Warning: This article contains spoilers for the ending of When the Phone Rings.
In today’s global media landscape, many TV dramas aspire to be as realistic as possible, hoping to reach viewers through a relatable premise and recognizable human behavior. When the Phone Rings, a Korean-language romance thriller that just wrapped up its 12-episode run on Netflix, is not such a drama. At its core, the K-drama adapted from Geon Eomul-nyeo’s web novel The Number You Have Dialed is the story of two people overcoming issues of communication to be together. This may be highly relatable, but the story elements are intentionally taken to the makjang extreme. (The descriptor “makjang” is applied to a Korean drama that stretches its depiction of reality, putting its characters in increasingly extreme situations that heighten the stakes and emotions, and populating its world with toxic characters who often act contrary to any known system of logic.)
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When the Phone Rings is one of the best makjang dramas we’ve gotten in a few years, with a plot driven by kidnapping, murder, contract marriages, arson, faked deaths, assumed identities, and political intrigue. What begins as the story of a seemingly loveless marriage between Paik Sa-eon (Yoo Yeon-seok), a rising politician, and Hong Hee-joo (Chae Soo-bin), a sign language interpreter, is turned on its head in the very first episode, when Hee-joo is kidnapped and speaks out loud, despite having used sign language to communicate since a traumatic event during childhood. From there, When the Phone Rings sustains its breakneck pace across 12 episodes, driven by the chemistry and performances from series leads Yoo and Chae. Let’s break down how directors Park Sang-woo and Wi Deuk-gyu and writer Kim Ji-won managed to wrap up the series’ many lingering plot threads in the show’s finale.
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Hong Hee-joo’s selective mutism
When we meet Hee-joo, she is living with selective mutism, a condition she developed as a child after the death of her brother. As the story progresses, we learn that Hee-joo did not lose the ability to speak in the car accident that killed her brother, but rather was coerced into staying silent by her mother, Kim Yeon-hu (Oh Hyun-kyung), shortly after. Selective mutism is defined as an anxiety disorder that prevents people from speaking in certain situations, even though they are otherwise able to speak.
Hee-joo’s mom, former club singer Yeon-hu, marries Hong Il-kyung (Choi Kwang-il), the patriarch of a powerful media family, when Hee-joo is a child. With the marriage, Hee-joo gains two step-siblings: Il-kyung’s daughter Hong In-a (Han Jae-yi) and Il-kyung’s son Hong Yu-jin. When the three children get in a car accident, Yu-jin dies and In-a loses her hearing. Yeon-hu, fearing that Il-kyung’s grief will take the form of vengeance against herself and Hee-joo for Hee-joo’s surviving the accident relatively unscathed, tells her daughter she must stop speaking. Hee-joo stops speaking and learns sign language so she can express herself and also interpret for In-a. As an adult, she uses her language skills to become a sign language interpreter. Initially, Hee-joo only speaks out loud to her father, Na Jin-cheol (Park Won-sang), who resides in a nursing home, where he is living with dementia.
Why did Paik Sa-eon marry Hong Hee-joo?
At the start of When the Phone Rings, Hee-joo believes that Sa-eon married her begrudgingly, as a replacement for In-a, whom he had intended to marry but then show up on the day of the wedding. The union was always designed as a political one, to secure a stronger alliance between the political Paik family and the media mogul Hong family. But Hee-joo, who was literally scared into silence by her mother with the belief that if she speaks she will lose their place in the Hong family, still believes herself to be the lesser choice between herself and her older sister, In-a.
When the series starts, Sa-eon and Hee-joo have been married and living together for three years, but barely speak or interact with one another. They are together only in contract. When Hee-joo is kidnapped by someone out to get revenge on Sa-eon in the first episode, she manages to escape with the kidnapper’s specially configured phone in hand. The phone is hard to trace, only calls Sa-eon’s number, and makes the caller’s voice unrecognizable. Hee-joo uses it to call Sa-eon every night at 10pm, pretending to be the kidnapper under the alias “406,” the first three digits of the phone’s number. Hee-joo’s initial goal is to convince Sa-eon to divorce her. She feels like a hostage in her own marriage, especially given that if either she or Sa-eon breaks it, they must pay 2 billion won, or over $1.3 million, to the other. However, as the two continue to talk and get to know one another better through the phone calls (albeit with Sa-eon unaware of just who he is getting to know), her resolve to leave him begins to falter.
Alongside Hee-joo, we learn that Sa-eon’s motivations for marrying her were in fact driven by love. When the Paik and Hong families decide to form a political alliance through marriage, Sa-eon goes along with it—but ensures that it will be Hee-joo, not In-a he marries. Sa-eon, who met Hee-joo when he was a teenager, has liked and observed Hee-joo for a long time. He married her to save her from the pain he saw her enduring within the Hong household. He didn’t try to get closer to her during their first three years of marriage because he didn’t want to pressure her into a relationship she had never shown any signs of wanting.
Who is Hee-joo’s kidnapper?
As the son of a leading presidential candidate and a spokesperson for the presidential office, Paik Sa-eon has made some enemies, but few who would go so far as to kidnap his wife. Hong Hee-joo’s kidnapper turns out to be… the real Paik Sa-eon, and his vendetta against the man we have come to know as Paik Sa-eon goes back decades.
The real Paik Sa-eon was born into the Paik family with sociopathic tendencies. Locked away and hidden from the public through his early years, things escalate when Sa-eon graduates from killing animals to killing local orphans who live near the Paik estate. Fearing for his political career, Paik patriarch Jang-ho (Jung Dong-hwan), brings his grandson to a rural lake and attempts to drown him. The man we have come to know as Paik Sa-eon lives at this lake, having been raised as an orphan by Jung Sang-hoon (Kim Jun-bae), a poor fisherman, for most of his childhood. Sang-hoon makes a deal with Jang-ho: he will dispose of his grandson’s body, and Jang-ho can take the boy he has been raising to replace the real Paik Sa-eon. From then on, the boy lives as Paik Sa-eon.
As you may have guessed, Jang-ho’s drowning of his grandson was not as thorough as he intended. When Sang-hoon goes to dispose of the body, he finds the boy alive. He raises him from then on out, but is unable to curb the boy’s sociopathic tendencies. When Jang-ho dies years later, the real Paik Sa-eon decides to take revenge against the second Paik Sa-eon for stealing his life. He goes after Hee-joo, who he rightly identifies as the person the second Sa-eon cares about the most.
Who is the second Paik Sa-eon?
In the season’s penultimate episode, we learn that Hee-joo’s husband, the man we have come to know as Paik Sa-eon, is actually the biological son of Paik Jang-ho. It’s unclear who his mother is, but Jang-ho left him to be raised as an orphan until the real Sa-eon became a problem and he needed a new grand-heir.
Jang-ho admits all of this to his daughter-in-law and the psychopathic Sa-eon’s mother, Shim Kyu-jin (Chu Sang-mi), on his deathbed. Kyu-jin has long suspected that the second Paik Sa-eon is Jang-ho’s biological son, and that Jang-ho killed her son because she wanted to replace him with his son. When she confronts Jang-ho, he confirms it, without remorse.
Why did Kyu-jin hate the second Paik Sa-eon?
After this revelation, Kyu-jin smothers Jang-ho with a pillow before he can die of natural causes, so filled with fury at his involvement in the presumed death of her son. Our Sa-eon gets this all on video, having inserted a camera into Jang-ho’s family signet ring in the hopes that he might learn more about the truth of his family’s sins. He doesn’t share the video with the police until the series’ penultimate episode. At this point, Kyu-jin has reunited with her biological son after having thought he was dead for decades. Desperate to keep him safe and to punish the second Paik Sa-eon—a boy she raised—for the sins of his biological father, Kyu-jin kidnaps Hee-joo at the end of Episode 10, and fakes her death.
Kyu-jin plans on keeping Hee-joo alive for decades before revealing her to the second Sa-eon after he has given up hope, but once she is arrested for the murder of Jang-ho, her fate is left to Paik family minion Min Do-ki (Hong Seo-jun). Kyu-jin has instructed Do-ki to murder Hee-joo, should she not return, but he cannot bring himself to do it. He lets Hee-joo go and adds another lock to the room that Kyu-jin has put the real Sa-eon in. However, in a misguided attempt to correct his own errors, the real Sa-eon’s father and Kyu-jin’s husband, Paik Ui-yong (Yoo Sung-joo) forces Do-ki at gunpoint to let Sa-eon out. Sa-eon quickly wrestles the gun out of his father’s grip, and takes off after Hee-joo.
What does Paik Sa-eon whisper in Paik Sa-eon’s ear?
The second Sa-eon finds Hee-joo before the real Sa-eon can shoot her. The police quickly catch up, but before they take out the real Sa-eon he whispers something in the second Sa-eon’s ear. He tells the boy who replaced him that the car accident that killed Hee-joo’s brother was orchestrated by Jang-ho, a.k.a. the second Sa-eon’s biological father. Hee-joo’s brother had seen the real Sa-eon’s face. After replacing the real Sa-eon with our Sa-eon, Jang-ho decided Hee-jo’s brother had to die so that he would not expose the identity swap. When Hee-joo’s stepfather, Il-kyung, realizes that Jang-ho is behind the death of his son, he confronts him at gunpoint. Jang-ho convinces Il-kyung to spare his life by promising a debt—one that is eventually realized in Sa-eon and Hee-joo’s marriage years later.
Why does the second Paik Sa-eon disappear?
After Hee-joo has recovered from her kidnapping, the second Sa-eon disappears from both public and private life. Driven by shame over the actions of his biological father and the pain they caused Hee-joo, Sa-eon stays away from Hee-joo to punish himself. But he doesn’t account for a Hee-joo who has started going after what she wants. After six months of waiting, she takes matters into her own hands, traveling to the fictional war-torn country of Argan, where he once worked as a negotiator alongside journalist friend Jang Hyuk-jin (Ko Sang-ho). With a tip from Hyuk-jin and a hint in the form of a major donation Sa-eon made to a sign language school in her name, Hee-joo travels to Argan to find her husband. “We spent more time misunderstanding and drifting apart than cherishing and loving each other,” she tells Sa-eon after getting captured by “rebels” and then subsequently rescued by a Sa-eon who has turned into some kind of vigilante in the past six months. “I won’t hold back anymore.” Hee-joo kisses Sa-eon, and the two fall into bed together.
Does When the Phone Rings have a happy ending?
It does! After all of the terrible events both protagonists endure, they are finally able to be together in a healthy relationship, defined by clear communication. The two divorce so they can get remarried with Sa-eon’s new name—a name he chose for himself, rather than one that was stolen from someone else and forced upon him. His new name is Paik Yu-yeon—“yu” for “only” and “yeon” for “love,” as Hee-joo tells their friends at an intimate celebration in their new, much cozier house.
Yu-yeon and Hee-joo are happy together, and joke about growing their family. Hee-joo sets boundaries with her mother, and forgives In-a for the cold way her sister treated her when they were young. “If I keep dwelling on the past, I’ll be unhappy in the present,” she tells In-a. Meanwhile, Yu-yeon rekindles his relationship with Sang-hoon, the gruff-voiced fisherman who raised him, and starts working again as a hostage negotiator. Kyu-jin is sentenced to life in prison for her crimes, but appeals, seeking the death penalty. She cannot stand to live with the agony that she failed her son, who is now dead, a second time. Sa-eon’s father, Ui-young, loses the presidential election.
It’s worth noting that, like the ending of other recent K-drama Lovely Runner, When the Phone Rings falls into the “magical cure,” “miracle cure,” or “throwing off the disability” trope, which links a happy ending to a character no longer having a disability. In When the Phone Rings, this applies to both Hee-joo and In-a, who has a mysterious, off-screen procedure that restores her ability to hear. This trope can reinforce the idea that disabled people are unable to live fulfilling lives without being “cured” of their disability.
In one of the series’ final scenes, Yu-yeon and Hee-joon are on the phone together. They no longer need the buffer as a way to communicate, but they enjoy teasing each other across the distances all the same. “I like it when my wife doesn’t hold back,” Yu-yeon tells Hee-joo. “Don’t hold back anymore. Throw a tantrum, complain, and nag if you want. Do you promise?” Hee-joo promises, and then tells Yu-yeon to come home. The series ends with this proclamation: “There is a couple here now. They don’t hide their true feelings and are honest with each other. They have promised to make an effort to be happy together.”
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