Summary
Memories of the Alhambra episode 9 offers a lot of emotional impact for the viewer, but it’s often mixed with repetitive nonsense, almost like its stretching one episode too far.
This recap of Memories of the Alhambra Season 1, Episode 9, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Everything is starting to come together now, but my word did it take an eternity for the plot to piece together finally. Memories of the Alhambra episode 9 finally gave us the juice to what happened to programmer Jung Se-joo (Chan-Yeol Park) on that fateful day on the train to Granada. It turns out he was experiencing the same glitch/delusion as Yoo Jin-woo (Hyun Bin) where his deceased friend repeatedly turns up in the game as a non-playable character trying to kill him.
Of course, the arrogant and misunderstood CEO explains this theory regarding the programmer for a good ten minutes. However, it irritates me that he calls his game experience a delusion. In the previous episodes, it was established that his experiences were not a delusion, but rather an issue with the game, which would explain why Jung Se-joo wanted his help to see if his company could fix it. Memories of the Alhambra episode 9 does a nonsense u-turn in that respect.
Memories of the Alhambra episode 9 featured a breakthrough between Yoo Jin-woo and Jung Hee-joo (Shin-Hye Park) with both of them having another emotional, but more calm conversation about her brother and the next steps to find him via the game. She utters those famous words, often scripted, “why do you make it so hard for me to hate you?”, sending a gut-punching moment the viewer’s way.
As Yoo Jin-woo enters Granada for the second time, but this time with confidence that he will find the programmer, he finds himself ambushed by multiple enemies, trapped on a train while his assistant is getting fought by characters on the platform. As the episode ends, Yoo Jin-woo’s assistant is killed in the game, leaving him feeling hopeless as the train continues to move forward.
While Memories of the Alhambra appears to go round in circles and deliver a lot of nonsense, it’s a good job the acting is good.
