Summary
It might be too little too late, but Heavenly Ever After finally hits a real stride in Episodes 9 & 10, teeing up an intriguing finale.
There’s probably a case to be made that nine episodes into a 12-episode season is too late for a show to get good. But this is also likely underselling Heavenly Ever After, which has always been “good”, so to speak, and has mostly just failed to progress beyond that. Not so in Episodes 9 and 10, though, which finally start to give us some meaningful, substantive answers, while also leaving enough unexplained that the two-part finale should be a worthwhile closer.
There’s a fair amount to go over here, involving both Som-i and Young-ae, not to mention the core relationship between Hae-sook and Nak-joon and how that all intersects, so let’s get on with it, shall we?
Continuing from where we left off, Nak-joon and Som-i’s exploratory excursion to Earth takes a few turns, some of them a little unpleasant, and almost all of them confusing. There’s Nak-joon furiously getting a hold of police officer Jeong-gu, pursuing all over the place until his badgering finally results in the man being hit by a bus and dying. Nak-joon is adamant to know who Jeong-gu sold someone to, but Jeong-gu is fuming about dying because of Nak-joon, prompting Som-i to intervene and hold Jeong-gu by the throat until finally the ministrations of Nak-joon and the literal grim reaper convince her to let go.
But it’s another side of Nak-joon, and that idea is plumbed well here. We already know that Som-i thinks she’s in love with Nak-joon and thinks they might have had a relationship in life, but when she mentions the kid she has been dreaming about, Eun-ho, Nak-joon immediately goes bonkers about it, playing with the notion of two very distinct personalities. The question of why Nak-joon has such strong feelings about Eun-ho, and how that relates to Som-i and Hae-sook, is central to Episodes 9 & 10 of Heavenly Ever After and will continue to define the drama in the finale.
Som-i believes that Eun-ho was her son, and that Nak-joon tried to take the child away and sell him, and then killed Som-i. She believes this strongly, too, even though it doesn’t really track with Nak-joon’s position in the afterlife. Yet, his fury about the mention of the child doesn’t jive with his usual persona either, and later revelations involving Hae-sook add even more mystery to the whole thing.
But it isn’t all mystery. What Heavenly Ever After tends to do well is the idea of closure, and that’s primarily explored in this pair of episodes through Young-ae. This, I think, is where you can really make a claim of the show having found meaningful substance; it’s by far the best, most affecting narrative arc. Here, Young-ae is thrown for a loop by the arrival in Heaven of her father, who has served his time in Hell, and it’s up to her whether to forgive him and let him reincarnate, or leave him to languish in torment.
But this intriguing moral dilemma is also wrapped up in Young-ae’s connection to Hae-sook. So, this is a little weird, but Young-ae’s father was Hae-sook’s father, and the mistress he brought home was the previous incarnation of Young-ae, very much keeping it in the family. Young-ae was the mother who abandoned Hae-sook. Their close connection in this life is an outgrowth of lost opportunities in previous existences, the opportunity to do things again, but better, given a second attempt. Young-ae hasn’t been a mother to Hae-sook, of course, but in learning these things she’s finally able to communicate to her that she wishes she had been, and in finally reaching the point where it’s time for Young-ae to depart, she can do so having found her own closure, and helped Hae-sook achieve some manner of the same.
This, of course, doesn’t explain the mystery of Som-i and Eun-ho, though. This also dovetails nicely with Hae-sook’s relationship with the pastor, and the pastor’s belief that she’s his mother, despite her insistence that she and Nak-joon never had children. Nak-joon’s intensity of emotion surrounding Eun-jo and the kid’s own claims that Hae-sook was his mother fill in more gaps. The real kicker comes in Hae-sook’s efforts in the heavenly lottery, where she needs to come up with a tragic backstory to win over the crowd, which becomes a freestyled claim that the pastor is her child, whom she abandoned at the age of 5 and has reconnected with in the afterlife. It’s supposed to be a fiction to win votes, but given Heaven’s attitude towards lying, and everything we know about Eun-ho, whom Nak-joon confirms to Som-i was Hae-sook’s child, what’s going on here? And who is Som-i?
Compelling questions for the finale to answer, right? Told you Heavenly Ever After was getting good.
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