Summary
Spooky in Love continues to indulge in a lot of contrivances and cliches in Episode 2, but it has a rather likeable vibe, and the familiarity may not end up mattering all that much.
I’ve already complained about Spooky in Love feeling a bit familiar and formulaic, and I wouldn’t say that Episode 2 assuages any of those concerns. But I’d also argue that the show’s probably fun enough for it not to matter. The premise, despite being built on a bedrock of cliches, creates a fun, chaotic vibe, and now we’re firmly heading into love triangle territory the show’s natural rhythm is really coming through.
Fittingly, Yeo-ri has more in common with Min-hwan, given the similarly affluent backgrounds and such, but since the dead and the ability to see them are of much more concern with what this show is actually attempting to do, it’s obvious that Gang-uk is the one with whom Yeo-ri is destined to be. I still don’t think any of this appeals on a level beyond the most familiar and comforting, but maybe it doesn’t have to. Not every show needs to reinvent the wheel.
We’re delaying pulling the trigger on the curse cliffhanger, anyway. Gang-uk might have grabbed Yeo-ri’s gloveless hand, but she’s cautious about it for now, and that’s good since we have to go through the process of Gang-uk not believing Yeo-ri about the whole ghost thing. He’ll get there, obviously, but it wouldn’t ring entirely true if he bought it straight away. For now, he’s just determined to find Eun-ju’s body and prove Seung-jae’s guilt, and he remains suspicious of Yeo-ri turning up where dead bodies are discovered, believing something else is the cause of that rather than an affinity with the dead themselves.
There are some interesting parallels between the leads in the form of their starkly different grandmothers. Yeo-ri’s, Chairwoman Baek, is more uncompromising and pushes Yeo-ri to collaborate with a big-name brand for the sake of business, whereas Gang-uk’s pushes him to volunteer at an orphanage and play football with the children. Different strokes. But it’s useful in playing up the differences between these two characters. They’re obviously both also connected to Seung-jae, but Gang-uk doesn’t have the advantage of communing directly with Eun-ju’s ghost, who we learn is knocking around with Yeo-ri.
As in the premiere, the show’s approach to playing up the differences and the similarities is to lead them both to the same place at the same time through wildly contrasting means. Gang-uk follows the investigatory route, meeting an air hostess who booked the room next to Eun-ju’s and who left her wallet with Seung-jae, and discovering that Seung-jae disguised himself as that air hostess to remove Eun-ji’s body and hide it inside a water tank. Yeo-ri ends up in the same spot at the same time, prompting more bickering but also the discovery of Eun-ju’s corpse.
Seung-jae responded badly to the news that Eun-ju was pregnant, pushing her away, causing her to hit her head and lose consciousness. He left her to die and then attempted to cover it up, which is a scummy crime on multiple levels, so Gang-uk takes understandable pleasure in arresting him at a golf course where he’s accepting a championship trophy.
Spooky in Love is still doing the wild contrivance thing in Episode 2, which is a bit annoying. Through questionable circumstances, Gang-uk and Yeo-ri end up in the same hotel – he’s attending a wedding, she’s meeting a CEO – and both get assigned to the Royal Suite without either of them realising until they’ve spent a night on the bed next to one another. There are noise-cancelling headphones, alcohol, and the small matter of being able to see ghosts and thus being used to unexplained nearby presences involved, but nonetheless, I’m not buying it.
Things come to an end by introducing a new case, that of a missing girl named Da-mi, whose grandmother, Chum-hui, enlists Gang-uk to search for her, claiming that she was last seen in the same hotel, working with designer Jung Hae-na. Through the CCTV footage, with help from Min-hwan, Gang-uk discovers that Hae-na stole one of Da-mi’s designs and passed it off as her own.
Naturally, when Gang-uk follows the evidence, he also bumps into Yeo-ri again, but the two of them dopily end up falling into the sea, where they discover Da-mi’s body. Presumably, with Gang-uk having presumably touched Yeo-ri in his sleep, he’s going to start seeing ghosts soon, which should hopefully add an intriguing new wrinkle to the existing dynamics.
