The Divorce Insurance: Episodes 2-4 » Dramabeans
The Divorce Insurance: Episodes 2-4
by Unit
The race is on for our divorce insurance team to launch their product. They face a few obstacles here and there, and as they try to work their way around these hurdles, they grow closer and we get to know more about them.
EPISODES 2-4
Our divorce insurance team is set to go forth and prosper, and Na-rae gives them marching orders. As they disperse to handle their respective tasks, Jeon-man warns Ki-joon not to let any feelings come in between him and his ex-ex-ex-wife, Na-rae. But if this reference is to feelings of the romantic kind, it is Jeon-man who should be careful because Na-rae pairs up with him for data collection, and I can see an incoming romance on the horizon. Ki-joon and Han-deul are paired to find justification for divorce insurance, and their research takes them to a Buddhist temple where we meet Ki-joon’s ex-ex-wife (cameo by Jo Boa for a Tale of the Nine Tailed reunion). Maybe Show could also let us meet his ex-wife so she won’t feel left out of the fun? Hehe.
After receiving some valuable insights from the ex-ex-wife/monk, Ki-joon and Han-deul go stargazing and marvel at how far they’ve come from not wanting to see each other again, to working together. We cut back and forth from the stargazers to Jeon-man and Na-rae, as their conversations pivot to what types of insurance they wish to create. Na-rae wishes for an insurance that compensates her with nice words if she gets injured by bad words. Han-deul wants an insurance that compensates her with self-esteem if her pride gets hurt. Jeon-man is all for an insurance that allows him to travel safely in space. I need an insurance that compensates me with three great dramas for every dud I watch. But we can’t always get what we want.
Some people do get what they want — like Ki-joon whose divorce insurance idea is greenlit by the higher-ups. Okay, maybe amber-lit since it’s a conditional approval. The divorce team is given a six-month trial run and mandated to sell out thirty policies within three days. Also, the divorce rate during the six months must be zero percent to prove the feasibility of their divorce prevention measures. Ki-joon is optimistic about selling the thirty policies within the allotted time, and this brings us back to our show’s opening scene with the divorce team at the wedding fair.
While the intending couples chase the divorce team offstage, they individually come to consult with the team in secret — and have hypocritical meltdowns when they catch their partners doing the same thing. If the divorce team wants the numbers, they definitely have it. However, if the potential clients are already arguing about broken trust and whatnot from the get-go, their unions are headed for divorce — which is bad for business because insurance companies love the premiums but hate the payout. So, Han-deul advises the team to put a pause on instant sign-ups and thoroughly vet the couples before selling them a policy.
Since the team doesn’t have enough hands to vet the couples before their deadline, they employ AI to do the analysis for them. They have to first test the AI themselves — probably because therapy is expensive — and this gives us some insight into their headspace, relationship-wise. On a divorce risk scale of 1-5, Team Leader Na is a 5. Ah-young chooses to remain single because she wants the freedom to have a life and career. Han-deul and Jeon-man are not entirely against remarriage. But Han-deul is quiet when asked what has improved most since her divorce, and Ki-joon’s sad face is his reply to AI’s query about what led to his divorce.
Anyway, the interested couples flock to the company for their assessment, and our divorce team successfully hits their sign-up quota. But Ki-joon’s anxiety grows with the sign-ups, and he worries that the team — and the whole divorce insurance thingy — went too far by meddling with couples who were doing just fine. Han-deul advises him to just think of the insurance as an umbrella they’re holding onto to give to the couples when it rains. But “we can’t do anything about the rain, no matter how much we try.”
The weekend arrives, and Ki-joon and Han-deul attend a client’s wedding to make sure it goes well. But the couple absconds from the venue and video calls from their honeymoon to inform the guests that this is payback for their moms purchasing the divorce insurance without informing them first. Ha! The embarrassed moms have no choice but to walk down the aisle themselves, and recite the modified wedding vows pledging to accept each other’s child as their lawfully wedding child-in-law. Lool. I’ve never seen any wedding like this, so props to Show for the originality.
After the ceremony, the moms persuade Ki-joon and Han-deul to take the rented limousine home since the couple isn’t around, and the non-couple enjoy the complementary champagne. The limo causes a bit of traffic when the driver is forced to switch lanes at a road diversion, but Ki-joon and Han-deul have places to be. So they hop off and make their way through the buildup of cars on both sides amidst cheers and wedding well wishes from occupants of the cars. Hehe. Not Ki-joon and Han-deul going from embarrassed to actually enjoying themselves and waving at their well-wishers.
Ki-joon and Han-deul soon part ways, and he goes to visit his brother-in-law. Via a flashback, we learn that Ki-joon’s sister was unhappy in her marriage and wanted a divorce, but Ki-joon dismissed her feelings and suggested that she wasn’t trying hard enough. It is implied that the sister took her own life shortly after. In the present, Ki-joon is filled with regrets, and her husband is now a shell of himself. Ki-joon has to constantly go out of his way to check up on — and babysit — his brother-in-law, and he encourages the dude to get his life back together because he doesn’t want to lose him too.
Afterwards, Ki-joon joins Han-deul at a coffee shop to nap ask her to teach him how to knit because he has an unfinished knitting piece (from his sister). They stop by the mart on their way home, and Han-deul runs into her ex-husband at the Kopiko aisle. He goes on and on about the bidet issue, and hits her repeatedly with his shopping cart. Such a douche! When he calls her an idiot and tauntingly asks what she’s going to do about it, she surprises him by screaming out her lungs at him, and Ki-joon ties everything with a pretty bow by winning the ex-husband in a stare down and a battle of the carts.
Meanwhile, Jeon-man and Na-rae run into each other at the laundromat, and he reluctantly helps her clean up the mess after her stuffed toy explodes in a washing machine. They discover they have a shared hobby of reviewing random statistical data, and Na-rae invites herself to eat at a reluctant Jeon-man’s place. Jeon-man would thrive in Han-deul’s bare apartment because he has less than bare minimum furnishing at his place — but it’s not because his ex-wife took everything with her when she left like Han-deul’s ex-husband. Actually, Jeon-man’s ex-wife was big on decorations, so there was always one new addition to the cluster they already had, and this pushed him further away from home.
The need for his own personal space played into Jeon-man’s reason for getting a divorce, and Na-rae can relate to this. She didn’t sell the house she lived in before marriage because she didn’t want to get rid of her personal space, but Ki-joon couldn’t understand why she needed a separate house when they already had their marital home. He was also upset that she didn’t tell him she was keeping her former house, but she didn’t see the need to tell him because apparently, married couples don’t need to tell each other everything. I-I have no comments.
The eventful weekend blows over and it’s the start of a new week. Some couples have pulled out of the divorce insurance, and the team needs two more contracts to complete their quota. To pile on the team, the Financial Supervisory Service finds evidence of an insurance regulation violation during their product development process. Ki-joon will need to appear before the FSS, and the divorce insurance approval may be revoked. Uh-oh. In the meantime, there seems to be some shady business between Na-rae and one of the higher-ups in the company. I’m not sure what they’re aiming at, but they had a fall guy use a computer allocated to the divorce team to transfer some files via company intranet. This is not looking good for our divorce team.
Two weeks in, and while I’m fully onboard this show, I want to like it more than I currently do. It doesn’t take a lot to amuse me, but for some reason, I’m not buying the humor insurance this show is selling. It works, on occasion, but it mostly falls flat and comes across as trying too hard. I’m also not a fan of the fourth wall breaks for exposition, and I could really do without those random wedding singers. If you squint, you can actually see the potential in this show, so I hope the humor department finds something that works and sticks with it.
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