Queen of Tears Episode 4 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
Kim Kap-soo as Hong Man-dae
Lee Mi-sook as Moh Seul-hee
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
Hwang Young-hee as Jeon Bong-ae
Jang Yoon-ju as Baek Mi-seon

Episode 3's final minutes come back first. Hong Hae-in's phone is found in a jacket and buzzes, and Baek Hyun-woo asks her to wait. Once their kiss is over, he covers by saying how lucky it is that the phone is there.

Back in the hallway, the two trade a stiff goodnight. Hae-in reads his question about whether she will stay up as a hint that he wants to come in. He is really waiting for her phone to charge. While she showers, he slips into her room and runs through passcodes: the date she was born, the date Queens listed its shares, his own birthday, their anniversary, the One Trillion Won Club. The phone locks him out; after a restart, one last code he can hardly believe she would use works. He deletes one of nine unread messages just as she walks in.

He claims he cannot sleep, she decides she must be the reason, and he talks himself in circles before backing out of the room. She concludes that he cares; he concludes that it was a close call. Alone, he keeps turning the passcode over, and the cut takes him to a doctor's office. A doctor congratulates Hyun-woo on a four-week pregnancy, with a due date of October 31, which Hyun-woo calls a good day. Someone orders eco-friendly materials for a nursery. The sequence ties the passcode to that date and says nothing more.

The Baeks take stock

In Yongdu-ri, Hyun-woo's siblings Baek Mi-seon and Baek Hyeon-tae are in trouble for their trip to Seoul. They report that Hae-in had no idea anything was wrong, that the divorce was Hyun-woo's idea, and that she has promised to visit. Mi-seon shows her father, Baek Du-gwan, that she and Hae-in are now friends on KakaoTalk. Their mother, Jeon Bong-ae, cannot see how a son floating divorce while his wife knows nothing counts as fine.

A flashback returns to the wedding photos, where Bong-ae tries to make peace with Hae-in's mother, Kim Seon-hwa. Bong-ae admits her own family once thought Hae-in, an intern about to lose her job, was not good enough for their son. Seon-hwa answers that Hyun-woo is anything but ordinary: calculating, and smart enough to cling to a marriage like this one. When Bong-ae proposes the mothers help the couple along, Seon-hwa says they married on their own and can be happy on their own.

Hyun-woo insists he is not jealous

Yoon Eun-sung fusses over Hae-in's hangover and leans in to pick lint off her. As Hae-in laughs, Hyun-woo's heartbeat pounds on the soundtrack and he writes it off as fear. Later, Hae-in models a 1982 vintage Hercyna piece for that night's meeting with Chairman Hermann. Hyun-woo allows that it looks nice, then panics privately that he finds her pretty. When she compliments his suit, he catches himself humming.

Seeing her smile at work throws him. His lawyer friend Kim Yang-gi calls this dangerous territory, like co-stars who fall for each other, and asks about the sneakers. In flashback, Hae-in charges up an escalator in towering heels while Hyun-woo yells at her to be careful, and he buys her sneakers in size 240. He tells Yang-gi it is strategy: she has not changed her will yet, so a fall is the last thing he needs.

The gift lands badly. She owns a closet of shoes she can buy at full price. He says her heels are as thin as pencils, and she tells him to leave the sneakers there. The punchline is that she wore them.

A colleague Hyun-woo calls Mr. Kim notes that Eun-sung has been at the store daily, eating and walking with Hae-in, who introduces him to her secretary, Na Chae-yeon. What really bothers Hyun-woo is that Eun-sung touched her hair, the thing she hates most, and she laughed. Over lunch a friend calls him jealous. Hyun-woo swears he does not like Hong Hae-in at all, while grilling his salad for five straight minutes.

At the Hercyna meeting, Hermann opens by calling a split-level store non-negotiable. Eun-sung has briefed Hae-in that Hermann is seeing Sara Lopez, a European designer opening at Queens, behind the back of a sharp-tempered attorney wife. So Hae-in notes that Sara's store sits right above Hercyna's and that a duplex would squeeze it out. Would Hermann, she asks, like to raise that with Sara himself? He sighs. Afterwards she tells Eun-sung that Kim Ye-na was right, he has changed since college, and she owes him one.

Hyun-woo buys peanut cakes, double-bagged to stay warm, and his companion calls it love. Then Hae-in texts that she has happy news, and the guess on the street is that she has rewritten her will to make him her sole heir. At home, she hands him an envelope instead: an email from a leading European cancer center and a paper on a clinical trial that puts her odds at about 51 percent. She thanks her husband and the universe. He beams along with her, then, in his head, screams.

He imagines success: fifty more years of in-law demands, Hae-in snapping at him, creaking bones. In the fantasy he hands her a divorce agreement, and she cocks a gun and fires. "Which is worse? My imagination or reality?" he wonders.

A Sunday visitor

Hong Beom-ja corners her father, Hong Man-dae, after his workout with Moh Seul-hee. She reminds him she was once his Fortune Cookie and asks for dinner on her birthday in two days. He tells her to get off him.

On a weekend morning, Eun-sung arrives at the Hong house to go over Hercyna's proposal with Hae-in, and Hyun-woo is told it is CEOs only for now. When Hae-in stops Hyun-woo from drinking coffee on an empty stomach, he gloats about how she looks after him. Eun-sung counters that she has phoned him for help since college. Now she wants a year-long negotiation done in two weeks, so he will be at her side almost constantly. Hyun-woo then asks Hae-in why she lets Eun-sung touch her hair when she once asked Hyun-woo if he wanted to die for doing it. He wants her to be consistent, hairdresser excepted. She walks off without a word.

Through a window, he watches them laugh until Eun-sung lowers the blinds. He hovers until Hae-in tells him to relax, since it is Sunday. Then Hong Soo-cheol bursts in calling for his hyung, and he means Eun-sung. Eun-sung already feels more like a big brother than Hyun-woo has in three years, Soo-cheol says. Hyun-woo leaves.

Yang-gi sees Eun-sung as Hyun-woo's way out, with alimony if Hae-in lives and ends up with him. Hyun-woo refuses, because something about the man feels off. Soo-cheol, meanwhile, pitches Eun-sung a resort bigger than the Everland and Souland theme parks combined, with a deputy minister in his pocket for the permit. Eun-sung promises to look at the plans.

Plots and old wounds

Grace Ko feeds Seon-hwa a flattering résumé for Eun-sung, a protégé of hedge fund legend Robert Bailey. Grace suggests he is keeping clear of Soo-cheol's resort because of Hae-in. The Hercyna store, she says, could carry Hae-in to a trillion won in sales and the succession the chairman promised. Now, Grace says, Eun-sung dines with Chairman Yeom's grandson. Somewhere else, a voice brags that the stars are scripture to a certain woman, and that a gullible family has paid for fifteen good years. The room laughs.

Seon-hwa storms in on Hae-in, threatening to revive her lawsuit and close the Gwanggyo branch before it opens. She accuses Hae-in of turning Eun-sung against Soo-cheol, calls her rotten and selfish, and starts to bring up Hae-in's older brother. Hae-in, short of breath, asks whether her mother really believes that. Hyun-woo steps in, says Hae-in has been unwell since morning, and ushers his mother-in-law out.

Alone with her, he argues they must tell her family, and calls her silence selfish, a way to protect her stock. She answers that her parents have already lost one child, and she will not frighten them or become a worse monster than she already is. She asks him to stop treating her like a patient and to leave.

Elsewhere, Eun-sung and Grace plot with a man called Director Jo in a room overlooking Queens Tower. One of them has bought 14.7 percent of the stock under three names. Director Jo explains the bait: a blind fund whose last round returned almost 90 percent, open only to those who pledge their Queens stock. For Chairman Hong, the plan is a criminal investigation. They have found Song Jeong-beom, the accounting team leader who runs the chairman's slush fund and skims from it, and the evidence is headed to prosecutors.

Man-dae berates his staff over font sizes while Director Jo works the phones: a 20 billion won minimum, Queens stock accepted as collateral. Three callers sign up on the spot.

Beom-ja's birthday dinner turns out to be an ambush. Her brother, Hong Beom-seok, is waiting. Man-dae reminds Beom-seok that he sold his father out to prosecutors and plotted with the directors while Man-dae sat in detention. Beom-seok says he panicked when told his father meant to pin the embezzlement on him. Twenty years have passed, but Man-dae bans his son even from his funeral. Later, over a soup like his mother's, he tells Seul-hee that after sixty years of building, starting from shining shoes in Myeong-dong, he still feels alone.

At the Queens cosmetics counter, a customer turns violent when clerk Kim Min-ji refuses a refund on a product used for nearly eight months. His partner films it all. Hae-in steps in, announces she is the CEO, and tells Min-ji to call security on criminals. When the couple threaten to sue, she does not blink: "My husband just happens to be a very good attorney." She lists the charges, shoppers offer their footage, and guards take the couple away to cheers.

Hae-in comes to Yongdu-ri

Du-gwan, the village foreman, learns that his rival Park Seok-hun, head of the Youth Association, is selling the Yongdu Apple over Du-gwan's beloved pears. Worse, Seok-hun's mother has put her pork gukbap on a half-price lunch special and drawn the whole town. A man in Du-gwan's camp photographs the diners for an election complaint and catches Hyeon-tae inside, ordering more boiled pork. Du-gwan explodes at his son. Mi-seon, whose hair salon starts most village rumors, plans to remind everyone that Seok-hun once stole jjondeugi from the family store.

At the debate in the Yongdu-ri Community Hall, Seok-hun promises young energy to chants of his name. Someone in the hall asks why Hae-in's store does not even stock Yongdu pears, and Du-gwan says his daughter-in-law keeps business and family apart. Villagers retort that nobody has seen her since a helicopter visit before the wedding. Then the ground rumbles.

A convoy rolls up, and Hae-in steps out to greet the stunned crowd as family. She says she missed a birthday, so she is treating the village to a meal, and introduces herself as the foreman's daughter-in-law. Mi-seon confesses she messaged Hae-in asking for an endorsement to save her father's reelection. Hae-in hands out gifts, calling them nothing much. The hall chants Du-gwan's name, Hyeon-tae chants Hae-in's, and everyone agrees the village fruit is pears.

Hyun-woo, meanwhile, returns his mother's call. Bong-ae asks whether the couple fought, since he clearly has no idea where his wife is. Hae-in, she tells him, is in Yongdu-ri.

At the Baek family house, Hae-in listens to Younha's Waiting on earphones. A boy challenges her as an intruder and quizzes her on the family dog's name, a trick, since there is no dog. He is Baek Ho-yeol, Hyun-woo's nephew, and he falls instantly for her car. She has her driver, Mr. Oh, take him around the neighborhood several times. Once she is alone, something clatters, and her gasps turn to sobs.

At the village hall, Hyun-woo gets a hero's welcome for the senior center's air-conditioning and a fixed furnace, and Du-gwan hails him as the pride of Yongdu-ri. Du-gwan promises he has not breathed a word about divorce to Hae-in, while saying it aloud. Then Hyeon-tae reports that Hae-in is not at the house, and Mr. Oh says she was gone when he came back. Hyun-woo calls and calls, then runs through the fields shouting her name as night falls.

When he finds her, he yells. She says she went for a walk and reminds him not to treat her like a patient, and he apologizes. Then she admits the truth. She was standing at the gate, and the next thing she knew she was somewhere she did not recognize, with no idea how she got there. "I was so scared," she tells him.

Epilogue: a Seoul high school

A banner hails Hanil Foreign Language High School as an outstanding school of 2006. Du-gwan drops off a teenage Hyun-woo and coaches him not to let Seoul kids push him around. Inside, a teacher announces that Hae-in is leaving to study in the United States. Classmates whisper that she is really bound for a mental hospital since her older brother died. Later, a boy holds something out to her and tells her to wash it once she gets home; she insists she is not crying. A sigh from Hyun-woo, a car door, and someone murmurs that she is a poor kid.

Thoughts

Hyun-woo in denial is the engine of this hour, and Kim Soo-hyun plays every stage of it: the humming, the salad left to char on the grill, the staring match with a set of window blinds. The will is still his official excuse, but the excuse keeps getting thinner. My favorite beat is the 51 percent news. He grins for her, screams inwardly, and then imagines fifty years of in-law dinners so vividly that a gunshot from his wife feels like the gentler option. It is a mean joke, and the show knows it, which is why the night search at the end lands so hard.

The quieter material is what stays with me. A passcode that may be a due date says a lot about what this marriage has been through, and nothing in this hour explains why there is no child in the house now. Hae-in's reason for hiding her illness also turns out to be her parents, not her shares. Her mother's half-finished line about an older brother and the epilogue's schoolyard gossip point at the same old wound. I want the show to slow down and open that door.

On the scheming side, the trap is now spelled out: tempt the directors close to Chairman Hong into pledging their stock, then feed his slush fund to prosecutors. Man-dae just shut out the son who once betrayed him, while Grace raises a glass to his downfall. The irony is heavy, but it works. Hae-in's lapse in a village she barely knows raises the stakes. Keeping her diagnosis secret from the Hongs gets harder now that she cannot keep track of where she is.

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