My Romance Scammer 1×05 Review: Episode 5

This episode marks a shift in the narrative, as we finally get our long-awaited Tim backstory.

I actually feel bad for Yu. No one trusts him or will listen to him, even though he didn’t actually do anything wrong. Well, that’s not entirely true. He did lie about his mother, which honestly makes no sense, as when he and North were stuck out in the woods, he talked about how he didn’t really have a family. I have no idea why he retconned his own childhood.

Anyway, not important. The important thing is that Yu is desperate to prove to North that his feelings are genuine. He first tries a standard romantic gesture of flowers and balloons, which does almost work. North admits that it would have, if he didn’t know about Yu’s history. So Yu goes to Tim for advice. Tim’s advice is to anticipate North’s needs, and Yu gets the chance to prove himself when Pai tells North that he needs to close his bakery.

Now, I don’t know a whole lot about running a bakery – or any kind of business, really – but I know that it usually takes years for a business to become profitable. So the fact that it’s been a year and North’s bakery is still running at a loss isn’t, to me, a sign of failure. It’s just normal. However, the family seems determined to infantilize North, which I’m sure has nothing to do with why he impulsively married the first person who treated him like an individual.

Seriously, they never even offered him advice or the opportunity to turn it around. It’s like they knew he would fail, so they didn’t even give him a real chance. He didn’t know he was on a timeline. That’s seriously unfair.

Yu helps out in the bakery on what North and Pure assume will be their final day in operation. Surprisingly, it’s the first day they make a profit. I believe it’s meant to be implied that a lot of this is down to Yu. He may be a scammer, but he did have an actual job when North initially tracked him down. (Curious as to what happened to that job, by the way.) Not only that, but he worked in a café. So he probably has some idea of what they’re doing wrong. (North’s “buy 1 get 5 free” sign may have had something to do with it.)

There’s also the fact that he’s handsome. I got the sense that many of the customers were there for him – much to North’s chagrin. He did not seem at all pleased that the ladies were flirting with Yu, even after Yu happily told them he was taken.

North is so ecstatic about his bakery finally having a day in the black that he kisses Yu in gratitude. Naturally, he still claims that he can’t trust Yu, but Yu is now even more determined to win North over again, and he refuses to listen.

Their story is moving at a great pace. They didn’t really get the chance to build a foundation, since their “courtship” and marriage were such a whirlwind. But they have a legitimate opportunity to start over with all their cards on the table, which I think Yu is willing to do. And again, he didn’t actually do anything wrong, it’s just that Pai is constantly in North’s ear telling him that Yu can’t be trusted.

Meanwhile, Tim and Pai are both dealing with their own crises. Pai is struggling to break free from his family’s business. He really wants to work on a gated community project with Tim, because he wants to build something for himself, rather than just taking control of something his grandfather did. Also, we saw in last week’s episode that the constant demands of his position are starting to wear him down. His grandfather confronts him about it, but does seem to give him permission to strike out on his own.

I had not given much thought to the family business. I never got much of a sense of anything about it. However, I’ve seen the theory floated that they may be involved in something shady, as the music during that scene came across as very menacing.

I don’t know that I subscribe to that theory, although I do like the idea of that putting Pai and Tim on more equal footing, morality-wise. (If Pai knowingly was involved in shady businesses, Tim trying to scam him is slightly less scummy.) Pai has previously mentioned a convenience store chain, and both he and North seem to live in a hotel, which is probably also owned by the family. Wealthy families like this tend to have their fingers in a lot of pies, so to speak, and operate a bunch of businesses under one corporate umbrella.

Grandpa is angry because, without a definite successor, it makes things a lot more complicated, logistically and legally. That’s why Auntie Kia looked so smug during that scene, and why she always brings Da Zhan with her. She’s hoping to set him up as the heir.

Tim is spiraling from the revelation that he is in love with his fiancé. There is really no other way to phrase that. He was so jealous when they were meeting with Kuea. I love that he kept figuring out ways to bring up that Pai was his fiancé, as though one of Pai’s best friends would not already be aware of that fact.

Something occurred to me while watching this episode. When Yu came to Tim for advice on how to make it up to North, I had sort of assumed that he was doing so knowing that Tim is also a scammer. However, their conversation made it clear that Yu came to Tim because Tim is a) his senior and b) engaged to North’s cousin. I don’t think he has any idea that Tim is supposedly scamming Pai.

I say “supposedly” because episode 5 shows that Tim has, indeed, fallen in love with Pai. He no longer wants to go through with his plan to divorce him and take half his assets. (Presumably. I don’t know how divorce law works in Thailand. I’d gather, from the way North is trying to convince Yu to agree to it, that no-fault divorce isn’t a thing.)

He struggles with the decision as to whether he should accept Pai’s offer of overseeing the gated community project as head architect, so he calls Prem for advice. Prem just flat-out tells him to his face that he’s broken his cardinal rule and fallen in love, so at this point he should just give up on his plan and marry Pai for real.

And Tim does. He burns everything from his crime board. He deletes everything from his laptop. He throws himself into the gated community project. That scene of him sitting in the dark with his triangular scale was perfection. It says a lot even without any dialogue. And then Pai comes in and turns on the light, because he is the light of Tim’s life. I cannot with this show; it does so much with so little. You can see a legitimate change in the way Tim is presented before and after he chooses Pai, and I don’t know whether this is down to Junior’s acting choices, the lighting, or the makeup, or a combination of all three.

Honestly, I did not expect Tim to admit to himself that he loves Pai prior to everything blowing up in his face. But I must say that this will make everything that much more painful when it finally does happen.

We also finally got some backstory for Tim. He is technically an architect, although he’s never worked professionally as one. And I didn’t realize, when we first saw his crime board, that he was in a house and not an apartment. It turns out that the house was his family home, and he is desperate to hold onto it after his parents went bankrupt. (Even Prem is surprised that he owns the house, and points out that if he sold it, he could pay off a good portion of his debt.)

Admittedly, even with this information, I am still a bit confused. Is the debt that Tim is trying to pay off actually his parents’? I got the sense that his parents had fled the country to avoid paying their debts, and Tim assumed responsibility for them because of filial piety or whatever. This is a pretty common story plot in a lot of Asian dramas, which I’ll say is odd to watch as an American, because in the US debt doesn’t really transfer.

But that’s just one more similarity between Tim and Yu, isn’t it? Both of them were abandoned by the people who were supposed to love them unconditionally and take care of them. Behind everything, the thing they are most desperate for isn’t money – it’s family.

I am really enjoying My Romance Scammer. I’m pretty sure I say that every week, but it’s true. It’s so well-written and tightly-paced, which makes sense when you learn that screenwriter PingPong Suwanun also wrote Thame-Po, Boys in Love, and Mu Te Luv: Love Me If You Swear. These are three series (well, Love Me If You Swear is part of an anthology, but still) that have been highly praised in the past year.

So I am seriously looking forward to the crap hitting the fan, which I think might be as early as next week. I trust this script, but also, we’re going to need as much time as possible to get to a happy ending. You know Tim is not going to have an easy time winning back Pai, and we’ll need all the episodes we can get for them to rebuild. Not even rebuild, since basically everything about Tim is a lie (except the love). They’ll need to start again.

Author: Jamie Sugah

Jamie has a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The Ohio State University. She self-published her first novel, The Perils of Long Hair on a Windy Day, which is available through Amazon. She is currently an archivist and lives in New York City with her demon ninja vampire cat. She covers television, books, movies, anime, and conventions in the NYC area.

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