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 the episode and watch for yourself? 

Summary

At Friday College before classes start on Monday, Earn collars Noh in the hallway to find out who he ended up sleeping with at Hua Hin. Noh accuses Earn of sleep deprivation, and changes the subject by offering him a bag of dried cuttlefish from Hua Hin. Earn accepts the gift and is happy that Noh remembered to pick him up something special. After Noh leaves, Pete finds Earn holding the package and tries to snag a piece of fish. Earn refuses to share and in the struggle over the package, the cuttlefish spill onto the floor. Earn leaves, angry at Pete for ruining the bag. At lunch, Earn is down in the dumps because he found out Noh brought cuttlefish for all of his friends so the gift wasn’t special. Pete buys Earn squid to make up for it. Earn accepts his apology.

Noh goes to the music club and hands out his gifts. Ohm enters the room and teases Noh about his confusion over his interest in boys or girls and complains that Noh left him with a lot of work to do for the live band competition. Noh gets even by taking back Ohm’s gift until Ohm apologizes. Noh examines the applications for the Live Band competition. (I’m assuming that he is looking for the Student Council application, since in the Novel, they were late getting theirs in). At lunch, the 11th graders ask about the competition and joke that the Student Council will get a pass even if they don’t have talent because of a certain relationship between the council secretary and the music club president. Noh denies this. Phun calls Noh asking him to bring him lunch. He is busy practicing his guitar for the try outs.

Earn overhears that Noh is going to visit Phun and follows him to the sixth floor where Noh confronts him. Earn says that he isn’t following Noh – he just needs to go to the bathroom and came to the sixth floor for privacy. Noh tricks Earn into taking the lunch to Phun because Noh needs to use the bathroom as well. On the toilet, Noh finds himself stuck in a stall without toilet paper and a broken bidet. Earn has entered the bathroom and hands Noh some tissue. When Noh tries to leave, he finds that the toilet will not flush and asks Earn to help him fix it. They remove pornographic magazines that have been stored in the tank, which fixes the problem. As they leave the stall together, they encounter Phun who is angry that Noh took his lunch into the bathroom and is bothered (and suspicious) that two would be together in a stall with pornography. Noh refuses to tell Phun what he and Earn were up to.

Before they can complete their discussion, Phun receives a call from Aim. While Phun cannot see her that day because he is practicing with his band, she invites herself to come to the trials the next night. Noh leaves Phun after telling him that he doesn’t care what he does with Aim because she is Phun’s girlfriend. He goes off by himself to think for a bit about the situation and calls Golf to find out if he could come to the competition trials the next night to tell Phun about Aim’s sex video.

In the music club room, Mick is miraculously playing his horn semi-competently. Film enters the room and sits next to Ohm who brags about his skill at teaching Mick. Film suggests that Ohm start teaching Ngoi as well, but Ohm says he’d rather just teach cute boys. Later in the hallway outside the club room Mick thanks Ohm for taking him on as a disciple and promises to work until he can hit high C. Mick gives Ohm a rare trading card as a present as he saw that Ohm kept a collection of cards by his refrigerator. Overjoyed, Ohm hugs Mick, which is witnessed by Fairy and Marshmallow. (In the book, that was supposed to be Per…where is he?). At lunch Ohm and Mick sit together and exchange food.

At the Convent, Grace announces that she has bought tickets to a concert for her friends and hands them out to everyone except Jeed and makes a point of letting Jeed know that she is purposefully not inviting her. Grace and Leiuw are selected to raise the flag to start the school week. In their homeroom assembly, their teacher announces that Jeed has been selected to represent the class at “Teacher Appreciation Day”, which makes Grace jealous. In a meeting with the teacher about a dance competition, the teacher puts Nan, Grace, Liew and Jeed together as a team.

After dance rehearsal, Jeed receives a call from p’Bee about a modeling job. Jeed’s phone dies and she is forced to borrow Grace’s phone to get the shoot details. Taking the job involves cutting school and Grace recommends that Jeed lie and say that she is in the Convent infirmary. Nan covers for Jeed with her teacher. On a break, Grace tells the teacher that Jeed is cutting school to be with a man who called her. At the photo-studio, Jeed tries to get out of the shoot when she realizes that she will need to wear a revealing outfit. Bee threatens her with breach of contract if she refuses. When she returns to school, the teacher punishes her by stripping her of the honor or representing the class at “Teacher Appreciation Day”. The teacher selects Liew as a replacement, which makes Jeed angry. The teacher comes to (comfort? poke fun of? It’s not quite clear) Grace. After the teacher leaves, Grace hatches a plan to bring down Liew by capturing screen shots of a text message string about a night she has spent with a boy.

Rambles

I have to admit that I’m finally starting to understand the girls of Love Sick and feel a bit sorry for them. I mean, the boys attend the prestigious Friday College, and in the novel there is a full array of high school courses and activities. After watching episode 9, I can see that the Convent, which as a sister school should be equally prestigious, is relatively starved. The boys have a full contingent of teachers, trained experts in their subjects as is standard at elite high schools around the world. The girls: well, they seem to have one teacher who is expected to teach them everything. It’s good that she knows gerunds and dance, and last season was teaching embroidery, but how much else can she have possibly picked up? The boys have huge soccer tournaments, a marching band that takes tours to Europe, a winter festival and a live concert; the girls have “Teacher Appreciation Day” as the most important social event of the year. I mean, it has to be important, right? Grace wouldn’t destroy the social life of Liew over something so trivial, would she?

Of course she would. And I guess we should respect her character for it. Sure, Grace is quite a piece of work, but she is learning some important skills that will carry her character forward into adult lakorns. She’s rich, and with money comes an inheritance and I can only imagine what her character will be like in 20 years fighting with family members over a piece of the pie. Considering what she’ll dish out over the small stakes of high school “Teacher Appreciation Day” recognition, I would not want to be her uncle or older brother when the parents start falling ill. Let’s just savor her while she lasts and hope to see her in the Love Sick 20^th anniversary reunion lakorn. Everyone needs an education, and the Convent seems to be the perfect training ground for a certain kind of character in high demand in the soap world. Every drama needs one.

Episode 9 was in general a bit of a mish mash of old and emerging stories, and I am uncertain how to find a summary theme that doesn’t involve a bit of scatological humor. Can’t be helped in an episode when a major plot turning point involved a stopped up toilet. I’ll be considerate to my own gentle readership and avoid that kind of thing. So this episode write-up will go theme-less so we can focus on more pleasant things.

Things like food. Cuttlefish, squid and fishballs and an errant lunch delivery were at the heart of the episode. Once again, we have meals standing in place of dialog letting us know where everything stands. On the plus side, Ohm and Mick are moving along quite nicely. On the minus side, everyone else is out of sync. It probably would have made more sense to introduce Ohm’s obsession with trading cards a little earlier in the series (as well as Phun’s obsessions with pens that look like Noh) as his over-exuberant response to receiving one from Mick seemed to come out of nowhere. It is part of his character to demonstrate his emotional response to anything – he’s not the most taciturn fellow. But even I was wondering where that bro-hug came from. Mick wins this round even if Ohm doesn’t yet see how he’s being led by his “disciple.” The gift worked and we now have Ohm doing very un-Ohm like things – like sharing food instead of just taking what he wants. Ohm is the type of boy who is more than happy if his friends don’t finish their food as he knows leftovers will come his way, whether his friends give them to him or not and he doesn’t always wait for food to become technically “left over” before he starts taking it. But not with Mick. I figure any relationship that someone can get into that improves one’s table manners can’t be all that bad – so let’s just bless this match and move it along.

Poor Ngoi, though. Not only do the seniors steal his food, they also won’t give him music lessons. Or make a pass at him. I think it’s time to start rooting for Ngoi.

Onto Pete and Earn and the cuttlefish battle. Yeah, it might help Earn if he’d just start filling in Pete on the whole Noh-crush he has. Earn is clearly favoring Noh over friendship and unlike Ohm, his true love is making him possessive of his food when he used to share. Pete does his best to substitute squid for cuttlefish, but that just isn’t the same. I think we’ll know that ship is ready to sail when Earn is as excited by what Pete can offer up as he is with the thoughtless “gifts” he thinks he is getting from Noh are. At least he isn’t like Yuri in his quest to find in his interactions with Noh little signs that he’s making progress. Once he realizes that the cuttlefish weren’t so special after all, he doesn’t continue to imagine that they were and accepts Pete’s peace offering.

As for Noh, way to keep focused on a simple task there, buddy. Phun asked you to do ONE thing. ONE! And you were almost there! You had 20 feet to go! I guess it’s partially Phun’s fault for letting Noh believe he was angrier about Noh’s disdain for Aim than he actually was. Noh probably wanted to avoid Phun. But honestly, dumping off the duty on Earn? There are things a guy has to do for himself. It is a little ironic that Noh shows such responsibility about cleaning up the bathroom but not dealing with other unpleasant things. In the end, I think Noh realizes that his reluctance to tell Phun about the clogged toilet- because it was his crap that was clogging it, and he’s uncomfortable discussing his crap with Phun – and his reticence regarding Aim are linked. As he remembers Aim telling him, Phun is going to be hurt more the longer he holds his tongue. Likewise, he could have avoided another fight with Phun if he had just explained some crap earlier, even if it would be a little embarrassing. Phun isn’t going to be surprised that Noh needs to relieve himself every once in awhile. That’s the breakthrough we were looking for. We understand that we are using a crappy metaphor to talk about Noh’s responsibilities, and for that, we offer our humblest apologies. But this shit’s important.

Finally, we go back to dealing with the Convent school drama, where Jeed was held responsible for some shit she pulled (o.k., I’ll stop, I promise) right away. While I probably am never going to warm to any of the stories at the Convent, I appreciate that the writers moved into a non-love story line in the animosity between Grace and Jeed and Jeed in particular. One of the things I was missing this year were the non-love story lines that made the show last year evoke high school so well. You can’t reduce high school to romances and it’s good to at least acknowledge that the girls have more going on than just their competition for boys and the prestige they bring. It isn’t a very pleasant school, sure, but I’ll wait and see what trouble Grace and Jeed get into. Grace despises Jeed a lot more than Jeed despises Grace currently. Despite referring to Grace and Liew as her “idiot friends” in episode one, Jeed still wants to reconcile with the clique. I think we’re probably heading toward open warfare between the two, but it’s too early to know for certain.

The girls were dealing with adults this episode in the first meaningful interactions with them in the series this season (I was beginning to wonder if there was some kind of “Children of the Corn” business going on at the schools). Not that these were positive interactions. Bee is rather much a monster in this episode and Jeed is too simple to realize that he could try suing her for 1,000,000 bhat, but you can’t get blood from a stone. She should have dealt with that shi—I mean stuff, yeah that stuff – right away and now she’ll be on the hook for showing some cleavage in a photo. As for the teacher, I’m still wondering about what that conversation with Grace was supposed to mean. It may have been the translation, but she came off as wanting Grace to cry about “Teacher Appreciation Week.” Maybe she thought she was being comforting, but it seemed like she was telling Grace that the faculty is onto her and doesn’t really like her. I don’t know how that would make Grace understand why she wasn’t picked.

That’s some seriously messed up stuff to hear from an adult.

Up next

Could we start singing already? Also, I hear Mahwin needs our support.

Fearless predictions

• Phun sees Jeed’s “money shot” an episode before he sees the first video of Aim (probability: 60%)
• Per’s band performs “Voodoo Child” at the live competition. (probability that Per chops down that mountain with the edge of his hand: 15%)
• Phun will be shown kissing that pencil “goodnight.” (probability: 25%)
• At the k-Pop concert, Taeyang spies Nan and the love of the ages starts to blossom (probability: 3%)
• It will be revealed that Grace has a brother. A younger be-speckled member of the Music Club who has no chance in ever inheriting a dime of his fortune (probability: 33%)