Queen of Tears Episode 2 Recap

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

First comes a replay of episode 1's final scene: Baek Hyun-woo's fumbled apology to Hong Hae-in, his staged shock at her three-month news and his declaration of love. The first new moment is Hae-in's answer. She suggests they die together, the way a lord's wife was once buried alive with him, and Hyun-woo scrambles to call his words a question. Finally he asks what the doctor actually said.

Three months

In flashback, Hae-in asks a doctor to email her test results, and the episode 1 moment replays from her side as Hyun-woo refuses to go anywhere with her. So she goes to Sungmin University Medical Center without him. Mid-consultation, she realizes she has no memory of getting from the lobby to Dr. Park Jin-kook's office. She admits to headaches and to losing stretches of time, half an hour or sometimes hours. A glimpse of a meeting shows a staffer reminding her that she cleared her day to meet Director Baek.

The diagnosis is a cloud cell tumor, so rare that she is basically the first case found in Korea. The cells are scattered between the cranial nerves like a cloud, worst in the temporal lobe, which the doctor links to her memory gaps. Hallucinations or personality disorders may follow. Medication will not cure it and surgery is too risky. Hae-in offers to fund his children's hospital if he will just name a treatment. When he cannot, she makes him say it: three months.

Back in the present, Hae-in rejects the verdict. She has never had a soda, she meditates and does yoga, so why her? Hyun-woo proposes a second opinion, then slips and says they must make sure she is really dying. He quickly adds that he would hate that, naturally.

The next morning, Hyun-woo wakes up glowing and hums through his workout. Then he scolds himself: in three months he will be a widower, not a divorcé, so he had better learn to frown. Hae-in, who barely slept, remarks that his skin looks well rested. He denies it.

Hae-in insists the diagnosis stays secret, above all from her family. Her grandfather has promised that if the department store passes a trillion won in sales, he will skip her father and hand the business to her. If her family knew, she says, they would push her out and fight over what she built.

A family at war with itself

Hong Soo-cheol frets to his wife, Cheon Da-hye, about an early summons from his grandfather, expecting trouble over a lost coffee deal. Chairman Hong Man-dae is angry about something else. Soo-cheol's company overpaid its taxes by eight billion won, and Hyun-woo's legal department caught it. Man-dae fires the finance director, Da-hye's cousin, asks why Soo-cheol cannot be more like his sister, and yells at him to speak until Soo-cheol cannot breathe and collapses. Afterwards his mother, Kim Seon-hwa, wants to know where Hyun-woo is.

At the hospital, Dr. Park confirms the result. Hyun-woo demands statistics. When Hae-in walks out, he stays to beg for accuracy: "My life literally depends on it."

Seon-hwa turns up at Hae-in's office, convinced that Hae-in had Hyun-woo report Soo-cheol to the chairman. Twice Hae-in tries to tell her that she has big news of her own. Her mother answers that someone so capable can handle it alone. Hae-in vows to keep giving her brother trouble until the day she dies.

At a restaurant, Hyun-woo's friend Kim Yang-gi, a divorce lawyer, announces he will take on Queens after all. Hyun-woo stops him: there is no divorce, because the marriage will end on its own. In a car at Jamwon Hangang Park, after warning Yang-gi that nobody else knows, Hyun-woo tells him everything.

Hyun-woo explains there is no inheritance either: before the wedding, Hae-in notarized a will leaving him nothing if she dies, and he is just glad to get out cleanly. Yang-gi reads it differently. Three months is enough time to revise a will, so Hyun-woo should love her with all his might until she wants to leave him her share of Queens Department Store. Hyun-woo asks whether his friend really thinks he is that materialistic.

On their anniversary, Hyun-woo turns up with flowers, admitting that not every year has been good but saying today can be. Grace Ko hears from a household staffer that Hyun-woo has been looking after Hae-in lately. At a dining table for twelve, Hyun-woo moves to Hae-in's side and cracks shrimp for her.

In a meeting with Vice-Chairman Hong Beom-jun, Hyun-woo flags harmful clauses in a contract to bring in a major brand. When Hae-in coughs, he calls for an ambulance; she has only choked on water. Soo-cheol notes that his sister would have exploded if Hyun-woo had ignored the cough. Outside, Hyun-woo warms her cold hands and asks Secretary Na Chae-yeon about the car. Once inside it, Hae-in tells him he is overdoing it.

In Yongdu-ri, Hyun-woo's home village, customers at Baek Mi-seon's Queen's Hair Salon gossip about a local divorce, and one declares that people from different backgrounds never last. Another asks why the Hongs skipped Mi-seon's father's 60th birthday, and Mi-seon defends her sister-in-law with clenched fists. Over noodles at home, Baek Du-gwan says he raised Hyun-woo too soft. When Mi-seon asks her mother to do something before he ends up divorced, Jeon Bong-ae says that would not be the worst thing; it beats dying.

In Seoul, the Hongs sit down to a family dinner planned from everyone's blood tests. Seon-hwa announces that she is suing, because the department store's new Gwanggyo branch was built over a sliver of her land. She agreed to it before construction, but says her attorney now warns of gift tax trouble. Hyun-woo is told to find a solution with Hae-in, and when Hae-in accuses her mother of extortion, he cuts in. Scolded for interrupting, he calmly lays out the legal response and the risk to the share price. Then he takes Hae-in home.

Afterwards, he warns her that outbursts will make her family suspicious. She turns it around. He interrupted her mother and took her side, so he is the suspicious one, and since when does he peel her shrimp?

Hyun-woo tells Yang-gi it is hopeless. Yang-gi recalls Hae-in flying to him by helicopter three years ago and says the heart, like a swimmer's muscles, remembers. Still, as a divorce lawyer, he calls marriage a monopoly that kills love.

Beom-ja comes home

To the Wedding March, Hong Beom-ja walks into a wedding. The groom had promised to leave the country for good, she reminds him, yet having heard she went to jail, he is back in Korea marrying his mistress. She announces she is free and lunges at the couple, with a tiger's roar on the soundtrack.

Afterwards Hyun-woo points out blood on her cheek, which is not hers. He reminds her she is on probation and says he has settled with the couple's lawyers using her money. Beom-ja says her husbands find solace in other women and she finds it in cigarettes. In prison she thought only of getting out, but nothing waits for her outside. Hyun-woo sends her home to her father.

Man-dae finds her refusing to eat. She accuses him of putting her in jail; he says she assaulted an innocent woman, his partner, who ended up with a slipped disc. Beom-ja blames that woman for her mother's death. Man-dae insists they are in love and that the woman wants none of his money, and Beom-ja asks what else an old man has to offer. He shouts at her to stop.

Man-dae plays janggi with his partner, Moh Seul-hee. In this board game, each side guards a general inside palace walls. As they play, the two trade advice about running from danger and charging a tiger with a stone. The game ends with one general trapped, and the winner claims a wish, to be named later.

That night, a shooting star prompts Beom-jun to remind his wife that one was Hae-in's conception dream. Seon-hwa claims not to remember. When he asks how long she will let the past stand between her and their daughter, she says he talked like that back then too. His father said to cover it up, and he went along. She still cannot understand why their son Hong Su-wan died. Beom-jun calls it an accident, but she says she relives that day constantly and will not change.

A miracle and a misunderstanding

Waiting up for Hae-in, Hyun-woo wonders whether she is even sick. He remembers Dr. Park saying that miracles do happen, searches online, and finds story after story of patients given three months who are still alive 30 years later. He decides a three-month prognosis means nothing and that soap operas lied to him, then dozes off.

Hae-in finds him asleep amid the search results. She confesses she assumed he was secretly delighted and that his kindness hid an agenda; now she sees she was wrong. She had felt like giving up, she says, but knowing someone is rooting for her cheers her up. She plans to fund overseas labs working on her illness and promises to hold on for his sake. He manages to say that this cheers him up too.

Da-hye stops Soo-cheol from posting a photo of her, since his parents dislike her being in the press. She passes along a peace offering from her cousin Jun-ho: an introduction to David Yoon, a Korean American investor who controls access to Middle Eastern oil money. He is the man behind Hercyna's first Asian flagship in Seoul, and Hercyna is the brand Hae-in wants.

The Hercyna party

At a party hosted by Hercyna's Chairman Hermann, Kim Ye-na of the rival store Royal trades barbs with Hae-in about the Hercyna flagship. Hermann, she explains, judges partners by how well they get along with their spouses, and Hae-in is the only guest who came alone. Hae-in calls Hyun-woo, who says he has a trial and hangs up. Ye-na calls it a convenient excuse and repeats the rumor that he married her for money.

Then Ye-na reveals that the man to see is Yoon Eun-sung, their college acquaintance and now Hermann's right hand. Eun-sung reminds Hae-in that the last thing she told him was not to contact her; she admits she said it because he kept crossing the line. She asks for his help with Hermann, and they agree to call their past a happy ending.

Hyun-woo walks in, having won his trial as fast as he could, and Hermann calls him handsome. At the bar, Hae-in turns Ye-na's lecture about couples facing the same direction back on her: "I prefer it when we face each other." Ye-na's husband appears with food on his face, and she shoos him away.

Eun-sung tells Hyun-woo that Hae-in was special to him, then needles him: if that does not faze him, either he trusts her completely or he does not care. He claims he is joking. Alone at a sink, Hyun-woo fumes: "You should have married her and saved my life."

Grace tells Seon-hwa that Eun-sung links Wall Street to Middle Eastern oil money and that most of the guests came to meet him. Grace still regrets the match between him and Hae-in that never happened. Hae-in, overhearing, thanks Grace for crossing her off her list of marriage prospects. Seon-hwa wants Eun-sung at the family's annual hunt and offers to drop the lawsuit in return. Hae-in goes to Eun-sung, and a whispered exchange follows.

The hunt

On the mountain, a guide sets the rules: stay on your own course, and if you meet a wild boar alone, neither aim at it nor turn your back. Man-dae fires, and two relatives swear it was a direct hit. A joke that Baek has never caught a thing gets a big laugh, while Eun-sung insists he is no match for anyone here.

Hae-in urges Hyun-woo to shoot something. Hunting takes instinct and cold judgment, she says, the virtues of a CEO, and her catch each year proves to her grandfather that she has them. Elsewhere, an unidentified caller says he has put something in place on the course, right in the middle, near signs marking Queens land as wild boar habitat.

Hyun-woo calls Hae-in and cannot reach her. He runs into Eun-sung, who is off his own course. After a joke about mistaking someone for an elk, he tells Eun-sung this is not his course and that straying into another's territory can get a man killed. When Eun-sung says he will stay and learn from him, Hyun-woo gives him a first lesson: on someone else's ground, you do nothing.

Alone and breathing hard, Hae-in tells herself that what she sees is not real. A boar growls while her confession and Hyun-woo's declaration of love echo in her head. The boar charges. A shot rings out, the animal shrieks, and Hyun-woo asks if she is all right.

In a flashback from before the wedding, Hyun-woo tells his family he wants to marry Hae-in, then an intern about to lose her internship. He says he worries about her constantly, from the holes in her clothes to whether she is kicking a photocopier somewhere. He is so crazy about her, he says, that he could die. Bong-ae tells him to marry her, since that beats dying. Hyun-woo vows to protect Hae-in for the rest of his life.

Thoughts

The show's best joke this week is structural. Hyun-woo's mother says the same thing twice, years apart: marry her, it beats dying, and now let him divorce, it beats dying. The echo makes the closing flashback land harder than any speech could. The man who swore to protect Hae-in for life spends the first morning after her news practicing a frown, and the episode never lets him off the hook. Yet Kim Soo-hyun plays the panic so well that I laughed when he told the doctor his own life depended on the numbers, and then felt bad about laughing. The misunderstanding over the miracle searches is the cruelest gag yet: Hae-in finally lowers her guard, and she does it for the wrong reason.

Eun-sung arrives the way trouble usually does in these shows, all modest smiles and pointed questions. He already knows how to get under Hyun-woo's skin, and he wanders off his course on the same day someone reports placing something in the middle of it. I want to know who made that call and what was placed. The janggi winner's open-ended wish is the other thread I am keeping an eye on. Meanwhile Hae-in, warned that hallucinations may come, is already telling herself that what she sees is not real, and her secret now rests with a husband who cannot keep a straight face.

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