Summary
“Pride and Prejudice” really turns up the character drama as Yeon-su is forced to confront the root cause of her and Ung’s break-up.
This recap of Our Beloved Summer season 1, episode 6, “Pride and Prejudice”, contains spoilers.
“Pride and Prejudice” really turns up the emotion and character drama, taking a closer look – through the use of flashbacks paralleling the present-day, of course – at why Yeon-Su and Ung split up all those years ago. It’s a less funny episode than usual, granted, but one that, on the plus side, really builds atop of the foundations laid by the first few installments, using yesterday’s quasi-cliffhanger ending to kick-start a deeper analysis of these two and their respective pasts.
Our Beloved Summer season 1, episode 6 recap
Returning briefly to the moment in which Ung asked Yeon-su to stay over, we wind back through time to pore over the past from Yeon-su’s perspective as a poor, though highly driven and ambitious student who sees Ung as something of an escape from her circumstances. Even as they grew up, though, the sense of their relationship being a facsimile never really went away; as Yeon-su continued to try and fail at bettering herself in the manner she felt he was, the more she felt inferior, and the more she worried that, eventually, he would discover her lingering resentment over their vastly different lives.
“Pride and Prejudice” swerves the immediate issue somewhat by having Ung, when he wakes up the next morning, be unable to recall the night before. He can’t fathom why he slept so soundly. When he presses Yeon-su about it, she’s cagey, so the feeling of things left unsaid, and feelings left unaddressed, persists. It isn’t until later that we see Ung collapsed, and that Yeon-su dragged him inside and let him sleep on the couch. It’s unclear whether she is keeping this to herself to spare him any embarrassment or to simply avoid having to confront the reality that their long-ago breakup still hasn’t been properly addressed by either of them – including, as it happens, Ung’s parents, who run into Yeon-su during the live drawing session between Ung and Nu-a and ask Yeon-su to visit them.
NJ also makes her presence felt at this session, congratulating Ung in front of the frenzied media, and subsequently tells them that they’re old friends rooting for one another. This only makes Yeon-su more jealous, and leaves her feeling more inadequate, which she confesses to Sol-yi at her pub. Despite Sol-yi’s insistence that it was a great deal of hard work that got Yeon-su where she is today, it does little to lift her spirits, and she eventually drinks herself unconscious, forcing Sol-yi to summon Ji-ung to move her.
Of course, Yeon-su, still very drunk, later encounters Ung outside her house, him apparently having remembered the events of the night before and become frustrated by her unwillingness to talk about them – and, more to the point, her unwillingness to discuss their break-up in general, which remains an open wound for them both. Yeon-su is forced to admit, finally, to herself and to Ung, that they broke up because of her pride. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like a very good reason.
Our Beloved Summer episode 6 really comes into its own in this final sequence, and in the epilogue that reveals Ung really started to draw in earnest as a response to their break-up – it gives what has thus far been a light, relatively frivolous comedy a note of real tragedy. This is, of course, a necessary step on their inevitable road to reconciliation, but it’s very well handled and performed and turns up the drama to cap off a solid, character-driven week of Netflix’s k-drama.
You can stream Our Beloved Summer season 1, episode 6, “Pride and Prejudice”, exclusively on Netflix.
