The most exciting thing about the Taiwanese drama Had I Not Seen The Sun is the fact that there’s going to be a Part 2 because we’re left with so many questions at the end of that first part. For one, we still haven’t gotten to the part where Jen-Yao killed people and ended up in prison. We’ve only covered the events that happened in school, which means more than half the story is still left to be told. The timeline of Part 1 went from 2008 to 2014, and then we had a little bit of the interview stuff in 2023, but we didn’t really get into what happened in those 9 years in between. This is what we’ll get to see in Part 2, I’m assuming. The show ended with Jen-Yao meeting a woman who reminds him of his first love, Hsiao-Tung. However, this woman is blind and doesn’t really look like the Hsiao-Tung we know. Additionally, we see a montage of how this man killed people and how Shen Mu was around for at least a few of those murders, if not all, so there’s a chance she orchestrated this whole thing. But why? And how did she not get in trouble? What can we expect to see Part 2? Let’s dig in to find out.
Spoiler Alert
What Will Happen to the Documentary?
After Ta-Wei’s partner yelled at him for pursuing passion projects without funding, he returned with news that he’d managed to secure conditional funding for the documentary. Ouyang Ti’s mother had reached out and said she would fund them as long as they asked Jen-Yao just why he had murdered her beloved son. Had I Not Seen The Sun Part 2 will likely see her returning, eager for answers and keen to talk to Jen-Yao. It appears the tone-deaf mother still doesn’t believe her son committed a grave crime by assaulting a classmate. Additionally, she thinks Jen-Yao already got his revenge for the drug stuff back in the day when he stabbed Ouyang at school.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the documentary itself, it looks like Ta-Wei is going to blackmail Jen-Yao into complying with the documentary by using the footage he found of what happened to Hsiao-Tung. I’m concerned by the fact that it’s still on the internet somehow. But, besides that, this is a very mean thing to do, especially if you know how much Hsiao-Tung meant to Jen-Yao. However, this means that, despite Shen Mu’s warning against Jen-Yao talking to Ta-Wei and opening up old wounds, Jen-Yao is going to reveal the truth. Additionally, Pin-Yu is kind of still possessed, no? So she’ll definitely get to the bottom of this eventually. Also, even if the documentary doesn’t get published, it will still get made.
What Happened Between 2014 and 2023?
In 2014, Jen-Yao had moved to Taipei after serving a 5-year term. He’s changed his identity and is living a decent life before he meets the blind woman who will eventually change everything. Now, in the first episode of part 1, we see Hsiao-Tung’s father close a window in his house, looking at a picture of his young daughter and tearing up. This seems to imply he knows for sure that she’s dead, but is she really dead? This is a mystery we have to wait to have an answer for. On the other hand, Jen-Yao obviously murders the 6 abusers and also En-Ya, who was complicit in the abuse of Hsiao-Tung, in this time frame, eventually getting arrested, but we’ll get to see what triggers him to turn so very violent in the future, when in 2014 it looks like he’s healed and everything is okay. But it also appears there’s a romance brewing between this blind woman and Jen-Yao, whether it’s Hsiao-Tung or not, so that’s something else we get to look forward to, though I have a feeling it ends tragically, too. She looks quite different from Hsiao-Tung, but hey, it’s been years, and she does have that butterfly tattoo in the exact same spot, which seems almost like too much to be a coincidence.
What Does Hsiao-Tung’s Story Remind Ta-Wei of?
Throughout Part 1, Ta-Wei comes across as quite a selfish man, who prioritizes accomplishing his own goals over anything, getting annoyed when he can’t have his way. This comes across most clearly through his relationship with Chien-Yi, his partner at the studio. She calls him out for leaving the responsibility of keeping the studio commercially viable on her shoulders while pursuing his passion projects without a care, and also for hogging Pin-Yu’s time even though she’d been hired to assist both of them. He’s also mean to Pin-Yu after he gets unsatisfactory answers during the Jen-Yao interview, plus he’s borderline insensitive when interviewing Jen-Yao’s mother. All in all, his behavior is callous and unempathetic.
But the one time we do see him be human and a bit vulnerable is after he visits Jen-Yao’s school and talks to some of the staff about the picture of him and Hsiao-Tung. They remember her as a bright and talented young girl, but the subject of her disappearance is left vague, though they bring up rumors that she took her own life. At this, Ta-Wei, who hadn’t even flinched when talking to a serial killer face-to-face, goes pale, and he flashes back to his childhood, when someone he clearly loved had taken her own life. We see a body on a hospital bed, and peeking out from under the cover is an arm covered in self-harm scars. It’s clear that whoever he loved was unwell and that their passing impacted him growing up, perhaps emotionally closing him off to other people. We’ll likely find out more about who this person was and what happened to her in Part 2.
