When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 16 Recap (Finale)

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
Lee Soo-kyung as Bu Hyeon-suk
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Lee Mi-do as Mi-suk (special appearance)
Yeom Hye-ran as Chloe H. Lee (cameo)

On Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, the bells that closed the last episode are still ringing, and now card swipes chime in. Geumeundong, the squid-soup restaurant Oh Ae-sun and her husband named for their three children, has a queue at the door and tables calling for refills. Ae-sun dances down the stairs and wonders whether this is what money feels like. The couple tally their windfalls, from World Cup deliveries to an actress who vouches for the soup, and Ae-sun wants trips to Guam and China, because Mi-suk, the real estate agent, gets to go. Their daughter's narration says the parents who once plowed rocky fields have built landmarks. A copycat place from Mi-suk, billed as the original squid restaurant, only helps, Ae-sun is told, since the genuine article sells better beside a knockoff.

In Seoul, Yang Geum-myeong is 37 and losing a battle of wills with her four-year-old, Park Sae-bom. Even a grown daughter needs her mother, the narration admits, so Ae-sun has come up to help. Geum-myeong knew a thousand of her daughter's faces, the narration says, but would one day picture her mother only through awkward photos. While Geum-myeong is out, Ae-sun asks her granddaughter to go easy on Geum-myeong, the person Ae-sun treasures most, then sings her to sleep. On Geum-myeong's day off, Ae-sun scrubs the bathroom, and her daughter grumbles instead of saying thank you.

Ae-sun's advice is practical: take the drumsticks, do what she likes, and live so she does not grow resentful, because a child reads every doubt on a parent's face. Asked about regrets, Ae-sun says she chose everything she did. She has been called an orphan, a maid and a dropout, and her finest title is mother to Geum-myeong and her brother, Yang Eun-myeong. Nobody becomes a mother overnight, she adds, when Geum-myeong confesses to yelling.

Later, Sae-bom explains her slow mornings: the longer she takes, the later her mother leaves for work. Geum-myeong hugs her and apologizes, then asks her husband, Park Chung-seop, whether they can spend Sae-bom's piano fund on her parents. He reminds her that she makes the decisions.

Two visitors at a small grave

The money buys full checkups in Seoul, though Yang Gwan-sik wants the blood test and nothing more. He is learning acoustic guitar now that they are comfortable, and the singer Kim Kwang-seok is his idol; Geum-myeong learns it is the first hobby of his life. Under sedation at the endoscopy center, he says over and over that he must not go to build the retaining wall, and calls for Yang Dong-myeong, the youngest son, lost in the storm. The narration says Ae-sun sees, for the first time, the place where he has been imprisoned. Afterward she tells Geum-myeong what he said, the conversation the show flashed forward to in episode 6. Now Ae-sun understands why the family never spoke of the boy.

The day before Dong-myeong's birthday, one parent is at his grave making car noises when the other turns up. One came a day early, expecting the other to come on the day itself; the other guessed and followed. Families gather at parents' graves, someone says, but a child's is different. His is the neatest grave of all, dotted with keepsakes and a label reading Grade 1, Yang Dong-myeong. When guilt weighs more than longing, the narration says, it never softens into a fond memory.

Afterward, the parents talk about him at last. He was an angel they got to hold for four years, and one says they would do it all again. The other has prayed daily that Dong-myeong would forget them, rather than be alone up there missing his parents. Later, someone says that introducing the kids to their Uncle Dong-myeong felt strange but happy, and that she feels a little less like a bad mom; she is told nobody is a bad person by nature.

Then a call comes, and Gwan-sik can hardly believe Geum-myeong wants him rather than her mother. The hospital wants another checkup. The heavens had been paying the family's overdue wages all at once, the narration says, and now they say sorry.

A curveball for Steelheart

Geum-myeong asks her mother not to cry in front of Dad, whatever the doctor says. The diagnosis is multiple myeloma, a blood cancer whose symptoms can pass for the rheumatoid arthritis Gwan-sik has lived with for years. It has already reached his kidneys. Nobody knew, the narration says, how fragile Steelheart, its old nickname for him, really was. Geum-myeong regrets the times he tried to talk with her and she pretended not to notice.

Twenty-four rounds of chemotherapy wear him down, and Ae-sun loses track of the seasons. Walking among flowers, Gwan-sik asks when he gets to read her poems and plans a trip to Zhangjiajie, the Chinese mountain park, for next year's autumn leaves. She has been the burden in his heart since childhood, he says, ever since she got no croaker fish at her uncle's house. She orders him to beat the illness, since a mother on her own burdens her children too, and he swears he will not leave her alone.

At a payment window, a clerk sighs at Ae-sun for bringing the wrong ticket, and Gwan-sik flares up at the staff for making her feel small. He orders Geum-myeong to come to every appointment. The outburst is put down to pain, and Geum-myeong is told it was never aimed at her: Ae-sun may be his number one, but Geum-myeong is his number zero. The narration says he could already see Ae-sun waiting there alone someday.

A private room

Geum-myeong books him a private room, for her mother's comfort, she insists. He asks her to stay the night and sends Ae-sun off to wash up. Alone with her, he tells stories she never knew: the class presidency Ae-sun lost as a girl, the innkeeper's nose she broke with a headbutt, and the day he followed her to Dong-myeong's grave, afraid she would throw herself into the sea. She was only 28. When he proposed, he promised to make her a poet, put her through college or take her across to the mainland, and feared he would keep none. Now she is writing again.

He asks Geum-myeong to look after her mother, and she refuses to hear it, begging him to raise her a little longer. Having her, he says, felt "like I caught a whale in a tiny boat." He was overwhelmed and sorry every day, but sorrier still toward her mother, who means the world to him. Geum-myeong apologizes for every phone call she hurried to end, and he says he always knew she was never really annoyed. She had a loving father, her narration says, and he did not get a loving daughter. Replayed fights show both children lashing out at him over the years, as if he were theirs to keep forever.

Gwan-sik wants to go home and see the sea. Presents wait for him there: a bike he can pedal sitting down, a Kim Kwang-seok LP and his guitar. Yang Eun-myeong sees how thin his father is and breaks down, because he promised him a Mercedes and a boat. Gwan-sik says he has watched his son all along, and he has been a good son.

A memory fills in the rest. After Dong-myeong died three days after Eun-myeong's birthday, the boy was told to live without birthdays, yet his father slipped him robot toys and sweet-and-sour pork in secret. Eun-myeong admits he knew all along and chose to remember only what suited him. To his children, the narration says, Dad was the sea.

A poem in print

There are things the children must show their father in time. Geum-myeong, CEO of the online-lecture company Ever Study, takes the stage while her parents watch. Her mother's old college-entrance workbook, she says, gave her the idea: a bookish island girl should be able to study as much as she likes. Ever Study grew out of her mother's dream, and her father gets his own mention, for the diligence she inherited from him. On the news, the Haenyeo Museum opens, and the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, cheer that their culture is alive.

Then Gwan-sik learns he has kept one of his three promises: Ae-sun's poem To the Heart That Leaves Me Behind is in print in a book, and the full poem plays over the scene. Once she believed only his hand could give her warmth; now she knows he is with her even when he is not at her side, the way the moon stays in the sky by day. If he must leave, he should go like gentle waves and be free after 50 years. He says she would have been published long ago without him; she says she could never have written it without him. She is a poet now, and someone tells the family to buy 100 copies for the fishing co-op. Ae-sun prays all night, the narration says, for time to stop.

The talk turns to five more years, then to one more round of the seasons together. Seeing her write before he goes has eased his heart, Gwan-sik says, and in the next life he will keep ten promises. Ae-sun says that thanks to him, she was never lonely for a single day. His last favor: she should not cry too much when his time comes, or he cannot leave like gentle waves. What he wants to see at the end is her smile. He asks her to pat his back, and the old lullaby from Ae-sun's childhood plays.

One of the children drives through empty roads, begging him to wait, and the narration counts it a last mercy that they all arrive in time. At his side, they tell him they are here, that they are sorry, that they love him. Husband and wife tell each other that after 50 years the other still looks the same. A boy, the narration says, spent his life keeping a girl's world safe. When the question comes of whether their time together was good, the answer is "It was more than perfect." Gazing at her, Gwan-sik sleeps in for the first time, leaving his last gifts behind.

What he left behind

Ae-sun gives Geum-myeong a bankbook her father wanted her to have. He never touched the small sums she sent him and only kept the book updated, because the thought meant so much. For himself, he kept just one section of the wardrobe. His uneven love had ended, Geum-myeong's narration says, and hers was just beginning. Eun-myeong hears that his father wanted to buy him a Mercedes, and Ae-sun finds the hairpins Gwan-sik kept buying her, the ones she lost every day.

Alone, Ae-sun asks her husband how she is supposed to go on. His words come back to her: stop making rolled omelets that will only make her cry, and move in with the kids if they ask. Then she notices he has moved everything down within her reach. Like the moon in the daytime sky, the narration says, he stays with her. Snow falls, time covers the loudest grief, and a cover letter from Geum-myeong sends out a manuscript: her parents' 70 years, a story she believes should not be forgotten.

At a nursing home, the residents call Ae-sun, now 70, Teacher. One thanks her for being able to order her own food at a restaurant, and Jeong Gong-rye, who had to dive instead of going to school, reads a poem about ordering a special sushi set. The advice from the poetry class where the series began returns: the best poem is the words kept in the heart all your life. Ae-sun's is one word, Mom. She asks her mother, gone so young, why she was in such a hurry, and hopes she was reborn to sit at a desk and live like a boss.

Spring, every day

Geum-myeong turns up out of the blue, and Ae-sun bustles about with kimchi, sour for one child and fresh for the other. When the singer Lim Young-woong comes on TV, Ae-sun explains that Gwan-sik learned guitar for this Kim Kwang-seok song but never sang it to her, in case she cried. Getting old, she tells Geum-myeong, changes nothing inside; only the mirror shows an old woman.

Eun-myeong rushes in with a parcel from Seaflower Publishers. He was sure it was a scam that would end in a request for money. It is real: Oh Ae-sun's poetry collection, with tribute blurbs and an editor's note. One poem is about turning 29, the age at which her mother died leaving three children, and crying like the ten-year-old she was then. The publisher's editor, caught in tears, can only say how proud she is of her. The contents page borrows the titles of the series' first and fourth episodes.

Ae-sun wishes only to see her busy daughter a hundred more times, though Geum-myeong has even bought her a house. She will not move to Seoul, because at the nursing home everyone calls her Teacher. She counts her titles, from a haenyeo's daughter crying at the shore to the Literary Girl, Chief Oh, a fish filleter at the market and finally Oh Ae-sun the poet. She is glad she never gave up halfway, and she says it is spring for her again. Life does not run neatly from spring to winter, she has learned; it swings between them, and her 70 years of bright moments are all in this book. The dedication is to her love: since she was nine, thanks to him, "my life has been spring every day," and she will live that way until they meet again.

The last scene belongs to the young couple. Ae-sun lists her dreams: two-piece dresses once she is a poet, a two-story house and a dog once she is rich, piano lessons for the kids, a Jeep and Ray-Bans. A short exchange about cars ends with a promise to go everywhere together in that car, even to America. The narration salutes their young, tender seasons and signs off with the episode's title line.

Thoughts

The finale finally says the name this family could not. Dong-myeong has been the hole in the story since episode 6, and the line Gwan-sik mumbled under sedation back then turns out to be the key to the whole man: decades of guilt over a retaining wall, and two parents tending one small grave on separate days so neither has to watch the other grieve. Letting the boy become an uncle the kids know by name is the kindest thing the show does all season.

Gwan-sik's death plays the way he lived, through things rather than speeches. A bankbook he never drew on, hairpins, things quietly moved down for her, one section of a wardrobe for himself: the show has always told his love in objects and food, from the croaker he could not forget to the 120 he handed over when he had 100. The private-room night is the sharpest scene of the hour because the narration refuses to let Geum-myeong off the hook. She had a loving father, and he did not get a loving daughter. Sixteen episodes of a daughter narrating her parents' lives turn out to be an apology.

Looking back, the series kept its own promises. The poetry class from its very first scene returns with the one word Ae-sun could not write then, her book's contents page borrows the show's own episode titles, and the girl who lost a class presidency over money ends up a published poet at 70. Gwan-sik kept one of his three promises outright, and you could argue the other two were paid through Geum-myeong, who got the college and the life away from the island her mother never had. Ending on two young people planning Jeeps and Ray-Bans is exactly the right place to leave them.

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