W-Two Worlds Apart

episode 5

I feel like there are no rules in this drama, which is terrifying and thrilling all at once. Is this the story of a hero, or a monster? Is this drama about creating your own happy ending, or is it about discovering that real life has no such thing as neat narrative arcs, or meaning, or purpose? Really, depending on which side of the bed you woke up on today, it could feel like either extreme. Maybe happily-ever-after is just what you make of it… or maybe happy endings are a construct that never existed in the first place.

 
EPISODE 5 RECAP

Kang Chul’s entire world literally comes to a grinding halt the second he becomes aware that he’s a manhwa character. After stepping through the mysterious webtoon frame connecting the manhwa world to the real one, Chul comes out on the other side and walks down the street in the pouring rain, still in a haze over the earth-shattering events he just witnessed.

Across the street, something catches his attention: It’s an ad for W the webtoon, with a giant image of Kang Chul plastered to the side of a bus, asking if he’ll finally catch his family’s killer. Chul is so shocked that he crosses the street in the middle of traffic, not even registering all the honking cars.

He comes face to face with his own… face… and looks stricken to see the proof so plainly, that he is a fictional character. He reaches out a shaky hand to touch the sign, like he’s still not sure that it’s real.

And because he’s smart, Chul goes straight to the nearest bookstore to track down his own manhwa. What he encounters is more shocking than he anticipated though—an entire display filled with volumes, all featuring him on the cover.

It takes him a moment to work up to it, but he rips open the first volume and sees character introductions for him, and the people closest to him. The story opens the way we opened the drama, in the Olympics shooting match where he won his gold medal. As Chul reads the part about his family’s brutal murder, he wells up with angry tears.

He rips open volume after volume, and we get clever exposition on Chul’s intervening years this way: Prosecutor Han got elected to the National Assembly, and though his public face was charismatic, behind closed doors he continued to hunt Kang Chul ferociously.

Chul sought out top fighter Do-yoon for martial arts lessons, saying that he had the feeling that he’d be gaining more enemies soon and wanted to protect himself. Chul only wanted training from the best, and the boys developed a natural friendship as they trained.

Chul went after the city’s biggest criminals himself, fighting crime lords and their henchmen with Do-yoon by his side. That’s how he regained the public’s favor—by using his crime investigation show W to clean up the streets.

The more Chul’s popularity grew, the more people turned on Assemblyman Han, accusing him of orchestrating a witch-hunt on Kang Chul all those years ago. But still to this day, Assemblyman Han believed that Chul killed his own family and deserved to rot in jail.

By that point in his own story, Kang Chul has caught up with all thirty-three volumes of the manhwa, and he throws the last one down onto the pile with a thud. He sits there numbly on the floor of the bookstore for a long time, until the employees finally ask him to leave because they’re closing.

He asks dispassionately if this manhwa is popular, and the employees say it’s been a bestseller for over five years. He scoffs at that, calling it funny. I have no idea how he has the presence of mind to find humor in the irony. He gets up to leave, and when the clerk offers to bag the books for him, he says, “I don’t need them. It’s a story I already know.”

At the hospital, Yeon-joo stares at the webtoon image of Kang Chul on his plane, saying to himself that he might be shaken if she said she loved him one more time. (I love that she gets to see these private moments after the fact!) She relives their kiss as she thinks of him.