Our Sticky Love Episode 5 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Jung Hae-in as Jang Tae-ha
Ha Young as Go Eun-sae
Heo Sung-tae as Baek Sang-gil
Jeon Bae-soo as Hong Do-yeop
Kim Young-ok as Go Yeon-hong
Cha Cheong-hwa as Cho Maeng-suk

Go Eun-sae still has no memory, but she has decided to trust Jang Tae-ha, the boxing coach who says he is her boyfriend. On the way home to Gujin Taffy Village, she asks whether they plan to live like housemates forever. She is ready to share a room again. Tae-ha says it cannot happen yet.

A houseguest with a hurt foot

Tae-ha has a ready-made excuse waiting at the house. Kim Gang-rok, nursing a hurt foot, introduces himself as Tae-ha's junior, staying until he finds a place. Tae-ha announces that Gang-rok will share his room. When Gang-rok offers to swap, Tae-ha insists it would be rude to leave a guest alone. Eun-sae politely tells him to sleep with his guest, then fumes in private over ever raising the subject.

Behind the other door, Gang-rok cannot see why a fake boyfriend would not room with Prosecutor Go to sell the act, unless Tae-ha is simply shy. A threat ends the teasing. Gang-rok has heard about the plan to smuggle her out of the country from Coach Hong Do-yeop, who runs Hong's Boxing Gym. A boat leaves late this month, Tae-ha says. If her memory returns first, she will go willingly to escape Baek Sang-gil. If not, he will force her. He bans the name Prosecutor Go in the house, since learning the truth too early could put her in danger.

Treatment, shrimp and taffy

At breakfast, Gang-rok pushes his gochujang stew, made with spicy red-pepper paste, and Eun-sae says she does not like gochujang. He already knows her clinic days, because ten years as Tae-ha's right-hand man taught him to keep track. Eun-sae tells him her memory has not come back, but her trust in Tae-ha has.

At An Mental Health Clinic, An Gi-jun explains TMS, magnetic pulses aimed at the part of the cortex that stores long-term memory. In the treatment room, she is teased about how scared she was not long ago. Eun-sae answers that she believes Tae-ha now. She still wants her memory back, because only he remembers their past, and that must be lonely.

On the way out, Eun-sae admits a bad feeling about nurse Min Su-ji, who turned out to be Tae-ha's high school classmate. Su-ji took his side and snapped at her last time, and Eun-sae does not like the way she looks at him. Tae-ha laughs it off.

At the gym, Do-yeop treats everyone to shrimp. The table teases Tae-ha as the village romantic, and Gang-rok complains about peeling alone. When Gang-rok mentions that Tae-ha's new car is ready, Eun-sae says she would rather earn her keep. She wants to go back to the taffy shop of Tae-ha's grandmother, Go Yeon-hong, where Tae-ha says she used to work.

Hot taffy burns, and Eun-sae botches her first try before learning that it only slides off a lacquered bowl. Sent to borrow one, she walks into the Garak Shaman's place. There Cho Maeng-suk is dulling a set of blades and muttering that her spiritual powers are gone and her feet will be next. Eun-sae asks for a gourd bowl and comes away certain the shaman really has lost her gift.

Back at the clinic, Su-ji hands Gi-jun a resignation letter, since she cannot keep working with him after their breakup. He fumbles his reply. That evening Su-ji drinks soju at a village restaurant, where the women remember her in a school uniform. They point out that Tae-ha, her age, is now settled with a wife he dotes on.

A night of walnuts and rain

Outside, under a sign promising that walnuts boost memory, a drunk Su-ji runs into Tae-ha. She asks him to take her home and grabs his hand when he moves to phone Gi-jun. Then she asks whether she could have been loved too, as his girlfriend. Onlookers gasp, then spot Eun-sae.

Eun-sae orders Tae-ha to put his arms at his sides and take three steps back. Then she tells Su-ji that her fly is open. Anyone sober enough to zip up, she says, should keep her hands off a taken man. She gets Su-ji's address and calls Gang-rok, cashing in his offer to be her little brother: a drunk lady needs an escort home.

In the new car, Tae-ha protests that he only kept Su-ji from smashing her cheekbones. Eun-sae asks if he dreams of being an Avenger and tells him to draw lines. "Only I'm allowed to do that. Only me." It is common sense, she insists, not jealousy, and he apologizes, smiling. When he offers walnuts as brain food, she scoffs that by that logic gochujang would give you red lips.

The word triggers a memory: someone at the orphanage screaming her legal name, Go Ji-won, and forcing gochujang into her mouth for leaving food. Eun-sae credits the day's treatment. She recalls bits of the orphanage, which explains her dread of a government facility. There were group punishments, winter nights outside barefoot, and weekend farm work three hours away, crammed in a van. She wished for a discarded MP3 player to play songs by g.o.d, the 1990s boy band. Thugs who took the orphanage's money beat the middle-school boys, and she thinks that is why she hates violence.

Asked what he hates, Tae-ha says rain. It fell on his worst days, when Grandma collapsed and when he quit boxing, and nothing sheltered him. He does not regret that choice, because he protected what he wanted to protect. Eun-sae thanks him for protecting her too, when anyone else would have given up, and says she is glad he is her boyfriend. Gang-rok then barges in with flower-shaped buns and is threatened with a kick in the buns.

Two phones and a ritual

At a meal at Hong's Boxing Gym the next day, Tae-ha apparently refuses a woman's offer to fetch water, saying he was told not to touch other women, and the table mocks him. Someone invites Eun-sae to Maeng-suk's shamanic ritual. Gang-rok slips off to make a call, and Tae-ha follows.

Tae-ha demands to know whether Sang-gil sent him, and why he has two phones and goes out at dawn. Gang-rok confesses to live-streaming reviews of overseas soccer on YouTube, with his face hidden. The matches air at dawn, and the calls are from his agency. Quitting the gang hurt his foot and cost him his income. Tae-ha checks, then asks when the cast comes off.

Gang-rok understands: if Sang-gil learns the truth, neither Tae-ha nor the prosecutor survives. The boat is close, and Tae-ha says Eun-sae remembered her childhood yesterday. Her full memory would make her easier to persuade, Gang-rok says, but she would also learn Tae-ha is not her boyfriend. Tae-ha says nothing that happens to him matters as long as she lives.

At the ritual, Maeng-suk is supposed to climb onto the blades and keeps stalling, until someone cries out that there is a snake, one Eun-sae has slipped in to stop the ritual. The villagers agree a snake dooms a ritual, and she calls it off. Afterward she admits her spirit has left. After losing her husband and child, fortune-telling was all she had. Her two friends scold her for hiding it.

Maeng-suk asks Eun-sae why she helped. Eun-sae says losing her memory taught her what it is to lose something overnight and feel cheated, and she guessed Maeng-suk felt the same. The two women, who recently fought over a broken statue, drink to it. Tae-ha arrives to find Eun-sae singing and plastered. At home, she asks him to stay until she falls asleep, and he sits with Gang-rok's question in his head.

A boyfriend who does not fit

At Sang-gil's end, a report comes in that several men have seen Prosecutor Go, all describing the same outfit. Either Tae-ha lost her or let her live, and someone calls that impossible. Also, Gwak Chi-hyeon, the aide who has been hunting for her, has said she prepared something besides the watch.

Hungover, Eun-sae has a new memory. She is introducing Gwak, a Hanguk University graduate and the Gangju mayor's aide, as her boyfriend. She nearly asks Tae-ha about it, then tells Gi-jun instead. She has supposedly dated Tae-ha for two years, so why would she call another man her boyfriend? She wonders if it was a dream. Gi-jun went to medical school at Hanguk and calls a friend.

A caption names Chairman Baek Sang-gil as a report comes in that there is still no CCTV footage of her; he orders her found within two days. Gi-jun confirms Gwak is real and gets his number. At Seoun University Hospital, Gwak, recently fired as an aide, takes a call from Eun-sae, who gives her name as Go Ji-won. They agree to meet tonight in Seoul.

Gi-jun's pitch to Tae-ha is an upgraded TMS machine at a friend's Seoul clinic, with only tonight free. Then a call comes from Kim Song-wol's phone: Grandma has been taken ill, and Tae-ha rushes to her.

At the hospital, a scan finds a tumor. If it is malignant, surgery will be harder than the operation 14 years ago. Tae-ha stays but insists Eun-sae go, because her treatment matters to him as much as Grandma. On the road, Gi-jun asks what she will do if Gwak really was her boyfriend. Either Tae-ha is a fake or she was cheating, Eun-sae says, and either way it will hurt.

Yeon-hong wakes and asks if she is sick. After all he did to save her, she tells Tae-ha, she will not die easily. She calls him her precious baby and sends him home.

He is still at the cancer center when Eun-sae finds him. Taking her pills in the car, she opened the care package Tae-ha gave her before the trip: socks, and an MP3 player loaded with g.o.d songs for the carsick ride. Then she heard rain forecast nationwide. She made Gi-jun turn around without checking a single fact: "Jang Tae-ha is real." Now she tells Tae-ha she worried more about him in the rain than about her memory. She wanted to be the shelter he never had. "Let's weather it together from now on." She has brought an umbrella, and they kiss in the rain.

Up next: Our Sticky Love Episode 6 Recap. See every episode in the Our Sticky Love episode guide.