Summary
Finding novel ways to approach love, power dynamics, and financial pressure, My Liberation Notes continues to be a compellingly atypical slice-of-life drama.
This recap of My Liberation Notes season 1, episode 7 contains spoilers.
My Liberation Notes continues with another steady dose of character and thematic development, with love persisting as a strong and consistent theme expressed in various ways.
My Liberation Notes season 1, episode 7 recap
Mi-jeong for instance – whose father presses her about changing her home address here – skirts the usual stereotype in never having had her heart beat faster for someone she likes – it’s always slower, more controlled and deliberate. This show is good at these small, meaningful details; a kind of determined anti-cliché.
Gi-jeong, meanwhile, feels something for Tae-hun, whom she is upset for after he speaks about his weakness and his desire to liberate himself from it. But there’s an idea of karma bundled up in this. Gi-jeong feels she is owed bad luck in love thanks to her mistreatment of someone who once asked her out. After Gi-jeong gets Tae-hun’s number and engages with him in text messages for a while, he eventually opts out of responding. That’s her unluckiness in love coming back to spite her – yet another obstacle that needs to be cleared.
These ideas of regrets over past actions and the need to pay penance for them are compelling. Everyone has regrets, but few of us have the chance – or the inclination – to atone for them, much less accept misfortune as due payment.
Seeing Tae-hun smile is nice, and the potential is there to open the character up by exploring this relationship further. It obviously contrasts sharply with the worship-based relationship between Mi-jeong and Gu, though there’s also a financial component to that which everyone can relate to. Mi-jeong’s conversation with her father about the address change was related to the loan too, and it’s a lingering specter over the dynamic, in much the same way as money woes are a lingering issue for all of us. Money troubles in film and TV are almost always depicted in an extreme sense, but anyone who has been broke and in debt knows that it’s the persistent threat of ruin that really takes its toll.
But Gu wants to help. And in his insistence on helping, Mi-jeong sees a problem. By supporting her in her decisions and not arguing against them, she can begin to feel confident about herself. She doesn’t want a man to do things for her, to ask the hard questions and make the demands she’d rather make herself. Consider the power dynamic here. Gu wants to embody the traditionally masculine role of protector, but that isn’t what Mi-jeong wants or needs. But in their connection, Gu feels weakness and fear which he doesn’t feel anywhere else. It’s a way of expressing vulnerability that isn’t all that typical, and if you can describe My Liberation Notes in one way, it’s certainly atypical.
You can stream My Liberation Notes season 1, episode 7 exclusively on Netflix.
