[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Emergency Couple" Episode 10

Poor Jin-hee. It's never a particularly fun time when mooching relatives, having burned all their other bridges some way or another, force themselves on a household using "but think of the baby!" as an excuse. I like the frustration the early portion of this episode gives off. Of course Jin-hee's mad but she can't be that mad. It's not like her younger sister, younger sister's husband, and baby are awful people or anything. They're just messy idiots.

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Not much is really done with that focus this time around though. For the most part the emphasis is on that simple expression- what do you care? Chang-min is suddenly taking every hypothetical romantic infraction against Jin-hee bizarrely personally. He's lucky there's not many witnesses around lately- but the few characters he does pester with these oddly specific and personal questions are suspicious and rather annoyed to boot. Chang-min's behavior is clearly starting to raise eyebrows around the hospital ward. In a way that's not professionally deleterious, thankfully.

He's not the only one either. Ah-reum also gets a moment to bask in the suspiciously angrily curious spotlight, and the reaction from her victim is exactly the same. What do you care? On a meta-level the humor in these proceedings is charming in its sheer weirdness. Obviously, characters have to ask questions like this or else there's no way to move the story forward. At the same time, these are very strange questions and a person has to be in a rather odd state of mind to ask them.

Beyond that, we finally get those flashbacks I've been hoping for. Not only do we see the circumstances of Jin-hee and Chang-min first meeting, but also the background of their first kiss. It's like something out of a romantic comedy. Yep, this is where the troubles first started. When an initial meeting is that adorably cute, there's no other direction to go but downhill.

What's most interesting there, though, is the precise context of where they first met. At the moment the goals of Jin-hee and Chang-min in flashback are as yet unclear, but they appear to be reasonably professionally minded, which only makes the context of their break-up that more bizarre. Honestly I'd prefer more exploration of this plot point than the loveline of Jin-hee and Chang-min getting back together, which is the direction "Emergency Couple" appears to be going right now. Still, the drama's entertaining enough to watch right now, so that's worth something.

Review by William Schwartz

"Emergency Couple" is directed by Kim Cheol-gyoo, written by Choi Yoon-jung and features Song Ji-hyo, Choi Jin-hyuk, Lee Pil-mo, Choi Yeo-jin and Clara.