My Happy Ending (2023) K Drama Episode 8

Episode 8 of My Happy Ending starts with a dejected and upset version of Jae-won waking up from bed and leaving the house as she takes a walk down the street. Another version of Jae-won follows after her, trying to boost her morale. Jae-won appears on the same bridge from which she fell off at the beginning of the show as her other self decides that it is time for her to turn her life around.

Meanwhile, in reality, Soon-young watches Jae-won sleeping in bed next to Ah-rin. He goes to his study and tries to understand Jae-won’s behaviour. He finds an audio recording of Yoon-jin talking to Mr Kwon about the accident she caused with the spare phone and is alarmed. The next morning, Jae-won wakes up energised and happy.

She goes about her day as though the last few weeks hadn’t happened. Soon-young is confused by her behaviour and asks if she is okay. Jae-won ends up keeping her headache medicines in the fridge and tells him she was not able to reach Yoon-jin. Soon-young is further confused and takes out the medicine from the fridge to examine it. Yoon-jin is also confused when Jae-won asks her to meet her at the Dereve office.

During the meeting, Jae-won asks Yoon-jin to sign a contract with Dereve as an employee working for her. Yoon-jin is psyched at first and recalls how Jae-won had erased the memory of trying to end her life by slitting her wrist when they were teenagers.

Yoon-jin realises that Jae-won has forgotten all about her affair with Soon-young as well and plays along with her. She agrees to sign the contract with Dereve and leaves feeling happy.

Secretary Kim calls Tae-oh to tell him how Jae-won is behaving differently all of a sudden. At the same time, Soon-young shows up at Jae-won’s father’s house to talk to him about Jae-won’s behaviour. He tries to lie to Soon-young but the latter shows him the pills. Chang-suk ends up apologising to his step-son-in-law for keeping the truth about Jae-won’s poor mental health from him for all these years.

Meanwhile, Tae-oh meets Yoon-jin and asks her to stay away from Jae-won as he is aware of everything she has done to ruin her life. Yoon-jin claims that Jae-won was the one who asked her to sign the contract and refuses to listen to him. Reporter Choi shows up at the Dereve studio to try and interview Jae-won but Tae-oh intervenes and warns him about troubling her.

Jae-won and Tae-oh have a conversation and he points out how she seems happier, something that she hadn’t been in a while. Jae-won is confused but leaves him to meet her father who had shown up at the studio. Chang-suk has a chat with Jae-won telling her how proud he was of her and how she had accomplished a lot over the years.

He tries to talk to her about Soon-young but holds himself back upon noticing that Jae-won finally looks happy. In the meantime, Soon-young shows up at a friend’s clinic and asks him to examine the medicines Jae-won is taking. He asks Dr Park to analyse the contents of the pills to determine the illness she was suffering from.

Dr Park initially refuses to do so but warns Soon-young, claiming that Jae-won’s condition might be worsening because of this sudden personality shift. Soon-young goes back home disappointed about all the times in the past 10 years he was harsh to Jae-won when she was suffering from her poor mental health.

Instead of going home, Soon-young goes out for drinks with Professor Lee, regretting his behaviour towards Jae-won over all those years. He goes back home in a drunken state and panics when he doesn’t find Jae-won and Ah-rin at home. The mother-daughter duo surprises Soon-young by hiding in his study room to celebrate his birthday. This further upsets Soon-young and he goes out of the house, crying.

Outside, Soon-young confronts Jae-won about her pills and she finally comes clean to him. Jae-won tells Soon-young that she was hiding the truth about her illness from him because she was worried about how he would react. Soon-young tells her how he is guilty of not knowing anything about Jae-won’s suffering.

The next morning, Tae-joo meets Yoon-jin at her studio and the two chat about his connection with Jae-won. She asks the investigator to keep in touch with her in the future. Later that day, Yoon-jin shows up at a cafe across from a children’s park and keeps an eye on Ah-rin who is playing in the park.

On the other hand, Soon-young believes that Jae-won was sexually assaulted on the night of the opening party due to her mental condition. He goes through a list of attendees of the party and looks through the CCTV footage from the event that Tae-joo had sent him from Reporter Choi’s laptop.

That night, Tae-joo asks Detective Lee to look up Yoon-jin because he is sure she is hiding something and could pay him well for keeping her secrets.

Soon-young, on the other hand, goes out dressed as his deceased twin brother, Chi-young and starts collecting items with DNA of the men on the list of attendees at the Dereve launch event to determine the man who had possibly sexually assaulted her. Jae-won meets Soo-kyung that night and discusses how she had Soon-young found out about her illness.

The psychiatrist assures her that everything will be fine and adds that her husband would have found out sooner or later anyway. The next day, Yoon-jin and Jae-won negotiate her work contract. Yoon-jin tries to take advantage of the situation and asks Jae-won if everything is okay with her. Jae-won opens up about Soon-young finding the truth about her illness.

Yoon-jin tells her that lying sometimes is okay and adds that she does not need to berate herself over it. That day, Mr Kwon has lunch with a business partner – Kim Sang-beom, asking him to invest in Dereve. Mr Kwon tells him that as competent as Jae-won was, she was still easily replaceable to him as he only cared about her positive impact on the company while it lasted.

At home, Jae-won finds Ah-rin crying in bed. Ah-rin tells her mother that one of her friends told her that Jae-won and Soon-young were getting divorced. Jae-won is shocked by the information and looks up the news online. Soon-young recalls his chat with Chang-suk wherein the old man had mentioned how Jae-won had a similar personality shift when she was in high school.

The next day, Soon-young meets Yoon-jin and asks him to stay away from her. Yoon-jin states that it was Jae-won who wanted her close instead of it being the other way around. Soon-young threatens to leak the audio recording of her conversation with her father if she doesn’t stay away from Jae-won which causes Yoon-jin to panic. Instead of doing just that, Yoon-jin calls Jae-won to the same cafe where she lurks on Ah-rin.

She pretends to have no idea about Ah-rin’s kindergarten being near the cafe and has a normal conversation with her friend. The two friends talk about the article on Jae-won’s divorce. A flashback from Yoon-jin’s conversation with another psychiatrist shows her discussing Jae-won. The psychiatrist tells Yoon-jin that a small incident could bring back Jae-won’s past personality.

Present-day Yoon-jin tries to gaslight Jae-won so that she doesn’t remember anything about her affair with Soon-young. She convinces to take Jae-won to their high school hoping to bring back memories of her slitting her wrist as a teenager. On the other hand, Soon-young meets Tae-oh and asks him if he knows anything about Sang-beom.

Tae-oh reveals that Sang-beom was Yoon-jin’s ex-boyfriend and adds that she had tried to end her life because of Sang-beom several years ago. At the high school, Jae-won starts having flashbacks from her teenage which has Yoon-jin excited. Yoon-jin takes Jae-won to the art room and pulls out their drawings from when they were kids.

A flashback shows Jae-won bidding farewell to Yoon-jin after her suicide attempt. She tells Yoon-jin that she is changing her name to Jae-won and is transferring to a different school. Yoon-jin asks Jae-won to apply for at the Yein Foundation later when she is older so that they could Mae art together.

Present-day Jae-won thanks Yoon-jin for being a good friend to her. The two then take a walk around the area when Jae-won gets a call from Soon-young. She hides the fact that she was hanging out with Yoon-jin upon her friend’s instruction. Soon-young reads out Tae-joo and Ah-rin’s DNA test report which turns out to be negative. He wonders if Sang-beom was the person who assaulted Jae-won at the party when he gets a text from Yoon-jin.

In the text, Yoon-jin asks Soon-young to show up at a restaurant she was going to take Jae-won to. Meanwhile, Yoon-jin calls Jae-won by her old name to try and instigate her memory. The two friends then talk to each other about their dreams. Yoon-jin claims that she wanted the life that Jae-won had and that she wanted to live the life that Jae-won ended up living.

Another flashback shows Yoon-jin watching Sang-beom take Jae-won to the hotel room while she was passed out. She also waits out and watches Sang-beom leave the room, possibly after sexually assaulting her when she is intoxicated. Due to the trauma, Yoon-jin suffers a miscarriage. Present-day Yoon-jin takes Jae-won to a restaurant where they have dinner.

Soon-young shows up at the restaurant in a rush along with Tae-oh who had also received a text from Yoon-jin. At dinner, Yoon-jin keeps bringing up Jae-won’s old name and reveals that Tae-oh also knew her when they were kids.

Yoon-jin makes the dinner awkward by pointing out that Tae-oh has been in Jae-won’s life for a long time. She also adds that Ah-rin was not Soon-young’s child. The episode ends with Jae-won being confused with Yoon-jin’s behaviour.

The Episode Review

From what we see in this episode, I am starting to worry that Soon-young too has a personality disorder. There was no reason for him to dress up as his twin-brother but he still did. He also broke up his past arranged marriage when he found out that his would-be partner had mental health problems which is why Jae-won hid the truth about her disorder from him.

While Yoon-jin is a terrible person for her behaviour, I wonder what ulterior motive she had because she did keep the information about Jae-won’s illness from Soon-young even when they were together. It is hard to root for two heroes at the same time because Tae-oh is always there for Jae-won and Soon-young is guilting himself for misunderstanding his wife and giving her trouble.

The end of this episode makes me sad for Yoon-jin but could she not have stopped Sang-beom when he was leading Jae-won to the hotel room? Even if she did not know Jae-won was passed out, she could have stopped her from being sexually assaulted had she intervened.

This drama has me confused, just like many other viewers. We will have to see how the story pans out in the episodes to come before we decide who to root for.