W-Two Worlds Apart

episode 7

Once Yeon-joo discovers that Kang Chul has been suspended in time for the last two months and can be saved, she enlists Su-bong’s help in trying to continue the manhwa.

After a frustrating attempt to draw a rescue scene, Su-bong gives up, and then suddenly remembers something he heard from her father long ago…

Su-bong: “About W… that Noona created it.” Omo. “He said that Kang Chul was a character you created,” Su-bong recalls.

Yeon-joo looks at him quizzically, and Su-bong gets all worked up as he remembers her dad saying that W was based on stories that Yeon-joo had created when she was young.

That finally seems to jog her memory, and we flash back to 2000, when Yeon-joo was a teenager. She and her friends were glued to the TV during the Sydney Olympics, when real-life sports shooter Kang Cho-hyun was competing for the gold medal. She lost in the final round and took home silver, and young Yeon-joo was crushed.

But that gave her an idea for a character, and that night she began to sketch out his characteristics: He was a national sports shooter, in his second year of high school just like her, and she decided he’d be 185cm tall.

When Mom came into her room, Yeon-joo hid the sketch under her schoolbooks, but over the phone she told her friend all about her new ideal man: He’s a tall, muscular, good-looking genius who’s nice, and funny, and also good at sports, and he wins a shooting competition in a last-minute reversal. Lol, this explains Kang Chul SO WELL—he was invented by a teenage girl!

Her friend got excited and asked when she could meet this awesome oppa, and Yeon-joo’s face fell as she said, “You can’t… there’s no way to meet him.” She sighed dreamily, thinking he’d never be real.

As the camera spins past the ’90s idol posters on her wall, we fade back into Yeon-joo’s old room in the present day, where she sits hunched over a tablet screen, trying to draw. Su-bong comes in with coffee and coaxes her to show him what she drew, and he busts out laughing immediately.

She’s attempted to draw Kang Chul, but Su-bong laughs and says she created a new character. Yeon-joo cringes and says this is too hard, and Su-bong points out that her father always said she was talented, and dreamt of becoming a manhwa artist. Yeon-joo sighs that she stopped drawing eons ago and shakes her digital pen in frustration, saying that they didn’t have these back in her day.

But when Su-bong suggests waiting for her father to return, Yeon-joo warns him not to make a peep about this to Dad. “I’m going to save him. I’m going to save Kang Chul,” she says with determination.

She falls asleep at her tablet and wakes with a start, while dreaming of Chul sinking in the river. She struggles to hold back her tears as she gets back to work trying to draw him.

Well something must have worked, because the next thing we know, Kang Chul is rescued by divers as soon as he jumps from the bridge, and Yeon-joo reappears in Kang Chul’s world, back in prison. She grins from ear to ear.

Kang Chul is startled to wake up in bed as if nothing happened, and So-hee asks why on earth he was on that bridge. She assumes that he was pushed off by someone else, but Chul just looks at her like he can’t believe she’s moving and talking again.

He asks what day it is and what happened, and is doubly shocked to learn that almost no time has passed since he left this world.

Do-yoon comes rushing in and says that Yeon-joo was found in prison, and Chul immediately grabs a jacket and heads back there to see her.

He switches on the radio as he drives, and when he hears that Yeon-joo is being transported tonight, he swings the car around and literally cuts off the prison transport caravan in the middle of the road.