Queen of Tears Episode 8 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
Jeon Bae-soo as Baek Du-gwan
Hwang Young-hee as Jeon Bong-ae
Jang Yoon-ju as Baek Mi-seon
Song Joong-ki as Vincenzo Cassano (special appearance)

A card sets the first scene four years in the past. Baek Hyun-woo and Hong Hae-in are on a date at a supposedly popular spot that is oddly empty, and a second card notes it has been rented for the day. When the music turns too romantic, someone demands a new song. Hyun-woo, still calling her Ms. Hong, marvels that the universe seems to be on their side. His evidence: a famous restaurant with no other diners, and an amusement park with nobody in it. Riding that thought, one of them proposes.

Back in the present, the hour replays the rainy close of episode 7, where Hae-in, with no memory of Germany, tells Hyun-woo she loves him. Then it keeps going. Hyun-woo tells her the truth: they already went to Germany, and she was not ready for the treatment. She is stunned, and afraid of losing every memory she has. He adds that he planned to divorce her without warning, and that she found out in Germany.

She refuses to believe it, so he pushes. He would be grateful for a divorce without a lawsuit, he says. Living with her was unbearable, and news of her dying came as a relief, since three more months would buy a clean split.

Hae-in cuts him off. She remembers now, she says, how much he despises her. She was miserable too, and she will not spend what life she has left beside him. "I want a divorce."

Vincenzo takes the case

The divorce is mutual and Hyun-woo has waived alimony, so someone on his side wonders why they need a meeting at all. The rumors about Hae-in's lawyer pile up, from youngest heir of a conglomerate to werewolf. His name is Vincenzo Cassano, and supposedly he is real mafia, a consigliere. What follows plays as broad comedy. Someone begs Hae-in for mercy, Vincenzo tells Hyun-woo that deceiving his client calls for payback, and Hyun-woo promptly blames his friend Kim Yang-gi for the whole idea.

Once business starts, Vincenzo says he is not there to negotiate and objects to the grounds on the papers, irreconcilable differences. His client is rich and beautiful, a CEO the tabloids call haughty, he argues, so divorcing a mere director over personality would make everyone blame her. He floats stock phrases, from busy schedules to staying friends to wishing each other well, and each draws an objection. Finally, one of them says to write anything, since it will not be the real reason anyway.

Two bowls of rice soup

On the subway, someone explains a habit for bad days with nobody to vent to. Ride Line Two, the loop around Seoul, and watch people until sundown, when the sunset between Dangsan and Hapjeong stations makes you want to go home. Then Hae-in asks her driver to make a stop, and an evening of watching Hyun-woo begins: rice soup, baseball, a car wash, laps, rice soup again. She notes that couples work out in pairs while he runs alone.

At a restaurant called Grandma's Home Cooking, Yang-gi tells Hyun-woo to enjoy the perks of divorce. He can eat food his wife hated and stop rushing off when the chairman calls. Hyun-woo says that was the life he wanted. He just wanted to be at Hae-in's side.

Elsewhere, someone tells a man addressed as sir that the pills he asked about treat malignant tumors. In a scene from the past, marked by a card for Evergreen Hope Orphanage, a man screams about his expensive dog. Voices call for Ms. Hong and for Hae-in, she calls for her grandpa, Hong Man-dae, and the man turns apologetic once he learns she is the chairman's granddaughter.

Later, a man scolds Hae-in's driver, Mr. Oh, for losing track of her. She got out near an elementary school, and lately she goes places alone. When Hae-in arrives by taxi, Yoon Eun-sung is waiting. She will not fire Mr. Baek if he wants to stay, she says, since the company needs him. Eun-sung says he is the one Queens needs, and the one she needs.

She turns down Hercyna, because Mr. Hermann chose her store for Eun-sung's sake, not hers. She did not divorce Hyun-woo to give Eun-sung a chance, she says. She married Hyun-woo because he promised to stay by her side, and let him go because she felt bad for all he went through. Eun-sung asks whether she would say that after losing everything.

The resort deal sours

Hae-in's mother, Kim Seon-hwa, wants Hyun-woo fired. Her son, Hong Soo-cheol, warns that nobody outsmarts Hyun-woo, who walked away without money but might use his brains to claim alimony if provoked. In Yongdu-ri, Hyun-woo's mother, Jeon Bong-ae, asks at her daughter Baek Mi-seon's salon for a hairdo fit for a politician's public apology.

In Seoul, she apologizes to Seon-hwa, who suspects an alimony scheme and says Hyun-woo bugged the chairman's room. Told he denied it, Bong-ae says that settles it. When Seon-hwa says some people should never marry, Bong-ae answers that happy memories are few and she hopes the couple keep theirs. Seon-hwa asks her to make Hyun-woo quit.

Someone else studies the buyers of a Ronde de Frédic anniversary watch. The only Korean buyer, someone suggests, is the chairman's mistress, who bought it in Manhattan six years ago. It is a men's watch.

On the road, Hyun-woo nearly collides with Eun-sung; he saw Eun-sung tailing Hae-in, so he tailed him. A call log naming Yoon Eun-sung surfaces, and someone confesses to reporting to him and, at his request, having the pills checked through a friend at a drug company. Eun-sung asks why Hyun-woo follows a woman who is no longer his wife. Hyun-woo says he will shadow Eun-sung as long as Eun-sung shadows her, and repay any harm. Eun-sung says she will choose him anyway. A snippet replays from episode 3, Eun-sung telling Man-dae at the hunting lodge that he was adopted and has no family left.

At Soo-cheol's office, Eun-sung brings bad news. A military base near the resort site will not relocate after all. Soo-cheol dodges a call from his grandfather, then runs to Hyun-woo, gushing that divorce papers in a safe are no worse than a resignation letter kept ready. Hyun-woo reminds him he told him to test the deal first. Soo-cheol begs for help, noting that Mr. Yoon never served while Hyun-woo was a marine.

The news reports that the resort's hotel is capped at 39 floors instead of 90. Man-dae tells his son, Hong Beom-jun, that Soo-cheol is as foolish as he is. Then Soo-cheol strides in with a fix: the aging radar is due for repairs this summer, so raise it on a concrete structure and the hotel can rise. He insists the idea was his and Hyun-woo only wrote it down.

The investors pull out anyway. Their legal advisor told them the chairman's financial manager was taken in for questioning, and the room guesses Apollon. Pione Investment then offers to be the sole investor, with a card announcing 900 billion won, and the offer is met with gushing.

Hyun-woo interrupts the signing. If the owner's risk becomes a problem, he warns, the convertible rights hand 6.7 percent of Man-dae's shares to Mr. Yoon. The investor says he will walk if the deal falls through. Someone relays a shaman's advice to the chairman: take the money and ignore whoever objects.

Man-dae tells Hyun-woo he gives people three chances. Betraying his granddaughter, bugging his room and sabotaging this deal make three. Get out.

His ID card stops working, and security orders him to hand over his ID, phone and laptop and leave. He protests that it is past working hours; the guards cite the chairman's orders, until Hae-in has them sent home. Hae-in tells him to at least bargain. He says he cannot be fired as a team manager without cause, and the Audit Team found none. Asked why he stays to be humiliated, he says he still wants to be there.

Beom-ja's file on Seul-hee

Hong Beom-ja orders Hyun-woo into her car and decides his trouble must be a mistress. He says Hae-in is the only woman he has had, and he is not leaving her; he will find whoever bugged the chairman's room and leaked the recording to Apollon. Beom-ja suspects Moh Seul-hee. Seul-hee, she says, has lived under a false name for decades. She is really Oh Sun-yeong, dead on paper, with a son who is now 34.

Beom-ja's digging brings in more help. A guard from Oh Sun-yeong's prison says she gave birth inside and sent the baby to Evergreen Hope Orphanage in Gangwon Province, near the family's hunting-ground villa. Beom-ja explodes: her father and Seul-hee sponsored that orphanage until it burned ten years ago. Someone recalls a brilliant boy there on Queens scholarships, once taken to the police for poisoning a neighbor's dog. Mr. Yoon looked like him, and that boy was also adopted to the U.S.

An 80th birthday

Man-dae signs a power of attorney giving Seul-hee the right to make any medical decision for him. The reasoning offered is that prosecutors probing his secret fund might not believe she managed it otherwise. She calls it her birthday gift to him.

At the family meal, Eun-sung is seated apart from the family. The seating starts a fight over whether he could become family, and whether placing him by the newly divorced Hae-in would make her look shallow. Then Beom-ja sees Seul-hee wearing something of her mother's that she was meant to inherit.

Beom-ja accuses her father of driving off her brother Hong Beom-seok, belittling Beom-jun and keeping only a woman waiting to drain him. Man-dae says Seul-hee alone stepped up when his children feared jail. Beom-ja shouts that Seul-hee has a prison record, a child and a false name. Man-dae threatens her with an asylum, Beom-ja lashes out, and Man-dae orders her to leave. She goes, promising to at least attend his funeral.

Later, someone asks whether the hair follicles are intact and is told the hairs were pulled out with full force. Then Mr. Yoon's come up. Beom-ja tells Hyun-woo she is not okay. Her father hit her for the first time in her life.

Soo-cheol tells his wife, Cheon Da-hye, he expects the day to be the best of his life. At the party for the chairman's 80th birthday, he unveils Man-sung, an amusement-park mascot modeled on his grandfather. He promises merchandise and NFTs, until someone asks for the pitch to stop. A screen shows Da-hye's name, and a voice says the DNA results are in. Soo-cheol calls for Da-hye again and again, pleading that their son cannot sleep unless his father tucks him in. Elsewhere, someone coaxes Hong Geon-u to eat, and Da-hye tells him Mommy is here.

Queens changes hands

Man-dae is playing janggi with Seul-hee when Hyun-woo calls. A DNA test puts the chance that Seul-hee and Eun-sung are related at 99 percent or higher. Mr. Yoon has already taken 9.6 percent of the directors' shares. Hyun-woo urges him to withdraw the convertible rights. Man-dae says he will call back, and then something is badly wrong with him.

Seul-hee explains the drug: slow paralysis. She needs him in a coma for two or three months before he dies, since only then can she act as his guardian. "So why did you trust me instead of them?" she asks.

At the hospital, his children are turned away; only the legal guardian decides who enters. Attorney Han explains that a heart attack has left the chairman unconscious, and that the power of attorney makes Moh Seul-hee his guardian. A warning about forgery charges follows, and a video of the signing is promised. Beom-ja accuses Seul-hee of scheming with her son, Yoon Eun-sung. Seul-hee admits he is her son and threatens to move Man-dae where Beom-ja cannot say goodbye.

A news report lays out the rest. After the heart attack, Pione exercised the convertible rights, reached 31 percent and became the second-largest shareholder. At a stockholders' meeting, Seul-hee used the power of attorney to side with Pione, and 68.8 percent voted to remove the family. Nobody knows where the Hongs are.

At the Yongdu-ri Supermarket that night, villagers have let themselves in to run the shop and settle their tabs. Over ramyeon and soju, one tells Baek Du-gwan that typhoons make crops root deeper. Du-gwan says his heart breaks for his son, alone in this disaster. Then Hyun-woo turns up, saying it was urgent. When Mi-seon tells him to forget the sly fox, he says the sly fox is here too, and she is not the only one.

The hour returns to Grandma's Home Cooking and replays Hyun-woo saying he just wanted to be at Hae-in's side. Later, a woman there is crying, and someone at the restaurant asks why. Her husband wants to be by her side, Hae-in says, and hearing that makes her want to live. She wants to stay beside him. Told she is drunk, she repeats it: "I want to live."

Thoughts

Hyun-woo's opening move is cruel and calculated, and it works too well. He seems to hand Hae-in the worst version of himself so she will fight, and she takes the bait so completely that the divorce follows within minutes. Watching him then refuse to leave the company and run laps alone is the episode's real argument. He has nothing left to gain from staying, so staying can only mean one thing. Vincenzo's cameo is pure dessert, and the stock-phrase haggling is the sharpest joke the show has made about how couples announce a split.

The Seul-hee material is the opposite: a slow trap that snaps shut. The power of attorney looks like a gift, the drug arrives with a timetable, and her line about trust lands because Man-dae was warned twice in one day. Beom-ja deserves better than the blow and the exile she got for being right. I am also curious about the orphanage scene. It has an angry man and a dog in it, the boy remembered at Beom-ja's meeting had a dog story of his own, and Hae-in was at Evergreen Hope too. I suspect she and that boy crossed paths long before the Hercyna deal.

The last scene reframes everything. Hae-in heard him, and the reason she gives for wanting to live is him. With the Hongs out of sight and Hyun-woo turning up in Yongdu-ri with company, I want to see whether she can admit to his face what she told a stranger.

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