Call It Love (2023) Recap Episode 2

Episode 2 of Call It Love begins a few days before the last scene of the previous chapter. Dong-jin and Sun-woo fight about Sun-woo’s car and how much money it cost. Sun-woo agrees to take a cut on his paycheck. Woo-ju watches the whole thing from the side and sees how comfortably Dong-jin is living.

Woo-ju interviews for the position of part-timer and gets it. Ms. Baek introduces her to Dong-jin. The night she followed him, Dong-jin was on to her from the start. He waited till he reached home, went up by lift and came down the stairs to catch her in the act.

When he asks for an explanation, Woo-ju simply says she has some interest in him, the non-romantic kind. When he doesn’t seem to want any more from her, she gets frustrated but he doesn’t care to know more. She leaves. While Dong-jin is in the shower, someone knocks on his apartment door.

At Jun’s place, Woo-ju stuffs herself with rice and noodles the same way she did when they were younger and she had just decided not to apply for college. Jun knew it was because of money since their mother was sick, but Woo-ju refused to ask her father for help. She considered herself fatherless. Despite being good at sports, Woo-ju sells her bow to someone else for money.

Woo-ju walks past her old house. Three women walking by talk about how the house was sold but they don’t see anybody living there. Moments later Hee-ja walks out of it. She meets her friends at a restaurant where they ask if she bought the house because it’s going to be redeveloped. She doesn’t deny it.

Woo-ju comes across Dong-jin at a grocery store and insists she’s not stalking him. She tries baiting him into asking about her story but he says he’s not interested in others’ miseries.

Woo-ju tries sneaking into the office early but when she’s about to go into Dong-jin’s cabin, Ms. Baek catches her and she gets told off. Later, she overhears employees talking about CEO Shin’s interference and conspiracies about how Dong-jina and Sun-woo embezzled his money. She finds out from Yuri who Shin exactly is. Woo-ju then stands by another employee named Mr. Kang and watches him put his password in his laptop and makes an excuse when he catches her watching.

Sun-woo tells Dong-jin to stop watching videos of campers and come to his school year’s reunion instead. Sun-woo is already there, despite being a senior. A drunk classmate asks Sun-woo why Dong-jin and Min-young broke up. Dong-jin arrives at the time and says it was because she went to the US. Dong-jin mingles with the others and asks another classmate about his kid. Later, this classmate tells him that Min-young came back for good but asked him not to tell anyone.

A flashback shows the young couple on a camping trip but Min-young laughs and talks to somebody on the phone. She then cancels her next camping trip with Dong-jin, making it clear that she liked it before but not anymore.

Back in the present, Dong-jin thinks he sees Min-young and tries following her but she disappears. After he leaves, we see she was hiding in a café.

After hours, Woo-ju sneaks back in and goes through Mr. Kang’s laptop.

The next morning, Hae-sung gets food for breakfast and Jun removes some gunk from her eye for her. They and Ji-gu eat breakfast while talking about how Woo-ju wore mismatching shoes, something she had done on ‘that day’ as well.

At the office, everyone is in a flurry because an email from Mr. Kang’s account sent all the sensitive information about contracts and pay rates to everybody. It included some personal information about one of the company’s directors, Kim Ju-ho.  Yuri suggests to Dong-jin that the spy could be Woo-ju. Cha Young-min, one of Dong-jin’s trusted circle, says he trusts Mr. Kang and he would never do such a thing.

Mr. Kang openly confronts Woo-ju about being the spy. He says Yuri saw her entering the building after hours. They argue but Dong-jin breaks it up. He calls Yuri and Kang inside his cabin, where they make a case against Woo-ju.

When a woman asks Jun if he’s single he starts to panic and then pretends Woo-ju is his girlfriend when she arrives. She tells him about the revenge plan and confesses she first went there to only ask for the house back. But then she saw his lifestyle and decided to take revenge. However, she’s not the real spy. She only copied a few files but noticed somebody else come into the office after she was done.

Dong-jin tells Woo-ju to come with him and drives her all the way to another building. She doesn’t know where they are and Dong-jin reveals this is Shinwoo Fairs, CEO Shin’s office. He accuses her of working for him. She denies it but has no answer when he asks why she followed him the other day. She says it’s easy for him to blame her instead of believing that someone he trusted betrayed him. He fires her. Later, Dong-jin admits to Sun-woo that everything she said was true.

They meet once more outside a grocery store where a drunk Woo-ju tells him she’s not the spy and that she can’t be manipulated so easily.

At home, Woo-ju tells Juns he got fired. She talks about how she got unlucky but Dong-jin got really lucky in life and that makes it unfair.

Dong-jin checks the CCTV footage of the building’s parking lot and sees one car enter at the time of the theft. He takes the licence number down and checks it to find it belongs to Cha Young-min. At their meeting, he is more distracted than usual and asks for Woo-ju’s resume.

Dong-jin asks Woo-ju to meet him. He tells her about the real culprit, apologises and asks her to come back to work. He also says he read her cover letter and it made him laugh. Director Kim Ju-ho drives up to them at that moment and storms towards Dong-jin, ready to punch him. Dong-jin closes his eyes and waits for the blow but it never comes as Woo-ju gets up and pushes the director sideways.

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The Episode Review

Episode 2 of Call it Love was just as slow as the first but also shows itself to be more of a character study. Despite the air of despair that hangs around both of them, Dong-jin and Woo-ju are both intriguing characters. Dong-jin for the unknown events that left him so submissive. And Woo-ju for her energy that is both fierce and chaotic.

We also saw a few newer sides to Dong-jin and it’s quite a pleasure to watch Kim Young-kwang’s face break into a smile (even a laugh!)

The storyline of the leak in information was a tad bit predictable but handled in a way that makes one want to keep watching. Meanwhile, the character of Dong-jin’s mother seems to be cast in stone as the evil stepmother. While I see how this could bring the lead pair together, it would have been more realistic to see more nuance. But, of course, this is a melodrama and the writing must fit the genre.