Summary
Typhoon Family hits a bit of a wall in Episode 9, with the pacing suffering on account of a side quest subplot that feels detached from the main story.
I can’t say I didn’t warn you, but Episode 9 of Typhoon Family hits the wall I expected it to. It isn’t a bad outing, don’t get me wrong. But it’s over an hour of meandering, a kind of side quest subplot given full runtime legs because of a need to manufacture character drama instead of allowing the fact-based backdrop to carry the narrative burden. That constant cycle of Tae-poong walking headlong into problems just so he can improvise solutions to them runs out of steam here, and the whole thing feels more like a bottle episode than a portion of the main story.
I only recently asked whether charisma was enough for this show; in “Walking to the Sky”, it turns out not to be. It definitely does help, though. General dramatic inertia aside, there’s still a ton of charm and personality to this instalment, as there has been to the rest of it, and that charm and heart are central to why the show continues to work emotionally even as it flounders a bit narratively.
We’re picking up where we left off, of course. Ma-jin has been taken away by the Thai police for attempting to bribe a civil servant, which the South Korean embassy considers a light enough crime that he’ll be released in due course. On the inside, Ma-jin believes this too. The certainty everyone seems to have about his imminent release can only mean one thing – it’s all going to go wrong.
Promptly, we discover that Tae-poong is being accused of attempting to bribe the officer with ten grand, so he’s due for a full big-boy trial, and all the confiscated safety helmets will be disposed of in 48 hours. It’s a useful ticking-clock device, but it doesn’t add a huge amount to the episode overall. There’s also an argument to be made that Ma-jin’s message to Mi-seon on the back of a family photograph is a pretty lazy way to deal with him accepting her into the company after the rampant sexism he showed previously, but I’ll let someone else make it.
To make matters worse, all this has very much soured Tae-poong’s relationship with the Nihakham Group, and Tae-poong doesn’t go in for Mi-seon’s suggestion of flirting with Nicha to butter her up into a deal. As ever, success is contingent on his freestyling a better solution to exonerate Ma-jin, though his dopey interactions with Mi-seon, getting pushed away when he tries to kiss her, are nonetheless some of the highlights of Typhoon Family Episode 9.
The viable legal angle is that Ma-jin is being used to take the fall for someone else on account of crossed wires stemming from his jacket, but this needs to be proved. Luckily, Mi-seon took a photo of the incident. Unluckily, they take three days to develop. But thanks to some quick thinking from Mi-seon, for once, she and Tae-poong are able to get them developed immediately, thanks to offering the guy in the studio a bribe and Tae-poong’s watch. Whatever works.
With everything coming down to the wire, Tae-poong and Mi-seon run to court, but tragedy strikes again when a collision sends the evidence fluttering into some water, ruining them completely. The smoking gun has misfired. The film is preserved, though, which means that, with the help of a torch, the photos can be projected onto the wall. “Walking to the Sky” ends with things admittedly looking up, but no sense that the matter won’t take another episode to properly resolve, which won’t be ideal for the season’s overall pacing. Time will tell.
RELATED:
