"Please Come Back, Mister" Episode 13 recap

It turns out that Han-na was just trying to see her real dad, Yeong-soo, all along, in typical chidlike uncertainty. The payoff for all that extended running around ends up being more tender scenes as Yeong-soo tries to do right by his family and with a little supernatural help, is able to comfort them somewhat about the fact that he's dead. It's all kind of sweet, actually, albeit somewhat annoying since there's not much left in the way of plot progression.
Credit given where it's due, though, every emotional argument we get this episode is pretty on-point. Flashbacks showing what it was like for Yeong-soo to actually try and date Da-hye show off some of the man's badly needed positive qualities. It's weird to think that Yeong-soo is better at coping with actual reality than he is with the paranoid delusions of his own imagination, even when both turn out to pretty much be the same thing.
Gi-tak's storyline is another matter. Distracted as Gi-tak is with Yeong-soo's life, for some reason, eventually we do get some major revelations about what happened in the aftermath of Gi-tak's death. The gangster conspiracies didn't really bother me quite so much as the contrived way "Please Come Back, Mister" ends up turning that plot threatening- by demonstrating how hospitals don't have CCTV, yet apparently funeral homes do.
Which honestly does kind of feel like nitpicking to me. This whole time I've been annoyed that the villains are more reactive than proactive, and now that they finally show some initiative the implausibility is the problem? That much is more a weakness of the overall writing, though, that at best "Please Come Back, Mister" is able to go from one kind of bad scripting to a different kind of bad scripting, with only the occassional moment of emotional sincerity capable of elevating the story to the level of somewhat sweet.
Although that does leave one big problem. All Yeong-soo can really do to help out his old family is by providing emotional comfort, and here, there's finally a decent out so that Yeong-soo as the fake Jae-hoon can leave his family behind without their becoming bereft all over again. But in that case, what's Yeong-soo supposed to do for the rest of the runtime? My best guess is that he and Gi-tak will team up to take on the villains, and while this episode was decent, it's hard to envision a satisfying takedown of bad guys who are this thinly drawn.
Review by William Schwartz
"Please Come Back, Mister" is directed by Sin Yoon-seob, written by Noh Hye-yeong and features Rain Kim Soo-ro, Kim In-kwon, Oh Yeon-seo, Lee Min-jeong, Lee Honey, Choi Won-yeong, Yoon Park and more

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