Queen of Tears Episode 11 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Kim Soo-hyun as Baek Hyun-woo
Kim Ji-won as Hong Hae-in
Park Sung-hoon as Yoon Eun-sung
Kwak Dong-yeon as Hong Soo-cheol
Lee Joo-bin as Cheon Da-hye
Kim Kap-soo as Hong Man-dae
Lee Mi-sook as Moh Seul-hee
Jung Jin-young as Hong Beom-jun
Kim Jung-nan as Hong Beom-ja
Kim Joo-ryoung as Grace Ko
Yoon Bo-mi as Na Chae-yeon
Jeon Bae-soo as Baek Du-gwan
Kim Young-min as Kim Yeong-song

The first minutes replay the close of episode 10, cut with fresh reactions. In Yongdu-ri, someone yells for Baek Du-gwan to look at the news: former CEO Hong Hae-in is terminally ill. He is reminded of his shoes as he bolts. At the press conference, Hae-in's admission plays again as reporters ask when she was diagnosed and whether Chairman Yoon knew.

Over a montage, Hae-in's inner voice lists what is still unsaid: that it is okay, that there was never any resentment, and thanks for staying through harsh words never meant. Hae-in's cutting lines replay, including her episode 8 demand for a divorce, along with Baek Hyun-woo's confession of love from episode 10. At a hospital, staff bar a door, voices ask for Hong Hae-in, and the sign reads INTENSIVE CARE UNIT.

The chairman wakes up a stranger

At the hospital where Hong Man-dae lies, Moh Seul-hee finds Grace Ko, who claimed he could not be found, and Hong Beom-ja, and orders them out. The jabs fly, including that Seul-hee's own son moved the chairman behind her back. Sent away, Beom-ja begs at a stairwell door, apologizing for years of rudeness and offering to kneel. She is let in, on condition she leaves right after.

Man-dae opens his eyes. Beom-ja is overjoyed, then briefly convinced he has died. When Seul-hee arrives, Beom-ja gloats that with him awake, the power of attorney is void, and someone confirms it. She asks her father whether Seul-hee hurt him. He asks who she is, and she is put out again.

Hae-in's parents find out

In intensive care, a doctor explains that tumor cells have caused acute brain swelling. Kim Seon-hwa turns on Hyun-woo for deceiving them again. Hong Beom-jun stops his wife: as parents who noticed nothing, they have no right to be angry. The doctor describes the cloud cell tumor, which he calls Cloud Cytoma here: a rare malignant tumor whose cells spread through the cranial nerves like clouds rather than forming a lump. Hyun-woo apologizes to Seon-hwa and explains that Hae-in wanted to spare her parents until the news improved.

Elsewhere, Man-dae's MRI points to vascular dementia from a head injury and brain hemorrhage. The damage clouds his reasoning and memory. The doctor asks for two weeks and promises nothing.

Someone who has just heard comes to Seon-hwa, and she realizes this is why she was warned in episode 9 not to do anything she would regret. Everyone knew but her. When Hong Soo-cheol reminds her he has a serious problem too, she tells him he always copes, so he says he will. A flashback returns to episode 9, when Hae-in fainted and was told not to be dramatic.

Cheon Da-hye, hearing the news, phones someone to ask that Soo-cheol's anxiety medication be fetched from home. The voice on the other end says to let him die. It threatens to kill him personally and forbids another such call.

At Hae-in's bed, Soo-cheol confesses to Hyun-woo that he carried a talisman to subdue his sister's energy, just to beat her for once, and fears it made her sick. He tears it up, and she wakes calling him a lunatic. He credits the talisman. When she apologizes to him for everything, he decides she is not in her right mind and calls for the doctor.

Hae-in tells Hyun-woo she has loved him since they met. She is sorry she did not treat him better and left him alone with her family, and part of her knew he wanted a divorce, which is fine. She is saying it now because she does not know when she will die. He says he prayed harder than ever the night before, vowing to drink, sleep in the street and throw his life away if she died. "That's a threat, not a prayer," she points out. She is not going to die, he tells her, because he will not let her.

At the bedside, Hae-in is told the family knows now. There are doctor friends worldwide, and the sick one need not apologize. She asks where her mother is.

Hyun-woo finds Seon-hwa alone. She asks what kind of mother misses that her child is dying, admits she took her pain out on her daughter and never held her when she reached out as a child, and blames the stress she caused. Hae-in appears and asks whether her mother is a doctor now: nobody knows the cause, and it is not stress. A daughter like her would have been hard too, she concedes, so not all of it is her mother's fault. When Seon-hwa asks if it hurt, Hae-in says sometimes. Her mother breaks down, begging her not to die.

Hae-in shuts the door on Eun-sung

Seul-hee brings Man-dae home and, since he will be fed by nobody else, has Yoon Eun-sung's staff come to her. She scolds them over the press conference and wants every draft first. The public backs the old management, the stock is sliding, and the anchor LPs are furious enough to want a co-GP. The chairman's secret fund would quiet them. A trace leads to Jamal Ibrahim of LCC Investment Bank in Labuan, Malaysia, who managed the account and is thought to have wired the money on, almost 900 billion won. Someone is sent to Labuan.

At a kal-guksu restaurant, Beom-jun cannot eat. His father was always the family's pillar, he says, and he was quietly relieved his children never leaned on him. Now his daughter is dying, and he doubts his promise that she could trust him meant anything to her. His companion, whose father died young, still asks what that father would have done. A parent is a lighthouse to their children, whoever they are, so Beom-jun should eat and shine.

In Hae-in's room, a visitor reads the online verdict: dying and still in love with her ex. People think she revealed her illness to save him. That much is true, and it is exactly why Hae-in is mortified. The visitor bought a formal dress on six months of installments for her return and wants her back before it is paid off.

Later, Hae-in complains to Hyun-woo that strangers pity her for the first time in her life. Her fix: "Dote on me in front of them." He manages a loving gaze on command, and she has to ask what his left arm is doing.

At Sungmin University Medical Center, Hae-in meets Eun-sung. She knows he is cornered, with the press, the LPs and too few shares to stop a new GP, and she warns him that provoking her again will cost him more. His heart still skipped at her call, he says. She reminds him why she cut him off at university: he pushes people into a ditch so he can pull them out. He reminds her Hyun-woo was leaving her. Hyun-woo is with her now, she replies.

Hyun-woo arrives. Eun-sung asks whether he fell for her once he knew she was dying or hopes she will leave him something, and offers him anything to walk away. Hyun-woo tells him he is not going anywhere. There is something he has not even told Hae-in, he says, then: "I'm going to stay by her side forever." He also punches Eun-sung.

At home, Seul-hee asks about Eun-sung's face. He tells her he has always lived without hope and she should stop playing a normal mom. A visitor is waiting, angry at being ignored: they dodged arrest, Hyun-woo will not let go, and if the land fraud and its double contract come out, Chairman Yoon falls too.

Following the 900 billion won

Hae-in reports that Eun-sung agreed his LPs want a new GP, so they conclude Eun-sung still has not found the fund. Hyun-woo traces its route from Switzerland through companies in the Virgin Islands, Moldova and Singapore, using a staged loan, a default and a court order, to a bank in Labuan. Eun-sung, who sent someone there today, does not know the final stop either. Hyun-woo's sources are unhappy Queens veterans, among them Secretary Jang, the chairman's longtime secretary, who quit rather than take a big salary. They did it for the company, and Hyun-woo does it because Hae-in loves it.

At the committee deciding Hyun-woo's dismissal, a team of lawyers appears on his behalf. The tip-off about leaked VIP data came on August 6th and the list was pulled on August 1st and 2nd, but his intranet access was wiped on July 28th, when he handed in his ID card, company card and laptop. If any employee could download the list, it was never secret. On the embezzlement, a former NFS document chief found all 27 of his signatures identical, which only copies can be. The lawyers offer to let prosecutors appraise them, noting that forgery means up to three years in prison.

Eun-sung phones a contact and orders Hyun-woo dealt with. Boracay and good money are the reward. The contact promises to do it properly this time.

Hyun-woo's lawyer friends call themselves the Avengers, and the one who majored in commercial law gets WSB Switzerland Bank papers to trace. On the second basement level, someone greets Secretary Na Chae-yeon. Eun-sung wants the 900 billion won to buy more shares, and someone vows to find it first.

Meat, mulberries and a boxing lesson

Grace claims to Seul-hee that she only helped Beom-ja out of pity, and that she sides with money and power, so she will be the queen's maid. Alone with Man-dae, Seul-hee demands to know where the fund he hid under her name is. On a phone call, someone orders that Seul-hee be watched.

In Yongdu-ri, a woman ogling a shirtless man is caught, and he offers her free mulberries. She calls it the most original pass yet, though accepting fruit is not accepting love. He pegs her as an ISTJ and says life is too short to work beyond being self-sufficient. The mulberries turn out to come from Kim Yeong-song, who shares his surplus with everyone.

A barbecue marks Hae-in's discharge, on the theory that wise people eat meat in hard times. Beom-jun takes the tongs to grill for his family from now on, and soon the meat is burned. Hae-in explains her white blood cell count must reach 4,000 to 10,000 per microliter for the German treatment; it was 1,500 in Germany and is about 3,000 now.

Hyun-woo dries Hae-in's hair with a broken dryer. That is all she wants, she says. Then she tells him that yesterday she could not recognize Soo-cheol for a few seconds, forgot her doctor's name and got lost on the way to her room. She was warned of memory loss, then sensory loss, then speech, and it is coming in that order. She does not want him beside her when it happens. Hyun-woo protests that they should be happy with where they are, and she answers that when it gets worse, she wants him to leave her.

Soo-cheol asks a man he calls Master to teach him to box, since he could not land a punch on Eun-sung and fears failing his family. The lesson covers one punch on someone stronger and two skills: overplay the pain of weak hits so the opponent drops his guard, and endure until the moment comes. Master quotes Muhammad Ali, then tells Soo-cheol to take his blows and become a champion in life.

Undercover at the warehouse

Grace arrives where the Hongs are staying, invited. The family learns the fund is in Korea: laundered through Hong Kong and lent to five Korean investment firms that never repay, whose ownership passed to Seul-hee before Man-dae collapsed. Seul-hee is still hunting it, as a recording of her questioning him shows. Grace, who claims to have defected like Lee Woong-pyung, brings a tip: a 5,000-pyeong warehouse on the edge of Gyeonggi Province is leased by Director Jin of Queens Gallery.

The group goes in disguise, with Grace posing as their real estate agent. She introduces a golf-equipment importer from China who understands Korean but cannot speak it and a clothes seller from Dongdaemun, and freely mistranslates his scraps of Chinese, subtitled as orders to hold the coriander, to suit the plan. The staff say past tenants stored artwork by rookies whose prices then jumped 20 to 30 times. The art is badly kept and not much good. Someone's theory: the chairman paid ten to twenty times its value and took 90 percent or more back in cash. In the office, there is too much data to decrypt in time, and they have to go.

In the rain, Hyun-woo tells Hae-in to wait and goes for the car. When a car pulls up, she is surprised he was so quick. She felt dizzy, she says, and asks if she was out long. The driver says no, then tells her to hold on; she asks if they are being tailed again, and he says he can lose him. After the chase, she wants to call the police, since three men attacked him last time. Then Hyun-woo's voice shouts her name, and Hae-in sees the man at the wheel is Eun-sung.

In a coda, comments fed by Eun-sung's embezzlement rumors call Hyun-woo a scammer who married her for money. He shrugs it off, but when one calls Hae-in easy, he wants screenshots and lawsuits, no settlements.

Thoughts

The hospital half is the strongest the show has been with the Hong parents. Seon-hwa finally saying out loud that she never held her daughter, and Hae-in asking whether her mother is a doctor now before conceding she was no easy child either, feel earned after ten episodes of frost. Beom-jun's kal-guksu meal is the quiet counterweight: a man who let his father be the pillar is told he is a lighthouse anyway, and a few scenes later he is burning the meat at the grill, which is about right for a first shift.

The romance now runs on two promises that cannot both be kept. Hyun-woo tells Eun-sung he will stay forever, and soon after Hae-in asks him to leave once her memory, senses and speech start to go in the order her doctor warned. Her dizzy spell in the rain, and her climb into the wrong car, look like that order arriving early. Meanwhile Grace tells Seul-hee she sides with money and power and tells the Hongs she has defected, and I believe her first statement more than the second. With Eun-sung ordering Hyun-woo dealt with and now alone in a car with Hae-in, the warehouse data had better decrypt fast.

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