Sometimes you forget how good chemistry used to be in old K-dramas until you see a show like Idol I. Firstly, I genuinely appreciate the episodes being 60 minutes or less. Please stick to this format, instead of being a Queen of Tears and giving us two feature films every week. Anyway, episodes 7 and 8 of Idol I give us just enough pining as well as drama to keep us hooked for what’s coming next. Also, we love these actors already, but together they’re actually fire. Has this pairing happened before? Really funny seeing an idol like Sooyoung pretend not to know how to sing when drunk because let’s face it, she’s a karaoke expert. I’m really loving the looks these two keep giving each other secretly, and I’m glad the whole “you were a fan of mine and lied to me” thing didn’t get in the way for more than a single episode. With that said, though, let’s jump straight into everything that happened in episodes 7 and 8.
Spoiler Alert
Why Does La-Ik Fire Se-Na?
Idol I episode 7 begins with Se-Na being devastated after coming home and learning that La-Ik has found her hidden stash of fandom merch. La-Ik is immediately disappointed and hurt because he thought Se-Na believed in him as a human being, not because she was a fan of his. More importantly, he’s hurt that she let him believe and trust her with so much ease. He immediately walks out of the house, leaving Se-Na alone and out of the loop. When Chung-Jae asks her why she didn’t throw away the stuff, she says it had sentimental value to her, and she couldn’t just let go of it. It’s like letting go of a whole part of her life, but it’s one of the most important things to happen to her. Really appreciate that this show gives us a realistic depiction of idol culture and fandom that doesn’t feel like an insult. Anyway, Se-Na then gets rid of the stuff, putting it all out on the curb. The next thing you know, we learn that Jae-Hee’s gone missing, and La-Ik’s being interogated by the prosecutor with no lawyer, but when Se-Na does show up because his manager called her, he ends up throwing her out and then firing her as well.
Why Does Byeong-Gyun Hate Se-Na?
Across both episodes, we learn that Se-Na’s father was accused of murder and then found guilty of the same. However, he continued to say he didn’t do it until he hanged himself in prison. This left Se-Na all alone. Now, it turns out Se-Na and Byeong-Gyun have beef from way back. Not just because he bullied her in school, but also because his father was a prosecutor, and Se-Na thinks he was also a cheat, just like Byeong-Gyun. He was the one who sent her dad to prison. Now, Byeong-Gyun’s father’s first note to him about La-Ik’s case was that he should not change the suspect because that would turn everyone against them. It breaks trust and makes not just Byeong-Gyun, but all of the prosecution look bad.
Later, Byeong-Gyun confronts Se-Na and calls her pathetic, like her father. At first, she holds her own, but by the end of the conversation, she can’t say anything and freezes up. Se-Na has to expose this man and the prosecution for her dad’s sake. Anyway, the whole reason La-Ik starts feeling genuinely close to Se-Na again is that he sees the cap he gave her when they were young. Turns out they both had a massive impact on each other’s lives.
What Happens to Chung-Jae?
On the other hand, in the middle of all of this, Chung-Jae gets clingy and tells Se-Na that she should not get stuck in the past because he wants her to see him as more than family. He’s been inspired by her since he, too, lost his parents young, but now he’s jealous of her love for La-Ik and how, despite him hurting her, she’s worried about him. Additionally, Se-Na got him to go from homeless teenager to man with a roof over his head.
What Happened to Jae-Hee?
Right after Jae-Hee and La-Ik had their face-to-face interrogation, and Jae-Hee got told he wouldn’t have any immunity from prosecution, the guy apparently dropped off the map. Nobody’s seen him since, and obviously La-Ik’s the biggest suspect, since he’s already been accused of murdering one bandmate, and because Jae-Hee testified against him at the interrogation. Byeong-Gyun starts to suspect at this point that Jae-Hee went on the run because he had something to hide, especially after his coworker starts nagging him, but the words of the chief prosecutor are running through his mind. So, even though Byeong-Gyun finally agrees to put out a warrant for Jae-Hee, he says the focus will remain on La-Ik.
La-Ik and Young-Bin are really worried about their bandmate and ring him a bunch of times, but to no avail. Meanwhile, La-Ik starts feeling really bad about how he treated Se-Na, and walks by the building of her law firm late at night. But when he sees her step out of the building, he freaks out and hides before starting to follow her from a distance. She even calls him on the phone at one point, and he has to quickly decline the call so she doesn’t realize he’s right behind her. Eventually, he sees her go to the piano where he’d sat her down and sung her a song back in the day, and she starts playing a tune on it and chugging away at the beer she brought with her. Eventually, he follows her home (not in a creepy way; she’s drunk and stumbling) and smiles to himself when she starts singing La-Ik’s anthem, finally turning around when she makes it home safe.
After Se-Na passes out on her bed, her phone starts ringing, and it turns out Jae-Hee’s calling, but it ends up going to voicemail because she’s in no state to wake up. The next morning, though, when a couple of cops stop by the side of the road to relieve themselves out in the countryside, they see a crashed car, and Jae-Hee is discovered inside it, after which he is quickly rushed to the hospital, still alive but gravely injured. La-Ik comes rushing to the hospital, but all Manager Geum can think of is how bad it’s going to look if the press sees him here. The doctors tell everyone that the surgery has helped, but if Jae-Hee’s brain swells up any further, he could suffer permanent neurological damage. La-Ik is crushed, and the next time Se-Na sees him, he’s sitting outside her house in the pouring rain, unfazed by the world outside because he’s so tormented by what’s happening to his friends. Finally, she lets him back into her house, and they spend the night together (as friends!).
Is Manager Geum the Man Behind Everything?
The next day, when Se-Na is heading to go see the site of the crash, La-Ik wants to tag along, and once they’re there, he holds her hand and helps her traverse the bumpy terrain. When they see the hillside Jae-Hee crashed off, they’re surprised by how little distance there is between the crash site and the road, implying Jae-Hee hadn’t accelerated that much. The reason for their surprise is that when Jae-Hee’s phone was recovered, it was discovered that he’d written a confession on it, admitting guilt for Woo-Seong’s murder. A bloodied knife was also discovered in the car. But if he was really suicidal to the point of leaving a note, wouldn’t he have accelerated harder and ended up further from the road?
When Se-Na speaks to the police, she finds out that she wasn’t the only person he’d called that night. Among all the people he’d called, though, only Manager Geum had picked up, but he’d reported that the conversation had been brief and unimportant. Se-Na has a voicemail from Jae-Hee, and Nam-Sik, the cop looking at this case, ends up becoming obsessed with it. Jae-Hee had left a voice message saying he was in trouble and needed help, and that there was something he had to tell her before the message abruptly cut off. This doesn’t fit the profile of a suicidal murderer at all. In the meantime, Byeong-Gyun’s under a lot of media pressure, because it looks like he was running a “coercive investigation” the whole time (I mean, he was), and now everyone’s gossiping about how his career’s done for.
Se-Na and La-Ik track down the hotel Jae-Hee had apparently been staying at before he died, and the receptionist is a massive Gold Boys fangirl who remembers every detail. Turns out, he’d barely ever left his room while he was here, and it seems random to Se-Na that he picked this place, but La-Ik tells her it isn’t. They’re right next to the first-ever stage that the Gold Boys were invited to play at, and Se-Na even remembers being in the audience that day. They’re also near the Forest of Wishes, where the bandmates went together that day to hang up little blocks of wood with their hopes and dreams on them. Funnily enough, La-Ik’s was that he wanted to make a lot of money. They see Jae-Hee’s, too, and it was about getting big enough to end up on a billboard. Both those wishes came true, so maybe it’s not all made up. They can tell from the second wish on Jae-Hee’s that he did, in fact, revisit it to add on to the wishes, and La-Ik adds on to his old wish too, wanting all his loved ones to stay safe and happy.
When they return to the hotel, the receptionist finds a member of the staff who was nearby on Jae-Hee’s last night at the hotel, when he’d made the phone call to Manager Geum. Apparently, he’d been mentioning a CEO a lot and had sounded extremely agitated, in contrast to what Geum had reported to the police. This gets the gears in Se-Na’s head turning, and she remembers how Gwang-Soo, her boss, had told her about the things he’d heard when he was visiting Geum’s talent management agency. Apparently, their legal team had been taking a very close look at the Gold Boys’ contract, particularly their breach of trust clause, and it seemed like they were anticipating betrayal. Gwang-Soo described how brutal Geum could be if he sensed that he wasn’t going to get things his way. Se-Na also recalls how the manager at the rival talent agency had told her that Woo-Seong was the one who’d signed the contract with them first, indicating he intended on switching the Gold Boys over to a different company.
Could he have invited Manager Geum’s wrath over such a betrayal? Woo-Seong died not long after signing that contract. And the way Jae-Hee had spoken to Manager Geum on the phone while he was on the balcony indicated he’d felt betrayed. Apparently, Jae-Hee had deliberately kept information hidden from the police under his orders, believing that Geum was acting in the Gold Boys’ best interests, but it was starting to look more and more like Geum cared about nothing but his company’s bottom line. He’s already started preparing for La-Ik’s return to the public stage, even though he was only recently a hated public figure. The tragedy of the loss of a full half of the band only strikes him as an opportunity when he realizes how much attention it’s going to focus on superstar La-Ik.
In the ending of Idol I episode 8, Se-Na and La-Ik rush to the office of Manager Geum, hoping to get an answer out of him. They know he’s concealed information from the police, and they know he seems hardly shaken by Jae-Hee’s recent accident, so they suspect him. Ominously, all Geum tells La-Ik is that there’s a terrible secret he doesn’t know yet, which is why he hid it from the police. He asks him to confirm repeatedly whether he really thinks he can handle the secret about Woo-Seong, but just as he’s about to tell us what it is, the episode ends, leaving us to wait a whole week if we want to find out what this earth-shattering secret is. But also, all the romance is waiting for us, so yay.
