This article contains spoilers.An end is often a new beginning and that certainly applies to the heartwarming Korean melodrama Thirty-Nine, which ended its 12-episode run with the expected death of a main character on March 31, the same day that series lead Son Ye-jin tied the knot with Hyun Bin off the screen.
Most of the show's dramatic weight is carried by Chan-young's pancreatic cancer diagnosis and the finite road it sends her on, but there were some other major moments in the show. The tensest of those arose from Chan-young's complicated romantic entanglement with Kim Jin-seok , her lifelong love, who is married to Kang Sun-joo .
Sun-joo's next move is to visit Chan-young's parents, where she spills the beans. Furious, Chan-young's parents call her and her friends down to reprimand them for this shameful carry-on, a moment foreshadowed at the beginning of the series when a jilted wife and her two friends mistakenly accused Mi-jo of adultery after barging into her clinic.
Mi-jo promptly cuts her biological mother out of her life, sparing herself any future trouble. While the danger evaporates a little too conveniently, the brief episode nonetheless brings an important point home for Mi-jo: her true parents are the people who have raised and cared for her all these years, genes be damned. Home, after all, is where the heart is.
Joo-hee also gets a tough run during the series. She is very much the third wheel in the friendship and seems to have the most forlorn existence.