Summary
A Virtuous Business Episode 5 has strong thematic underpinnings and once again delivers good character work, even if the mystery subplot doesn’t quite fit.
Power is a funny old thing. Sometimes it’s obvious who has it – monarchs, elected officials, CEOs, etc. – and sometimes it isn’t. A Virtuous Business is largely about the more insidious forms of power – especially how it manifests between men and women in relationships – and turning them on their heads, as seen in Episode 5.
On a macro level, the show is about women using their agency to make their own decisions. On a micro level it’s about a string of tiny subversions that, taken together, qualify as something like emancipation. Jeong-sook is freeing herself; financially, from her marriage, and from the expectations of society.
Seong-su wanting to get back with Jeong-sook is one of the key ways in which these ideas of power and expectations are addressed. He clearly didn’t want her in the first place, or he wouldn’t have been sleeping with Mi-hwa, but because Jeong-sook seems fine without him, he can’t take it.
Da-hyun, in typical male lead fashion, can sense the insincerity of this. His being openly antagonistic to Seong-su is satisfying for the audience as much as it is for Jeong-sook. His character doesn’t strictly fit into the deconstruction angle – he is, after all, mostly just a romantic interest for the lead – but he gives it some contouring now and then.
Consider the implications of the Chairman’s wife being so instrumental in the success of the vibrator sales. If she’s brought on-side, everyone who considers themselves “beneath her” will be too. And that’s more or less everyone. Status is a powerful thing, and it’s the people with power who control wider sentiment. The way you free a topic from being taboo is to have influential people normalize it.
This is pretty explicitly a commentary on marketing and capitalism, but it’s equally a cultural critique. Society is just a big game of follow-the-leader. This is why the ploy is a success. But crucially, even the powerful aren’t immune to the very power imbalances that we’ve seen our leading ladies grapple with. Chairman Eom is a serial cheater himself. Heo’s endorsement of the products is a masquerade to distract from the obvious pain of being tethered to a loveless marriage just to avoid the taint of divorce.
A Virtuous Business | Image via Netflix
Da-hyun’s personal subplot does feel a bit divorced – pun intended – from all this. With a burn scar all up his arm and a burning – again, pun intended – desire to find the woman who saved him from the blaze, it’s a compelling enough story but not one, as far as we can tell, with much deeper meaning or connection to the wider ideas espoused in A Virtuous Business Episode 5. Sure, I’m interested to see what he turns up about the serial arsonist active three decades prior, but I’m not sure what connection it has, if any, to everything else.
I’m much more interested in Jeong-sook and Seong-su, for instance. When In-tae tells her that Mi-hwa is pregnant and she realizes there’s a very good chance the child is her husband’s, she eventually resolves to file for divorce and cause him the maximum amount of pain possible. Which is fair enough, I suppose.
Now that I think about it, the way this connects to Da-hyun is quite obvious. Both he in the course of his investigation and Jeong-sook in the breakdown of her life as she knows it feels adrift. They relate to one another on this level, as they’re both now suddenly faced with a single, clear objective. For Da-hyun it’s about unravelling his past. For Jeong-sook, it’s about doing right by Min-ho.
These are fundamental human impulses and they give A Virtuous Business a strong core of humanity that reinforces some of the sillier K-Drama shenanigans and the few elements that don’t entirely work. The key question for the audience, though, is whether Jeong-sook and Da-hyun will decide to pursue their singular objectives together.
This being a K-Drama, it’s quite likely that they will.
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