Summary
When Life Gives You Tangerines is an emotional rollercoaster in Volume 2, with Episodes 5-8 provoking tears by the bucketload.
Oh, boy. That was a lot, right? I can’t even begin to imagine how many viewers were left heartbroken by Volume 2 of When Life Gives You Tangerines, which is a brilliant but exceedingly heavy clutch of installments picking up where Volume 1 left off and then taking things to another level emotionally.
The immediate circumstances aren’t exactly rosy. Gwan-sik is out of work and is feeling particularly down about being unable to provide for his family. The specter of grief, of failure, looms large and persistently, but it’s reliably punctuated by bright spots of kindness from others who sympathize with Gwan-sik and Ae-sun’s predicament. A financial boon from Ae-sun’s grandmother allows a turnaround in circumstances, the purchase of a boat – coinciding with Ae-sun’s waters breaking – and then more progress; a house, and a third child.
Episode 5 of When Life Gives You Tangerines is clearly designed to foster the idea that everything’s going fine. There’s community, progress, and security of a sort. But superstitions still abound. Ae-sun following Geum-myeong onto Gwan-sik’s boat at the end seems inexplicably like an ill omen. Something wicked this way comes.
Tragedy strikes in Episode 6 with the death of Dong-myeong, Ae-sun and Gwan-sik’s son, in a storm. Everyone, parents and siblings alike, feels equally guilty, each nursing some element of responsibility for what happened. The healing process is expedited by the necessity of carrying on, continuing to work, to live, to push forward. But it’s a group effort. The family rallies together, and the community once again provides support. But the development is enormously impactful, stiffening Ae-sun’s mistrust of the sea.
Subsequently to this, everything exists in the long spectre of loss. It colors everything, especially as Geum-myeong continues to grow and pursue her own path. After getting into Seoul National University, we see her refuse to say goodbye to her college sweetheart as he leaves for the military, keeping the pain of saying goodbye at arm’s length. The hurt ripples through the generations, but so too does the solidarity that springs up to protect against it, to heal in its wake.
When Life Gives You Tangerines doesn’t get any easier in episodes 7 and 8, either. Time moves on, the narrative frame shifts a little, but the pervading sense of sadness and melancholy persists, indefatigable. It’s difficult to accept the fact that we’re only around the halfway point. How much trauma can one life possibly contain?
When Life Gives You Tangerines Still | Image via Netflix
Episode 7 does, at least, allow you to take a bit of a breather. It settles on less drastic developments, like Ae-sun running for chief against Sang-gil, and Eun-myeong essentially being the opposite of Geum-myeong academically. He’s a bit of a huckster, a smaller version of his go-getter father.
Geum-myeong also occupies more focus here, which is understandable given the passage of time and the fact her subplot about becoming a tutor for a rich girl who hates her because she can’t reconcile her intellect with her social status speaks more directly to the show’s underlying themes. This whole thing’s an accident waiting to happen. When Geum-myeong rejects an instruction to take exams in her client’s place, sticking to her parents’ principles, she’s accused of stealing and taken to the police station.
Geum-myeong refuses to give the police her parents’ number so as not to embroil them in this situation, which is a nice gesture, also reflective of the show’s themes. Geum-myeong is ultimately freed from this situation by the family’s maid, who turns out to be the woman Ae-sun and Gwan-sik helped out at the Busan motel. She pays the kindness forward. Geum-myeong remains her mother’s daughter, and the same is true of the brat she was tutoring. Both get deserved fates.
Geum-myeong’s closeness to Ae-sun is noticed by Gwan-sik when he makes his way to Seoul to see Geum-myeong and bumps into Yeong-beom, whom Geum-myeong has repeatedly dumped for reasons that are very familiar to Gwan-sik, because they’re the reasons Ae-sun gave to him. He can see his life playing out again, Geum-myeong’s inevitable future with Yeong-beom becoming clear.
But loss still haunts everything. Geum-myeong carries tremendous guilt for the loss of her brother and the circumstances of her parents following it. Ae-sun and Gwan-sik grieve in different ways; her by avoiding looking at anyone Dong-myeong’s age, and he by fantasizing that he lived beyond that, and grew up the way he should have. In a way, in helping to allow Geum-myeong to spread her wings and live the life Ae-sun might have fleetingly imagined for herself, Ae-sun has fulfilled her purpose, however hard it might have been at times. Nowhere is that better symbolized than in the dreamy conversation Ae-sun has with her mother towards the end of When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 8, a beautiful bit of writing and storytelling that highlights this K-Drama’s wonderful emotional texture.
This is, I think, something quite special.
