The Time Jump
Episode 1 of Love Alarm Season 2 begins with a beautiful montage, combining hand-drawn animation with live-action snippets. This serves as a brief moment of tranquility as we then cut back to Jojo. 4 years have passed since Love Alarm’s inception, and Love Alarm 2.0 is a big thing now. The brainchild behind all of this is Brian Chon, who’s the CTO of the company. Jojo is late to class but hurries in just in time, ready to start her lesson. There, Jojo receives a message from Lee Hye-Yeong asking to meet. Well, she does just this as her love alarm goes off. He’s finished work early, prompting the duo to sit and eat together at the cafeteria. Hye-Yeong makes a big show about ringing her love alarm, stepping in and out of the circle. As he sits and talks to her, finally, he admits that Love Alarm 2.0 is coming along nicely and eventually will lead to Jojo loving him. Well, Jojo is conflicted as she heads over to Hye-Yeong’s apartment. Still, she enjoys her time with him, snapping photos and commenting on the cherry blossoms outside. He looks longingly at her as she envelops herself in the curtains. Only, as he looks set to kiss her, the entire curtain pole falls. Meanwhile, Sun-O attends a photo shoot with Yuk-Jo but leaves midway through, feeling sad. He believes Jojo may still have feelings for him and the love alarm situation is still a sensitive subject for him. Back home though, he comes under fire for his misdeeds last season, as his Father berates him. His Mother isn’t much better either, only caring about money and hiding her smoking from Sun-O’s father. She knows that Sun-O was crushing on Jojo too, and calls him out for it. At work, Gul-Mi does her live stream but after losing viewers, decides to turn the attention toward Jojo. Specifically, she breaks the news that she’s the artist for The Ringing World. Unfortunately, this leads to a shady guy waiting for Jojo after work, charging down the street trying to catch her. Thankfully Hye-Yeong shows up and saves the day. As it begins raining, Hye-Yeong encourages Jojo to stay at his house that evening. With Hye-Yeong putting the curtains back up again, Jojo creeps over and kisses him on the cheek, wishing him good night. However, doubts continue to plague her mind as she contemplates whether to get rid of her shield and figure out her true feelings. In the morning, Gul-Mi learns that several developers have been caught and are currently being held in the police station. It turns out they’ve developed a code to fake ring an alarm bell – which she jumps on. The culprit gives her an email address and claims to be able to help, something he’ll do in exchange for helping him out his predicament. Gul-Mi, predictably, agrees to help. Meanwhile, Jojo goes searching for Duk-Goo, believing that Brian Chon may actually be his alias. Given the brief little flashback segments we receive, it seems like this may actually be true. Well, first of all she heads back to school as memories of the past dreamily bleed through. Cutting back to the present, Jojo’s love alarm is rung. But by who? Well, as she opens up a door none other than Sun-O is sitting there!
The Episode Review
Love Alarm is back! After a two year hiatus, Love Alarm jumps forward in time to deliver an episode that tackles Jojo’s conflicting feelings. It also seems to hint that Duk-Goo is still alive – could he be Brian Chon? After he jumped out the window last season, many of us were sure he committed suicide but it seems like he’s not. Meanwhile, Hye-Yeong and Sun-O continue to live their lives but it’s already clear that both are conflicted over how they really feel. I’m sure we’ll get more love triangle shenanigans as the season progresses. With all 6 episodes up on Netflix, this opener works quite well to set the scene, although some of the prolonged, drawn out sequences could very easily have been tightened up slightly. That’s a minor point though in what’s otherwise a pretty good start to this series.
