Summary
When the Phone Rings builds more and more mystery in Episode 5. Despite some dated sensibilities, it’s easy to see why its audience remains hooked.
When the Phone Rings Episode 5 arrives after an additional week’s wait thanks to real-life South Korean political calamity, and while the episode obviously couldn’t have predicted that, in an odd way it seems to benefit from its audience waiting on it with bated breath. It takes an effort to remember, but in the previous episode, Sa-eon had seen a recording of his selectively mute wife, Hee-joo, screaming for the police, unearthing a long-term ruse. With this at the forefront of his mind, Sa-eon pushes the issue, but also seems to deliberately and determinedly overlook several very obvious clues that she’s the one who has been calling him as her “kidnapper”.
Also in the previous episode, Sa-eon had caught Hee-joo on the roof making a call (at the same time he was receiving one from the kidnapper.) This is framed as him questioning her about why she was on the phone given she can’t speak, not as an accusation about calling him. It’s a bit silly, but the episode does an okay job of explaining why Sa-eon is fixated on the idea of Hee-joo’s mutism and why he’s reluctant to go whole hog in asking her outright about anything.
Ostensibly, the mutism is an outgrowth of her trauma, with Hee-joo’s mother claiming she has been unable to talk since the accident that killed her brother and deafened her sister. He never even heard her speak in childhood, with a hiccup being the most noise she has made in front of him in two decades. So, this isn’t just a case of a secret being revealed. The idea of Hee-joo not being mute collapses a huge part of Sa-eon’s life.
Now isn’t the time for accusations anyway, since Hee-joo was successful in the interview process and is now part of the presidential team, which she’s roundly congratulated about, including by her husband. Sa-eon decides to buy her a nice new suit as a reward, and they almost cross paths with In-a while they’re shopping.
There’s a fair amount of depth to this dynamic. Obviously, there’s the whole business with the wedding, but it goes back further than that. Hee-joo used to translate for In-a while Sa-eon tutored her in maths, oftentimes obscuring his actual sentiments, so there’s this weird element of dependency and mistruth that characterizes the three-way relationship.
While we’re on the subject of three-way relationships – Sang-woo. While he’s trying to find out more about something that happened at the villa near the orphanage – where, apparently, some rich kid he knew suggested dismembering a cat – he’s also inserting himself in Sa-eon and Hee-joo’s marriage, and the former is not happy about it one bit. When Sang-woo asks Hee-joo to meet so he and Yu-ri can congratulate her, Sa-eon goes with her, and the whole thing’s super fractious. It doesn’t help matters that there are things Sang-woo knows about Hee-joo – like her dream to be a newscaster – that Sa-eon never bothered to learn, so Sang-woo isn’t just a love rival but a mirror to Sa-eon’s own inadequacies.
This is part of the reason why I think Sa-eon has already figured out that it’s Hee-joo on the phone. There’s even more pushing in this regard in When the Phone Rings Episode 5 when Hee-joo makes the latest call and almost gets spotted, and when Sa-eon learns that the voice on the phone is a female in her 20s, and the climax reveals he has run a 99.9% successful voice match. It’s almost impossible that he hasn’t figured it out yet, and I reckon he’s just using the calls as a way to be able to speak frankly about their feelings for one another. When he almost gets run over and Hee-joo pushes him aside, shouting his name, he says he wants to hear her voice more and starts learning sign language. This is, fundamentally, a show about communication; about saying the hard things you’re scared to in whatever way works.
The twist at the end of the episode is that the real kidnapper says something to Hee-joo that implies she isn’t who she says she is, and Sa-eon will find out soon. The ‘napper also intimates that he knows Sa-eon better than anyone, which implies it’s someone close to him. But there’s still a ton of mystery here and the show can’t help but drop hints that there’s even more going on than we initially realized. It’s engaging for now, but will the drama eventually run out of steam as a result?
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