Recap Korean Drama "May I Help You" Episode 3-4

Picking up from last week’s adventure in the closet, it turns out that Dong-joo was on a ghost errand to search for a 100 million won check. After Butler Kim recovers from the shock of seeing her in the dead man’s closet — and unwittingly joins her to turn the house upside-down in search of it — he helps to deliver the check to the man’s widow. But he can’t help but wonder how Dong-joo knew about the check. Thankfully, Butler Kim met the deceased man recently as a substitute driver, so it doesn’t sound strange to the wife when he also delivers the man’s last words to her.

Turning in the check is a huge image booster for the Dime a Job guys, and business picks up again for them. A grateful Butler Kim offers to treat Dong-joo out, and they finally put a rest to the ghost dad business. The two of them become somewhat friendly, and Butler Kim reintroduces himself to Dong-joo as KIM TAE-HEE (which I will now begin to call him by).

Dong-joo will soon become friends with the rest of the Dime a Job crew after she moves into their building for a month. Her excuse for moving out of the house is that she wants to take her studies seriously, but really, it’s because Dad is this close to finding out that she still works as a funeral director. And Dad in turn agrees to the move because he has to work the night shifts at his security guard job for that month. Father and daughter are such adorable little liars, and it’s cute how they both want to protect each other from getting hurt.

The Dime a Job men are excited at the prospect of having a female neighbor, and police officer SEO HAE-AN (Song Deok-ho) falls in crush with Dong-joo at first sight. (I erroneously introduced this character as Sung Deok-ho last week, but that’s the actor’s real name.) Hae-an tasks Tae-hee and Vincent to be his wingmen in wooing the new neighbor, but Tae-hee hasn’t run into Dong-joo as a neighbor yet — because the male lead is always the last person in the know when it comes to situations like this.

 

But Tae-hee is the first to find out that Dong-joo can see ghosts after a pregnant woman is murdered. Her husband falls into despair and fearing that he’ll take his life to follow after her, she requests Dong-joo to speak with her husband. But that’s when Tae-hee enters the powder room at the funeral home on an errand, and pales on seeing the corpse resting on Dong-joo’s shoulder. And of course, he thinks Dong-joo is nuts when she tells him she was just talking to the woman’s ghost.

Tae-hee is kinda repulsed by Dong-joo’s actions and when they finally meet as neighbors, he tells her to move out and stop following him around. But Dong-joo corrects him and says that he’s the one who is doing the following around. After all, he was the one who stepped into the powder room right in the middle of her ghost conversation, and she couldn’t hear the concluding parts of the message. Now the husband is missing and they don’t know his whereabouts.

 

While Tae-hee is not actively looking for the missing husband like Dong-joo is, he cannot help but worry about the man – even though he finds Dong-joo’s idea of seeing ghosts ridiculous. But when he hears a story over the radio that has similar elements to what Dong-joo said about the pregnant ghost, he begins to rethink Dong-joo’s ghost seeing ability.

It turns out that shortly before her death, the woman sent in a story to a radio broadcast and she told Dong-joo that the story contains a message for her husband. Dong-joo in turn reached out to the radio program to please read that particular message in hopes that wherever the husband might be, he’ll hear how much the wife loves him and banish all thoughts about following after her.

Truly, while the message is being read, the husband is making his way to the bridge where they shared their first kiss. Tae-hee arrives just in time to stop him from jumping off, and stays by his side as he grieves. Afterwards, the husband returns to the funeral home to perform the final rites for his wife and promises to be united with his family one day. Sigh!

I really didn’t want these depressing type of cases but now that we’re in the middle of it, I’m torn. On one hand I want the drama to dive deep into the stories of the deceased. (Because this woman could have died of natural causes, but why was she murdered? Was it a serial killing? Revenge? A random act of violence?) But on the other hand, I’m not so sure I want to know any more than we are told about the ghosts. The few hints here and there are enough to tug at my heartstrings, so what would change if we got full background information?

There are twelve requests left on Dong-joo’s ghost contract, and it’s pretty obvious that Tae-hee will be tied to each one of them whether he likes it or not. I mean, he has already been involved since last week’s cab driver ghost. And he might have even been involved from the beginning, seeing how he dreams about Dong-joo’s first ghost asking why he killed him (which is a bit shocking because Tae-hee doesn’t look like he could hurt a fly).

Then again, not everyone is exactly who we expect them to be. Like, I was looking forward to seeing the funeral home’s new interns, but I was not expecting them to be elderly men. That was a big chuckle moment for me this week. Anyway, I hope we get to see these ajusshis living their best intern lives — and get more insight into the business of funeral services as it’s such a unique and unexplored profession in dramaland. Despite the sad ghost stories, this drama still has an overall light-hearted tone, and I’m optimistic that this balance will be maintained going forward.