When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 15 Recap

Who's in the cast:
IU as Oh Ae-sun (young)
Park Bo-gum as Yang Gwan-sik (young)
Moon So-ri as Oh Ae-sun (older)
Park Hae-joon as Yang Gwan-sik (older)
IU as Yang Geum-myeong
Kang You-seok as Yang Eun-myeong
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Jang Hye-jin as Park Yeong-ran (older)
Lee Soo-kyung as Bu Hyeon-suk
Kim Sung-ryung as Jeong Mi-in (guest)

Years before any squid restaurant, a memory returns to a first birth. A young Yang Gwan-sik is so afraid his wife will die in labor that he would rather skip having a child at all. His mother, Kwon Gye-ok, predicts he will only get worse once the baby comes. Then the girl is here. Oh Ae-sun shows him how to hold her head, and he backs away, sure he will hurt something so tiny. Reminded that he is Steelheart and that the baby will always have them, he watches her smile. Their daughter, Yang Geum-myeong, narrates that they never guessed how long she would stay in their debt.

Decades later, Geum-myeong turns down a bag of tangerines, and the refusal gives her away: fruit is the first thing people cut when money runs short. Pressed to show her new place, she admits it is a one-bedroom. She has quit her job, started a business and put up everything. Her brother, Yang Eun-myeong, is struggling too, and the narration later explains that his injured hand has frostbite. Asked about children, Geum-myeong refuses to raise kids she cannot give new clothes, shoes that fit and lessons. Ae-sun cries that their troubles never end, and those words, the narration says, push her father into the first risk of his life, one fired from a bazooka.

Gwan-sik's bazooka

In a car crossing the empty countryside of Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, Gye-ok calls her son out of his mind. Gwan-sik has sold the cabbage field and put up the family's apartment to buy a commercial unit near a promised golf course. Hong Gyeong-ja, one of the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, smells a scam. Gye-ok asks who mortgages a home for a building at 50. The answer is that if he cannot try at 50, he never will, and that they are in it together. At the site, banners promise a hospital, a clinic and a supermarket.

Inside, Gye-ok admits it broke her heart when her only son went from captain to laborer, and Ae-sun apologizes for taking him away. They remember the one time Gye-ok slapped her, the first slap of Ae-sun's life. Gye-ok made up for it, Ae-sun says, by never once blaming her when they lost Yang Dong-myeong, the little son who died in the 1978 storm. Gye-ok hands over the gold toad she says Ae-sun stole when the couple ran away, passing over her own daughter, Yang Gyeong-ok. She apologizes for being so hard on her. Then a lease card names a new tenant, Park Yeong-ran. Someone else, the narration says, is firing a bazooka too.

Yeong-ran rides away

Bu Sang-gil greets his wife, Yeong-ran, with a crack about her weight and a pair of new bicycles, since couples who do things together supposedly grow closer. She asks whether ping-pong did that for him and the woman in his mixed league. On the ride he pulls ahead, and she notes that he has never once ridden beside her. A woman runs out of a house to see him, and he sends her back inside. Afterward, he asks whether the ride was her goodbye. In 30 years, she answers, they had never gone around the neighborhood together. She is selling a tangerine field to go into real estate and no longer needs his money to eat. When he calls it a show, she tells him he knows it is not.

Memories of the Bu house flicker past, among them a card reading SANG-GIL LOVES OK and a mother telling her crying daughter that at least she gets to have a first love. Asked whether she ever loved him, Yeong-ran says it would have driven her mad. She recalls the bathhouse woman after their daughter, Bu Hyeon-suk, was born, and a clothes hanger he insists she ran into. People call her a saint, but she is not: "Not loving you was the only way I survived." What feeling remained died when he refused Hyeon-suk the money to save her husband, Eun-myeong. A card reads JEJU DISTRICT COURT.

In the car afterward, Yeong-ran asks about a shoe, and the dance-hall raid from episode 5 replays, with a woman fleeing with her child. Sang-gil recognized the shoe and never said a word. Had the dancing come out, he explains, she would have walked out on the spot. At home, his son, Bu Oh-seong, drops off instant rice that his wife guessed his father would need. A memory from episode 4 replays Ae-sun telling Sang-gil to come to his senses first, and the narration asks why anyone is surprised to reap what they have sown.

The pillar of the family

Under the sign of their new restaurant, Geumeundong, named like the old boat for the three children, Ae-sun reminds Gwan-sik that failure means losing the apartment. Still, she has not seen that look on his face in 30 years. He wanted a halfway decent life, he says, and blames himself that the children struggle. Even Sang-gil's pajamas for their grandson, Yang Che-il, beat anything he can buy. Ae-sun says she would run away with him again. Then the setback comes: the other stores never move in. Eun-myeong reports that the realtor dumped the property and ran, the golf course and the hospital are lies, and a hotel is going up on the cabbage field. He is told he has no right to shout, since nobody was consulted when his own scheme landed him in jail.

Geum-myeong arrives with cash, partly borrowed. She is the eldest, she says, the pillar they raised her to be, and she has sent 100,000 won home every month since her first job, out of guilt rather than gratitude. If she is the pillar, she asks, why send her abroad? She is sick of being the big fish from the little pond. The door opens and her father calls out her full name, "Yang Geum-myeong!" It is the first time he has raised his voice at her.

After she storms out, Ae-sun is reminded that at her daughter's age she was raising two children and mourning a third. The narration says this day is the first thing Geum-myeong will remember at her mother's funeral. Back home, the couple find a note that blames her hormones and apologizes in three languages. Geum-myeong is pregnant.

Sae-bom arrives

In a hospital, after hours of labor, Geum-myeong is refused more epidural, and the baby will not move. Asked to sign a waiver, her husband, Park Chung-seop, says to save his wife no matter what. Then he phones Ae-sun, because Geum-myeong is asking for her mom. The baby is stuck at the shoulders, and Geum-myeong nearly passes out before the baby finally cries. TV news reports that Korea has repaid its emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund, the bailout that named the IMF crisis, and Chung-seop calls their daughter, Park Sae-bom, a financial crisis baby. After 28 hours, Geum-myeong cannot believe her mother had her at 18 with no epidural. Ae-sun and Gwan-sik walk in and become her fortress again.

Chung-seop jokes to Gwan-sik that he married the princess of Tangerine Island. When he reports that the baby weighs eight pounds, he learns the question was about Geum-myeong's gestational diabetes. Gwan-sik has bought the priciest baby clothes, and his new dream, Geum-myeong hears, is to be the rich grandpa for once.

Squid is the star

Protest signs at the building curse the vanished realtor, Han Man-cheol. After another winter, Gwan-sik lays out a plan: if customers will not come, deliver. He caught squid for 30 years and will sell it fresher, cheaper and faster than anyone. The restaurant opens promising delivery within 10 minutes, and soon it is 2002. Park Ji-sung scores against Portugal on TV, and soccer nights mean deliveries. The narration casts Dad as Park Ji-sung and Mom as the coach, Guus Hiddink.

Ae-sun pitches a boat captain for an exclusive supply. When he asks why he is not dealing with Gwan-sik, he hears that the household runs on its women, and a card names her GEUMEUNDONG'S CEO, OH AE-SUN. Tourists, a film crew and Japanese fans of a star they call Byun-sama bring in business, and Gye-ok works the phone. Then Sang-gil bursts in calling for the family: Park Cheol-yong, Eun-myeong's old friend, has been arrested. Nobody would pay him 70 million won for the buncheong stoneware, a traditional Korean ceramic set, so he listed it on Joonggonara, a new secondhand site.

A woman calls the squid soup the comfort food that saved her life. She is the actress Jeong Mi-in, and she obliges with her famous movie line selling soup, then admits she does not even eat seafood. When a scandal broke, she wanted to die, so she got on a fishing boat. Gwan-sik saved her, and when all she wanted was to hide her face, he covered it with his jacket. She once came back to repay him, and he refused. Teased for telling the story a hundred times, Gwan-sik admits he is showing off: he saved a star.

A father's biggest loss

A card notes an 18 percent rise in gray divorces, and Sang-gil, living on ramyeon, is made to stay and eat at the restaurant. A card names the bride as Bu Jeong-suk, Sang-gil and Yeong-ran's other daughter. One of his children reveals that Dad got Cheol-yong caught. In flashback, Sang-gil tells the lead detective that settling would brand his innocent son-in-law a thief, and brings velvet antler as a bribe. Of chief, captain and father, he says, "being a father is the biggest loss." Later he blocks the police station with his car, demands his money or Cheol-yong, and curses his own title, Bu Sang-gil of Dodong-ri, his fishing village.

One of his children remembers sneaking home late to find him switching off the TV and pretending to sleep. That child calls him timid, afraid that everyone will leave him. Yeong-ran cannot stand seeing him, or not seeing him. Sang-gil is invited to the restaurant to help his in-laws before a TV show airs, and told it is his last chance. At the building everyone abandoned, the narration says, eight dwarves gather, and at last the dark forest rings with bells.

Thoughts

The hour is two marriages on the same island, and the contrast is the point. Gwan-sik's bazooka is a scam that strands his family in a ghost town, and yet his wife, his mother and eventually a film star line up behind him. Sang-gil does everything with money and ends up eating instant rice alone. Yeong-ran finally says the quiet part out loud, and her line about surviving by not loving him is the coldest, saddest sentence of the series. The reveal that he noticed her shoe at the dance raid and never mentioned it gives Sang-gil more decency than he has shown in 14 episodes.

Geum-myeong's guilt speech hurt to watch, because she is right and so are her parents. The single shout of her name says more than a lecture would. Then the hormones note turns the fight into comedy, and the labor scene turns it back into terror. The narration keeps reaching forward, too, to her mother's funeral, where she says this quarrel is the first thing she will remember. I am bracing for that.

The card that closed episode 14 returns at the end, the promise that she can always back down because they are always there. With the restaurant finally busy and Sang-gil now invited to join the crowd there, the family is in its best spot in years. My guess is that the TV show brings the rush Sang-gil is told to expect.

Previous: When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 14 Recap. Up next: When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 16 Recap. See every episode in the When Life Gives You Tangerines episode guide.