Birth Of Beauty

1

It's a grand entrance for a gorgeous woman, whom we'll come to know as SA-RA, who walks down a street and turns heads left and right with her stunning appearance. Everywhere she goes she attracts admiring glances and drops jaws; she explains that she's an actress who's just come back to Korea after working in the U.S. This makes sense to everyone who sees her, and she gets the royal treatment.

She gets her fortune told by a face reader, who is awed by the interesting combination of fates she holds in her hands (er, face): Not only is she an uncommon beauty, she also has the fortune of a military general and might even save the nation. That is, if she steers clear of her two pitfalls: the need to get involved in matters, and bad guys.

Sa-ra starts to clue into the uneasy feeling that she's being followed, and this is how we get our introduction to HAN TAE-HEE. She catches him peeping in on her while she's in a lingerie shop and freaks out, in the process tapping into some latent self-defense instincts to take him down. He's hauled off by officers, and Sa-ra sighs in relief.

It's safe to say that anyone watching the show probably knows that Tae-hee's going to be more than a mere stalker, and it makes us wonder why Sa-ra wouldn't know him in this situation. But this is an example of one of the premiere's strengths, in that it plays on our expectations and keeps us guessing. We know the gist of the story, but it's the how that piques our interest.

Sa-ra catches a glimpse of an extreme-makeover television program titled Change, and gets hooked to the story of one woman in the running to be gifted with a full makeover. Her name is SA GEUM-RAN, and she's a good-hearted woman with frankly a lot of assholes in her life, though she endures with a smiling face to hide the tears.

From here, the episode flips back and forth between Geum-ran's story and Sa-ra's reactions to the woman she feels a strong pull toward. She watches with sympathy as Geum-ran gets disdained-and worse, pitied-for her bulk, which makes accidents like tripping in public or falling into a tub of fish doubly humiliating when nobody helps.

At home, it's even worse. Geum-ran has married into a well-to-do family, but her husband has spent the past seven years in the States for his business. Her place in the household is more of a maid than daughter-in-law, with snobs for a mother- and sisters-in-law, who think nothing of saying in front of her face, "We should stop eating, we don't want to end up like her." The senile grandmother that Geum-ran cares for is a source of comfort, but the only one.

Sa-ra's completely absorbed in the show, and beside herself when Geum-ran loses the extreme makeover opportunity to the other contender. She's so moved that she decides she has to help her, but when she calls the TV station to ask about her, she hears that Geum-ran withdrew from the process.

Meanwhile, Past Geum-ran discovers her husband's infidelity when she hears he's back in Seoul and goes to his hotel room. That's where she sees him (named LEE KANG-JOON) cozying up with his girlfriend on the side, the sophisticated broadcast announcer GYO CHAE-YEON.

Even despite the betrayal, Geum-ran meets with Chae-yeon to ask her to step aside. Chae-yeon is initially quite polite, apologizing for the hurt she caused and expressing her regrets contritely, but she must have expected the wronged wife to simply back away. So when Geum-ran continues to sob and beg, Chae-yeon's words get blunt: Kang-joon may have been ordinary when they married and it's true that Geum-ran supported him through his career, but he is now far out of her league. She asks plainly, "Do you never look in the mirror?"

The sisters-in-law snicker behind Geum-ran's back when she films a hello video to her busy husband, who hasn't been able to take her calls lately. It's because they know something she's about to find out, which is that her handsome husband is lying cheater-and not only is he completely unrepentant about having an affair, he has even introduced the girlfriend to his family. Who all love her more than Geum-ran.

when Geum-ran asks Kang-joon for another chance so she can treat him even better, he merely returns his wedding ring and says that their marriage is over, and that he just wants to love.

Adding insult to injury are her terrible in-laws, who practically gloat at Geum-ran for being so naive to think her husband ought to be faithful to her looking like that. Senile Grandma sweetly offers to make her look nice, but paints her face in a grotesque parody of beauty.

Watching this all is a distraught Sa-ra, who thus jumps at the chance when she gets a mysterious note telling her where she can go to find out about Geum-ran. She meets Geum-ran's friend, who is outraged at her friend's shabby treatment and shares the truth, which brings yet more terrible news: Geum-ran committed suicide, and today is her 49th day memorial. (The 49th day is observed as the day when a departed soul moves on to the afterlife.) Her in-laws didn't even bother to observe rites for her.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when Geum-ran saw Chae-yeon being welcomed to the family behind her back, and Geum-ran couldn't bear to return to that house. But she had nowhere to go, and ended up driving her car into the sea.

As Sa-ra leaves Geum-ran's memorial, she's knocked out by her stalker-man Tae-hee.

Sa-ra wakes up in Tae-hee's car as he's listening to a news report about serial killers who kidnap and murder women, and takes the first opportunity to run out. He chases her in exasperation as they run down the beach, but ends up getting his ass handed to him when Sa-ra's dormant judo skills pop back up and send him sprawling. She only relents when he bellows at her, "You're Sa Geum-ran!"

She's understandably skeptical, but Tae-hee explains that she's missed her meds and is suffering a spell of delusion-a side effect of all the anesthesia from her head-to-toe plastic surgery. He's been chasing her to give her the pills, only she's so locked in her fantasy of being an actress that she didn't recognize him and took him for a killer.

It's from Tae-hee that Sa-ra gets the rest of the story, showing us how Geum-ran's drive off a cliff wasn't intentional, but accidental. She mustered all her strength to pull herself out-she was so wronged she couldn't bear to die-and when she'd returned to the city, everyone already believed her dead. So Geum-ran watched as her husband and in-laws dutifully attended her funeral and shed exactly zero tears.

So she appeared at the good doctor's doorstep, having tracked him down as the surgeon who works on all the Change show's participants. She'd begged him to help her become beautiful and exact her revenge on the people who did her wrong, whom she couldn't bear to let go unscathed while she'd supposedly died. Tae-hee reluctantly agreed, thus beginning her transformation, down to even a vocal cord operation that changed her voice. And the spiffy apartment she'd assumed was hers is actually his, which she's been living in ever since.

With her head back on straight, Sa-ra/Geum-ran apologizes to Tae-hee, who now insists on a contract outlining their agreement. To his shock, Sa-ra bites down on her thumb and stamps the thing down in her own blood, ready to do everything he tells her to do.

However, Sa-ra doesn't actually have a plan for revenge other than "I look pretty, so it should be easy now," and Tae-hee has to impress upon her the necessity of working a carefully thought-out strategy. He tells her very gravely how very little her husband cared for her, how she doesn't even register on his radar as anything worth a thought, and pumps her up to go after her mission properly. She can't just look like a new person; she has to become one. He challenges her to leave behind Geum-ran completely, and after witnessing her husband being cozy with his girlfriend, she musters up the resolve to do just that.