Recap Korean Drama "Mental Coach Jegal 2022" Episode 11-12

There’s just way too much going on in this drama, and not in a good way. While I love the quick dips into stories of other athletes, it’s just too much to track our main characters and add all these single-episode side characters in there too. Even though the plot doesn’t feel rushed, it feels out of focus. I forget who I’m supposed to care about most, or whose story this really is.

Confusing emotions are the name of the game, though, for many of our characters this week. After her giggly hallway confession and Gil’s obvious distress, Mu-gyeol wrist-grabs Ga-eul and drags her off scene. I greatly sympathized with his, “Yah! Cha Ga-eul!” — half betrayed since her heart was supposed to be for him, and half horrified that she’s fallen for the old man mental coach (or just thinks she has?).

Gil tries to explain — rationally — what is going on in her emotions, and we get a whole lot of concerned chatter between him and Dr. Park, and him and Ga-eul about emotional transference. And later, counter-transference. Whomp whomp!

For Ga-eul to put all her positive emotions and gratefulness towards Gil and mistake it for affection makes sense for me, and I can ride out this little plot line all right. Except is that what’s going on? I cannot tell where the drama is taking this “romance,” and that worries me.

For all of Gil’s distress and balking over her attachment to him, he doesn’t seem to be able to detach himself either, despite trying to be a rational adult. This comes to a head when Ga-eul hits a major crisis (more on that later) and he literally runs off like a lunatic to find and embrace her, worried about always being too late to save people in his life, and thinking that this is the moment he’s been getting premonitions of. But not so. Instead, Ga-eul says she’s okay now that he’s near, and they share an embrace.

 

Dr. Park watches from afar and holds Gil accountable for his mixed signals to Ga-eul which, to his credit, he’s good for. It was counter-transference, he explains. And sure enough, we saw flashbacks of his most vulnerable moments as a child and how he displaced those emotions onto Ga-eul and thus ran to protect her (like he had wanted to be able to do for himself). That’s all well and good, but this crush is still not resolved, and Ga-eul insists at every turn that she’s so happy and she’ll just continue to like him from afar and have her feelings for herself.

That would be okay, I guess (?), but she’s a giggley schoolgirl in front of him and not only glomps him when he appears at the rink, but plants a kiss on him too. It’s innocent enough, but there are two things going on here: what the heck is with his reaction, and of course the kiss is secretly captured by a nasty teammate of Ga-eul.

While this uncomfortable display of affection is going on, it’s played against a similarly confused dynamic between Mu-gyeol and skating sunbae HAN YEO-WOON (Kim Shi-eun), who has been so forgettably tangential that I haven’t had much to say about her.

Yeo-woon has a long-standing friendship with Mu-gyeol, but now he’s confused about his feelings since it’s made clear that Yeo-woon feels more for him, but he says he likes Ga-eul. And yet — as Ga-eul so fearlessly points out to him — when the two girls had an accident on the ice, which one did he run to first?

Mu-gyeol is confused about his heart, so he runs to our favorite mental coach, who gives good advice… but also, he seems confused about his own heart too. And so is Dr. Park, who seems to like Gil. And then there’s Tae-man, who seems to like Dr. Park. But, the weird part is, all of these attractions and crushes are a bit undermined by the how-do-I-trust-my-heart vibes, so it’s hard to get fully behind any of it, frankly. At least for now.

Also, the fact that the Mu-gyeol/Yeo-woon romance makes so much sense (and I quite like them together even if the sunbae seems so poorly miscast) worries me, because it suggests that the Ga-eul crush on Gil will materialize into an actual relationship. This is the last place I wanted the drama to go — for multiple reasons — and I’m hopping as they tease it out we won’t end up with them as a couple. Because I might have to resort to my own flying sidekick.

In addition to all of the confused hearts this week, we have all the side plots, which (as I mentioned before) are just too much. There’s the national fairy gymnast who’s ostracized and miserable and wants to quit her sport. Even with Gil’s counsel she can’t find a way out, and winds up purposefully falling during a routine to get herself out of the hell she’s in. Oof.

Then there’s the taekwondo athlete who’s the son of one of the No Medal Clubbers, and in his match, Gil has major flashbacks of his own totally unfair ruling years ago with Tae-man. All the plot beats — the gymnast who gets blatantly favored, the taekwondo athlete who wins after bribing the ref, Coach Oh’s endless match rigging, and even Moo-tae’s betrayal — point to the same corruption that we started this story with. It’s getting to the point where it all feels hopeless. Every sport seems rigged, every athlete pressured and manipulated, and the athletes suffer while the sponsors and politicians and leaders play their cards and win their games.

Where is it all going to end? Getting rid of Coach Oh and Tae-man and even the assemblyman is no longer enough, so I’m wondering where the drama is going to take all this, with only two more weeks to go. Surely noping out of professional athletics and joining the No Medal Club isn’t the only way to be a real victor.

So where do we stand at the end of the episodes? Gil has quit his job in a fury, and also to protect Ga-eul since the photographs of their rink-side kiss have been captured and sent straight to Tae-man. Gil seems pushed to the brink, and he challenges Tae-man to a rematch.

As for Ga-eul, her heart is confused (or is it?), but she’s had a lot of healing with her past. The infamous night from four years ago, we learn, was heading in the assault direction (disgusting!). Coach Oh made a move, but Ga-eul took off, and then bad was made worse when Yeo-woon turned her eye to it, as she says. In the present-day, when Yeo-woon gets her cancer diagnosis and decides to leave the national team to focus on treatment, it also serves as a healing moment between her and Ga-eul. This was sorely needed, since Ga-eul had lost everyone and is now gaining them back. And I actually really liked this storyline for Yeo-woon, I just don’t know why I find her character so unlikeable.

Anyway, in the end I’m flummoxed. I don’t know what the drama is trying to do with their message and most of all with these love lines and transference crushes. I want to keep faith that the drama will stay true to the inner healing it’s been about, but I just don’t know how they’re going to pull it all together. There’s still a lot of healing to go for all of our characters.