Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Lonely Shining Goblin - Episode 12 Summary

Eun Tak (played by Kim Go Eun) comes face to face with the ghost of the king’s evil eunuch, Park Joong Hoon, the same dead soul who’d once met Reaper and showed no fear. He gives her an unsettling leer, confirms that she’s the goblin’s bride, and licks his lips.
Eun Tak forces herself to act normal as she shoos out the ghosts, citing the start of business hours. The other ghosts pout at her for being so mean, but dutifully leave. Eunuch Park lingers a moment later, then also vanishes. He leaves her with an uneasy feeling, and the memory of his blackened hands and tongue make her shudder later. Her attention then turns to Shin’s hanja love letter, which annoys her all over again.
Sunny (played by Yoo In Na) drinks at home, thinking of Reaper’s (played by Lee Dong Wook) confession of his identity, and with each shot alternates between wanting to see him, then not wanting to see him. Of course, she knows every bottle has seven shots, and begins purposely with “I want to see him,” thus choosing the answer from the start. Then she starts the game over with pickled radish cubes, saying the same alternating refrain as she picks them out one by one.
Reaper asks one of his subordinate reapers if he’s ever been hit with peach blossoms, thinking of Sunny hitting him with the branch the other night. (Peaches are thought of as warding off spirits.) The other reaper has, and warns that the injury lasts a while. Then Reaper asks if he’s ever wanted to recover his lost memories, and his subordinate says no, that erased memories are just like ones you never had. Reaper says he longs for his. “Don’t,” his subordinate says. “We’re all sinners. You don’t know what will be behind that longing.” Reaper thinks of Sun in her past life, dying as a queen, and sighs that he knows that but can’t yearning anyway.
Later as he drinks at home with Shin (played by Gong Yoo), he admits that Sunny found out his identity, then wonders where she found a peach blossom branch in the dead of winter. Ha, Shin gets a little shifty, knowing that he made them bloom because he was so happy with Eun Tak, though he feigns ignorance. Shin says that since Reaper’s been outed, he may as well grab Sunny’s hand again to see if he can see Shin in her past life. Reaper protests that seeing a past life is mentally taxing, like somebody’s shoving their way into your mind. He starts to say that Sun’s beauty was overwhelming, but Shin levels a glare and warns that this is his sister he’s talking about. Reaper does recall seeing the young king, and Shin grumbles that she was thinking of him in her last moments, with no thought for her brother.
Eun Tak heads to Reaper’s door clutching her notebook, but when seeing him with Shin, she hurries away. Shin, however, summons her notebook and flips through it, finding the hanja letter she’d copied. Now that she’s been caught, she admits she was going to ask for Reaper’s help in figuring out the backstory to the letter Shin wrote to his first love.

“What’s the front story?” Shin asks, looking confused. He says it’s not a love letter, which she doesn’t believe, having gotten the translation from Deok Hwa. But Shin says there’s no way Deok Hwa could have known those words—he’d kept them to himself, his plea to the gods about confessing his first love. 

Reaper reads over Shin’s shoulder and confirms that he’s right, leaving Eun Tak confused. Reaper and Goblin look at each other in bewilderment over Deok Hwa knowing things he shouldn’t know, like knowing that Reaper could erase human memories. Now they think of various incidents with budding suspicion, like how Deok Hwa knew Eun Tak was at a ski resort, or that Sunny was Shin’s sister in a past life.
Meanwhile, Deok Hwa (played by Yook Sung Jae) sits at the bar of a crowded nightclub, looking out at the sea of clubgoers dancing. He sees them in slow-motion, an inscrutable look on his face. We flash back to the day Deok Hwa met the young Samshin Granny on the bridge, and had asked her out for a drink. Now it’s apparent that they already knew each other—and that he’s some sort of god as well. Perhaps the ultimate god?
As Shin and Eun Tak have their first encounter in the rainy street, Samshin Granny notes that the goblin has met his bride, and Deok Hwa replies that it’s fate. Granny asks why Deok Hwa brought Wang Yeo (the King) to Shin: “How can you make the man who got stabbed by the sword meet the man who stabbed him with it?” Deok Hwa just says, “That’s another fate.”

Samshin Granny says disapprovingly that there ought to be limits to him playing around, and that Shin has suffered plenty. Deok Hwa answers coolly, “That is the weight of one life.” We see the times Shin had killed on the battlefield and on that ship, and Granny snaps that he should have created a perfect world if that’s what he wanted. “Then people wouldn’t search for god,” Deok Hwa says. Granny tells him to stop tormenting them, and to let them recognize each other and make their own choice.
Back in the present, Shin and Reaper arrive at the nightclub to confront Deok Hwa—but just as Shin gets close, time slows and the air ripples in front of him, like it’s a barrier between him and Deok Hwa. Shin changes his speech from the familiar to the formal, asking for an introduction to the god. Deok Hwa recites Shin’s last words while dying out in the field: “Do not pray to anyone. God is not listening.” Then he repeats Reaper’s words back to him, about how god must have a reason for erasing his memory. He tsk-tsks both for getting it wrong.
“I was always listening,” Deok Hwa says. He’d even given Shin the chance to ask for death, and asks, “Why are you still living?” He turns to Reaper to say he never erased his memory—he made the choice to erase his memory (having drunk the tea).
“God is just the one who asks questions,” Deok Hwa says. “Fate is the question I ask. The answer is for you to find.” He points a finger back to himself and tells them that this is goodbye to “this kid” as well, and suddenly butterflies materialize and flutter upward to the ceiling.
Deok Hwa’s body goes prone and falls to the ground as time resumes. He slowly comes to, and when he looks up, his old personality is back, like he’d never been god. 
Shin and Reaper stare in bewilderment while Deok Hwa tries to figure out if he got blackout drunk. Then Shin says grimly, “Whoever you are, let me hit you once.” Reaper has to hold him back, HAHA, saying that Deok Hwa hasn’t done anything.
Sunny and Eun Tak eat roasted sweet potatoes at the street vendor outside the goblin manor, and Sunny says matter-of-factly that she knows Reaper is the grim reaper. And if that’s true, then the strange man who insists he’s Sunny’s brother must have lived for nearly a thousand years. Eun Tak apologizes for not saying anything and confirms that yes, she is technically the goblin’s bride. Eun Tak advises Sunny to call Reaper, rather than hanging around in hopes of running into him. Sunny protests that she can’t call after being the one to suggest breaking up. Then Sunny startles Eun Tak by knowing what she was going to ask before she asks it (a request to revise her schedule), and Eun Tak looks at her in wonder and asks, “You’re a human, right?”

A group of grim reapers (sans our Reaper) arrive at Sunny’s chicken shop, and the moment she turns to greet them, they’re hit with her beauty. Ah, Reaper’s hoobae suggested the place, since he’s Sunny’s upstairs neighbor, and she brings them a plate of free chicken. But then she says, “Since you do such arduous work,” and the reapers’ eyes widen—could she know who they are?
That night, the ghost of Eunuch Park finds the woman reaper and speaks to her familiarly. She eyes him with distaste, but he asks if she’s not curious to know who he is or why he’s sought her out. Moreover, doesn’t she want to know who she is? He advises the reaper to touch Sunny’s hand, saying that she will find her sin in that past life, and also Eunuch Park’s.
Reaper is joined by Hoobae while he’s brooding outside, and admits to thinking thoughts he shouldn’t be thinking. Hoobae warns him not to, saying that things are tense right now in the wake of the reaper who ran away. Their reaper management has even issued a reminder to them not to forget that they’re all criminals. Hoobae hands over a briefcase of this month’s death notes, and Reaper wonders to himself, “Is it the answer that’s been given, or the question?”
Looking over the name cards later, Reaper finds the chairman’s among them. He tells Shin, giving him the chance to see him one last time, but Shin says he’s already said everything he wanted to. He asks Reaper to see the chairman off with Shin’s words to be reborn in a life where he can live freely, not bound to anyone, and that Shin was very grateful to him. Eun Tak overhears the conversation, and Reaper advises her to prepare for the chairman’s death and look after Shin. Alone in his room, Shin starts to sob, and the rain starts to pour.

Deok Hwa is busily griping about having to do menial work at his company when Secretary Kim comes by to deliver the news. Shin sits down to write the message that will mark the chairman’s gravestone, and struggles to hold back his tears. That gravestone is placed on that hill in Quebec, among the other faithful servants Shin has buried.

Eun Tak finds Shin sitting in his room, and embraces him gently. She says, “So this is what immortality is,” but adds that the living have to continue living, which is the proper way to respect the love you’ve been given.
Deok Hwa is in worse shape, full of guilt and remorse for not being a better grandson. “What do I do now?” he cries. “What do I do now that I’m all alone?” Shin says, “Why are you all alone? You have me. Stay with me, and don’t worry.”
Deok Hwa remains listless and unresponsive to Shin’s, Reaper’s, and Eun Tak’s attempts to cheer him up. Shin even offers to summon gold, which Deok Hwa had previously begged him to do, and Reaper apologizes for not giving him warning.
Deok Hwa just thanks them and excuses himself to polish the silver, and tells Shin that grandpa arranged everything before his death. Secretary Kim has been named CEO, and Deok Hwa recognizes that he himself isn’t ready. He promises to learn properly from the bottom up, suddenly full of the maturity he’d lacked, and says he’ll learn how to play baduk too: “And I’ll become your hyung, father, and grandfather. Like my grandfather.”

President (formerly Secretary) Kim goes through Grandpa’s last documents, and smiles to see the envelope marked with Deok Hwa’s name containing a brand-new credit card. There’s one with his name, too, and it contains a letter telling him that he will meet Kim Shin, who will “come walking in the rain and go in blue flames,” to whom the grandpa’s every possession belongs.
Samshin Granny walks across that familiar bridge toward Deok Hwa, and as they pass, she senses that the god has left him. Deok Hwa asks confusedly if she’s talking to him, and she describes him as a kind child, telling him to remember that his fortune comes from his good nature.
Deok Hwa asks her out for a drink, and she tells him to drink with a beautiful person. “You’re beautiful,” he points out. “Drink with a person,” she says, and waves goodbye.
Shin and Reaper prepare dinner together, and Reaper sighs that he’s envious of Deok Hwa for having an uncle. He adds that he’s feeling a lot of envy and yearning these days, and Shin starts to tease him—but then, out of nowhere, Wang Yeo’s face flashes in place of Reaper’s. It’s just for a split second, but Shin notes that he saw a face in Reaper that he hadn’t seen before. Reaper asks whose face that is, and Shin replies, “A face I shouldn’t be seeing.”

As Deok Hwa works in the living room, Shin hovers in the background, grinning like an approving parent, saying that he’s proud to see that Deok Hwa has a use. Then one of the resumés in the pile catches Shin’s eye, of a man named Kim Woo Shik.
Eun Tak gets dressed with particular care for her first day of classes, and assures a concerned Shin that she’ll be fine, showing him her bag full of arson materials. He says she’s missing something, and she puckers up expectantly, thinking he means a kiss. Shin smiles and places a necklace around her neck—the one he picked up in Quebec.
She asks what the letters read (destiny), and he explains that it’s an absolute kind of fate designated by the heavens, out of humans’ reach. Then he forbids her from dating, Tae Hee oppa, and letting any man within 30 centimeters of the necklace. He calls his rules heaven’s fate and therefore immutable, and sends her off with a smile.

Once on campus, Eun Tak records a video message on her phone, using an app to draw a cartoon goblin’s hood around her head (making her look like her Mr. Buckwheat doll). Shin watches it on his way into the chaebol corporation’s office building, which is holding job interviews.
Ah, that’s what that resumé was about: Kim Woo Shik is an applicant, and he’s awaiting his turn. Shin enters the hallway as Kim Woo Shik waits, looking at him with strangely emotional eyes. The man notices Shin staring, and we see the moment from his past life when he was Shin’s second-in-command, the man who vowed to follow Shin in death before driving the sword into Shin’s chest.
Shin tells him that his path (to the afterlife) must have been lonely because Shin lived, and asks for his forgiveness. The man doesn’t understand, but finds out later that he got the job, which brings his family to tears. They must be struggling, since they live in a rooftop apartment, and President Kim soon shows him to the fancy new apartment provided by the company, as well as a car, “Because you had a good interview.” President Kim even provides him with a name for his future son, promising great things for his future.
Kim Woo Shik asks why he’s being given such lavish things, and President Kim answers, “Because you saved the nation in a past life.” It’s that ubiquitous phrase used when good things happen to people, and extra poignant because it’s literally true this time. Kim Woo Shik looks around in wonder, and from afar, Shin looks at him fondly. 
Shin calls Eun Tak to pester her about why she’s not home yet, and when he demands to know where she is, she gets a gleam in her eye. Moments later, she blows out a match—and Shin finds himself crammed into a teeny photo booth. She says they can leave the booth in about five minutes, alluding to a heart-pounding way to spend the time till then. Ha, he looks disappointed when she pulls out an envelope of money, to be used to repay Sunny her 5,000 won for sweet potatoes. She’s providing him an excuse to see Sunny, knowing that it’s awkward to seek her out but that he wants to see her.
Then she gets up to leave, and Shin holds her back, wanting to spend more time together. He asks how school is, and starts to get pissy when she mentions Tae Hee oppa, though she adds that he’s moving to America to play major league baseball. Shin starts to brag about his ability to see which people are destined for greatness, and Eun Tak cuts him off with a kiss, saying she has to go to work. Shin gets flustered and bashful, and decides he likes small and cramped places like this.
Outside the chicken shop, Eun Tak runs into that little boy from the neighborhood again and greets him affectionately. Then she freezes to see the ghost of Eunuch Park staring down at her, and she quickly sends the boy off. Eunuch Park does that terrifying teleporting move to appear right before her, and introduces himself by name. She tries to ignore him, but he stops her in her tracks by saying that Shin was the one to kill him, and that his punishment includes Eunuch Park’s life.

Eun Tak asks what he wants, and he says nothing: “I merely want to tell you an interesting story.” He says that Wang Yeo was the one to have the sword thrust into Shin, and names him as the beginning and end to “this tragic fate.” He gleefully declares that Wang Yeo is the nameless reaper currently living with Shin and wonders what will happen when they recognize each other.

He says, “Now it’s in your hands whether Kim Shin will kill or spare me—just as Kim Shin’s death is in your hands. Ah, looking at it, you are in control of death.” Eun Tak retorts that Eunuch Park is wrong, and that their reaper has a name. After she leaves, his chuckle turns to a stony glare, and he says, “You asked what I wanted. I want their destruction.” The encounter badly rattles Eun Tak, and in the ensuing days, she thinks of all the friendly bickering between Shin and Reaper, not knowing what to do with her knowledge.
Reaper seeks Eun Tak out first, finding her at school and explaining that he has nobody to share this with. He tells her of how people become reapers when they commit a big sin in a past life, and while he doesn’t know his, he suspects it has something to do with Shin and Sun. He’s identified three possible sinners in their history: Shin, for cutting down thousands of lives on the battlefield; Wang Yeo, who gave the order to kill Shin and Sun; and Park Joong Hoon, the eunuch who directed the king. That leaves his past self to be either Wang Yeo or Eunuch Park—but either way, he would be Shin’s enemy, and either way, he’d be unable to see Sunny.
As Sunny closes up shop that night, she jumps when the woman reaper suddenly appears and tells her that the shop is closed. The reaper says she’ll have to come back another day, and holds out her hand for a handshake. Sunny takes it, and the moment they touch, the reaper sees Sunny’s past life—and herself in it, as the court lady who’d tried to serve the queen tonic (was it actually poisoned, then, and not the king’s paranoia?). Moreover, she’d been at Eunuch Park’s side when he’d whispered poisonous thoughts into the king’s ear.
Sunny perks up to get a call from Reaper, who says he’s outside her house. She hurries to get ready and meets him outside, then sees the somber look in his eye and asks about it. He says he doesn’t know who he is, which brings him fear, and hopes that “this” will be the right answer. He explains that a reaper’s kiss will allow a person to remember their past life, and that he’s afraid to know who he was in her past life. But he hopes that she’ll only remember happy memories, that her brother will be in them, and that the brother will be Shin.

He kisses her. And then, the memories flood into her head, of Sun first seeing Wang Yeo before they were married, and then when he demanded she choose between her husband or her brother. He’d thrown her jewelry box to the ground, angry that she didn’t wear the things he’d given her, and picked up that jade ring. He’d said he would kill Shin today for treason, then forced the ring onto her finger, ordering her to act like a queen.
Suddenly, the scene continues with Sunny in Sun’s place, and Reaper in the king’s. He asks whose side she’s on, and whether she’d ever once been on his, or loved him.
She slaps him with tears running down her face, and he pleads with her not to stand with Shin—it’s her only chance to live. He asks whether she will live as his woman, or die as a traitor’s sister.

Sunny replies, “The woman who loves you is a traitor’s sister.”
When Reaper pulls away from the kiss, Sunny is crying. In disbelief, she asks what she’s just seen. He tells her it’s her past life, and asks if Shin was in it, and also himself. She nods yes to both.
Reaper asks Sunny to look him in the eye, and when she does, he wishes for her to only recall happy memories and forget the sad ones, “Whether in a past life or the present one. And also, forget me.”
He raises a hand to her cheek, and wishes for a happy ending for her. Then her eyes go slack, and he walks away. After he’s gone, Sunny touches her chest and bursts into sobs.
The next day, Sunny opens her shop and finds Shin staring at her through the window. She asks sarcastically which ancient trinkets he will have brought for her today, but Shin offers her the 5,000 won instead, to pay for the sweet potatoes. She declines it with her usual sass—but then, she asks “oraboni” if he really told the king she was ugly. 
Shin stares at the idea that she’s recalled her past life, while Sunny’s expression softens and she gets teary-eyed as she scoffs about the brother who never wrote back to any of her letters. She apologizes for taking so long to remember, and for not keeping her promise to be happy.
She steps forward to hug Shin, and thanks him for the gifts he’d brought her before. Wracked with emotion, they hold each other for long moments, and she tells Shin to come see his ugly sister frequently.
Reaper receives yet another death note with Eun Tak’s name on it. As Reaper plays baduk with Deok Hwa, he touches his chest and admits to something bothering him. He thinks back to that night he’d wiped Sunny’s memory the first time, and how he’d been stricken with a sudden chest pain, just as Shin had been writing something.
Deok Hwa thinks back to that day and recalls that they were at the temple for Shin’s yearly trip—he’d been writing names that were sent up in a lantern. Deok Hwa remembers Kim Sun and Wang something.

On campus, Eun Tak walks right past the ghost who’s always tagging along, and the ghost gets peevish, knocking her books to the ground. Then she realizes that Eun Tak isn’t pretending not to see her—she actually doesn’t see her.
Eun Tak is preoccupied in the car ride home, and only snaps back to the present when Shin says he’s happy to be picking her up. She notices he’s in a good mood, and he tells her that Sunny remembered him.
It only occurs to him now to wonder how she remembered, and suddenly Eun Tak looks serious. She asks him to pull over, then tells him she’d been deliberating over whether to tell him, and recounts her encounter with Eunuch Park. She’s not sure of how things are related, but it’s occurred to her that the strange things that happen around them could be connected to Eunuch Park, including Sunny’s memory return.
Shin takes up watch that night from a tall rooftop, surveying the city below. In an alleyway, Eunuch Park sets his sights on a drunk man and follows, licking his chops. But before he can do anything, a hand grabs him by the throat and holds him up against the wall—Shin, gripping the goblin sword in his other hand. Eunuch Park as been avoiding Shin for nine hundred years, and Shin asks why he suddenly allowed himself to be found. Eunuch Park says somewhat cryptically that he found it absurd for Shin not to recognize his enemy.
Shin just says that he’ll cut out the eunuch’s tongue first, then rip his body to shreds. The sword flashes blue-green in his hand, and then he slashes it across the eunuch’s body. But nothing happens, and the eunuch crows that he can’t kill him with that sword. In a blink, he disappears from in front of him and reappears down the street, laughing that Shin must fancy himself a real god after granting a few wishes. Shin advances again, intent on killing him by any means necessary.
Then Eunuch Park does something to the drunk man nearby, possessing his body before sending it crashing to the ground. He sneers about Yeo growing up and changing drastically, and Shin orders him not to mention that name.
“Do you know who that grim reaper next to you is?” Eunuch Park asks. “The one who stuck that sword in your chest is none other than him. He is Wang Yeo.” He adds that Shin’s sister fell for him again in this life, and laughs that Shin will never be able to get his revenge on him.
Shin thinks back to all the clues that didn’t make sense till now, like Reaper’s reaction to Sunny and the portrait of Sun, and recognizes Reaper’s ring as the one his sister had worn when she died.
Full of purpose, Shin barges into Reaper’s tearoom, then his bedroom, but doesn’t find him anywhere. Reaper is currently at the temple, sending up a prayer before two names posted at the altar: Kim Sun and Wang Yeo.

Shin shows up to Sunny’s chicken shop as she’s leaving for the night, and asks point-blank if Reaper was in her past life. Was he Wang Yeo? Shin’s intensity unnerves her, and she tries to brush him off. But he grabs Sunny’s arm and asks again, and from her silence, he realizes, “In both that life and this one, you are protecting that fool.”
At the temple, Reaper wonders if it was all true: “The emotions that remained without memories—were they the punishment I gave myself, so I would not forget that I am Wang Yeo?”

Shin arrives at the temple and walks in with purpose, much like he did as the general marching in to meet his fate. The Goryeo scenes intercut with him now as he makes his approach.

Reaper thinks that he was the worst memory for Sun and Shin, just as he hears Shin’s voice: “You can hear my voice, can’t you? I can hear yours.”
Finally, they’re face to face. While Goryeo’s Shin had been cut down before reaching the king, now he reaches Reaper and grabs his throat, announcing himself as the general here to see his king.
Some time later, Reaper (as Wang Yeo) clutches the queen’s bloody clothes and says that they have no owner now. Looking disheveled and heartbroken, he says, “Are you looking for them? Then take them.” With tears falling from his eyes, he tosses the clothing into a fire.
He walks away from the flames, and then adds, “It is a royal order.”

Personal Thoughts:
I’ve been struggling to connect to this show on an emotional level, so this episode was a good one for me; there were lots of poignant moments sprinkled throughout, and lots of reasons to feel angst and pathos. In addition to the primary plotlines, we also had Deok Hwa’s growth in the wake of his grandfather’s death, and the brief but heart-stirring bits with Shin’s old second-in-command being rewarded for his faithfulness—which show that a lack of screentime doesn’t preclude moving storylines. (I wish the show would learn that more screentime doesn’t necessarily more emotion, either.)

I haven’t wanted this to be the reason for my disconnect, but I think I liked this episode more than the others because it was fairly removed from Eun Tak, and despite wanting to warm up to her as our heroine, I’ve just been unable to. All series long, I’ve been waiting for more depth from Eun Tak, thinking the show might have more in store for her, but at this point it’s safe to say that she is who she is. There’s no more “wait and see” for me, so I’ll just have to live with the fact that I still don’t like her. I don’t hate her, either, but as a character does nothing for me, the performance is hit-or-miss, and I find the story much more gripping when she’s not the focus of it.

Which is why I’m hanging in there thanks to Shin, Sunny, and Reaper. I do find Shin quite moving in the non-Eun Tak moments; his romance is pretty cute so I don’t mind him having a loveline, but it just pales in comparison to the impact the rest of his story has. It was a relief to move the story onward, then, from focusing on his love story to the greater tragedy surrounding his past betrayal. It’s almost poetic how good and bad come hand in hand for Shin: First, he could only die at the hands of the girl he loves, and now, the discovery of his sister’s identity comes alongside the realization that Wang Yeo is inextricably linked to her in this lifetime as well.

For not being given a lot of time—either onscreen or in the story—to process or react to the truth, I though Sunny displayed lovely pathos in her past scenes. Yoo In Na does a wonderful job bouncing between Sunny’s present-day personality and the sadder, more heartfelt Sun, and I loved when the king and queen’s argument switched to Reaper and Sunny. There wasn’t anything wrong with the version of the scene that we’d seen previously, but man did Lee Dong Wook and Yoo In Na pack that short exchange with eons of feeling, giving the exact same dialogue so much more gravitas. (Aided, of course, by new information and added context.)

Reaper continues to be the most intriguing and sympathetic character for me, and it’s such a sharp characterization, because his current self makes it almost impossible to reconcile him with the past Wang Yeo. It retroactively makes me want to find goodness in Wang Yeo (although if I’m being frank I don’t really see it, not without doing a lot of fanwanking to get me where the show didn’t take me), and to find some kind of loophole where he can pay for his past sins and earn his way back to ordinary happiness. It just reinforces the idea that the gods in this world are cruel—because despite what Deok Hwa said when he was god (about not being the answer, just the question), I was right there with Samshin Granny in thinking he was dragging out that punishment far longer than made sense. I guess he would argue that it’s the goblin’s and reaper’s faults for not figuring out everything sooner, and that he isn’t actively keeping them in their punishments, but come on. He’s certainly not inclined to lift a finger to help.

I have to believe that there exists some kind of happy ending for Reaper, even if he doesn’t believe there’s one in store for him, because he’s just so… good. He’s such a nice guy! Shouldn’t it mean something that rather than searching selfishly for a happy solution for himself, his main concern is to leave one for Sunny? I think what’s directly ahead of us now, with Shin knowing Reaper’s true identity, will be the source of all kinds of angst, but the kind that I find dramatically rich and satisfying. Noble idiocy where lovers spend needless time apart being sad “for his/her own good” is the dumb kind of angst that wastes their (and our) time, but this kind of rock-and-hard-place conflict ought to make for some heartbreaking and moving developments. I mean, as long as Subway and Baskin Robbins keep their noses out of it.

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