He lacks so much confidence in himself and his future that when a natural spark ignites between him and another co-worker, he suppresses the instinct to follow it, resolutely deciding that he won’t be able to provide for her.
Chang-hee’s next revelation happens when he returns home one evening after a bad day with an urgent case of diarrhoea. Seeing that the house toilet is occupied he barges into Gu’s cottage to relieve himself and emerges as a new man.
Instantly he has become brighter and more optimistic. At work he even manages to be unshakeably civil with the awful Ah-reum. The reason for this is the kernel of hope he discovered in Gu’s bathroom – the keys to a Rolls-Royce. He now has a drama to latch onto as he dreams that Gu will let him drive it someday.
Meanwhile, elder sister Ki-jung (Lee El) is having a much harder time. After deciding that she would unconditionally fall in love with someone by the coming winter, she has fallen for someone, Mi-jung’s kindly co-worker Cho Tae-hun (Lee Ki-woo). Her crush becomes all-consuming and she all but throws herself at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
Son Suk-ku in a still from My Liberation Notes.
When she finally does confess to him, her heart is broken when he doesn’t reciprocate her feelings. Things only get worse when she’s chewed out by Tae-hun’s sister Gyeong-seon (Jung Soo-young) for something she said at the beginning of the season before they knew each other.
On top of all that, her co-worker gives her an earful because she’s been getting a lot of dating counsel from her boyfriend, their boss Park Jin-woo (Kim Woo-hyung).
A broken Ki-jung is no longer able to control her emotions as she explodes in tears and other eccentric displays any time of day, at work or on the subway. We’re rooting for every character on the show to break through to better circumstances, but in the remaining six episodes, Ki-jung is the one who needs it the most.
Lee Min-ki in a still from My Liberation Notes.
Mi-jung never joined a club at her corporation, which makes her a bit of an outcast. This is partly because of money and living far out of town, but it’s also rooted in her fear of being in a group that passes her by. She feels a group ignores the individual and moves on to the next task before she’s had a chance to fully absorb the first one.
Nevertheless, since the company is compelling her and two other outcasts (including Tae-hun) to join a club, they make their own. Their “liberation club”, and the diaries they maintain as a result, encapsulate the show’s raison d’être – following relatable, downtrodden characters as they try to find their own personal freedom, in whatever form that may take given their circumstances.
Lee El in a still from My Liberation Notes.
Mi-jung is crippled by her ex’s debt, and she is now on the verge of having her credit destroyed. She is too diffident to bring him to court, both because she can’t stand up to him and because she’s scared of revealing her situation to her parents. So for Mi-jung, freedom means being able to have confidence and honesty, both of which she finds in Gu, the only person who knows her secret and who she can be herself around.
Gu has been harbouring his own secret, and his past, which involves shady nightclubs, gangsters and the suicide of an ex-girlfriend, gradually comes to the surface. Yet while he still drinks, to feel human, in his words, he faces his problem straight on when he marches back to Seoul and confronts a gang boss and coolly warns him to back off.
With four intricate and distinct lead characters, terrific dialogue and a bounteous array of intimate moments for all the smaller characters in the cast, My Liberation Notes is far and away the best drama on TV right now.
Kim Ji-won (left) and Son Suk-ku in a still from My Liberation Notes.
My Liberation Notes is streaming on Netflix.
