My Happy Ending (2023) K Drama Episode 9

Episode 9 of My Happy Ending starts where we left off as Jae-won appears confused due to the sudden change in Yoon-jin’s behaviour. She alleges that Ah-rin looks nothing like Soon-young, instigating that he was not her father. Yoon-jin brings out information about the design leak as well as Jae-won’s divorce to instigate her memory but Soon-young takes Jae-won home.

Tae-oh walks Yoon-jin out and scolds her for trying to mess with Jae-won’s mental health. She is about to tell him about the paternity of Jae-won’s daughter but holds back. Jae-won spends the next few days thinking about Yoon-jin’s claims and wonders why she cannot remember anything. She looks through her notes and tries to make sense of how she knows Tae-joo.

Meanwhile, Tae-joo searches for information on Kim Sang-beom’s friend circle to understand his life. On the other hand, Soon-young meets Yoon-jin and urges her to stop messing with Jae-won’s life after all that she’d done to her. Soon-young is finding it hard to understand why Yoon-jin is doing this to his family.

When Soon-young threatens Yoon-jin about leaking the voice recording, she warns him and states that she will tell Jae-won that Ah-rin is not Soon-young’s daughter. At the same time, Jae-won meets Tae-joo and learns how she had used his help to leak the Dereve designs for which Soon-young was blamed. She is dumbfounded and wonders why she would do something like this.

Jae-won gets even more confused after seeing the messages and videos sent to her by her stalker. Soon-young gets back home and is worried about Jae-won going missing. Jae-won shows up at home and tells her husband how she does not understand anything that is going on in their lives. Soon-young tries to calm her down but does not explain much.

The next day, Jae-won has a meeting with Yoon-jin and calls her out for taking undue advantage of her mental health. She accuses her former best friend of trying to trigger her memory and asks why she was doing this to her. Yoon-jin accuses Jae-won of running away from her actions by taking the easy way out and erasing her memory.

Jae-won breaks down and eventually musters up the courage to say that Yoon-jin will be in big trouble once all of Jae-won’s memories come back. Yoon-jin makes her way out of the Dereve office when she gets a call from Chang-suk. Jae-won’s father asks Yoon-jin if she knows anything is wrong between Soon-young and Jae-won. Yoon-jin takes the opportunity to tell Chang-suk the truth about her affair with Soon-young.

Chang-suk goes to Jae-won’s house fuming and slaps Soon-young. He scolds Soon-young and asks how he could do something like this to his stepdaughter. After he is calm, Soon-young tells the truth about Jae-won’s rape and everything else that happened in succession until Jae-won lost her memory again. Chang-suk asks Soon-young to keep everything hidden from Jae-won, claiming this is what’s best for her.

On the other hand, Tae-oh offers to help Jae-won at work. Jae-won tells Tae-oh how stressed she was for not knowing what was going on in her life. Tae-oh tries to motivate her and asks her to look past this incident. Soon-young later brings Ah-rin to meet Jae-won. Jae-won introduces her daughter to Tae-oh as he leaves.

From outside her cabin, Tae-oh longingly watches Jae-won have a good time with her family. After dinner, Soon-young and Jae-won take Ah-rin to the park where she plays. The couple discuss the recent turn of events in their lives and Soon-young tells his wife how he wishes her memories never come back. He tells Jae-won how she lost her memories of a time when their family was not in a happy place.

Jae-won is overwhelmed and decides she should live without knowing the truth about the time her past self had already forgotten. Meanwhile, Tae-joo watches a photo of Soon-young, Jae-won, Yoon-jin and Sang-beom at dinner and follows Sang-beom to figure out why Soon-young is after him. Soon-young, on the other hand, burns the DNA reports to keep the truth about Jae-won’s rape a secret to protect his family and her mental health.

On the other hand, everything she does reminds Jae-won of the memories she had forgotten. The next morning, Jae-won wakes up to a nightmare of Yoon-jin trying to push her off the cliff. Soon-young tries to calm her down and offers to be Jae-won’s guardian. She then goes off to work and sits down for an interview with Mr Kwon and Reporter Choi.

During the interview, Reporter Choi brings up the incident of Jae-won trying to cut her hand with broken glass at the Cafe. Jae-won keeps her calm and tells the reporter it was an accident, not sure what happened that night.  After the interview, Jae-won leaves to go back and accidentally crosses paths with Sang-beom whom she does not recognise. Sang-beom later runs into Yoon-jin and tries to engage in a conversation with her.

Yoon-jin calls him a piece of trash and argues with her father. She accuses Mr Kwon of forgetting what Sang-beom did to her and accuses him of doing business with him despite that. Mr Kwon tells Yoon-jin how it was a matter of the past and asks her to move on. Later that day, Jae-won calls Tae-joo to her office and talks to him about his involvement in her life.

Tae-joo tells Jae-won that Soon-young had paid him for some information. Jae-won refuses to see what Soon-young is looking for and asks Tae-joo to leave. At the same time, Soon-young is having a hard time overlooking the fact that Jae-won was assaulted by Sang-beom who turned out to be Ah-rin’s father. He goes to Dereve to pick her up after work but ends up in an elevator with Sang-beom.

Soon-young loses his calm and beats Sang-beom up in his own office. Soon-young comes back home, much calmer and asks Jae-won to go out on a date with him. On their date, the couple thinks back to how Soon-young would watch Jae-won work in her studio when they were still dating. Present-day Jae-won apologises to Soon-young as he has to give up his dreams to allow her to fulfil her dreams.

Soon-young apologises to Jae-won for not trusting her in the past which triggers a memory. Jae-won tries to learn the truth from Soon-young but he stops her, asking her to fight back. Meanwhile, Tae-oh visits Seung-kyu, hoping for him to wake up from his comatose soon. However, he doesn’t know that Mr Kwon is paying the doctors to drug Seung-kyu which is preventing him from waking up.

Despite her attempts to avoid her past, Jae-won keeps getting flashbacks from the time. Soon-young meets Yoon-jin and asks her why she was blaming Jae-won, the victim of rape when she knew everything about her mental illness as the fact that she was drunk. Yoon-jin refuses to let Jae-won get away because of the horrible pain she caused her. She claims that she had been a good friend to Jae-won when she hid her mental health problems from Soon-young and points out how it was she who allowed their relationship to go on for so long.

Soon-young does not have any way to reason with Yoon-jin and goes down on his knees, begging her to spare his family. He breaks down into tears and apologises to Yoon-jin on Jae-won’s behalf. This further triggers Yoon-jin and she states she will not let Jae-won have a happy life because she never can have one.

At the same time, Jae-won walks over the same bridge that she fell from as she recalls everything bits and pieces of what happened between Yoon-jin and Soon-young. She also remembers the DNA test results which pronounced that Ah-rin was not Soon-young’s daughter. The episode ends with Jae-won waking up in her spare condo when the police come in and arrest her.

The Episode Review

This K-drama is difficult to watch because I am sure we, as the viewers are being gaslit into believing something only for the makers to turn the tables on us with a different plot twist. The insane number of plot twists in this drama makes me believe that we have no way of determining who the real villain is.

This episode makes me believe that Yoon-jin is also mentally unwell because it is clear that she hates Sang-beom for what he did to her but fails to acknowledge the fact that he had also sexually assaulted Jae-won. She is extremely narcissistic and victimises herself for what happened to her due to Sang-beom’s actions. It is audacious how she blames Jae-won for being raped and I don’t think there will be any redemption for her.

The characters of this show need to learn empathy and I am hoping Tae-oh doesn’t change because I am rooting for him to be in Jae-won’s favor. Yoon-jin’s allegation from the last episode hints at Tae-oh being in their life as Jae-won’s first love when they were high schoolers. Additionally, Jae-won makes a comment stating that Yoon-jin will regret it once Jae-won remembers everything.

This makes me believe that something serious had taken place when Yoon-jin and Jae-won were in high school and the fact that Jae-won knows something that Yoon-jin wishes she wouldn’t remember. I can’t wait to see how the show progresses in the next