First Impressions: One Spring Night

We are having spotty internet issues while traveling which is making live recapping pretty difficult. So we are switching it up to turn our June recaps into review style recaps/quickcaps (we just need to catch up!). Hopefully this will work out. Though, once we get a good internet signal, and a desk, we will try and live recap it! Today’s recap is coming to you from a camp ground in the snow capped mountains of Colorado!

We have watched the first two hours of One Spring Night which only brought me joy and had me sucked into the screen because this show is capturing the mood and tone of Something in the Rain in a lovely way. It has the same slow melodic walk through the lives of Yoo Ji-ho and Lee Jung-in as well as the long screen takes, to incorporate us into their lives. So far, everything we see is through the eyes of either Ji-ho or Jung-in. The only other step into a characters life we get is from Jung-in’s father, Seung-han, and sister, Lee So-in. And goodness, her sisters life looks fabulous from the outside, but Lordy Lordy does she need Ayana to come fix her life. 

The sister actually feels like the main internal reason why Jung-in is not getting married to her long time boyfriend Joon-han. Though her father will possibly sell a pound of flesh for her to because her boyfriend is the son of a very rich man. This is the same type of pressure that he gave to Jug-in’s big sister which the sister regrets. They also hint in the opening episodes that the sisters husband is abusive. Though no one in the sisters life knows this because the sister is a news caster and all her bruises are always hidden. They do not say the the husband is giving her these bruises, but I think they are going in that route because she kicked him out of their home.

Jung-in’s boyfriend actually looks nice, though rather boring. He is always soft spoken to Jung-in, he always smiles around her, he gives her his attention, and he talks to her frequently. The things he talks about are boring and not so romantic, but he has open communication. The only time he seemed like he might have control issues is when Jung-in accidentally texts her bank account information to her boyfriend instead of Ji-ho (which I’ll explain further in our episode 1 and 2 recap). But that all kind of made sense because her boyfriends family are a bunch of bankers. So it seems like he is ultra sensitive when it comes to money. So far I will put that in the rang of normal. Though he might have a psycho moment later on (hello ex-boyfriend in Something in the Rain!), but right now he is not showing any kind of abusive or obsessive tendencies. 

Another good thing is that the boyfriend appears to know how his family and his father are and it seems like he tries to protect Jung-in and understand her in regards to them. The boyfriends father, Kim Chang-wan, is all business all the time and actually looks like he does not want his son to marry Jung-in. He has not said this outright, but every time he sees Jung-in’s father, Seung-hwan, he tells him that his daughter should get married, but he does not mention his son in that sentence which implies that she should not get married to his son. The problem is that Jung-in’s father is the principal of a school that is owned by Jung-in’s boyfriend’s father, and he appears to be under all kinds of financial pressures with having three daughters. He wants them all to get married asap and is not the kindest when he tells them this. The mother is on the daughters side. (It is basically a switcheroo from Something in the Rain).

With Ji-ho, we find out that he is a pharmacist, he is on a club basketball player team, and he has a son. Though we do not know how he came about having a son (besides the birds and the bees method) until episodes 3 and 4. Ji-ho knows what he wants, which is Jung-in, and tells her that almost as soon as they meet. Jung-in takes a little more convincing, though not much. All she does is think about Ji-ho after their meet cute moment in the pharmacy. Fate steps in after that and shows us that Jung-in’s best friend, Sang-hee, lives downstairs from Ji-ho in a small apartment building. The pharmacy is right around the corner from this apartment and Ji-ho actually plays on the same club basketball team as Jung-in’s boyfriend. So, lots of things are present to bring them together and to cause a lot of drama when the relationship progresses!

Another person I think will bring the drama is Jung-in’s little sister, Min-kyung who is recently back from Paris after being accused of being a stalker to a French man. She said that all she did was follow him around and ask him to marry her, but she had to bounce when the stalker allegation came up and wound up sleeping outside Jung-in’s door as she waited for her sister to come home from work. This little sister is adorable, free-spirited, and is all set to bring a bit of life into Jung-in’s life. She is already interested in Ji-ho as well as another member of the basketball team. It really appears that her M.O is to just have fun.

Jung-in feels stuck in her life though she has no real reasons to complain. From the outside looking in, she is an independent woman who has a solid family, a catch of a man who dotes on her, a fun friendship, and a wonderful job. But her life is missing something. Ji-ho’s life is being held together by his parents and a supporting network of friends and coworkers who understand his situation and offer advice. He is very much not independent of anyone and even has a little guy who depends on him a lot.

For both, stepping out of their lives to meet and love another person is a stretch because Jung-in will basically throw away all the comforts she has, and will marry in to, in order to date a single father from a middle to lower middle class family who is the hubae of her boyrfriend. Ji-ho will be risking his barely stable family and economic life to date Jung-in, and will also smudge her good name by pulling her into all his drama. And yes, he has a lot of baby mama drama (though the baby mama has not shown her face and is very much absentee). But I am rooting for them because they a so adorable in their timid awkward interest towards each other!

If you want to feel like a fly on the wall as two characters take a moment out of their disparate lives to fall in love, then you might enjoy taking a walk through this drama.

PS. It took a solid hour to upload this, argh!…the good Lord is testing me