Family By Choice – K-drama Episode 11 Recap & Review

Episode 11

Episode 11 of Family by Choice begins with San-ha’s confession. Ju-won tries to feign ignorance but is ultimately so distracted by the event that she completely forgets about her date and goes back home instead. Park Dal figures out that it’s not a sibling issue with her and San-ha anymore. The next day, when she meets San-ha in the elevator, she swears to keep his confession a secret.

On the other hand, Hae-joon figures that he needs a family relation certificate to buy a property for Jeong-jae. Now, while still bothered by San-ha’s confession, Joo-won acts nonchalant when they gather for dinner at her house. There, Hae-joon asks Joo-won to marry him, to everybody else’s comic disgust, because it’s the only way for him to make his relationship with Jeong-jae legal.

Later, Joo-won tells San-ha that she’ll forget about his confession, but he pushes for her to reconsider, asking her to give him a chance all over again, without their past history. While going back, San-ha helps Hae-joon realize that he doesn’t need a legal status for their relationships.

Meanwhile, San-ha’s mother keeps calling him. Unable to get through, she calls his father after Hae-joon and San-ha have left, letting him know that she’d only sent San-ha on a month-long vacation and is expecting him back soon.

The next day at Joo-won’s bakery, Joo-won catches Hae-joon’s friend helping him visualize whether Hae-joon is romantically interested in Joo-won, which ends badly, with Joo-won hilariously punishing Hae-joon by making him clean her bakery’s windows.

On the other hand, San-ha clarifies to the dads that he’s back for good and his mother is just being her overbearing self. While he’s leaving, he asks Jeong-jae to visit the hospital for a checkup the next day. Jeong-jae and Joo-won arrive there, and while Jeong-jae completes his checkup, San-ha treats Joo-won’s wrist pain, which is when Joo-won feels butterflies in her stomach.

The next day, Hae-joon meets with his aunt, and the topic of his mother is brought up yet again, as she hasn’t contacted Hae-joon at all in the last 10 years. While coming back, Hae-joon follows someone who looks like his mother but bumps into Dal again. On the other hand, Jeong-jae actually bumps into Hae-joon’s mother while he’s on his way to get his prescription from the hospital in Busan. She tells him that she’d killed someone, which is why she cannot meet with Hae-joon and now runs a shop in Busan.

On the other end, frustrated with her blind dates, she asks Hae-joon to pretend to be her boyfriend for a day.

In the meantime, Joo-won and San-ha meet, and Joo-won tells him that they couldn’t be anything more than siblings. As they’re leaving, it begins to rain, and they rush to take cover in a tunnel, where San-ha kisses her, and Joo-won doesn’t refuse it.

The Episode Review

Our San-ha and Joo-won ship has finally sailed after 10 years, folks! Although we still don’t know the status of their relationship, it had been quite clear that Joo-won did have latent feelings for San-ha that only surfaced with his confession, considering how dense Joo-won’s personality is. The only thing is that, though we know what happened to San-ha and Hae-jun during the 10-year gap briefly, we don’t quite know what happened with Joo-won and how she ended up being a baker running her own business. But the show’s direction is clearly more into reconciling the three “siblings” and serving as a catalyst in their journey toward love and life, so we aren’t really complaining.

We also finally discover the reason behind Hae-joon’s mother’s absence, and although we’d guessed something similar when she disappeared suddenly, her reasoning to stay away from Hae-joon without an explanation lacks substance. If only she’d let Hae-joon decide. But since the moms in this Kdrama are flawed, thereby giving the drama its title, we’re curious to see how this will pan out when Hae-joon finds out the truth.