Recap
A young man is slumped next to some bags in a stairway on a cold night. He flashes back to happier times with his parents before he stops breathing.
Back where we left off last episode, Yi Yong’s mom punches him out because he punched Guang Yan. As an apology, she offers free haircuts to Guang Yan’s dad. He’s not interested.
Yi Yong wakes up and Guang Yan wants answers about the mysterious falling petals, but he doesn’t see the young woman under the tree. Yi Yong calls for his mom, who only sees Guang Yan making finger hearts at her son and doesn’t see the apparition either.
Guang Yan goes running, realizing the cop only saw the zombie because it inhabited a real corpse. He gets his friends to take him to the mausoleum and the location of the accident but doesn’t see his dad.
By chance, Guang Yan realizes he sees the petals only when he’s in contact with the flyers with Yi Yong’s calligraphy on them. Yi Yong is unimpressed because the tree lady is asking for help. He tries doing calligraphy to release her, and she wants him to write ‘his name’, leading to some comedy. Ultimately though, she doesn’t know the name she wants.
Guang Yan wants to know who Yi Yong is talking to, and when he draws a picture, Guang Yan sees her too. He freaks out and runs away.
Yi Yong gets a job as a bellboy, but the tree lady follows him wanting his help finding the name, and distracts him. Yi Yong loses his job.
He makes Guang Yan help him by leading him to the medical lab where he first saw the petals. There’s a corpse that has been there for years without deteriorating. He’s the man from the stairway earlier, he has no name and the tree lady tattooed on his back.
Tree lady tells Yi Yong that once her petals fall, the corpse will turn into an ordinary corpse. Guang Yan supplies that means he would be cremated in about two weeks.
Chu Ying finds the case file on the unidentified man and Yi Yong uses his drawing to get her to see the tree lady. From the files, they know he died 11 years ago and has never been identified. The tree lady recalls how he used to talk to her, apologizing for not finishing her, but has no other info.
Chu Ying sends out pictures of the tattoo to artists to see if anyone recognizes it. They wonder if he wasn’t homeless, and start asking homeless people if they recognize him. Guang Yan’s social skills work better at first, but Yi Yong is the one who finds someone who knew him.
The older homeless man tells them the young man started joining the group of homeless in the tunnel. They were suspicious of him, but he listened to their stories and brought stuff they needed. He visited them for many years but didn’t live there, and left at night. He had no family and they didn’t know his name.
Chu Ying finds the artist that did the tattoo. The young man came and picked the image from a picture on the wall and asked the artist to make the face more ordinary. He wanted the tattoo because he wasn’t used to being alone. For a while he’d come back to replenish the colors. The tattoo artist liked him and is tearful that he stopped coming because he died.
The tattoo artist has a piece of paper the young man drew a draft on that leads them to a business. A corporate suit tells them they didn’t keep personnel files that long and he doesn’t like having cops at the business.
As they leave they discover a taxi driver was just there protesting the company’s treatment of employees and something about pensions. Yi Yong goes running after the taxi and gets in it when it stops.
Meanwhile, tree lady shows up in Guang Yan’s class. She’s deteriorating.
Thoughts
This show is so sad at times, but it’s a sadness that feels like it has a larger meaning, and is not just the drama creators trying to manipulate the audience’s feelings.
When we first see the young man he’s dying alone in a stairway, a painfully sad death. His death seems even more lonely when we discover he’s an unidentified corpse in a medical lab. But as this episode goes on, we meet two different people who are heartbroken to know he’s dead. People who didn’t even know his name or really anything about him, but they remember enjoying being around him.
Then there’s Yi Yong, desperately hopeful that he’ll be able to see his dad’s ghost. It’s heartbreaking how much he wants to see him one last time.
This touches on another thing I really like about this show: the lack of a clear explanation for what’s going on. With a show like this, typically there is at least one character who, if they don’t know how it all works themselves, at least has a sacred tome or some kind of line on a clear explanation. In this case, the only living person who might have the answers, Grandpa, is in a coma. The apparitions themselves don’t have answers, that’s part of the mystery.
Because of this, we really get to be with Yi Yong and the others as they try to figure out what’s going on.
Thankfully the episode is peppered with bits of comedy. Yi Yong and Guang Yan’s annoyance with each other, Yi Yong’s habit of not thinking things through, the ridiculous aspects of the tree lady’s look and personality. These shallow, silly moments of levity keep the sadness from being overwhelming.
Oh No! Here Comes Trouble Main Page
Oh No! Here Comes Trouble is currently available in the US on iQIYI.