The Midnight Romance in Hagwon Episode 5

a sign of more romance to come?

I feel like I keep repeating myself in these reviews because I keep saying "good episode", but listen, it was a good episode? I did actually gasp out loud during one of the scenes, and that was when Si Woo expressed his intentions to switch hagwons directly to Director Choi Myung Sun's face. Even though we, as the audience, already knew that he'd switch -- it was still a surprising moment for him to say so out loud to a character that's been established to be very intimidating and scary, especially since Si Woo seems to be the kind of student who is very polite and listens to the adults around him. I also gasped at the end of the episode preview, but that's for the next episode.

Hye Jin really is my favorite character of this series. She's just so cool and extremely refreshing in a society where women are instructed to downplay their achievements and exhibit modesty at all times. She's also not written in a "grrl power" kind of way, where her superiority is constantly talked about or displayed without any real meaning or build-up behind it. The story's done a fantastic job at establishing that she's a confident person with the intelligence and talent to back up what she says. The line when she tells Jun Ho that she wasn't shocked by Choi Myung Sun's offer because she believed that she deserved that kind of offer was a banger line. Of course, I also enjoyed at how she shared her troubles with her lawyer friend about how she doesn't know if she wants to take this offer, and her own hesitance is so strange to her. We can tell that part of that hesitance is because of her attachment to Jun Ho, but I wonder if she a.) realizes that or b.) has realized that but is slowly coming to terms with it.

The other characters kind of recede to the background during this episode, which is fine because it is undoubtedly Hye Jin's episode. It is Hye Jin who has to deal with the consequences of their special lecture failure, it's Hye Jin's history with the hagwon that makes her punishment feel so bitter to us as the audience, and it's Hye Jin's emotions and decisions that control the flow of the events in this episode. For example, it's essentially Hye Jin who gives Jun Ho his first student, because she decides to step aside for him.

The best thing a drama can do is keep the audience wanting more, which I definitely felt when this episode ended. I'm curious to see if Hye Jin will leave Daechi Chase, and I'm curious to see how Jun Ho will try to either convince her to stay or the reasons why he'd let her go.

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