Summary
Love Next Door continues its directional shift into melodrama territory, with all signs pointing towards a surprisingly traumatic ending.
Here’s a question that seems more relevant as of Episode 9 of Love Next Door than it has before – where, exactly, is this show going? I can almost feel the tension of the fans who were happily minding their own business, watching what they thought was a formulaic but very well-done romantic K-Drama, now having to face the very real possibility that there’s a terribly heartbreaking ending coming their way.
Time will tell, of course, but things aren’t looking especially positive in this regard, and one gets the sense that however well it might be pulled off, the audience will really turn on the show if they feel betrayed by it.
As Episode 8 revealed, Seok-ryu’s cancer diagnosis is intimately tied to her relationship with Hyeon-jun, so Episode 9 starts there, with a useful flashback that shows how instrumental he was through her diagnosis and recovery.
But it didn’t last. Seok-ryu returned to work too early, and Hyeon-jun was happy to let her, and amid her worsening mental health he failed to be there for her. Sometimes it’s easy for a drama to lean on the most salacious thing, like an affair, but there’s a lived-in quality to this kind of break-up that I do respect.
It raises some interesting questions, too, since again, it’d be all too easy to suggest that Seok-ryu never really cared about Hyeon-jun much in the first place. But that would be less interesting. It’s more intriguing drama for us to understand that she did love him at the time and that the breakdown of their relationship and their separation, especially in the context of her physical and mental health being in jeopardy, took something significant from her.
This might make Seok-ryu uninterested in reconciling with Hyeon-jun in the present day, but more worryingly it also makes her – so she claims, anyway – reticent to pursue anything with Seung-hyo, either, telling him that she can’t see him as anything more than a friend.
Is this true? Almost certainly not. But it represents a serious defense mechanism that is understandable for someone who has been through the things that Seok-ryu has. She’s trying, above all, to protect herself, and in so doing to protect Seung-hyo.
Not that he sees it like that – the rejection makes him physically ill. And this is where the lines blur a bit since it’s Seok-ryu who reflexively sits at his bedside nursing him back to health. Their degree of intimacy is almost indistinguishable from a couple’s, and yet they’ve never been able to get over that final step. And given the direction Love Next Door Episode 9 takes, they might not ever get there.
Of course, quite by chance, Seung-hyo discovers Seok-ryu’s cancer report and realizes her deception. And he’s badly hurt. Even without any romantic connotations between them, that’s the kind of thing that friends should share with one another. It’s the kind of thing that children should share with their parents – another thing that Seok-ryu overlooked. Her belief was that doing so wouldn’t help; it wouldn’t prompt a miraculous recovery and would cause others pain. But not sharing her strife left it weighing heavy on her shoulders, and its effects have been profound.
This time should be different, and now that the word is out, it might be. But the knockabout romantic tone of the earlier episodes is very much gone now, and Love Next Door is quickly becoming more of an outright melodrama than anyone really expected.
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