay to do something crazy even in Korea. The actress is also looking extra stunning as time goes by, and she’s definitely one of Korea’s top stars. Anyway, episodes 7 and 8 focus on what’s happening between In-Gang and Ah-Jin, and there’s a surprising amount of heart in it until things change up as usual. It’s also been quite shocking, but I wonder what the final 4 episodes have in store for us. With that said though, let’s jump straight into the recap of episodes 7 and 8.
Spoiler Alert
Do Ah-Jin and In-Gang Start Dating?
Episode 6 of Dear X ended with Ah-Jin and In-Gang kissing on the street as the snow started to fall, leaving them looking like something out of a postcard. At the start of this episode, after we see Le-Na’s cousin, the journalist Lim Hee-Kook, snap a picture of them, it seems it wasn’t all that private a moment. But then we’re shown that Jae-Oh was there snapping pictures with a telephoto lens too, and it appears Ah-Jin never meant for it to be all that private. Meanwhile, Jun-Seo, who hit his head after a bar fight at the end of the last episode, seems to be just fine, not even dazed or concussed, and he helps Le-Na into her car and sends her home. Before she leaves, though, she gets a call from Hee-Kook, and since she’s passed out, Jun-Seo picks up and ends up finding out Ah-Jin and In-Gang kissed.
The next morning, the news hasn’t been made public yet, but Longstar Entertainment CEO Mi-Ri has been tipped off. She talks to both Ah-Jin and In-Gang, trying to get them to see how it’s terribly bad for them to get together right after In-Gang publicly broke up with Le-Na, but she doesn’t seem to make any progress at all. Instead, Ah-Jin reaches out to Hee-Kook and strikes a bargain—cover their dating as a positive and heartwarming story, and she’ll keep feeding him pictures and content. She even hands him a flash drive with the pictures Jae-Oh took, telling him he doesn’t have to bother tailing her anymore, and Hee-Kook’s only too happy to accept this gift that’s fallen into his lap.
But it seems Ah-Jin’s not done plotting yet. Her manager, Hyang-I, who she’s been suspiciously extra nice to, becomes her next unwitting minion. It seems Hyang-I’s been set up on a blind date, clearly one she’s excited about, judging by how she talks to Ah-Jin. Maybe it’s been a while, but Ah-Jin sets her mind at ease by booking her a salon appointment and telling her to be careful not to drink too much, in case she says something she shouldn’t. Cut to the date, and, surprise, it’s Jae-Oh she’s out to dinner with! He looks really cool, and he’s got some stylish glasses on too; he looks practically unrecognizable. He’s charming, and the soju flows like water, and next thing you know, he’s managed to steer the conversation towards covering up crimes, and Hyang-I ends up confessing how she took the fall for Le-Na’s DUI back in the day, even lying to the cops.
Once this recording gets out, it’s over for Le-Na, who had already been reeling from the news that In-Gang had started dating Ah-Jin. After the video of Le-Na slapping Ah-Jin had played at the Longstar anniversary party, she’d already been having trouble finding work, but with this, her career is as good as over, and Ah-Jin takes the opportunity to gloat and remind her she shouldn’t have messed with her. Oh, also, Ah-Jin casually disposes of Hyang-I by firing her, now that she’s served her purpose. Everything’s fallen into place for Ah-Jin; her career takes off, her relationship with In-Gang is the talk of the town, at least for now, and she even fits in with his family. One tiny hiccup comes when her old high school bully, Sung-Hee, sees her one day and gets infuriated by her success, trying to make a blog post to expose her, but it’s only too easy for Ah-Jin because she gets too many negative comments from Jae-Oh and other accounts, and she ends up taking down her post.
Ah-Jin grows particularly close to In-Gang’s grandmother when she’s sick one time, and the old woman ends up coming over to her place and making her a home-cooked meal just to take care of her. She even feeds her by hand, and the way she touches Ah-Jin on the shoulder almost seems to change something in her, and we see what feels like a spark of humanity in her eyes. When they’re cuddling later, the old woman calls Ah-Jin a gift to her family and says she’s as precious to her as her two grandsons. Ah-Jin enjoys the experience so much that she gives her the door code to the flat (1225, Grandma remembers it as Christ’s birthday) and tells her to drop by anytime she wants. It’s when she’s out with In-Gang’s grandmother on a different day that she ends up bumping into Choi Jung-Ho, the retired baseball player whose life she ended up ruining when he took the fall for the death of her father.
In the meantime, Le-Na and Jun-Seo have started dating, though it’s not clear if she’s just using him. When there are rumors that Jun-Seo’s book (written under the pseudonym Seok-Ha), “Winter’s Sleep,” is about to be adapted into a drama, Le-Na’s name starts to be associated with it in rumors, and you start to wonder if this was her doing. Except it turns out Jun-Seo specifically wants Ah-Jin to play the lead, which makes her finally go meet him. He yells at her about how she promised to date In-Gang for only a year, but now it’s been way longer and she’s still not left him. It’s when he’s about to lean in to kiss her that Le-Na shows up, and she’s furious that Ah-Jin’s trespassed into her life again. Later, when Ah-Jin and In-Gang are at a restaurant for her birthday dinner, Le-Na crashes the party with Jun-Seo and brings up how she was at their place, causing In-Gang to storm off, upset she’d kept secrets from him, especially when he finds out she and Jun-Seo were step-siblings. This is especially significant because he’d been meaning to ask her to marry him. She tries to console him, but then he gets a call that his grandmother needs to be checked on back at home. Turns out, she’d discovered her diary, which she thought she’d lost, at Ah-Jin’s place; putting two and two together, she’d realized Ah-Jin had been manipulating the whole family. We don’t see what exactly happens after Ah-Jin goes to her place, but the next thing we know, the old woman “slipped” down the stairs and is lying there in need of medical attention. Jae-Oh and Jun-Seo turn up at the scene, and they can’t tell if she did it.
How Does In-Gang’s Grandmother’s Death Change Things?
At the beginning of episode 8, we sadly see the sweet grandma die, despite the doctors’ best efforts, and Ah-Jin seems genuinely upset outside the operating theater. At the funeral, In-Gang is in great grief, but his brother, In-Mo, has been looking into Choi Jung-Ho and Ah-Jin and is suspicious of Ah-Jin’s past. He asks Choi if Ah-Jin had anything to do with her father’s death, but the good man that he is, he decides to give up on this chance at revenge and just says she had nothing to do with it. Later, he even says he wishes Ah-Jin good luck, since he managed to come to terms with his fate over the 5 years he spent in prison, but Ah-Jin just tells him he should have taken his revenge when he could. In the absence of his grandmother, In-Gang grows even more dependent on Ah-Jin, and this starts to become a drag on her, with him going around shopping for wedding rings, which starts rumors. This culminates when a director tells her that he wants to cast her, but the rumors around her getting married are causing trouble.
This leads her to decide to break up with him, and this sudden change of behavior leaves him bewildered. I don’t know why she doesn’t stop at this point, but she goes on to tell him about the stolen diary and how she’d left his grandmother horrified, almost letting him imagine that she let her die on purpose. Guess it’s just a way of marking a distance between them?
Anyway, after she leaves, Mi-Ri comes over, and she tries to get In-Gang to stop drinking, but he says he’s allowed to be sad if it’s just for one day and, giving in, she joins him. However, when she goes over with a hangover-cure soup the next day, she discovers he’s taken his own life in the bathtub, leaving her broken. When Jun-Seo confronts Ah-Jin over what she’s done to this family, she seems remorseless, and so he’s convinced now that she did kill the grandmother. He’d earlier asked Jae-Oh to retrieve the CCTV footage from the staircase where she’d died, and as he watches it now, it turns out the absurd story Ah-Jin had told at the hospital was all true. The old woman had forgiven Ah-Jin; she really did see her as a daughter, and then she had tried to take her to see the kitten on the doorstep, but she felt sick and lost her balance, falling to her death.
At the end of Dear X episode 8, we see more of the mysterious man who seems to be plotting something to do with Ah-Jin. After she’d broken up with In-Gang, Jae-Oh had noticed a car following her and tried to stop it. When he did succeed in doing so, several other cars showed up, all full of men in black suits carrying weapons, who beat him up severely, to the point he ended up in the hospital. At the time, Jae-Oh had noticed a tattoo of a cross on the wrist of one of these men, which might be relevant later. Who is this mysterious man? Guess we’ll have to keep watching to find out.
