Summary
With each episode, Romance in the House coheres into a better drama. However, it’s still regularly let down by its fluctuations in tone and sometimes misplaced comedy.
Romance in the House is an odd, slightly confounding show, but with every episode, it seems to be getting closer to cohering into a much better one. Episode 4 is the closest that the Netflix K-Drama has come yet, I think, to a real mystery without as many head-scratching moments of wondering why a certain line or scene was included, or at least included in quite that way.
There’s plenty of time to see how it all pans out – although less than usual, given the twelve-episode season order, and even in the best case, having a quarter of a story be a little hit-and-miss isn’t especially ideal.
Anyway, let’s get on with it.
Episode 4 begins in flashback, finally showing a non-antagonistic side of the relationship between Mi-rae and Moo-jin. But the clues are there if you’re looking for them. Even then, Moo-jin didn’t seem to have any avenue to express himself or his feelings other than through money. As we know, that would get him into trouble as Mi-rae got older and eventually lead him into ruinous circumstances, to say nothing of the big mysteries surrounding his financial activity and motivations in the present day.
Speaking of the present day, it isn’t like Moo-jin’s dodgy behavior has gone unnoticed. In Episode 3 of Romance in the House the Family Villa residents were gossiping like mad and are trying to sweet talk their way back into Ye-yeon’s good graces here as a result, and Moo-jin worries when he finds out that Ye-yeon called his oblivious sister.
Ye-yeon and Lee Jeong-hyeok remain very suspicious despite the other residents trying to flatter Moo-jin with gifts and such, and later Moo-jin drinks himself into a stupor.
Not the behavior of a man without something to hide, clearly.
In a far cry from her more idyllic relationship with her father as depicted in flashbacks, Mi-rae remains furious and blows off some steam at tae-kwon-do. Her relationship with Tae-pyeong – whose relationship with his own father is a bit frosty – is developing slowly, but picking bits of wood out of someone’s hair is generally a sign of affection, isn’t it?
In the meantime, Mi-rae is also determinedly attempting to keep Moo-jin away from her mother, though this is very much like ice skating uphill at this point. It’s bound to happen, despite Ye-yeon’s frustration and the ongoing mysteries surrounding Moo-jin, including his apparent relationship with Jae-geol, who is supposedly an old high school friend turned tax accountant but obviously isn’t.
A big moment in Romance in the House Episode 4 is Ye-yeon temporarily going missing after being grabbed in an alleyway, right in the process of calling Moo-jin. Her phone is later found by Chun-sik, but after Moo-jin and Mi-rae both rush to find her, she eventually turns up at the police station, where she’s making a statement about the creep who abused her.
This only compounds Mi-rae’s anger, given she had come close to stoving the creep’s head in before, and she’s not exactly brightened up by the presence of Moo-jin, who follows her while she’s out walking. Despite his seemingly sincere apology and actually quite good advice to give herself a break, Mi-rae is furious and insists she never wanted to be anything like him.
This situation is obviously untenable, and it’s in these areas that I think the show really excels, with the comedy and tone switching actually bringing things down. Towards the very end of the episode, with Tae-pyeong shielding a sobbing Mi-rae under his umbrella, you can see the bones of a really good drama that is suffering somewhat from having to share screen time with silliness.
But we’ll see how things go.
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