My Perfect Stranger (2023) Episode 2

Episode 2 of My Perfect Stranger begins with news breaking about Hae-joon’s death. He’s been missing for a week now but nobody seems to know where his body is.

Hae-joon though, wakes up next to this newspaper article in the time travel car (no, it’s not a DeLorean!) and stumbles into town. He’s also bleeding from the head, and after bumping into Hee-seob, the latter is convinced that his shoulders are super tough, especially after similarly bumping into Yoon-young at the end of episode 1.

Yong-young pushes past Hae-joon and heads into town, knocking out our male protagonist in the process. Hae-joon heads straight for a club, following her mum. Soon-ae is predictably left out by the other girls there, and as she heads for the bathroom, Yoon-young follows and excitedly calls out for her mum.

Predictably, Soon-ae sees the cut on the woman’s head and the scarf, and believes the girl is delirious. More specifically, she thinks Yoon-young has been sniffing glue. When she rushes past and leaves, Yoon-young is left in the bathroom alone. Unfortunately, police show up looking to round up all the minors and take them home.

Hae-joon hears about this outside and heads in, which is just as well because the head detective here, Baek Dong-sik, asks to see ID. Hae-joon manages to turn things around and claims to be their teacher, forcing all the kids to scuttle out to safety. This includes Yoon-young, who finally decides to play along. It gets her out the club, but once there, the pair discuss how they even came to the 1980’s in the first place.

Hae-joon brings Yoon-young back to his place, and decides to try and get the car patched up so they can return to their time period. He’s quick to point out how she doesn’t even have an ID or anything so she needs to be careful in this time period and stay inside no matter what.

Furthermore, they’re nearing the point of the first murder from the serial killer too, which is marked by 14th May on Hae-joon’s calendar. In the morning, Hae-joon is pulled away to attend a big walking competition with the different townsfolk, while Yoon-young obviously doesn’t listen to Hae-joon. No, instead she tags along with Soon-ae, whom she’s still calling mum.

Soon-ae calls her glue unni in response, in what ends up being a rather amusing segment. After talking, Yoon-young agrees to call her Soon-ae… and follows her everywhere.

At the convenience store, Yoon-young looks around and starts to put the timeframe in place, realizing that Hee-seob and Soon-ae met in 1987 and actually married a year later. It’s immediate fireworks for Hee-seob when he first sees her, but when Yoon-young gets involved, she realizes who he is and roughly pulls him apart to talk, demanding that he not speak to Soon-ae anymore.

Yoon-young calls herself Soon-ae’s BFF and stands firm. Hee-seob is not to be deterred though and remains determined to change Yoon-young’s opinion of him.

When Hae-joon returns home, he notices that Yoon-young has gone, but he also discovers that she has a Bong Bong Cafe matchbox too. Inside, he sees the sheet of paper and, putting his against hers, sees that it spells out “The woman reading a book is in danger too”. Now, who this could be referencing is anyone’s guess but given the next shot is of yoon-young reading Soon-ae’s diary, could that be a foreshadowed clue?

Either way, Yoon-young heads down to the dock and notices all the girls together including whom she believes is Mi-sook acting like a bully, involving Soon-ae being pushed into the water. The thing is, Yoon-young read Soon-ae’s diary and the entries there are suspiciously similar to Mi-sook’s book, published all those years later. It seems like she actually stole Soon-ae’s work to leapfrog to superstardom.

However, Mi-sook isn’t the ringleader here, as she’s one of the other kids that just falls in line. As for Soon-ae, she admits to Yoon-young later on that she’s still friends with all these kids because she doesn’t feel like she has anyone else to confide in. As a result, Yoon-young speaks to Hae-joon, just after he seems to have patched up their car, and tells him she can’t go back to the present just yet, as there’s something she needs to do.

The Episode Review

The second episode of My Perfect Stranger slows down quite considerably this time around, as we see a lot more detail about the 1980’s, including the framework in place for Yoon-young getting heavily involved in this serial murder case. We actually don’t see very much from that side of things this episode, except for the slip of paper which could be interpreted in any number of ways.

It could well be that Mi-sook is actually dead in the present and the person we’re seeing is just posing as Mi-sook and putting on a persona. This would certainly fall in line with what we’ve seen so far, with Kim Hae-kyung, the orchestrator of the glue-sniffing incident, being the actual killer.

Beyond that, seeing more of Yoon-young’s parents and how they met, including the quickness at their marriage and this suspicious friend circle is a nice touch, although the Detective is almost certainly going to become a big focal point here too.

While a lot slower than yesterday’s opener, there’s enough here to enjoy and next week’s double bill should be quite the intriguing watch.