‘The Winning Try’ Episode 4 Is Another Crowd-Pleasing Outing

The Winning Try doesn’t have much rugby in it, which is surprising for a show ostensibly about the sport, so it says a lot about the underlying quality of this K-Drama that I’m starting to wonder whether it even needs it. Episode 4 includes about four minutes of gametime, and it’s probably the weakest part, if only because the outcome is so obvious. By the time the totally unexpected last-minute cliffhanger rolled around, rugby was the furthest thing from my mind.

On a serious note, this show’s really good, isn’t it? I know I keep reiterating this point, but it’s worth repeating because of how each episode keeps coming up with new surprises. Unlike how Episode 3 was primarily set off-campus, this one is entirely confined to Hanyang; instead of a rugby focus, there are multiple competitive scenes across different disciplines; instead of the dramatic burden being on Mun Ung, it shifts instead to I-ji and, unexpectedly, U-jin. You just never know what’s coming next, only that it’ll invariably be handled superbly well.

The hook of The Winning Try Episode 4 is, predictably, some funny business surrounding Hanyang’s special admission process, which was teased in the last episode’s epilogue. Seong has pulled some strings so that now the entry requirements involve a prospective student having to compete in multiple disciplines and win in two out of the three. One is rugby, so that’s easy enough. But the other two are fencing and archery, two of the most technically difficult sports, deliberately chosen so that Ung can’t rely on his natural athleticism. This used to be how the process worked, and was in fact how Ga-ram got into the school, but it was changed because it was almost impossible for any student to be admitted.

Notably, Seong’s cartoonish villainy is lent logical justification here. Sure, everything he’s doing is entirely self-serving and is now becoming a personal rivalry with Ga-ram instead of anything to do with bettering the students, but he has a point about how Hanyang’s low success rate in producing successful athletes undermines Principal Kang’s somewhat idealistic vision of the school’s purpose. It’s a sound argument, but he’s the wrong guy to be making it, as he’s so consistently unpleasant that one of the drama’s essential upsides is constantly seeing Ga-ram get one over on him.

All the humour here comes from the rugby team trying to get Ung ready for fencing and archery in an incredibly limited amount of time, which involves Ga-ram spying on the other teams and Seong-jun calling in a favour. U-jin, from the shooting team, used to do archery, and he knows her from way back, so he recruits her — literally begs her — to train Ung. She eventually agrees and gets him into decent competitive shape, but Seong-jun doesn’t love how close she gets to Ung in the meantime. There’s something here that I’m sure will be addressed down the line.

But look at all the minor details at play. Even with the rugby team having agreed to let Ung blow through them to secure an easy win in the first round, the show still makes a point of how naturally athletically gifted he is, which will surely become important later when the team gets a game. You see it again, in the fencing; Ung loses, but he’s able to score a point for a moral victory because he can read and adapt incredibly quickly. It’s all character-building.

But when we get to the archery round, this is where The Winning Try Episode 4 really turns up the drama. Seong, tipped off about the training session and Ga-ram’s clever way of using the sprinklers to simulate environmental factors, claims that the entire archery team has fallen ill with food poisoning, and so the discipline has to be changed to shooting, an even more technical sport. With only an hour to spare, Ung has virtually no chance of winning. Seong-jun suspects that U-jin ratted them out to Seong because the shooting team stands to directly benefit from the rugby team folding. She’s also going to be Ung’s opponent.

But in incredibly dramatic fashion, U-jin deliberately misses all of her shots to allow Ung to coast through with a single point. When Ga-ram pursues her to ask why, she mentions overhearing him tell Ung that it was okay to lose. Various times, we’ve gotten hints about U-jin’s relationship with her mother, who clearly, like a lot of Hanyang’s senior faculty, would never express such a sentiment. Ga-ram’s coaching mentality is getting through to students outside the rugby team, which is probably why Seong is so determined to get rid of him.

Since he’s unable to do that for now, he does the next best thing and cancels I-ji’s pre-approved three-year contract, clearly in the hopes of causing more issues between the two of them. I-ji already has plenty of reasons to hate Ga-ram, and now she has another. But, tellingly, it’s she who finds him in the corridor at the end of the episode, close to passing out from some unspecified condition that causes him to seemingly lose control of one side of his body.

Is this related to the drugs he took? A legacy of his athletic career? Something else entirely? It’s impossible to tell right now, but it’s another surprising, highly welcome complication in what is quickly becoming one of the year’s finest dramas.

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