Marry My Husband – K-Drama Episode 1 Recap & Review

What Goes Around Comes Around

Marry My Husband Episode 1 begins with Kang Ji-won wistfully looking outside the window. She’s in a hospital bed and suffering from cancer. Her friend, Soo-min, comforts her and tells her not to give up. Ji-won admits she thinks her husband is cheating on her.

While she’s getting a transfusion, we learn that Ji-won was given 6-12 months to live. A flashback to her wedding shows Soo-min catching the bouquet. We learn that Ji-won was raised by her father but he died. After the wedding, Ji-won’s mother-in-law became overbearing and berated her for not being able to have kids.

Her husband, Min-hwan, quit his job and neglected her as well. In the midst of it all, she gets diagnosed with stage four of stomach cancer. Even then, her husband and mother-in-law continued to ill-treat her. 

Ji-won tells another woman at the hospital about her friend, who is great at work and has always been there for her. Well, this ‘good friend’ is the one her husband is having an affair with. Suddenly, Ji-won is told that her guardian needs to pay the hospital bill or she won’t be able to stay.

Of course, Min-hwan doesn’t pick up the phone. She heads home in a taxi but the mysterious driver takes her down a different road. It’s a path surrounded by cherry blossom trees at the height of bloom. He tells her she can always choose a different path. He returns some of her money as well and tells her to consider it a blessing from her father.  

Struggling, Ji-won makes her way home only to see Soo-min in bed with Min-hwan. She even hears Min-hwan say he knew Ji-won was falling sick and bought cancer insurance on purpose. Ji-won storms inside and throws things at them, shouting that she’s going to report them for insurance fraud.

During her struggle with Soo-min, Min-hwan grabs Ji-won and pushes her into a glass table. Ji-won’s head smashes into the glass. This is April 12, 2023 — the day Ji-won dies.

The scene shifts and Ji-won suddenly finds herself standing in an office facing Min-hwan. On instinct, she begins to attack him and is forced to stop by one of her colleagues. She realises something is off and runs out into the street where she finds that it is the year 2013. Her colleague, who comes after her, gives her his jacket and some cash to get home. He even brings her groceries.

She wonders if this is all a dream. Then realises it can’t be because she knows her colleague, General Manager You Ji-hyuk is the grandson of her company’s founder and will go on to become the CEO. That she knows this when no one else does, means that everything she remembers about 2023 will be real.

When she brings out the cash Ji-hyuk gave her, she finds the note the taxi driver handed her as well — it has a small heart drawn on it. A memory shows that Ji-won’s father had drawn such a heart on a currency note years ago. Ji-won realises the taxi driver was really her father, in spirit.

Min-hwan comes home and they go out for dinner. He asks her why Ji-won had told him she thinks she’s pregnant earlier that day. He rants about how he doesn’t want kids anyway. Ji-won tells him it’s only gastritis. As the irony of his words and their future strikes her, she tells him they should break up. He physically assaults her and she calls for help. They end up at a police station but the police are of no use. She recalls that Min-hwan hated the idea of breaking up.

Back home, she looks at her low bank balance, most of which is Min-hwan’s fault. An idea strikes her, she can invest in the companies that went on to do well and earn her freedom from him. While doing research on stocks, she comes across Ji-hyuk again. She buys him a meal for taking care of her the day she freaked out in the office.

She finds that he’s more handsome and considerate than she realised. She gets a call from Soo-min but ignores it. She suddenly realises that Ji-hyuk got a scar on his arm from that scuffle at the office and it’s the same shape as the scar she had in her previous life. Before they part ways, he tells her that she’s talented and shouldn’t give work up for marriage.

At home, Ji-won remembers all the dreams she had before she got married. The next day at work, Ji-won avoids Min-hwan and invests in Roijental, a company that Min-hwan had successfully invested in their other life. Soo-min approaches Ji-won and the latter finds it hard to return her affections. Ji-won is then called by her boss, who berates her new proposal on meal kits. Although, Ji-won remembers that in the future he accepts the same proposal when sent by Soo-min.

Later, Ji-won meets Yang Joo-ran, who was a good employee but never promoted by the overbearing boss. Joo-ran is called outside but she leaves her coffee cup on the edge of the table. Previously, Ji-won remembers she had gotten hurt while rushing to save the cup. This time, she avoids injuring her knee and is ecstatic about it. But later, while avoiding Min-hwan, she ends up getting hurt in the same spot anyway. She wonders if her fate is, after all, inescapable.

Min-hwan tries to make it up to Ji-won and to show his affection he sells his Roijental shares to pay her back the money she took from him. Instead, he’s kept his investments in TKU, a company that Ji-won knows will go on to fail. She realises that once she bought the shares, he sold them. Similarly, she didn’t get the scar on her hand like she previously had. But Ji-hyuk got the scar instead.

Ji-won realises that whatever happened will happen, but it could happen to somebody else. Just then, Soo-min walks with her and Ji-won asks her to throw some trash out for her. She decides to make Soo-min marry her husband and take her rotten fate at the end of Marry My Husband Episode 1.

The Episode Review

Episode 1 of Marry My Husband is interesting enough to really capture one’s attention. It’s a relief that the series went through Ji-won’s dismal life in 2023 pretty quickly, as lingering on that phase of her life would have made it boring and easy to abandon. Instead, we rush through her plate full of miseries and get to the good part — the time jump to the past.

The writing is crisp and lays out the situation very clearly. Ji-won must not only live her life anew but will actively need to avoid her fate by giving it to somebody else. It’s an intriguing concept that makes it easy for Ji-won to take revenge on the cheating couple.

At the same time, it’s vague and we’re not sure what parts of life and what kinds of decisions it could be limited to. Either way, with the number of times Ji-hyuk saved Ji-won from falling, I think we can expect to see a tropey but deliciously fun K-drama up ahead!