A Good Day to Be a Dog (2023) Episode 13

We resume with Seo-won kissing Hae-na to jog back her memories, but Hae-na pushes him away and runs out with just one thing on her mind: her eventual transformation into a dog. How ironic! Hae-na forgot that the curse has already been lifted because her memories are wiped. And her memories are wiped because she chose to lift the curse. Thank you for nothing, Lee Bo-gyeom!

To Hae-na’s surprise, she doesn’t turn into a dog, and to her mortification, she still has to see Seo-won at school. Hae-na tries to avoid Seo-won because of her reaction to his kiss, but he refuses to be avoided. He is patient, though, so he tells her he’ll wait until she figures out her “missing piece” and how she really feels about him.

Meanwhile, thanks to Bo-gyeom’s selective amnesia spell, Hae-na’s uncle remembers that she once broke her curse with Seo-won. But Hae-na can’t recall being friendly with Seo-won to the point of kissing him. When Uncle stumbles on a chummy picture of Hae-na with Seo-won and Yul, he makes a beeline to the school to share his findings with his niece. Unfortunately, Uncle runs into the vice principal who distracts him from said assignment with treats. Sigh. Poor Uncle is still mentally and emotionally a dog.

To further prevent Uncle from spilling the beans to Hae-na, the vice principal confiscates the picture evidence and turns Uncle’s human voice into a bark. But several woofs — and the vice principal’s work ID — later, Uncle is at least able to inform Hae-na that the vice principal stole his voice. Okay, little mermaid.

Hae-na eventually sees the picture when she goes to drop off the vice principal’s ID in his office, and she remembers Seo-won’s words about her “missing piece.” Bits and pieces of her memories begin to return when she sees Bo-gyeom, and she confronts him stating that she wants the rest of her memories. “Which memories? The past life or the present?” Bo-gyeom asks. The present, duh! But for Hae-na to get her beloved memories back, Bo-gyeom says she has to return to the mountain where everything began.

Coincidentally, the vice principal brings up a horror story idea to the film club, and recommends an abandoned haunted house in the mountain as the perfect location to film. Hae-na is also to accompany the club members when they go filming. The members recruit Ji-ah to go along with them — probably because of her shamanic powers — but she smells something fishy about the arrangement, so she goes to Bo-gyeom. Unfortunately, he already moved out of his secret basement at school, and it seems like he has also quit his job.

Ji-ah shares her suspicion that Bo-gyeom is preparing for something bigger than erasing Hae-na’s memories with Seo-won, and she warns him to prevent Hae-na from going to the mountain. Ji-ah also shares that she died in that mountain in her previous life, and that all of them are connected via the past life.

From the little she remembers, Hae-na can tell that she and Seo-won were a couple, and she apologizes to him for not realizing sooner. With Ji-ah’s warning in mind, Seo-won tells Hae-na that she doesn’t need to find her missing piece or even go to the mountains at all, since they can always start over. Still, Hae-na insists on going, so Seo-won comes along on the trip with the film club. And as usual, Yul ropes himself into the activity because he has to “protect someone” *coughs* Ji-ah *coughs* Lol. Like uncle, like nephew.

The club members scram when the haunted house becomes a little too haunted, and the teachers spread out to assemble the students. Seo-won and Hae-na end up on a semi-leisure stroll, and while playing catch-up, Hae-na re-learns that Seo-won has a dog phobia. Unfortunately, Bo-gyeom is right there waiting for our OTP with a pack of wild dogs — which he releases in their direction! Whoa! I didn’t think Bo-gyeom could get any crueler, but here we are.

Ji-ah comes face to face with Bo-gyeom at the cliff, and unlike other times, he sees her now as Cho-young. Since Cho-young is the heroine of the past life tale, it is only fitting that we get the full backstory from her point of view. It turns out that Mak-soon did not snitch to the soldiers, rather, they trailed her back to the mountains to get to Cho-young. Soo-hyun also escaped from prison on learning that Mak-soon was pregnant, and everyone ended up at the Cliff of Doom.

In the process of swatting arrows aimed at Cho-young, Soo-hyun had his sword pointed in her direction — which is the scene Bo-gyeom spotted from afar off and misinterpreted as Soo-hyun aiming for Cho-young. Ha! With no foreseeable way out, Cho-young grabbed the sword and drove it into her belly. “Mak-soon, my baby is gone, but we can save your baby,” she said to a sobbing Mak-soon, before falling off the cliff…

This whole time, it was Cho-young who willingly sacrificed her life to save her friends. So where do we go from here, Mr. Mountain Spirit? All this damn drama over a simple misunderstanding. Tsk. Would it have killed Bo-gyeom to ask questions before jumping into conclusion and cursing everyone and their dogs? I can’t believe Soo-hyun took an arrow to the chest and died to protect Bo-gyeom’s woman, only for Bo-gyeom to curse his woman and their descendants in return. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.

In the present, Bo-gyeom licks his wounds about being abandoned by Cho-young to protect Mak-soon and Soo-hyun. There’s regrets on both sides, but most importantly, there’s closure. Now Bo-gyeom can move on with his life or stick himself into therapy or something. But before moving on, he better apologize to Hae-na’s family and her ancestors for putting them through hell due to his misunderstanding.

Back to our OTP, the wild dogs are poised to attack them, and Seo-won covers Hae-na with his Coat of Protection like she did for him several episodes ago. The dogs literally dissolve into thin air a few seconds later, and since the spell is broken, Hae-na’s full memories return. The couple fall into an “I missed you” embrace, and it looks like we’re back to the swoony endings of the initial episodes.

There was always the possibility that the past life business was hinged on a misunderstanding, and now that this has proven true, I don’t know whether to feel robbed that we were taken for a ride, or relieved that Mak-soon and Soo-hyun were indeed innocent all along. Anyway, I congratulate myself — and the rest of y’all Beanies — for making it this far. Hopefully, now that we’re done with the dark tonal shift, we can return to what is left of the light and fluffy moments in next week’s finale.