Ghosts Of The Past
Chocolate takes all the ingredients of the first episode and blends them together, drizzling the resulting concoction over episode 2 in a rich and lavish hour of drama. Featuring some nicely worked flashbacks and the usual array of musical montages you’d expect from a drama like this, Chocolate continues to impress with its follow-up episode. As we begin the episode, we see Kang and the doctor fighting in the hallway from before and as the camera zooms out, Cha-Young happens to have heard the entire conversation. As she narrates about Kang’s personality and whether he helps people, we see this first-hand as he and Cha both help a delivery man outside collect up his cardboard boxes in the rain. With Kang in a critical condition in Libya following the bomb blast, his Grandmother decides to take him off the ventilator, much to the displeasure of Lee Jin. After calling his Father a coward, he storms off while outside the hospital, Cha Young sits on the bench. After bringing back her lost purse, Min-Seong watches from afar as she cooks food inside. Unfortunately Cha Young appears to have come down with a fever, and heads outside where she clutches her head. Thankfully Min-Seong is there to save the day, and picks her up in a car to bring her home. In Libya, against the odds, Kang pushes back from the brink and regains consciousness. Just as well too as the 2013 Christmas season begins in Korea. Cha Young sits watching a Santa Claus talk to kids while Min-Seong surprises her with a tablet spelling out Merry Christmas. They’re celebrating their 100 day relationship too but when he asks her to accept his love, she hesitates. He hugs her tight but tells her someone is watching. Refusing to let her go, he talks to her about the strange man who we find out is actually Kang. After a montage in the snow, we cut to Summer 2018. Kang is back and as a man is brought to the hospital, he’s given the opportunity to perform the surgery. Heading inside, we see the man is actually Min-Seong. President Hyeon-Seok prays for a safe recovery but unfortunately as we cut to a blood-stained Kang, exhausted outside, he weeps as we’re led to believe Min-Seong died in surgery. Only as we soon find out, this isn’t the case as we see Min alive and well in a future sequence. Following a flashback involving her troublesome little brother, Cha-Young continues to work hard, performing at a competition while ignoring her eager brother watching from afar. As the competition draws to a close, Kang steps up and offers his services as a judge, much to the shock of Cha Young. With a solid episode of drama, Chocolate delivers a really decent amount of progression for our characters. The unexpected turn for Min-Seong certainly caught me off-guard and some of the subtle dialogue does a wonderful job hinting at past events. There’s a couple of really nicely worked segments here and uncovering the different evolving relationships for our characters is going to be very interesting indeed going forward. The music is great too and looks to be a real winner, while the flashbacks are some of the best placed I’ve seen in a k-drama for quite some time. Every single one adds depth to the story and the amount of progression this week for our characters is certainly a far cry from something like Melting Me Softly that completely dampened its story with meaningless flashes. It’ll be interesting to see where the show goes from here and I’d imagine the flashbacks to the past and present will continue throughout as we learn more about the evolving relationships and what happened to our different characters during this period of time. Quite what will happen next however, remains to be seen! Have you watched Chocolate? What did you think? Feel free to leave a rating for this episode and a comment below!
