Buried Hearts: Episodes 5-6 » Dramabeans Korean drama recaps

Buried Hearts: Episodes 5-6

by mistyisles

It’s back into the lions’ den with our hero this week as he tries to make sense of what’s happened to him and his enemies try to pry the information they need out of his head (literally and figuratively!). But this family has an awful lot of secrets buried deep in the past, and unearthing one may just start to pull all the others out into the light.

 
EPISODES 5-6

Dong-joo has successfully found his way back to people who can tell him who he is. The only problems are: 1) He doesn’t remember any of them, which means he has no idea who is and isn’t trustworthy. 2) He does know someone tried to kill him, and it’s no stretch of the imagination to think they’ll try it again. 3) The first memory to resurface is of Il-do aiming a gun at him. And 4) his encounter with Eun-nam and Hee-chul makes him suspect he was involved in an affair. Even without knowing that Jang-sun’s people are actively trying to kidnap and torture him, that’s a lot to process. So when he runs into Chairman Cha, Dong-joo doesn’t trust the chairman’s warm greeting and flees in a taxi.

Curiosity wins out, though, and he ultimately accepts Eun-nam’s invitation to family dinner (in celebration of Hee-chul’s birthday, naturally). There, Dong-joo explains that all he remembers is his own name, which he currently thinks is Sung Hyun. That startles the kindly SECRETARY GONG (Seo Kyung-hwa) so much that she spaces out and drops Hee-chul’s multi-tiered birthday cake. Though she brushes it off as a bout of lightheadedness, she and Eun-nam’s mother later assure each other that Sung Hyun is a common name and *THAT* Sung Hyun is definitely very much dead. Innnnteresting.

As it happens, Chairman Cha is facing memory decline himself, and there’s a doctor in the family. So he has his own medical team runs tests on Dong-joo to try and find both the source of his amnesia and a cure for it. Which makes it very easy for Jang-sun to show up unannounced in Dong-joo’s hospital room. He seems convinced Dong-joo is faking the amnesia. But before he can make good on his threat to break open Dong-joo’s head if that’s what it takes to extract the slush fund password from it, Chairman Cha arrives with doctor KANG YI-HYUN (Noh Susanna) in tow.

Yi-hyun immediately cottons onto Dong-joo’s nervousness and sends both Jang-sun and Chairman Cha away. But she doesn’t know Jang-sun planted a bug in the room, or how easy it is for Jang-sun’s people to impersonate nurses. Dong-joo is wheeled away on a stretcher right in front of her, and she doesn’t realize what’s happened until the real nurse arrives a few minutes later. By then, Dong-joo has been sedated and whisked out of the hospital.

As planned, Jang-sun’s men proceed to torture Dong-joo and demand he stop playing dumb and just give up the password already. Whether or not that would have worked before, it doesn’t work now because Dong-joo genuinely doesn’t remember that he’s supposed to know this password, let alone what it is. So all he can do is endure, keep trying to make them believe he’s telling the truth, and — failing that — fight back. By feigning unconsciousness, he buys himself an opening to knock out one torturer and drown the other. Unfortunately, there’s still one more guy waiting just outside to ambush him, and this guy doesn’t seem to care much about Jang-sun’s insistence that he needs Dong-joo alive. But Dong-joo is saved in the nick of time… by Il-do.

Dong-joo has Il-do take him straight to Chairman Cha so he can tell him all about the kidnapping and torture. Jang-sun is already there when they arrive, and takes credit for discovering Dong-joo’s location (which is easy to do since Dong-joo doesn’t know who was behind the kidnapping). Between him and Il-do, they convince Chairman Cha not to involve the police. But Chairman Cha at least insists on keeping Dong-joo in his home for the time being.

Jang-sun is bitter about still not getting his password (he’s also under pressure from an unnamed “Elder” to access that money ASAP for an upcoming election), but even he is starting to accept that Dong-joo isn’t lying. Il-do, on the other hand, has gained a boost of confidence. He demands Jang-sun promise him half the slush fund upfront — or else he might just have to kill Dong-joo again, right away. Or, at the very least, he’ll let Chairman Cha in on the secret that Dong-joo holds the key to 2 trillion won. Jang-sun doesn’t quite promise to meet Il-do’s demand, but he does seem a tad unsettled.

On that note, unsettled is exactly how Il-do feels when he finds Dong-joo casually using the window-facing pull-up bar in Il-do’s office early the next morning. Dong-joo is weirdly chipper as he claims to have remembered Il-do letting him do this often. But his smile fades into something darker as he asks outright if ll-do shot him. Il-do tries to laugh it off, but Dong-joo keeps pressing until Il-do sits him down and admits that, yes, they hated each other — and hey, maybe Dong-joo’s mixed-up brain took that animosity, plugged it into his need to identify his attempted murderer, and produced a false memory. (And now I’m unsettled by how convincing Il-do sounds.)

Il-do contemplates killing Dong-joo for good right then and there, but thinks better of it (well, his wife distracts him, and then he comes up with a better idea, but the point is he puts the dumbbell away instead of bashing Dong-joo’s head in). Remember the doctor, Yi-hyun, from before? Her father is Il-do’s old college friend, and before she was formally licensed in medicine, she had a career in hypnotherapy.

With Dong-joo’s agreement, Il-do takes him to Yi-hyun’s house to see if she can coax the memories out. While she does succeed in helping him recall a few details about that car accident he’s been dreaming about — namely that the car’s other occupants may have included Dong-joo’s father and a young girl — they don’t get very far before the process sends Dong-joo into a complete panic attack.

Meanwhile, Eun-nam has been trying to arrange a meeting between Dong-joo and his sister, AGNES (Han Ji-hye). They finally set a time and place, and Eun-nam gives Dong-joo a ride to the meeting spot. But Jang-sun has decided the trick to unlocking Dong-joo’s memories is by administering another traumatic shock. So he arranges a Truck of Doom to mow Agnes down right in front of Dong-joo. And, indeed, it appears to have worked.

While I’m on the fence about Eun-nam in general, I want to believe she truly regrets betraying Dong-joo, is trying to make things right the best way she can, and didn’t know anything about Jang-sun’s plan to harm Agnes. And I’m curious about that “accident” that killed her father. Whether she’s right about her mother and Il-do’s involvement in said accident, I found their respective arguments — Eun-nam’s mother telling Eun-nam she misunderstood what she overheard and Il-do telling Dong-joo his imagination was playing tricks on him — to be eerily similar.

And given that it seems fairly safe to suspect Eun-nam was the little girl in Dong-joo’s nightmare accident, I can’t help wondering if the two accidents are also connected. The question is, how much of that accident did Dong-joo remember prior to his (second) memory loss, and how much of it will he remember now?

 
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