Summary
Episode 10 of The Potato Lab spices up the obligatory “falling out just before the finale” trope with a key recontextualizing bombshell, leaving the core romance in serious jeopardy.
As suspected, Episode 10 of The Potato Lab is indeed the obligatory one where problems between the leads threaten to upend their entire relationship. But as I predicted in my recap of Episode 9, this isn’t the kind of show that’s content to do tropes by halves. So, sure, this part of the story is an expected cliché, but The Potato Lab’s version of it peppers in some recontextualizing bombshell reveals that throw the core dynamic into disarray in a way that doesn’t feel quite as easy to come back from as these things usually do.
Just ahead of the final two episodes, this is, of course, the exact right time to leave the fate of the leads hanging in the balance, especially when we believe that the worst-case scenario might be possible. A show more slavishly devoted to formula wouldn’t have that tension. But the willingness to subvert tropes earlier in the season has conditioned us to the possibility.
There’s another kind of tension in this episode, which stems from Baek-ho’s reluctance to reveal the truth. Again, this isn’t new to him; he has been grappling with his feelings for Mi-kyung throughout the whole thing, but recent developments about her past with Ki-se have led him to a realization that he was instrumental in the breakdown of their relationship, having been tasked by CEO Yoon to get a handle on the situation. Now he’s not only nursing the stress of his feelings for Mi-kyung, but also guilt over how much emotional pain he potentially caused her without even realizing it.
And understandably, he can’t bring himself to say anything. He refuses to talk to her about Ki-se, he falls into someone else’s arms in search of shelter they can’t provide, he tries the old telling-the-truth-but-not-really to get a sense of how the honesty might taste in his mouth, and he keeps using “the right time” as a delaying tactic, knowing he’ll never find it.
The distractions pile in from outside, too. It’s like the universe is conspiring to keep Baek-ho from telling Mi-kyung the whole truth; whether it’s phone calls or playing princess, he’s stymied at every turn. As ever, The Potato Lab Episode 10 sprinkles in relevant potato context, too – the rivalry between potatoes and sweet potatoes speaks to the obvious rivalry between Baek-ho and Ki-se, and Mi-kyung finding reassurance and continuity in a secret greenhouse makes the fact it’s all going to go wrong even harder to take – for Baek-ho and the audience.
Naturally, Ki-se sneaks in here to warn Mi-kyung not to trust Baek-ho. She begins to get a vague sense that there’s something she doesn’t know right at the time Baek-ho seems ready to tell her everything. The collision course is sadly inevitable. And right in time for the finale.
There are a couple of ways you can probably look at what Baek-ho did. Manipulating Mi-kyung’s grief to force her out of the company and spare everyone the legal ramifications of a dismissal is, obviously, despicable. But that’s the fault of corporatism, not Baek-ho specifically. He was complicit, sure, but for him it was nothing personal; he had no idea who Mi-kyung was or that she would find her way into his life down the line. He was doing his job, as unsavoury as it might be.
But this must be a small consolation to Mi-kyung, who had to live through that trauma. In this reading, Baek-ho is the villain.
But there’s another angle. What happened to Mi-kyung, as terrible as it was, is a lynchpin moment in her personal development. It thickened her skin and set her on the path she’s on now; in many ways, it completely defined the person she became. And Baek-ho was, albeit unknowingly, instrumental in that.
But how will Mi-kyung see it? By the end of The Potato Lab Episode 10, she has clearly been thrown for a major loop by the revelation, which is coming at the worst possible time, but she’s going to have two full episodes to process it all. She could come down on one side of the aisle or the other, and it’s a testament to how surprisingly compelling The Potato Lab has become that it’s genuinely difficult to predict which.
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