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SBS Drama "Temperature of Love" Yang Sejong & Seo Hyun-Jin etc. *The END*


Bella D'Amour

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  • Temperature of Love: Episodes 9-10​TempofLove09-10-00479a.jpg

 

After time apart and with so many hurt feelings between them, Jung-sun and Hyun-soo have a lot to talk about. Unfortunately, they’re still at wildly varying temperatures when it comes to love, so it’s a good thing that neither of them is afraid to be honest. But even with both of them having realized their professional dreams, will they be able to agree on how they should conduct their personal lives?

 

 

EPISODE 9 RECAP

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We backtrack to five years ago, right after Hyun-soo tells Hong-ah that she won the scriptwriting contest. Hong-ah dutifully congratulates her, but when they hang up, she calls Won-joon to come visit because she needs someone to take her anger out on.

He easily agrees, but she calls right back to yell at him for being too easy. Hong-ah changes her mind and says she wants to be alone because she lost the contest, and Won-joon says all the right supportive things, admitting that he’s trying to impress her. Hong-ah goes to a club to dance out her frustration. Won-joon arrives to pick her up, and on their way out, he tells her that it’s no big deal to lose a writing contest because becoming a writer is difficult.

Hong-ah confesses that she’s more bothered by Hyun-soo winning than the fact that she herself lost. She says knowing that about herself makes her feel worse, and that makes her miserable. As promised, Hyun-soo treats Hong-ah to lunch at Jung-sun’s former restaurant to celebrate becoming a real writer. Jung-woo arrives for lunch with CP Yoo and they stop to say hello to the ladies. CP Yoo tells Hyun-soo that he liked her drama, and bids Jung-woo to treat her well when he learns that she signed with his agency. Jung-woo insists on paying for Hyun-soo’s table, so Hyun-soo promises to treat Hong-ah another time.

 

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Hong-ah expresses envy that Hyun-soo is dating such a rich, powerful man, calling him the perfect prince. But Hyun-soo says she’s no Cinderella, and explains that Jung-woo isn’t her boyfriend—he’s just the first person to acknowledge her skills. She says she had no choice but to sign with him, but Hong-ah says that love often starts that way.

The mention of love reminds her of her trip to France to visit Jung-sun, when he’d told her that he was in love with Hyun-soo. She’d told him that Hyun-soo was dating a rich big-shot, but he’d taken the news in stride, assuming that someone as pretty and nice as Hyun-soo wouldn’t stay single for long.

Hong-ah had disagreed, thinking Hyun-soo plain and modest compared to herself. Jung-sun had teased her for her arrogance, saying that he’d never thought of her as pretty, and she’d surprised him by asking him to date her.

 

=== Read more: http://www.dramabeans.com/2017/10/temperature-of-love-episodes-9-10/

 

 

COMMENTS

I really love the dynamic between Hyun-soo and Jung-sun now that we’re in the present time; it’s everything I hoped it would be.The age difference is much less prominent, leveling out the power imbalance and giving Jung-sun a bit more of a leg to stand on. Neither of them is shying away from their feelings, and they’ve both gone out of their way to let the other know that there’s still something there. But Jung-sun is wary now… he’s not the open-hearted boy he was five years ago, and he’s not about to make this easy for Hyun-soo. She’s going to have to work for it, which is only fair, since she made him work for it when they first met and she still rejected him multiple times.

It’s not that I think Hyun-soo deserves to suffer, it’s just that I think she took Jung-sun’s feelings too lightly when they originally met. She considered him too young to know what he was feeling, so she didn’t see him as someone who would stick around. Plus, she had her own very serious problems to focus on, so I don’t blame her for the choice she made. I do think she’s regretted it for five years, and that now she knows the value of what she let go. But I also think that if Jung-sun lets her back in too quickly, Hyun-soo might see him as too “easy†again, and we know she doesn’t value things that come too easily. So his reticence to open himself up to her again is actually a good thing, because Hyun-soo needs to see Jung-sun’s love as something to work for, not something to be handed to her without any difficulty.

My favorite thing about all of these characters is their constant, brutal honesty with each other. I love that Jung-sun basically told Hyun-soo that he’s been miserable, and he’s resentful, and he doesn’t want to get hurt like that again. But his vehemence also shows how much he still cares and fears that he’s still in love with her (not to mention his insistence on not dating, even when he thought she was). Jung-woo is just as honest with Hyun-soo—he doesn’t overwhelm her with his feelings but he lets her know that he hasn’t given up on her yet. And Hyun-soo tells them both how she feels without sugarcoating it, even when it’s hard to say and harder to hear.

 

And that’s what makes Hong-ah so frustrating, because she’s on the opposite side of the spectrum—no matter how honest anyone is with her, she never seems to hear what they’re saying. Even when Jung-sun says straight out that he doesn’t like her and he never will, she just keeps trying. It’s toddler logic, to think that all she has to do is say it enough times and he’ll change his mind.

Her conversation with Won-joon on the roof was so typical—he was upset and hurt that she’s been lying about her relationship with Hyun-soo and spreading rumors about her in the attempt to keep Jung-sun away from her, but Hong-ah just kept talking about wanting to be a writer, missing the point entirely even when Won-joon spelled it out for her. She’s so caught up in her own re-written narrative that makes her into the poor, maligned heroine that she doesn’t listen to him at all when he tries to explain that it’s not about her humble job as an assistant writer, but the constant lying. And speaking of Won-joon, I was so proud of him, because as much as he likes Hong-ah, he’s not blind to her faults. When she let him down, he told her so and walked away from her. He’s much too good for her.

I like the way this drama plays with time, now that we’ve caught up to the present. Each episode begins by going back to flesh out a few scenes from the previous episode, giving us a bit more insight before moving forward again. And I even like how this is done with scenes from the past that we’ve already seen, such as that conversation in Paris between Jung-sun and Hong-ah—seeing her reaction to his reaction to Hyun-soo having a boyfriend tells us that her resentment for Hyun-soo goes back further than we thought. Somehow the show manages to weave the past and the present in a way that’s more clever than just a flashback to what we’ve already seen. The flashbacks actually give us more to work with, more knowledge about the characters and why they’re behaving as they are in the present. It’s not that it’s a particularly innovative approach, but it’s very refreshing in a genre that often overplays flashbacks without adding anything new.

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  • Temperature of Love: Episodes 11-12TempofLove11-12-00582.jpg

 

Jung-sun and Hyun-soo are like a pair of magnets, unable to resist each other’s pull no matter how determined they may be. Not that they’re actually that determined—neither of them seems to object to the frequency with which they keep running into each other. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that their encounters aren’t all that accidental, and that someone may have been planning this all along.

 

EPISODE 11 RECAP

 

We go back in time again, to Jung-woo’s confession to Hyun-soo. As we watch the sweet moments that Jung-sun and Hyun-soo shared, we hear her telling Jung-woo that she’s not happy even though she won the writing contest, because she realized too late that she loved someone, but he left.

After his confession, Jung-woo drives Hyun-soo home and asks what the man she loves does for a living, then immediately chastises himself for asking. Hyun-soo offers a meek apology, but Jung-woo says not to be sorry because that would mean this is the end. He tells her not to be scared, because he won’t make her uncomfortable. He turns up the radio, which is playing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, the song Hyun-soo played for Jung-sun when she turned him down. Jung-woo seems to sense Hyun-soo’s discomfort and starts to turn the music down, but she stops him. Their hands touch, which just adds another level of awkwardness to the moment.

That night, Jung-woo looks out his penthouse window, flipping his old pocket watch and thinking about Joon-ha telling him that Hyun-soo is very rational about love. He’d said that Hyun-soo wants to marry a man who respects her, and advised Jung-woo to win her trust.

A few months later, Hyun-soo asks Jung-woo why he never offered to contract her as a scriptwriter. He says sadly that she has many agencies who would want her and she feels uncomfortable with him, but she reminds him that he promised not to make her uncomfortable. Jung-woo cracks a tiny grin, and Hyun-soo excitedly points out how sexy his lopsided smile is.

 

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It cheers him up, and he offers her a contract right then, which she accepts without hesitation. He tells her not to worry about making money, but to write what she wants to write.

Not long after, Jung-woo goes to Paris, where he meets up with Jung-sun. Jung-sun tells Jung-woo about his plans to graduate school and work for two years before going home, making Jung-woo ask if he even has time to date.

Jung-sun turns the question on him, and Jung-woo sighs that he was rejected recently. Jung-sun sympathizes, saying that before he left for Paris he was rejected by a woman who put work before love. Jung-woo is impressed by the lady’s ambition, so Jung-sun says that he plans to find her when he gets back to Korea, offering to introduce her to Jung-woo.

 

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Jung-woo jokes that he might steal her away, but Jung-sun says that he wouldn’t allow that, adding that she’s dating someone else anyway and might marry the guy. Jung-woo looks wounded on Jung-sun’s behalf, and the two friends toast as Jung-sun says in voiceover that he never guessed that they were talking about the same woman. He asks himself, “If I’d known this first, would I have been able to calm his rage a bit? I still wonder.â€

We come back to the present and rejoin Hyun-soo as she demands for the director of her drama to be replaced. They bicker until CP Yoo shouts at them to just deal with it, fed up with their fighting. He informs them that if the ratings drop again, they’re both out.

After running their hearts out, Jung-sun and his chefs flop on the grass, dreaming of chicken and beer. Suddenly, a deliveryman shows up with chicken right on cue, followed by Jung-woo.

 

=== Read more: http://www.dramabeans.com/2017/10/temperature-of-love-episodes-11-12/

 

 

 

COMMENTS

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it many times, but this couple has some serious chemistry. I almost don’t even notice when they have a charged scene but no kiss, because the energy between them is so intense whenever they get close, they may as well be kissing. I love how drawn they are to each other, both emotionally and physically, as though they genuinely can’t help but end up together over and over because anything else would be an insult to Fate.

Not that it’s entirely up to chance, because I’m now fully convinced that Jung-sun has been planning to get Hyun-soo back all along. I had hoped that he was playing hard-to-get on purpose, but hearing him tell Jung-woo in Paris that he planned to find the woman he loved when he came back to Korea just confirmed it, at least for me. He always intended to get her back. And normally I don’t approve of playing games, but I think that Jung-sun is mostly just playing it smart—he knows Hyun-soo, and he knows that she doesn’t value things that come too easily. He was too easy when they first met, wearing his heart on his sleeve, so now he’s forcing her to see the value of his feelings by holding them back a bit.

But it’s cute how he’s not really doing a very good job of it, and even Hyun-soo knows it. Jung-sun gave himself away when he rejected her on the rooftop, then turned right around and offered to make her breakfast, then later when he told her not to skip meals. Hyun-soo knows that he shows affection by feeding people, so his concern about her eating was a dead giveaway.

 

And that little smile when Jung-sun saw that Hyun-soo had called him just killed me dead, plus the fact that he called her right back. But the biggest giveaway is his utter weakness in the face of her tears, which pretty much melted him on the spot.

 

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I didn’t think that Hong-ah could get much worse, and when she won the contest I actually assumed for a few seconds that she might even let go of some of her jealousy and resentment of Hyun-soo. But then she got all snippy when Hyun-soo and Kyung didn’t give her enough attention, and even though I do think she had a point about Hyun-soo devaluing her win in an attempt to make Kyung feel better, she did it in a really childish, “Hey, this is MY moment, pay attention to MEEE†way. She’s just incapable of seeing the world in any way except the way that she wants it to be, and it’s that complete lack of empathy that’s going to cause a lot of problems down the road.

I just love how this show takes things we’re used to seeing in dramas and uses them in unexpected ways, creating a very unique feel to the events. I’ve talked about the way that important emotional scenes are marked, not by musical cues, but by a moment of slow motion black-and-white, and the way flashbacks are used to add extra information that gives the audience deeper insight into the characters and their motivations. But I also appreciate how voiceovers are being used to introduce a vague sense of foreboding, as if everything between these friends is about to go horribly wrong.

In the previous episode, Hyun-soo said in voiceover that she didn’t initially know why Hong-ah began to hate her, but that she would learn why in time. While she was saying this, we were treated to a montage of happy moments between the two friends, before their feelings for Jung-sun started coming between them. Then the show did it again in this episode, showing us the friendly times between Jung-sun and Jung-woo, while Jung-sun talks about whether he could have calmed Jung-woo’s rage if he’d known sooner that they loved the same woman. Both of these moments, showing us happy scenes while telling us that things are about to explode, make me more than a little concerned about the friendships and whether they’ll be able to survive Jung-sun and Hyun-soo’s romance. Not only would it be terribly sad to see them both lose a close friend, but the last thing they need as they fall in love again is the complication of knowing that their love is hurting people they care about.

 

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Edited by FranCella
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Team Dramabeans: What we’re watching???

 

 

So, what are we all watching this week?

 

What kept you reaching for more (or agonizing when there was no more), and what made you want to throw your remote through the screen? Time to weigh in…

 

 

javabeans

  • Temperature of Love: On hold, indefinitely. This show doesn’t induce strong feelings in me and has been easy to watch—but on the other hand, I don’t really get anything out of it.

 

girlfriday

  • Temperature of Love: Romance: Take 2 is happening with more ease than I expected, which is definitely a plus. I guess the upside of the initial romance not being all that deep is that there’s less angst than a traditional breakup, leading to a pretty smooth rekindling of old feelings. I just wish the drama about the drama writers wasn’t so dramatic, but it’s an otherwise breezy show with good banter between the leads.

 

odilettante

  • Temperature of Love: This writer isn’t generally one of my favorites, so I’m not too bothered that the first few eps didn’t really grab me, although I think I might be more invested once we reach the current timeline. Even though I don’t really care about the main romance right now, I love all the minor characters, and I’m definitely going to keep watching for my darling Jo Boa and Handsome Oppa of the Cut-glass Cheekbones.

cr

Edited by FranCella
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  • love changed the title to SBS Drama "Temperature of Love" Yang Sejong & Seo Hyun-Jin etc. *The END*

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