Nanon Korapat Kirdpan as Pran and Ohm Pawat Chittsawangdee as Pat in episode 9 of Bad Buddy

Bad Buddy – Episode 9 – Recap and Review

TL;DR Version:
The secret is out and Wai refuses to listen to Pran’s apologies. Things get tense during rugby and Wai barely works with Pat to get a win. Then Pat ends up getting shot while defending Wai then nearly arrested for having a gun. Wai saves the day though and all the friends are on board with the relationship. Then, Pran walks out of the hospital room to see Pat’s parents.

Recap:
The episode starts before the last one ends, this time following Wai. It turns out there was a mic somewhere (Pat is shirtless so… I dunno where) so he heard everything. Not only that, he saw them in the car earlier too.

We skip forward to the end of the last performance. Wai is giving Pran the cold shoulder. Pran goes after him, but Wai is too hurt that his best friend kept this secret from him to accept his apology.

Pat is getting crap from his own group and is sent away from the lunch table. Pat’s friend Korn chases after him and confirms that it’s basically for show, just give it time. 

But for now, Pat is exiled to an outdoor picnic table, which is where Pran finds him. Pat is annoyed with Wai on Pran’s behalf and treats it with his usual aggressive attitude in comparison to Pran’s sensitivity. Still, Pat offers to post to social media that they broke up, but when he goes to do it Pran pulls his hand away. Pran gets self-conscious and let’s go, then goes back to holding hands again.

Rugby practice time! Pat and Wai are not cooperative. Pran is there, and there’s some PPL flirting to piss Wai off further.

Ink, Pa, Pat, and Pran are having dinner together and teasing the two guys about their relationship. The new couple continues to show their affection with teasing and bickering. Pa and Ink walk out together and flirt. 

The next day Pran is trying to win Wai over with PPL but is rejected. The game starts and it looks to me like Pat is doing great while Wai is ready to lose rather than interact with Pat. They eventually get into a physical fight. 

The coach scolds them both, so maybe Pat was doing something I couldn’t tell because Rugby. Pat volunteers to stay off the field if Wai wins the game. But instead, they keep losing more dramatically and one of the engineers gets injured. There’s also a beefy guy getting camera love so he’ll be important later. 

Pat goes in and gets their team all the points. At a crucial moment Wai gets the ball and, after a brief hesitation, passes it to Pat. For a moment I care about sports.

Pran has made up with the other architecture students during the game but Wai still gives Pat the cold shoulder. The beefy dude from the other team then starts trash-talking at Wai.

At home, Pran dries Pat’s hair and then applies remedy cream that he’s now keeping for special boyfriend occasions. Pat gets him to apply it to more and more places until it turns into a foot fight and then skinship. Korn shows up and feels comfortable enough with the couple to use crude gestures to ask if they were having sex, which they weren’t.

At the bar, the other team is there and the beefy guy is going after Wai. He threatens him with a gun and Wai is scared. Back at the table, Pat’s group has also shown up and Pat ends up getting in between the beefy guy and Wai. Outside there’s a fight, and Pat gets shot.

Pat’s friends play it up to a worried Pran, but it turns out Pat was just grazed, although he’s in a bed with an IV. Police show up because they think it’s Pat’s gun.

Pran is stressed about this and tells Wai, who has decided to talk to him again since Pat got shot. Pran tells him they can’t prove anything about the gun. At work, Wai finds the security recordings of the beefy guy threatening him, and Pran runs it to the hospital where the police are about to interrogate Pat again. I guess. It’s a little sloppy here. The video proves things and over video chat Wai and Pran and Pat are all friends now. 

Pat and Pran are cute together at the hospital. Later, Pat gets clingy when Pran wants to leave and makes him blush by calling him boyfriend. Pran goes to leave, and right outside the door is Pat’s entire family. 

Thoughts:
First things first, everything with that gun was super clunky. It doesn’t bother me so much that this show suddenly has a gun, it was how the whole thing was done.

It was never clear when Wai might have mentioned the gun to anyone else, and considering he saw Pat confronting the guy, I hope he warned him at some point. Then, Pat was only grazed but based on the number of shirt changes Pran made, he was in the hospital for days. Then again, people go to the hospital for sniffles in these dramas so maybe that’s standard. Then there was the strange, tense music playing as Pran rushed to the hospital to share the security video, but it wasn’t clear why it was so urgent. Were they about to arrest Pat?

All these vague details point to weak, clunky writing. The show did such a good job with Pat and Pran’s relationship, but when it comes to Wai the writing has just been off. He needed a moment earlier that showed why he’s a good friend to Pran so Pran puts up with him. Then for this section, I think they could have come up with something better. But sticking with this scenario or making up another one, I definitely think it needed more time. Considering how much of the show they were dealing with their groups hating each other, I wouldn’t have minded more than 1 episode to show a more gradual acceptance.

Pat and Pran together, teasing and bickering though, are pretty adorable. It’s nice to see them supporting each other as they deal with their friends. Also, little details like Pat’s shirt is now hanging in Pran’s room.

There’s still some good satire going on here if you’ve seen other BL. The continued use of “remedy cream” and Pat trying to use it as some kind of foreplay. Over dinner, Pa teases Pat that she thought he’d say: “I’m straight, Pran is the only guy I like.” This has to be a reference to all the BL that tries to have the “not-gays” by having the characters not really be gay, they just like one guy. Korn joking that he also had a crush on someone in the architecture department seems like a reference to how often characters pair off in these shows.

So now we’ve gotten through the friend group conflicts, which was like the first boss battle. The next boss battle is going to be the parents. I was so distracted by the whole thing with the gun that I, too, was surprised to see Pat’s parents standing outside his hospital room.