Recap
The taxi driver refuses to talk to Yi Yong about the unidentified young man, pulling out a bat.
Guang Yan’s sensitivity about the cadaver losing his name and life earns his classmate’s help. The classmate feels Guang Yan has become more sincere. They inject the body to stop its (and tree lady’s) deterioration.
Chu Ying goes to get a battered Yi Yong, who also beat up the taxi driver and may go to jail.
On his way from the station, the taxi driver sees the homeless. He remembers seeing the young man with them and mentioning it to a co-worker. He also remembers the young man staying at work late so the taxi driver wouldn’t be alone.
The taxi driver doesn’t sue Yi Yong but sends the young man’s work ID and a letter. He explains the young man was fired because of what he said. The young man wanted to be a teacher but his parents died and he didn’t go to university. He lived alone but neighbors heard him talking to himself.
We see him talking to the tree lady, red threads connecting them.
The taxi driver feels that Yi Yong beating him was a part of his penance. The tree lady cries as she finally sees the young man’s face on his ID. Yi Yong does his calligraphy, and we see the young man and the tree lady embrace in darkness. Then his corpse decays and she dissolves.
They go to a memorial for the cadavers and we get his name: Lin Yong Chuan. The homeless, the tattoo artist, and the taxi driver are there too. The homeless man tells Yi Yong he realized that even people like them need names. They tell Yi Yong their names, and he has them line up to write them down.
Chu Ying and Yi Yong squabble while Guang Yan thinks about Yi Yong being nice to the homeless. Chu Ying knows people like the young man from her work, who have homes but don’t want to be alone.
Yi Yong has a vision of his grandfather and the smoke figures. His grandfather shoves him, and he wakes up with the burnt paper calligraphy in his hand. The tree lady had it but doesn’t know where it came from.
Guang Yan asks Yi Yong how he does what he does and isn’t satisfied with the hereditary demon story. The tree lady explained it to Yi Yong as obsessions with a life of their own. She wondered why Yi Yong wasn’t scared, and he felt that he might see his dad this way one day. He doesn’t explain any of this to Guang Yan.
At the young man’s parents’ gravesite, Guang Yan tells them that he become a teacher, as his body taught hundreds of students.
Chu Ying picks them up because they have no ride, and dumps Yi Yong on a corner near the hospital. He walks off, and we see a man walk over a road sign. Smoke rises up, and turns into a child that grabs the man’s hand.
Yi Yong’s mother tells him Guang Yan explained what happened. She believes it because she fell in love with Yi Yong’s father at first sight, and knows people don’t believe that either.
Yi Yong talks to his comatose grandfather about what’s happened and asks him to wake up and teach him. Walking from the hospital, Yi Yong trips over the road sign the child came from, which is fully revealed as a man holding a child’s hand.
At home, Yi Yong finds a tough-looking man with a fedora. He thinks he’s being robbed, but then the man asks for help and his skin turns into asphalt.
Yi Yong becomes internet famous for tripping over nothing and wants to report a missing child to Chu Ying. When he shows her the image on his phone she thinks it’s a joke, then she trips over nothing.
At his home, Yi Yong uses a drawing to reveal the fedora-asphalt-man to Chu Ying. She asks about his missing child, holding up the phone to show the road sign of the child.
Thoughts
Again, sad, but not a manipulative, meaningless sad. A sad to illustrate the importance of names and lives and how we are connected with one another and what it is to be human. I love this kind of sad.
The apparitions are so interesting. I’m with Yi Yong on still not totally understanding what they are but that’s fine. What’s more interesting is how our first one was this genuinely horrifying re-assembled-corpse-zombie-thing. This second one is a lady under a tree. She’s not threatening at all, but she still expects Yi Yong to find her presence scary.
Now our third one shows up and Yi Yong thinks he looks like a thief and the asphalt skin is strange but not that horrifying to me. Yi Yong seems more driven mad by annoyance than fear.
I think this episode is where Guang Yan becomes the first not-parent to appreciate Yi Yong. Yi Yong has low self-esteem; in this episode, he tells Guang Yan that he can’t talk to the parents’ grave because he’s ‘nothing’. He’s been called a hooligan at school for his bad grades, he feels like he can’t do calligraphy from the heart, and he can’t admit to anyone that he wants to be a comic artist.
Something I missed until someone online pointed it out, Yi Yong also feels responsible for being in the crash because he slept late and was working on his comic book. Underneath the blank stare and grumpy personality, there’s a lot going on.
But Guang Yan noticed his kindness to the homeless men after the memorial. Yi Yong is also the one that wanted to tell the parents’ grave about their son being a teacher. Not that Guang Yan is fully sold on Yi Yong, he still thinks he was ready to cheat his father, but he’s seeing what’s going on underneath too.
It’s influencing Guang Yan too, as his classmate noticed.
Finally, I have no idea what to call the signs painted directly on cement or asphalt. So road signs it is.
Oh No! Here Comes Trouble Main Page
Oh No! Here Comes Trouble is currently available in the US on iQIYI.