Love Sick Season 2 Episode 6

Noh and Phun wake up by the beach at Hua Hin in the morning. Phun’s hand and Noh’s hand are touching, but most importantly White’s other hand is touching his crotch. What is he covering? I am jealous of his hand. Noh and Phun look at the sunrise together. A title screen comes up between scenes, computer typing: “Doing the right thing comes before your heart?” [Did we ever see this computer screen title effect again? In any event, knowing the director, we know this is going to explain a lot about this episode. We will need to look at this question in the analysis below.]

Yuri wakes up alone surrounded by all the petals (from that one offering that she broke). Yuri is embarrassed about what she tried to pull off. Noh knocks at the door. She panics. Noh can sense something is off, but he simply thinks Yuri may be sick. Maybe she is Love Sick? As he looks around the room, he realizes that Yuri had been trying to have sex with him. Panicked, Noh thinks about who he should call.

Should he call Om? No, because he will just grill him about not being there. What about Noi? Well, not really because he is just an idiot. In the end he calls Earn, who apparently still has a ringtone that says “I have a secret crush on you”. So obvious Earn! Noh asks him, “You still have a crush?”. Earn reacts by changing his ring back tone (with As Is Calling Melody, of course). He lets the song play long enough so that Noh can hear Yinglee’s “My Heart for your Number”, wrong song. (Lyrics here). He hangs up and changes it again. (NOTE: Clever sponsorship). The next one is “I want this person to be mine… It would be great if this person was mine”. Now Noh catches on what message Earn is sending him. He makes a face. Noh explains his predicament to Earn, who tells Noh that the girls should stay together and the boys together. Noh tells Earn “When I saw the candles and the rose petals, I didn’t even know what to do… I am still a virgin”. Cut to a gleeful Earn. Wait, Noh is a VIRGIN? So, Phun entering via the back door doesn’t count? Alos, are petals and candles a universal way of saying do me or is that just a Thai thing? There is an awkward pause while Earn laughs. Noh thinks about it and then tells Earn, “Thanks.  I will just sleep with Phun” [Laugh turns to somber face] “Wait, what? Just sleep with Yuri” OK, now I am laughing…. 😀

Finally Earn tells Noh that he can sleep in the same room with Yuri because “girls are not as scary as guys”. It is interesting that earlier they played scary music while Noh had the realization of what Yuri wanted to do. I guess Noh is scared of having sex with Yuri.

At breakfast (I think? doesn’t look like breakfast food to me), Aims asks Phun where he was last night. Noh sends Phun off on an errand to get toast that is crunchy on the inside and soft on the outside. Noh feels uncomfortable pretty quickly and eventually leaves the girls by themeselves. Aim gets a call on her cell phone. She says it is her mom, but we see the name Bomb on her phone. She steps outside to take the call. Meanwhile, Yuri is left alone thinking Noh may be gay.

We listen to Aim’s conversation with Bomb. Aim wants Bomb out of her life. She tells him they are over. She seems distraught and hangs up.

He sends her a video of them having sex. Revenge Porn. Phun walk in on her. She is nervous. He sits on the bed with her. He asks her if she is alright. He is so sweet. “if I made a mistake, would you forgive me?”. Phun says, yes. She hugs him. I am jealous.

The gang goes to the beach. Noh complains about having fair skin and not wanting to get cancer. Actually, he is so happy to be pale that he says to Phun “Look at how great my skin is, this takes effort, you know?”. Phun offers his sunblock, but Noh says it is useless. Phun just applies the sunblock on him himself. White looks so sexy in that tank top. Passed plays in the background while Phun applies the sunblock on Noh’s arm (The way White applies sun block to Captain this is so straight LOL He does it with no finesse). The girls look shocked. Really? If they think that is gay, I wonder what they would think of Phun pounding Noh in the bedroom.

Golf sends the video to Noh. Why didn’t he send a note NSFW? Noh plays the video, and they all hear it. Phun asks if its porn. Noh says it is not, then freaks out and tells everyone he wants to go in the water. He even forgets his other arm. LOL What an interesting tan he will have!

Aim seems suspicious and checks Noh’s phone but can’t get past the lock screen. Noh realizes something is up and goes back to check on his stuff. Aim asks if that was really porn [Note how this is not treated as revenge porn, or child porn, just as Aim trying to protect her reputation or her relationship with Phun]. Noh tries to screw with Aim by telling her that Phun may have already watched that video. Why is Noh smiling here? He is enjoying screwing with Aim. LOL.

Phun throws Aim in the water while Yuri and Noh play on a float. They are cute. The boys end up playing together. [Note, Captain rarely takes his shirt off. He was pudgy]

Yuri sits alone on the beach, she thinks back about the morning events and suspects Noh is gay because of how Phun rubbed sunblock on him.

Aim fakes pain in her ankle and Phun springs into action and picks her up and takes her back to the beach chairs. Noh suggests the girls stay together tonight, because girls know how to take care of each other better. Aim asks Phun to spend the night with her so that he can massage her ankle. Noh suggests Aim puts ice on the ankle instead, “You can just put ice on it and the swelling will go down.” That’s something I would say LOL

Eventually, Aim wins and Phun takes her back. Yuri leaves and goes walking along the beach alone. Noh goes after her. Yuri asks Noh if he is straight. Noh doesn’t seem to know what to say, so Yuri puts his hand on her boob.

The less interesting story

Pang and the crazy fujoshis are out hunting for P’Shay and P’Pop. They talk about why, even though Pop is in the same year as they are, they still call him P’Pop. Apparently, it is because that’s what the fans call them and according to Pan, it is kind of cute.

The girls are spying on Pop. He is cute. They confront the one girl who is hitting on him. She says she is his sister “… for now”. The girls are mad. They give money to a guy on the streets. It is clear they have something in mind and are planning something. Afterwards, they follow Pop and that other girl. The editing here is hard to follow but the girls seem to be thinking about some plan they had which didn’t work because the guy left with the money. They found out that the girl was Pop’s cousin, but didn’t she tell them almost that much before they hired the guy?

Episode closing quote: “It doesn’t matter how others view you, as long as you believe in yourself“

Analysis

In this episode, the director has provided us an opening and a closing quote. The opening quote is “Doing the right thing comes before your heart?”, while the closing quote is “It doesn’t matter how others view you, as long as you believe in yourself”. The first quote definitely refers to Noh’s dilemma: Should he tell Phun’s the truth about Aim or should he hide the truth from Phun? If he tells Phun, he thinks Phun will be very hurt and he doesn’t want to see Phun suffer. On the other hand, he can’t live with not telling Phun what he knows. And what if Phun accidentally sees the video? Another thing that Noh has to consider is how this will ruin Aim’s reputation and what effect that will have on Phun’s reputation. With so much at stake, what should he do? The opening quote distills the issue into a simple question of whether he should do what is right or put his heart above it all and not do what is right but what is convenient. Eventually, he chooses to keep hiding the secret about Aim from Phun, and to let Phun live a lie.

If you have any doubt that Phun still likes Noh, check out how they wake up in the morning by the beach, with Phun’s hand over Noh’s. And if you don’t know how Noh feels about Phun, check out how Noh looks at him when he realizes that Phun had put his hand on him.

I thought it was interesting that Noh is genuinely scared of Yuri wanting to have sex with him. They even have him react with horror as he sees an image of Yuri in the mirror with offerings in her hand and a big candle in the other, trying to look all sexy. The idea is that Noh really is scared of the thought of having sex with Yuri. He didn’t seem to be scared when Phun knocked on his back door. Speaking of back doors, Noh considers himself a virgin. This is in spite of the fact that he had sex with Phun. Does that mean that for Thai men sex with other men doesn’t count or is this a simple case of a white lie?

This episode has some outstanding funny moments, including the back-and-forth calls between Noh and Earn and all the things Noh tries to do to avoid sleeping in the same room with Yuri, including telling Aim to just put ice on her ankle (I laughed). I have always enjoyed the entire Hua Hin trip arch because it seems so realistic. I remember when I was in high school and some of my classmates, who came from families with money, would go to their family’s beach condos and have big parties, spending the entire weekend over at the beach. Phun comes from money, and this is the kind of activity he likes to do with his friends. I always imagined that these was the kind of trips in which people lost their virginities, and so this whole subplot of Yuri trying to have sex with Noh makes sense to me.

It is interesting to note how Yuri’s character and Aim’s character are treated so differently by the director and by the screenwriter. While Aim is presented as promiscuous and manipulative, Yuri is presented as naive and childish. This is in spite of Yuri trying to have sex with Noh even when Noh clearly does not want it.

Another interesting thing is that the video is not treated as child pornography or revenge porn. The show does not place any blame in the people who distributed this video, nor is any blame or shame placed on the person who filmed the video without Aim’s permission. Instead, the focus is on Aim and her promiscuity. It is ironic that Noh is the one who gets sent the video and that he is the one who teases Aim about it. In real life, Captain was involved in a very similar scandal not long after this episode aired: someone distributed a video of Captain working on pleasing himself. Captain’s family put a complaint with the Thai police, but by then it was too late, and the video had been distributed widely on the internet. So, Captain knows the shame and hurt of having these types of videos released, yet his character of Noh is involved in victim shaming and victim blaming in the series. It is appalling that Love Sick could not take the right stand here. Aim was a victim of exploitation. I wish this had been addressed while still having Phun break up with her. Contrast the way this topic is treated here with how it is dealt in Make It Right Season 2 (same director), in which one of the male co-leads has a leaked video released by his ex-boyfriend. It seems like when it comes to women issues, Thailand is behind the times.

Yuri is starting to suspect that Noh is gay, but some of her reasons to suspect this are a bit lame. She doesn’t like how Phun puts sunblock on Noh. On the other hand, she is right about being suspicious of how Noh keeps avoiding sleeping in the same room with her. It doesn’t help that the girls at the convent have already made fun of Noh and planted doubts about his sexuality on Yuri’s mind.

The closing quote alludes to the final scene in the episode in which Yuri asks Noh if he is gay, then when he hesitates, she grabs his hand and puts it on her boob. Does it matter what other people think of Noh? Does it matter that Yuri thinks he is gay?

It occurs to me that the episode may parallel Yuri’s experience of wanting to be with Noh with how the fujoshis want Pop and Shay to be together. Pop and Shay may or may not belong together, but what is certain is that no one can make them be together unless they want to be together, just like Yuri can’t force Noh to be with her if he doesn’t really want that.

Overall, this was a really fun episode. I love when Noh complains about the sun, because it is very “Noh”, and I love when he tries to derail Aim’s plan of being alone with Phun. The part where Earn tries to change the callback ringtones was funny too. I didn’t enjoy the “other storyline” (e.g. the Pop and Shay storyline) and I thought the acting in parts was really terrible. For a show that is in its second season, I would expect the actors to be in better form. Captain had some real awkward moments, especially in the breakfast scene.

Overall impression: Decently good episode with lots of funny moments. The acting was a bit flat in parts. The cinematography was OK. Sound was an issue in some outside shots.