Love Grows Here: Hugye Restobar

For Park Dong Hoon, the neighborhood restobar is the safest place in Hugye, and he goes there whenever he wants to be alone, away from the observant eyes of the Hugye gang and Yoon Hee. Over the course of our story, it’s a place where he lets show his longing, smiles, worry, and even his tears.

It’s also the special spot where he invites Ji An to join him. From the time he takes Ji An there for a drink in Episode 6, to the time they have their bittersweet farewell in Episode 16, the restobar sees several important and increasingly-intimate scenes unfold between them.

As usual with other locations in this show, the restobar is packed with symbolism and things to discover. For one thing, there’s at least one male-female couple in almost every instance.

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Do Joon Young: Captain of the Ship

As mentioned in Part 1, Do Joon Young and Ji An spend a lot of time together. For someone who says, “What man would eat and drink with a woman he doesn’t like?” he meets up with her quite often. He even has her over to his house a couple of times. If only the Managing Directors knew about that!

Tracing the progression of Do Joon Young’s relationship with Ji An, we see how and when things start to turn against him. At first he believes (understandably) that Ji An is working with him to fire Park Dong Hoon. Then as he attempts to use her to trap Dong Hoon further, he starts observing troubling things about her — she seems to have feelings for the loser engineer! Suspicion turns to confirmation, confirmation turns to fear as Ji An starts working against him, and finally what he thought was a win-win situation crumbles.

By the end, Do Joon Young is our disgusted shipper in the show, the one that drives Ji An more into Dong Hoon’s orbit and then names the love between them. He had tried to pair them off to create a scandal….but his plan comes back to bite him.

All the Ending Scenes: A Deeper Look

by @actionscript from the Soompi Forum

It’s a K drama trope to end episodes with cliffhangers, and My Mister used it with great effectiveness. For My Mister, not only were these ending scenes cliffhangers, but most of them were the highlights of those episodes as well. Looking at these final scenes per episode, we get a glimpse of how the show moved the narrative forward.

The first 4 episodes established how the fates of Dong Hoon and Ji An have become intertwined:

Do Joon Young: Dong Hoon’s Antithesis

Do Joon Young is the slimy CEO we all love to hate, the cause of many of Park Dong Hoon’s problems and the one who doesn’t care if people get run over on his quest to maintain power.

There’s so much to say about him, but I want to focus on his relationship to Dong Hoon and his relationship with Lee Ji An. His interactions with these two demonstrate his character as well as one key role he plays, that of naming the love between Dong Hoon and Ji An.

Yu Ra: Spokesperson for Ji An

Throughout the show we see close-ups of the other characters’ hands. But I noticed the show hardly ever shows Yu Ra and Ki Hoon’s hands — and I do think this is because the show wants us to listen carefully to what they’re actually saying.

Park Dong Hoon: Built in 1974, Renovated in 2018. Part 1/3: His Structural Cracks

Soompi members discuss how the drama’s structural engineering jargon (cracked concrete, structural reinforcement, pillars, emergency escape routes) mirrors Dong Hoon’s state of life / marriage. What causes these cracks to form, and how can they be reinforced?  

Who Is Pretty and Nice?

@chickfactor once said, “It’s like Jae-Chul said, they are speaking in code to each other. The audience knows the code, because the writer-PD taught it to them. You can refuse to see it if you need absolute confirmation via traditional visuals (kissing, etc), and/or don’t want to believe in this romance, which is fine. Everyone has that choice. But the code is there, and it’s quite clear and consistent.”  One facet of this code is the creative use of camera and the very deliberate choice of scene.  When viewers take the time to understand this code, nothing has to seem vague and ambiguous anymore.  

by kerfuffle_95 from Soompi

The End of The Affair

One of the key turning points in the show is the moment when Ji An, instead of remaining a silent bystander in Dong Hoon’s life, decides to step in and do something: she confronts Yoon Hee and tells her Dong Hoon knows she’s cheating, changing the course of their marriage for good.

Why? What made Ji An decide to interfere in their marriage? Was she protecting or harming him? What do you think?

Pictures: Episodes 7-8