Episodes 3-4 » Dramabeans Korean drama recaps

The Potato Lab: Episodes 3-4

by DaebakGrits

If you, like me, thought that our potato couple would board an express train bound for romance after just one kiss, then guess again. This enemies-to-lovers trope — and its associated workplace conflicts — is still keeping this couple apart. And perhaps it’s doing its job a little too well.

EPISODES 3-4

The morning after Mi-kyung’s moonlit smooch with Baek-ho, she wakes up in her bathtub with a hangover and a crick in her neck. For a moment, I wondered if she might have forgotten her amorous actions from the night before thanks to a makgeolli-induced case of amnesia. But, as she goes about treating her headache, memories of the night before come back to her, and like any good bestie, Ong-ju is there to listen while Mi-kyung spills the tea. Or, in this case, Mi-kyung denies any deeper meaning behind her lustful kiss. Baek-ho is hot. She was drunk. Case closed.

Mi-kyung’s feelings the morning after lip-locking with her boss and sworn enemy may lean more towards embarrassment, but the kiss caused Baek-ho to malfunction like a robot infected with a virus that spreads through mouth-to-mouth contact. He might have been near comatose in the moments leading up to the kiss, but afterwards his insomnia was so bad that he indulged in a little hedge trimming at crack-thirty in the morning… for a property that he doesn’t even own. Needless to say, when the clock strikes a time that is reasonably appropriate for a person to come calling on his neighbor, he’s dressed and waiting at Mi-kyung’s door.

Mi-kyung, however, does not want to face the consequences of her actions and have an adult conversation with Baek-ho, so she tries to sneak out through a window and avoid him. Almost immediately, she’s caught red-handed with one leg on either side of the windowsill. Since there’s no means of physically escaping Baek-ho at this point, she does what (almost) any K-drama leading lady would do in this situation: lies.

She pulls the ol’ I-was-too-drunk-last-night-to-remember-anything card. But Baek-ho, who wasn’t born yesterday, lays down an Uno Reverse and cunningly lies that she borrowed money from him to pay for their designated driver and to fill up the gas tank — and he wants it back. The price to maintain her lie is steep, but Mi-kyung is willing to pay. However, before she can wire Baek-ho the money, she’s dragged away by Hwan-kyung and Ong-ju, and Baek-ho — determined to get some kiss-related answers (or some money) — secretly climbs into the back of their truck and hitches a ride to the local potato cooking contest.

That’s right, an outdoor Iron Chef-like competition where the secret ingredient is potatoes interrupts our regularly scheduled programming for another round of village hijinx and — depending on your sense of humor — either laugh-out-loud silliness or… cringe. Personally, I fall more into the latter category, as I’m of the opinion that the story and character development were sacrificed for an unnecessarily long series of cheap, over-the-top laughs made at Baek-ho’s expense and to the detriment of his character.

For example, Baek-ho is obviously pressing Mi-kyung for the money he’s “owed” as a ruse to get her to engage in a conversation about their kiss. When he realizes that she’s too overwhelmed by her dual roles as a Potato Lab staff member and as her brother’s assistant in the competition, he steps up to cover some of her assigned tasks in hopes it will free up her time to talk to him. Not only are his reasons for helping Mi-kyung overshadowed by the comedic emphasis placed on his ability to excel at every task assigned to him, but his support also brands him a “doormat.”

Baek-ho receives similar disrespect after Hwan-kyung is injured in a food fight that breaks out between the villagers and their competition rivals. Mi-kyung approaches Baek-ho to be her team’s substitute chef, but given how Mi-kyung and the villagers have ostracized Baek-ho up until this point, he’s justifiably reluctant to help them.

Ultimately, he agrees to be their substitute chef when the villagers promise to grant him a rite of passage on their private roads (yay, easy morning commute!), but there’s noticeably no apology from the villagers for how unfairly they’ve treated him. There’s also a huge disparity in the amount of time dedicated to the villagers’ atonement — if you can call it that — and the subsequent cook-off, for which Baek-ho must don a ridiculous disguise in order to hide the fact that he’s currently residing in Mi-kyung’s guesthouse and village. (And we’re not even going to touch that Food Wars anime-inspired CGI cooking battle.)

By the time Mi-kyung realizes that she should woman up and discuss the kiss with Baek-ho like a mature adult, I kind of want him to live up to her expectations and scold her for kissing him without his consent. Instead, he asks her to go out with him because he compartmentalizes his professional and personal relationships, and he doesn’t know where to file Mi-kyung. They’re co-workers, but they’ve kissed. They’ve kissed, but they aren’t dating. The situation does not compute with Baek-ho, and the solution — in his mind, at least — is to date Mi-kyung and complete the logic string, thus making her a co-worker he’s dating.

Yeaaaah, his robotic logic doesn’t fly with Mi-kyung, who’d rather deem the whole incident an unfortunate facial fender-bender (pfft!), but when she indirectly admits that she finds him attractive, Baek-ho sees it as his opening to pursue her. Step one: Buy her her favorite flowers. Step two… well, he’ll figure that out after buying her favorite — er, make that her second favorite — flower.

While Baek-ho is doing his flower research, Ong-ju drags Mi-kyung and Hwan-kyung to get their eyebrows tattooed. Even though I didn’t find the results as shockingly hideous as Mi-kyung’s coworkers, I was far more amused by all the running eyebrow jokes than the cooking competition. That is, until Ki-se and CHAIRWOMAN WANG (Cha Mi-kyung) pay Potato Lab a surprise visit. I swear, Ki-se’s sole purpose in this drama is to show up when Mi-kyung is feeling her worst and force her to reach new levels of embarrassment — well, that and instigating passive-aggressive pissing contests with Baek-ho that he can’t win.

Case in point: When Chairwoman Wang asks Baek-ho and Ki-se for their thoughts on the future of Potato Lab, Ki-se responds to Baek-ho’s noncommittal “It’s too soon to decide” answer by taking a hard stance that they should shut the lab down, as it’s not currently profitable. Baek-ho, however, quickly points out that they bought out Sunnyeo Food because they were number one in the potato chip market, and since potatoes are the main ingredient of potato chips, they should investigate the long-term value in Potato Lab before definitively deciding the lab’s fate.

Chairwoman Wang deems Baek-ho the winner of this debate, but she also agrees with Ki-se in that Baek-ho shouldn’t waste too much unnecessary time on Potato Lab. However, just because Baek-ho hasn’t decided the final fate of the lab, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made any decisions. In fact, he’s decided that the lab, at the very least, needs to be downsized. And he starts by firing Mi-kyung.

Something tells me that the way to Mi-kyung’s heart is not by making her jobless, and — predictably — she does not swoon upon hearing that she’s been fired (or will be fired once the timing is right). She worries that he’s retaliating because of the kiss, but his decision has everything to do with her role — or lack thereof — at the lab. She’s the person who fills in the gaps whenever and wherever needed, but without any specialization or expertise, she’s deemed non-essential. Although Baek-ho’s words sting, she finds that she’s unable to dispute his objective assessment of her career, and so she slinks away to a Buddhist temple and visits a monk — who, by the way, is also her father (cameo by Lee Dae-yeon, whose painfully obvious bald cap indicates he was not paid enough to shave his his head for this minor role).

For some reason, the show is dropping tidbits about Mi-kyung’s family history at the oddest times and sparingly, like bread crumbs that aren’t always easy to follow. For instance, last week, there was a passing conversation between Hwan-kyung and Ki-se in which Ki-se asked about “kids” (whose kids?). And this week, after Mi-kyung returns home from visiting her father, we learn she’s the oldest of three siblings.

The suggestion of a yet-to-be-introduced middle child was revealed in passing, overshadowed by the more important conversation between Mi-kyung and Hwan-kyung, who have a difference in opinion over their father’s current life choices. Mi-kyung, as the eldest child, is more pragmatic, believing their father did his due diligence after their mother died, and should be free to live his own life once they all graduated from high school. Hwan-kyung, however, as the youngest, felt abandoned, and even as an adult, he’s disappointed that their father does not acknowledge them on Children’s Day.

The day after being told her remaining time with Potato Lab is limited, Mi-kyung tries to get Baek-ho to retract his decision, but flirting — even with her eyebrows magically back to normal — and bartering with her salary don’t work. Finally accepting her fate, Mi-kyung meets with a headhunter who says it will be hard for her to find another job as an agriculturalist for the very reasons Baek-ho cited for firing her. Jobs are limited, and since she’s not an expert in the field, well, the odds aren’t in her favor.

And because this is a particularly low point for Mi-kyung, of course Ki-se is at the same hotel cafe and overhears everything. Surprisingly, he tells her not to be upset with Baek-ho, as firing her is simply the nature of his job, and then, because he’s Baek-ho’s boss, he offers to get her another job with the company for old time’s sake. Mi-kyung isn’t interested in his pity or handouts, though, and she walks away from the offer, leaving Ki-se to sulk and wait endlessly for his ex-wife, who used his credit card to check into the hotel.

And speaking of Ki-se’s ex-wife, YOO HEE-JIN (Jung Shin-hye) is downright delightful, and her friendship with Baek-ho is even better. The way he came into her hotel room and immediately started cleaning was subtly humorous (because Baek-ho is so OCD that he can’t not do anything about the mess) and hinted at their comfortable familiarity. And Hee-jin’s enthusiasm and support of Baek-ho’s love life dispels any chance of one of them harboring an unrequited crush. Daw, I love it when K-dramas exemplify healthy, platonic friendships between men and women.

Now that we’ve finally met Hee-jin, I’m particularly interested to see how she and Baek-ho will react when they learn of Ki-se’s history with Mi-kyung. Honestly, given the tone of this show thus far — and some passing comments made by both Baek-ho and Ki-se — I don’t believe news of Mi-kyung and Ki-se’s dating history will be as explosive as I’d originally suspected. Although there is definitely a professional rivalry between Baek-ho and Ki-se, I no longer sense a strong animosity between them because of the way Ki-se defended Baek-ho as simply “doing his job” when he fired Mi-kyung. Also, Baek-ho encouraged Hee-jin to call Ki-se, and she reminds Baek-ho that he was her friend first. If he and Ki-se truly developed a friendship as a result of his marriage to Hee-ji, then their divorce it would explain some of the current tension between the men.

That being said, I’m still not a fan of Ki-se. Whenever he’s alone with Mi-kyung, he makes her uncomfortable, and the fact that he not only noticed — but commented on the fact — that Mi-kyung still uses the shampoo, gives me the ick. I can’t tell if he still has feelings for her, or is just socially inept and doesn’t know how to interact with her without referencing the past in order to facilitate a conversation.

After Mi-kyung meets with the headhunter, news travels fast, and two of her coworkers find out that Mi-kyung has been fired. Another round of petty office warfare ensues, and while their behavior is far from professional, there is still a line that even they don’t cross. And apparently that line is using their words to tell Baek-ho how they really feel about him. Unfortunately for Mi-kyung’s absent-minded coworker, she accidentally shares her opinion in the group chat instead of their private one. And, there’s apparently no message recall feature.

Since Mi-kyung has already been fired — and, therefore, has nothing left to lose — she steals Baek-ho’s cell phone right from his hands, runs to the restroom, and deletes the message before he can read it. Her already erratic behavior becomes even more suspicious when she locks herself in his office to try and delete the message, again, from the messaging app on his computer, but she’s stymied by his password and has to come clean. Except she tells Baek-ho that she accidentally sent him a message that she doesn’t want him to read. Baek-ho claims he wouldn’t be offended by the messages, but he logs into his computer, turns his back to her, and allows her to delete them because it’s obviously causing her distress.

Although Mi-kyung has a lot of character flaws — most notably that lack of professionalism that’s shared by her co-workers and a penchant for petty revenge that is only feasible in fictional dramaland — she has a lot of heart. She cares about her friends, co-workers, and family, and even though she doesn’t have a clear role at Potato Lab, her willingness to wake up in the middle of the night and brave a severe thunderstorm in order to patch a hole in the lab’s greenhouses demonstrates her passion for her job. I’m rooting for Mi-kyung, but sometimes it really feels like the story is intentionally — and unnecessarily — taking a dump on her.

Potato cooking competition aside, this week’s episodes of The Potato Lab were a fun viewing experience, but upon reflection, I don’t fully enjoy how Mi-kyung and Baek-ho’s character development and romance is being overshadowed by the show’s pervasive need to be funny. Mi-kyung is consistently thrust into embarrassing situations — usually when her ex is around — and made the source of a lot of jokes that don’t always paint her in a favorable light. Meanwhile, Baek-ho is on the path to falling for a woman who is openly antagonistic towards him, and very little time is dedicated to revealing how he might feel about being the “bad guy” in her life story. Just him looking sadly at the flower — Mi-kyung’s second favorite flower — after it’s delivered to his guesthouse doorstep. (Dawww… poor guy.) So, moving forward, I hope we see a little more romance and a little less comedy in this rom-com.

 
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