Summaries (Spoilers, Obviously) and Comments

Note: I group summaries by story line, not in presentation order. If you want to know how the scenes actually played out in their official sequence, why not follow this link to Kuda’s site and watch for yourself?

Episode 3

Continuing Story Lines

At the post soccer tournament party, Noh sits down briefly with Earn. Realizing Earn is upset that Noh didn’t fulfill his promise, Noh feeds earn some fries and a beer and gives Earn a light-hearted massage before leaving. Pete notes that Earn wasn’t hungry a few minutes earlier when he offered fries to Earn. Earn gives Pete a peanut but forgets to shell it.

Golf corners Noh with a video of Aim having sex with someone from his school. He explains that there are several videos like that in circulation. Noh gets drunk rather than tell Phun. Noh starts making an ass of himself. He confronts a girl who he thinks is Aim but is actually Chanel. He falls into a pool and pulls Phun in. Phun takes Noh to his house since Noh is too drunk to go home where his father would catch him.

Pang, Whanjieb and Munmee are having a slumber party at the Phumipat mansion, reading yaoi. Pop messages Pang and wishes her “sweet dreams.” Whanjieb says that she’ll be mad if it turns out Pang is seeing Pop. Noh and Phun arrive at the mansion. Phun drags Noh to his room and is about to kiss Noh, but Noh vomits. After he’s through vomiting, the boys take a bath to clean up. Pang and company want to make sure Phun and Noh get close, so they sneak into Phun’s room to steal all of his clothes and blankets and turn the AC down. Phun finds an old blanket for Noh. Noh puts the body pillow between them. Phun kisses Noh on the forehead. Noh tells Phun that he thinks he’s a nice guy.

Mo attempts to make tiramisu for Moan to celebrate their first anniversary, but burns it in the microwave. Moan is late anyway. She calls Golf. Moan finally arrives and she confronts him about a girl he is writing a report with. They argue, she tries to leave, but Moan catches her. He has tiramisu he purchased from the store. They talk about whether they will be together for the long haul. Golf shows up outside Mo’s condo, but she’s not answering her phone.

Episode 4

Continuing Story Lines

At Friday College the next day, Ohm and Noh’s 11^th grade classmates recall the Noh’s drunken behavior from the night before. Noh realizes that the bruises and cuts that Noh saw on Phun were caused during a fight he had with Phun when he was senseless. Noh also lets it slip to his friends that he and Phun bathed together. His attempt to argue that they wore boxers only increases his classmates’ mockery. Later, he finds Phun to apologize and asks him to hit him back. Phun pretends that he is about to strike Noh but produces one of the dog tag keepsakes from the tournament for Noh instead. Earn finds the two and asks Phun to leave. He presents his own dog tag for Noh, who shows Earn that he already has one from Phun. Earn leaves dejectedly. Noh goes to a space where he can stare at the dog tag and smile privately.

At the Convent, Mo arrives and has a hickey. Yuri wonders why Noh hasn’t given her one and never makes a move on her. The girls mock Noh for being a gentlemen by stating that he must be gay. This upsets Yuri. To console her later, Mo takes Yuri to the Friday College to spy on Noh. They witness Phun’s dog tag exchange from the bushes. Yuri cries as that proves Noh is gay. Then they watch Earn do the same and Mo convinces Yuri that guys at Friday College must just exchange dog tags as a tradition.

 Neung trips Khom in the cafeteria and demands that Khom clean his shoes. Khom finds a job after searching all day.

Jeed goes on her first date with Neung. She asks him to take her on vacation to the beach, go steady, and proceeds to go shopping with him. He buys her everything she wants. Two swim team members see Neung coming out of a women’s clothing store and mock him for being gay as they think he is by himself. Later, Jeed is upset that convent girls are talking about her.

New Stories

Per is posting flyers for an upcoming live band competition that the music club sponsors each year. He is joined by Win who asks to help him even though he isn’t in the music club. Per refuses at first, but eventually lets Win do the work for him. Per mentions that he is dating lots of girls and wants to know when Win will start dating. Win just wants to be with Per.

There will be a dance competition at the Convent. It requires four-member teams. Liew, Grace and Nan need a fourth. Since Jeed is the best dancer, Grace wants her to join the three of them. Jeed says she’ll get back to them.

Rambles

I always often sometimes hardly ever fess up to my errors (because the issue doesn’t come up often), but I was wrong in my previous episode summary and included two events in episode 2 that were part of a preview of episodes 3 and 4. It demonstrates how choppy the editing is for the rest of the show when I can’t tell when an episode ends. I’m sure there was some text in Thai on-screen that said “Next Week”, but actually the scenes as were shown made perfect sense to me and didn’t seem out of sequence.  Golf didn’t actually show the video proving Aim’s infidelity until the third episode and Noh didn’t receive the dog tag from Phun until episode 4. I don’t think it mattered. My sequencing may have been better, as it would have moved events along more swiftly. Heck, we would have avoided a lot of the filler in episode 4 if the show did it my way. I’ve decided not to correct my post. I like the pacing of my mistake better.

 Episode 3 can be summed up as “Noh gets drunk and fans are immoral.” Captain plays a jolly drunk, even when Noh is hurting, so the impact of finding out about Aim’s infidelity and Noh’s inability to deal with having to tell Phun the bad news is played for laughs. Why the writers felt the need to drag Chanel into his meltdown is beyond me. But we’re back to “kathoey make everything instantly funny” again. So much for their “All is One” victory in episode 2. It’s a little disconcerting that none of his friends, and most likely the writers, understood why Noh decided to black out. But at least they hit the right note during the episode, trying to demonstrate Noh’s belief that he is responsible for keeping Phun happy and Phun’s regret that he dragged Noh into their relationship. Those feelings should resurface quite often going forward.

Once again, we have this idea of the connection between the stomach and love which should play out more positively as time goes by in Phun-Noh story. Food, love, appetite and desire are all related in the novel, and I think the new production team gets that. If you want to find out the status of a relationship in the story, check out the food. Phun can’t help himself and tries to kiss an almost passed out Noh. Noh isn’t ready to do that again. He vomits instead. Phun will need to wait. We wrote about the motif of the lover’s banquet in the last episode summary, and this time, we get a bit of vomit. We also get a burnt tiramisu and a rejected peanut. Mo is unable to create said dessert on her first anniversary with Moan, and the store bought version Moan brings home is ruined (if it was actually meant for her), which pretty much sums up their wrecked future together. At least they are somewhat realistic when they discus s their prospects.

More positively, Pete finally makes a move! (Maybe). He tries to feed Earn, who is feeling a little down about Noh flaking on him at the soccer tournament. Unfortunately, Earn isn’t eating any fries until Noh shows up. Then he is hungry. One is always hungry around someone one has feelings for, and Pete notices that Earn readily accepts Noh’s offering but not his own. Earn responds by thoughtlessly feeding Pete a peanut still in its shell, which Pete needs to spit out. Yep, that pretty much is their “relationship” in a nutshell. Pete/Earn shippers be warned (and I know your numbers are legion) – you’ve got a long way to go before your hunger is satisfied.

But enough on food. Episode 3 also reintroduces us to Pang and the Rotten Girls who have been surrogates for the yaoi fandom in the series so far. There’s a little reminder that last season a romance may be budding between Pang and Pop, which Whanjieb is having no part of. Pop is for Shay! True to form, Pang dismisses these concerns and besides, Pop and Shay are only dating. If they break up, they can find other people. When Whanjieb also objects to maybe not rooting so hard for Phun and Noh to get together because Phun is dating Aim, Pang responds that Whanjieb just doesn’t understand “forbidden love.” Pang’s commitment to romance is pure – to the lives of people? Not so much. I love her, but the way she imagines that actual people in her world can just be rearranged without thought of hurting anyone scares me sometimes. For instance, scheming to steal all the clothes and blankets from Phun’s room so that Noh and Phun will need to sleep closely together to keep warm – a little empathy for the suffering, please! (At least leave them some warm socks).

Anyway, the scheming teen-aged fangirls seemed out of place in the episode and interrupted what should have been a moment when Noh and Phun were starting to work out their issues a little more seriously. I understand that the Phun/Noh story started a little implausibly as two boys acting out a yaoi romance for Pang, but the novel and the series last moved beyond that rather quickly. I’m finding these kind of “girls acting ridiculously about romance and boys” sketches a little intrusive. They seem drawn from a different kind of TV show.

Which brings us to episode 4, which can be summed up as “Mo has a hickey and the girls go insane.” It was largely a Convent led effort. Yes, Phun and Noh had their moments, and we saw the 11^th grade class picking on Noh for the first time in what will be dozens of “pick on Noh” scenes this year. And we saw Mahwin and Per interact for the first time, but the bulk of the episode revolved around the Convent girls, who seemed to lose their collective minds, because Mo came to school with a hickey. It was always going to be difficult to produce likeable female characters from a novel that came out of the yaoi world, but in this episode none of the characters seemed to act in ways consistent with their past behaviors or in ways so extreme that we have to now regard the Convent as an asylum filled with young women whose grasp of reality is notional at best. Crazy girls are crazy about boys. Yuri and Mo concocting a scheme to sneak around Friday College in unpersuasive disguises seemed to be drawn from Japanese teen girl comedies. Jeed asking to go on a vacation with Neung without learning anything about him, then confessing that she’s worried that the Convent girls might talk about her? Grace expecting Jeed to join her dance team? I understand that Yuri’s ability to stay connected to the real world was always going to be a problem. I just didn’t expect the entire Convent to go that way. We need a grounded character there, a tether. In a novel where the separation of fantasy from reality is a central concept, we need at least someone at that Convent to step forward and be willing to live in the sane plane most of the time.

I understand the desire to have Yuri witness Phun and Noh’s big moment as her tears served as a counter to Pang’s fandom ideal that relationships can be rearranged willy-nilly without consequence. But not only did the the “silly disguise” plot device to get her into Friday College so she could witness that moment take up almost a third of the episode, her presence made it seem that the director and writers felt that her response to the situation should trump other concerns. As with Pang’s scheme in the previous episode, it seems that someone decided that the viewers need to be reminded that the two male love birds exist for the pleasure or displeasure of the female characters and we shouldn’t read anything more into their love story.

Up Next

Hopefully a trip to the beach (but without Jeed, please) and a maybe a chance to review the presentation of “Phun-Noh World” in the series so far.

The two of us listen to the faint sounds of waves crashing into the shore. It’s like how I feel on the inside right now. It’s as if there’s a fist that keeps smashing against my heart over and over…
And no matter what kind of a relationship we end up having, I feel so at ease every time that we hold one another like this…
I just want him to stay by my side as long as possible. This is all I ever wanted.

Let’s see how the team handles the terrifying and comforting experience of love. Can they pull it off without a cheesy k-Drama reference?  Can they show it without making it seem like one of Pang’s dreams?

Fearless Predictions

• Neung and Jeed show up at Hua Hin (probability: 42%)
• The boys check into room 17 (probability: 17%)
• The director will regret running a live band contest at the boys college and a dance contest at the Convent simultaneously. (Probability: 95%).