Our Unwritten Seoul – Episode 4 review: facing your own nemesis

Episode 4 of Our Unwritten Seoul opens on a warmer, more inviting note, centering on Mi-ji as she steps into the role of Mi-rae to help Lee Ho-soo, the young man struggling after quitting his firm. His former boss has made it painfully clear that burning bridges comes with consequences, and now Ho-soo finds himself locked out of every job opportunity.

Mi-ji doesn’t try to fix his life with grand advice or hollow optimism. Instead, she brings him something surprisingly small: a trip to buy yarn for crochet. She explains to him that when someone has no hobby, no small task to anchor them, the mind has too much space to wander, and wandering too often leads to spiraling. Crochet, she says, gives your mind something gentle to hold onto. It offers a pause, a break from turning over all the worries and regrets that pile up when life feels stuck.

This section in the most recent episode of Our Unwritten Seoul feels unusually tender, almost like the kind of comfort you sometimes wish a friend or even a crush would offer you, not with words or solutions, but with a quiet nudge toward something that might restore a bit of balance.

It taps into that adult reality many people face, the moment you realize you don’t have a hobby anymore, or anything outside work to steady yourself. Mi-ji’s approach avoids feeling patronizing; it carries the warmth of a small gesture that reminds Ho-soo (and maybe us too) that even tiny activities can become lifelines.

Layered metaphors and the weight of survival

Layered onto this are Mi-ji’s own metaphors: the chameleon that changes colors to survive, the creature (likely a squid or octopus) that releases ink to distract and defend, and the broader truths the episode highlights through Mi-rae’s words:

“Even deer and hermit crabs do everything they can to survive.”

These images carry the emotional backbone of the fourth episode of Our Unwritten Seoul. They express Mi-ji’s understanding of her need to shift, adapt, and shield herself, and they echo through her offer of crochet to Ho-soo. This is more than an act of kindness to help him pass the time, it’s a glimpse into how she’s been holding herself together all along.

Flashbacks, guilt, and a brutal emotional core

The emotional weight of this episode of Our Unwritten Seoul hits hardest when the flashbacks begin. We see what happened to the sisters’ grandmother, and more painfully, what Mi-ji herself endured. And how she blames herself for something she had no control over.

Both Mi-ji and Mi-rae live under a constant cloud of self-blame. They believe they’ve always been wrong, always fallen short, but the truth the episode carefully reveals is that they were always doing the best they could within the circumstances they were given.

This realization, however, doesn’t come as a loud, dramatic catharsis but through quiet, piercing moments, the kind that force you to reflect on all the ways we carry guilt simply for being human.

A deeper kind of empathy and a personal nemesis

Now that the sisters have swapped lives, they’re engaging in something far more intimate than surface-level roleplay. They are walking through each other’s worlds, experiencing the weight the other carries, and confronting truths they never fully understood before.

Mi-rae, in particular, reaches a hard conclusion by the end of the fourth episode of Our Unwritten Seoul: one that ties directly to the title My Nemesis. She realizes that her true enemy has always been herself: her relentless self-criticism, her inability to forgive her perceived failures, her doubts about whether even this new perspective will change anything.

The episode leaves her asking the hard question: so what? What does all this mean, now that she’s seen it from the inside? It’s a raw, unsettled ending, setting up emotional developments yet to come in future episodes.

Meanwhile, Ho-soo’s growing presence in the developments of Our Unwritten Seoul adds another layer to the story, his interactions with Mi-ji and Mi-rae becoming an anchor that promises to change dynamics even further.

Our Unwritten Seoul - First love, exposed

One of the most touching turns of the fourth episode of Our Unwritten Seoul comes when Ho-soo, speaking to Mi-ji (who’s still pretending to be Mi-rae), confesses that Mi-ji was—no, is—the first love of his life.

He doesn’t speak in the past tense. He says it like a fact that’s still alive, still burning quietly inside him. And Mi-ji, so full of shifting identities and survival tricks, is left momentarily stunned, wearing that unmistakable expression of now what do I do with this?

It’s a moment of raw vulnerability, one that cuts through the layers of pretense and survival the characters have built around themselves. It feels like the perfect emotional climax for an episode already packed with reflection, memory, and self-reckoning.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 hermit crabs stepping into the sun.