‘Typhoon Family’ Episode 7 Recap – Is Charisma Really Enough?

I find myself thinking again about contradictions. Typhoon Family has its fair share. On the one hand, it wants to be a fairly realistic portrayal of a financial crisis with devastating effects; it wants to chart those effects on characters who seem like real people. But on the other hand, it wants to be a fun K-Drama about a guy who can freestyle his way through any conceivable problem through sheer force of charisma. I’ve mentioned this already, but it comes up again in Episode 7, “The Meaning of Life”. It will, I imagine, continue coming up again and again, because it’s baked into the show’s very firmament.

I like Tae-poong. I’m supposed to like Tae-poong, because the show hinges on his madcap antics and boundless energy. But I often find myself not liking his function in the story, which is essentially to add an unrealistic hero vibe to what is otherwise a fairly grounded narrative. It’s harder to buy into scenes of genuine hardship when you’re continually being called upon to hand-wave away inexplicably successful improvisation. There are only so many times the same guy can fall on his feet without it straining plausibility.

Some won’t care, and fair play to those people. They might have a legitimate gripe with the pacing, though. Typhoon Family isn’t unusually long for a K-Drama, but it can feel it sometimes. It has a tendency to languish in a situation before contriving a solution to it. That one thing after another structure can feel trying sometimes. And yet I still think the highlights are enough to keep people engaged, especially when the romantic elements are burgeoning. Even if charisma can’t paper over all the cracks, it can certainly make the walls look a lot nicer.

Picking up where we left off, Tae-poong and Mi-seon, covered in salt, have a job to do. They need to convince a local ship’s captain to transport their hefty consignment of shoes. The good name of Tae-poong’s father greases the wheels, and Yun-cheol’s offer to go with the cargo seals it. But since someone reported the ship for smuggling, the whole plan is almost waylaid. It takes another bit of trademark Tae-poong thinking-outside-the-box – a particularly silly example, even by his usual standards – to give the fully-loaded boat time to depart. It’s a close-run thing, and Tae-poong’s eyeballs are still in the offing for failure, but in the short term, at least, it’s a victory.

But maybe you see what I mean here. All this is Typhoon Family Episode 7 at its most K-Drama-like. But the heart of the story is in the other ex-employees of the company struggling to get by. The relative ease with which Tae-poong gets away with stuff can sap a little of the emotional impact from the more grounded stories. His victories can be hard to enjoy too much because they’re his victories, primarily, and other people close to him continue to suffer. Sure, it’s nice to see Tae-poong paying off Hui-gyu, but it’s not nice to see Jeong-mi queuing up to sell her wedding ring, and those two things are ill-fitting.

But we are building towards a wider-ranging win, I feel, and you can sort of see that in “The Meaning of Life” ending with Ma-jin returning to the company. In a macro sense, I do like the idea of Tae-poong rebuilding the company not for his own personal success, but to provide a home of sorts to everyone who was adversely affected by its collapse in the first place. That kind of getting-the-band-back-together vibe works, and helps to alleviate some of the contradictions at the show’s core. We’ll see how things go.