My Perfect Stranger (2023) Episode 10

Jun 1, 2023

Episode 10 of My Perfect Stranger begins with Yoon-young turning a corner and offering her hand to Hee-seob. Bloodstained and a mess, Hee-seob refuses to go to the hospital until his hyung comes out. Yoon-young realizes this is why his leg is such a mess and has never been fixed in the present timeline.

Reporters come racing to the motel, right off the back of Hae-joon’s tip-off. In fact, he gives Yoo-seob his watch and tells him he needs to survive for 15 minutes before the reporters arrive. And thankfully, he manages to do just that. Yoo-seob and Hee-seob are still alive and even better, the latter heads off to get his leg fixed up at the hospital.

As fights break out in the police department over Hee-seob and Baek’s connection, Principal Yoon shows and reprimands them all, angry and livid that they’re fighting amongst themselves while blood is being shed in town.

Hae-joon sets to work on a different path, bringing in Yoon Yeon-woo to fix up their time travel car. While he’s hard at work, Yoon-young and Hae-joon discuss their current situation, believing they have to try and finish everything up in this timeline before they can return. The last victim in 1987 is Kim Hae-kyeong, the student who has ties to Mi-sook.

Outside the cafe that night, Hae-kyeong talks to Mi-sook and questions her ties to Hee-seob and her brother. Apparently she’s going to go through with framing her brother, while also claiming to have ties with Hee-seob too, glad that he hasn’t blabbed about her trying to kiss him.

Hae-kyeong though, has issues at home that’s closely linked to kimchi soup. After a fight in the restaurant turns ugly between two parents, Hae-kyeong returns and finds the soup there, telling her mum that she’ll only accept seaweed soup from now on otherwise she’ll never come home.

This is a pivotal time in the case and something that sees Hae-joon and Yoon-young more determined than ever to try and save her before she meets a horrible fate.

At school the next day, a big fight breaks out. Hae-kyeong ends up in a fistfight with one of the students, who basically calls her mum weak and not able to live without a man. When the homeroom teacher shows, he ends up slapping her in the face. Heading home, she finds kimchi soup and decides to write a letter and runaway. Thankfully, Hae-joon is there to stop her. After reading her letter, he decides to take her out and head off for a trip together.

This one-day field trip sees the pair visit a 300 year old tree that’s still standing. This may have had to withstand many floods and droughts over time, which is reminiscent of Hae-kyong’s mum, who stood for years on end trying to find some sort of news about her daughter, whom we know has been killed.

He relays the heartbreaking story of what happened to her mother in the future, and she tentatively replies that she was only going to go missing for a little while.

It seems to do the trick and her mother ends up making her seaweed soup after all. She did initially make kimchi soup too but her boyfriend is not going to show up anymore. She goes on to tell her that the homeroom teacher slapped her because she was badmouthing her mum.

Meanwhile, Yoon-young takes Soon-ae off to the hospital to see Hee-seob. He holds her hand and tells her she’s done nothing wrong. As she sobs into his arms, Yoon-young watches from the doorway and she’s overcome with emotion. She’s starting to understand why Hee-seob was so precious to her, and that comes from the fact that he’s been her pillar the whole time.

Back home, Hae-joon speaks to Yeon-woo who’s still fixing up the car. However, he overruns on his date to see Our Happy Youthful Days, which is apparently playing at the cinema. This is when Hae-joon’s parents first started dating and out of curiosity, he shows up.

Only, the girl he happens to be dating is wearing a pink ribbon in her hair. When she gave birth to Hae-joon, she skipped town and never saw him again. But who could this girl be? It’s certainly one of four people… and then we see it. Both Mi-sook and the waitress, Chung-a, head out the theatre wearing the ribbon. Which one is his mother?

The Episode Review

Alas, the plot thickens. We’re now left with a situation where Hae-joon could well be inadvertently messing with the future. But then there’s more to it than this. Mi-sook and Chung-a could both be a misdirection for his real mum, who is none other than… Hae-kyeong. Maybe she never went missing and was presumed dead after all. Perhaps she’s the killer in waiting and she’s been working with Mi-sook all this time.

Of course, take those theories with a pinch of salt but this episode in particular brings the mystery roaring back in the best way possible. However, it does come with some odd additions, namely that involving the romance between Yoon-young and Hae-joon which seems to have come from absolutely nowhere and just randomly picked up in the last 15 minutes of this episode. I don’t really see that chemistry between them – at least not yet!