SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Baby It’s Over Outside
(일주일 만에 사랑할 순 없다 / Iljuil Mane Saranghal Sun Eobsda / You Can’t Fall In Love In Just A Week)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

First of all, Merry Christmas everyone! I’m writing these reviews during my holidays, as it’s the longest period of free time I’ve had in a while. Anyways, it’s time to move into the second half of this fascinating anthology. I’m still not sure whether this is the fifth or the seventh episode (the order still confuses me 🫠), but I’ll say right off the bat that I watched it twice in a row. While I found it to be yet another really interesting episode with great cinematography and acting, a lot is left to interpretation. Even after rewatching it I still have a few things that don’t make sense to me or that I wish would’ve been explained better. What I did like about it was how completely different it was from the previous episodes, primarily because it didn’t deal with any of the themes surrounding technological development. It does, however, take a really fascinating spin on one of my favorite themes in existence: time travel. More specifically, a time loop.

SF8: Baby It’s Over Outside is either the fifth or seventh episode in the SF8 anthology. It has a duration of about 44 minutes and was directed by Ahn Gook Jin. It’s based on the short story ‘You Can’t Fall in Love in a Week’ by Kim Dong Shik.

This story takes place in 2020, and instead of a global pandemic the world is facing a different kind of crisis: a meteorite, heading for Earth, FAST. We’re not talking about weeks or months here – NASA has confirmed that the meteorite will strike Earth within a maximum of twenty days. What’s worse, an attempt to stop the meteorite from crashing into the surface by launching a missile to stop its course has tragically failed and the end-of-the-world countdown is set to seven days. One week left.
Amidst this situation, we are introduced to a rookie police officer named Kim Nam Woo (played by Lee David). He spent the last four years studying his butt off to become a police officer, only for doomsday to be announced after only a month of service. Now he doesn’t even remember why he wanted to become a police officer in the first place, and he feels like nothing he does even really matters anymore. His gut feeling has been telling him he’ll be alone at the end for as long as he remembers and the only ‘remarkable’ thing about him is that he has frequent instances of déjà vu, which he always just dismisses as coincidences and useless hunches.
Apart from his pessimistic outlook on his own life, Nam Woo isn’t a particularly clever or sharp police detective either. He’s quite lethargic and slow-witted, and he tends to get confused a lot (mostly because of the déjà vu). Whenever he seems to recognize someone or something he either brushes it off or takes the wrong conclusion. Something that frustrates him even more after the final week on Earth has been announced is that he suddenly seems to be surrounded by lovey-dovey couples, who clearly take the news’ message of ‘spending your last days with your loved ones’ quite literally. Instead of global panic or chaos, people generally choose to remain calm and spend their time together peacefully. It annoys Nam Woo to no end, and it only strengthens his frustration in being alone and spending his work hours on useless patrols.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that starts to emerge after the official doomsday-in-a-week announcement. All over the country, people start claiming that they possess ‘superpowers’. People start livestreaming and sharing their special talents with the rest of the country, and while the authorities are initially suspicious about the credibility of this phenomenon, it is actually proven that these superhumans are for real. In fact, NASA starts establishing a plan to work together with these superhumans to attempt another launch to stop the meteorite.
Nam Woo watches all these news reports on superhumans without a clear conviction – he feels neither connected to them nor does he completely dismiss the idea. That is, until he mistakenly arrests a girl when he’s on patrol – again out of a déjà vu moment as he swears he remembers her face from the wanted list. Turns out she isn’t, and she was just trying to get into someone’s house who she claims is a very capable superhuman who can help save the world. This person she’s looking for has another house up in the mountains, and Nam Woo is instructed to go with the girl.
Despite their continuously tense companionship, they start getting to know each other a bit better as they travel together.

Seeing as the original Korean title of this episode is ‘You Can’t Fall in Love in Just a Week’, one might guess that that’s actually what’ll happen to the two youngsters. In all honesty, the DramaWiki summary is very misleading as it says “a young man and woman choose romance in the face of the impending destruction of the Earth by a rogue comet”. Still, the hope or expectation that it does happen remains, and I think that’s one of the main themes (or tricks) of this episode.

As I mentioned in my introduction, this episode is the first one I’ve seen so far that didn’t depict a world that’s become highly dependent on a specific type of technology. It takes place in the year the series was released, 2020, so it’s not futuristic either. If I had to describe it I’d probably say it depicts an alternate universe version of 2020 – one with a destructive meteorite instead of Covid.
I found it quite remarkable how calm everyone remained in this crisis. It would probably be more realistic for mankind to completely freak out and cause global chaos in its final remaining days, but it was surprisingly powerful how everyone just seemed to accept their fate and agreed to peacefully spend their final moments with their loved ones. It also symbolized a kind of inevitability of some sort, like, everyone just understood that they weren’t able to do anything about it. If NASA and the superhumans could work something out, that’d be neat, but otherwise, this would just be it. It’s quite an impressive mindset to adopt, all the more when it’s adopted by every single person.

Let me talk a bit about our main characters before I move on to my comments on the rest of the story. As established, Nam Woo is quite the softy. I wouldn’t have taken him for a typical police officer, to be honest. He is soft-spoken, slow-witted, not very brave or fast, and he generally just has very little confidence in himself. His only ‘quirk’, as mentioned, is his proneness to déjà vu, but at the same time he’s too lethargic to even consider where that might come from. I think the fact that he never even stops to realize and fully think about what is happening to him is a very important aspect of his character, especially when we discover the truth about the whole situation he’s stuck in. He doesn’t even stop to think about why he can’t remember his reason for wanting to become a police officer, or why he can’t remember anything before this exhaustive studying from four years ago. He doesn’t stop to think about why he always has that frustrating and nagging feeling that he’ll always be alone, or where his déjà vus come from. As a main character, you could say that this makes him quite unreliable and even slightly annoying – after all, which main character doesn’t eventually decide to go in search of an explanation for something that’s been so consistently strange in their life? During his trip to the mountains while he’s accompanying this girl, he eventually realizes that he wants to stay with her. This is the first time we actually see him hold onto something, as he experiences what it’s like not to feel lonely for a change. Even if they don’t get that close within two days, the time he spends with the girl is still enough to make him decide he wants to stick it out with her. In the meantime, he tries to win her interest by creating a story about how his déjà vus are actually also superpowers, even though he’s not sure whether that’s actually true. In any case, it’s the first time he’s starting to realize that there might also be something inside him which causes these déjà vus, he’s finally starting to open up to the idea that he might be able to contribute something as well.

We actually never learn the girl’s name in the episode, but every drama source website I could find credits her as Shin Hye Hwa so I’ll just stick to that for convenience purposes. Shin Hye Hwa (played by Shin Eun Soo) is a remarkably stoic girl. She doesn’t appear to be very animated or cheerful and she mostly just keeps a pokerface whenever she’s with Nam Woo. We don’t find out a lot about her background, except for the fact that the person they’re trying to find was able to identify her superpower, and that she’s hesitant to reveal it because she finds it ’embarrassing and useless’. She does tell Nam Woo about the superhumans and how they’re divided into two groups: voluntary and involuntary. There are only a couple of voluntary superhumans who know their powers and how to use them, but there’s apparently a great number of involuntary superhumans, who either don’t even know they have powers, or who have been using their powers without being aware of it. We also see one involuntary superhuman on the news at some point who, when asked why he never revealed his power before, replies simply with that he always thought it was useless – this seems to be the overall tendency. Shin Hye Hwa only reveals her power to Nam Woo when they’re forced to spend the night at the person’s mountain lair while they wait for her to arrive, and here we come across a crucial piece of information – even though we don’t know it yet. Hye Hwa reveals that she has the ability to make the person she loves remember her forever. She hasn’t had a very good experience with this so far, as it rendered her unable to discover her mother’s Alzheimer’s until it was too late. Besides this revelation, she doesn’t particularly seem to warm up to Nam Woo as she doesn’t even care whether he goes back or not, but she also doesn’t mind him staying.

Linking their relationship back to the original episode’s title, ‘You Can’t Fall in Love in Just a Week’, this seems to be very fitting for the dynamic between Nam Woo and Hye Hwa. They’ve only just met and while it’s obvious Nam Woo is immediately interested in getting to know Hye Hwa better as she feeds on her company, it doesn’t seem likely that something will bloom between them in this short period of time.

When the person they’ve been waiting for, Mrs Yang (played by Hwang Jung Min) finally arrives back at the mountain house, she brings bad news with her – she just came from a gathering of superhumans, but what it came down to was that it was too late to collaborate with NASA as the meteorite had taken up speed. That same evening, the news reports that instead of taking five more days, the meteorite might actually hit the Earth as soon as tonight, and pieces of debris have already entered the atmosphere.
Just as doomsday officially starts, Mrs Yang casually offers to do a face reading on Nam Woo to determine whether he actually has a superpower or not – it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. However, this is the point where the real plot twist of the whole story is revealed. As it happens, Nam Woo does have a superpower and the déjà vus definitely are a part of it. Nam Woo is able to travel back in time to his earliest memory whenever he dies in an accident. Which means that, when he’s killed by the meteorite, he survives by going back in time. What’s more, it’s suggested that he’s already been through a lot of times, and this has caused his deteriorating memory. His earliest memory has become his training time four years back because he’s had to relive that period so many times he doesn’t remember anything before that, including his reason for wanting to become a police officer. So what if he and Hye Hwa combined powers? What if Hye Hwa would learn to love him (which, in this last minute scenario would have be solved by just kissing him) and this would cause Nam Woo to remember her even when he went back in time? They could work together in order to point out the approaching meteorite to NASA earlier! After all, the late discovery is what caused the inevitable situation, and the news keeps repeating how it could’ve been avoided if it had just been discovered earlier. They might actually be able to stop the end of the world within one more time loop! What a brilliant idea! That is… if only Hye Hwa could bring herself to kiss Nam Woo. Because that’s where it ends. Hye Hwa backs off at the last second before kissing him, apologizing to Mrs Yang that she can’t do it, the meteorite strikes, and we’re zipped back to four years earlier. Back to when Nam Woo is sweating in his little studio while studying for his police exams. Not only that, we find out that Hye Hwa lived just down the hall in the same apartment complex and they actually crossed paths there. Apart from a vague sign of recognition, Nam Woo doesn’t seem to make the link and disappears back into his room while Hye Hwa stares out of the window, facing the inevitable future of the approaching meteorite.

Honestly, after grasping the mavity of the situation and the fact that we’ve basically been dropped in the middle of a time loop with this episode, I’ve come to appreciate this story more and more. When I finished it the first time, all I could think of was how this was such an anticlimax and how much was left unexplained and unsolved. However, after rewatching it and taking a considerable amount of time to write this review, I’ve ended up rating this episode higher than I initially did because the idea of the possibilities this story hold is absolutely fascinating.
I don’t know if anyone who reads these reviews watches anime and happens to know the Haruhi Suzumiya series, but they would probably know the Endless Eight (∞) arc from the second season. This arc consists of eight episodes of the same week repeated over and over again until the main characters finally figure out what needs to be done in order to break the cycle, which is made even more problematic that they, much like Nam Woo, don’t retain any substantial memories from previous loops and only experience vague moments of déjà vu. Baby It’s Over Outside reminded me painfully much of this arc, and a part of me is glad that it doesn’t depict a continuous repetition of the same four years all over again. In hindsight I find it pretty cool that we’re only shown one time loop which does not succeed, but which does give us a first clue as to how the disaster may be avoided. The next step undeniably comes down to Hye Hwa getting over herself by kissing Nam Woo, because the story will only be able to progress once Nam Woo remembers Hye Hwa when he travels back in time.

I actually thought it was nice how this episode held onto the hope of survival. Not just when looking at how calm everyone remained and the consistent optimism of the news reporter (more about her later), but also in the very fact that it leaves the story unfinished. It literally leaves the possibility and hope of fixing the situation open, and we can only hope that Nam Woo and Hye Hwa ever reach the point of getting close enough within that one week to make it work. In fact, you could argue that there is a hint which shows that they were able to get at least a little bit closer in a previous loop. While staying the night at the mountain house, Nam Woo has a dream of Hye Hwa joining him on the veranda, and the way she talks to him in that dream, the way she lets her tears roll at the sight of possibly their last sunset, suggests that they may have actually grown closer in that loop. We can assume that this must have been a previous attempt as the next morning, Hye Hwa actually repeats the same line from his dream, only in a more detached way which only signified that they hadn’t grown that close yet. Of course, Nam Woo has no idea how to interpret his dream at this point, but it does lead him to feel like he might have some sort of predictive ability. At this point, it also seems like he’s more alert to his déjà vus when it concerns Hye Hwa or anything she says or does. All in all, I think it’s safe to say that after finishing this episode we can all answer the question Nam Woo asks himself “Why do I feel so frustrated?” when he’s debating whether to go back to Hye Hwa or to just go home. We’re all frustrated bro, we all are.

Honestly, how wry is it to realize how many times Nam Woo must’ve already gone through these same four years? His whole life and personality have been shaped by this time loop, he has literally lost all his memories from before the time loop started. Every single time he realizes he can actually play an important part in saving the world, and every single time he’s rejected by possibly the only girl who’ll ever be able to love him. Who knows how far he may have come in previous attempts? He may have actually gotten closer to Hye Hwa, he may have met other superhumans, he may have come one step closer every single time but just not close enough. I can only hope that they will be able to get to that point eventually. Despite my initial feeling of disappointment and anticlimax, I’ve now come to appreciate the structure of this episode’s story and how it actually only strengthens my hope in that they manage to solve the situation one day, rather than my disappointment of failing at it this specific time. It’s pretty genius when you think about it.

Which brings me to a couple of elements in the episode that really puzzled me. In hindsight, I feel like these events may have even played a part in previous attempts but were just not tackled in this particular loop.
First of all, when the seven-day countdown is first established, we see Nam Woo standing in his room with a gun in his hand. Now this could just as well have been the beginning of that particular day which goes on to him getting dressed for work, but a comment I read on one of my drama source websites gave me the idea that maybe this could also be a reference to a previous loop. After all, this scene is accompanied by a narration by Nam Woo that once again signifies how he’s always had ‘this strange feeling’ and how he always dismissed his premonitions as ‘useless hunches’. What if in one loop he actually decided to leave Hye Hwa at the mountain and went home and ended up taking his own life with that gun when confronted with the inevitable countdown? It might as well be another clue to how many times he’s repeated this cycle before.
Secondly, the discarded clothes in the gas station convenience store. During their journey to the mountains, Nam Woo stops at a gas station to tank and get some snacks. When he’s standing in the shop he finds that there’s no one there to help him. What’s even more strange as that only we as the viewers get to see a trail of discarded clothes that leads up to the cashier. Nam Woo doesn’t see this and his attention is quickly distracted by the sound of Hye Hwa leaving the car. But what’s with these clothes? It literally looks as if someone lost a piece of clothing every step of the way towards the cashier, because it builds up from outer clothing in the pathway to a piece of underpants on the cashier’s chair. The fact that this isn’t clarified and just left there as some piece of evidence (or not) puzzled me very much.
Thirdly, the thing in the gas station bathroom. Nam Woo realizes Hye Hwa left the car to go to the bathroom, and while he’s looking around to see where she went, he hears a scream and finds her outside the bathroom. She’s crouching down against the wall opposite the entrance, seemingly terrified of something inside. Nam Woo doesn’t spot anything inside, and Hye Hwa drags him away after one of the stall doors suddenly opens. However, as they disappear from sight, a cinematographic trick does give the impression that there’s something or someone inside. The final shot is taken from inside the bathroom, and it literally crawls down as if someone who’d been watching them from that top right corner was now coming down. Again, it’s not revealed what or who this is, what it was doing there and what Hye Hwa actually saw. We only see the story from Nam Woo’s point of view, which provides quite a restricted storyline. At least saving Hye Hwa and giving her a bandaid did contribute to her opening up to Nam Woo a little bit, but apart from that I find it hard to gauge what this scene was about. Could it have been the clothes-less cashier that had lost his mind and now hid away in the bathroom? What other forces were at play here? Not being able to find out what this part was about is one of the more bitter pills we have to swallow.

Finally, I want to mention the news anchor that’s predominantly featured throughout the story. This woman (played by Bae Hae Seon) is depicted several times while she gives updates on the meteorite situation. She’s also shown one time while she has a couple of superhuman guests and she confirms at least one of their powers. In the final update where she announces the meteorite’s debris can hit any moment, she’s adamant on stressing that she is positive that the situation can be solved, but the connection is interrupted – most likely because of the debris because we’ve just seen how pieces of it are already starting to cause explosions on the surface – and she’s not able to finish expressing her final hopeful wish. By the way, the way the connection was cut was pretty creepy, the way the channel suddenly started to switch and how the news anchor’s final scream (quite literally resembling the painting ‘The Scream’ by Edward Münch) was stretched over the screen before it turned black. I can’t help but wonder if there was something more to the news anchor. What if she actually knew more about the time loops and she was trying to reach Nam Woo or anyone else with her determined words about how she believed it wasn’t the end? I just felt like there was (or could be) more to her character, and if maybe in one loop she got (or would get) personally involved with Nam Woo and Hye Hwa, helping them out as they tried to save the world. This thought is only strengthened by the fact that in the opening sequence of the anthology that features short clips referring to each episode, Baby It’s Over Outside was depicted through a flickering TV screen on a barren wasteland with the meteorite in the background. The fact that the TV was specifically featured just makes me feel like there is something more to be explored there.

I have to admit I don’t really understand why the title of this episode was translated into English as ‘Baby It’s Over Outside’. I mean, I understand it refers to things ‘being over outside’ in the sense that the world is ending. It also features the scene where Nam Woo, Hye Hwa and Mrs Yang are standing outside the mountain house, watching as the sky starts to change color and the pieces of debris start to hit the Earth’s surface. But I still find it a bit of an odd English title. The Korean title of the episode and the short story it’s based on, ‘You Can’t Fall in Love in Just a Week’, makes more sense to me as it actually refers to a key part of the story: these two people have to fall in love or at least have some kind of physical intimacy within a week in order to save the planet. I don’t know, I don’t think ‘Baby It’s Over Outside’ really suits the tone of the story, and it also reminds me too much of the Christmas song ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ (good timing to watch this around Christmas, lol). I even saw someone write new lyrics to the song that included references to this episode, which was quite original.

Let’s move onto the cast comments! Again, we’re dealing with a very small core cast in this episode.

I’ve seen Lee David in several dramas before this, Who Are You: School 2015, Let’s Fight Ghost, Hotel Del Luna and Itaewon Class. I found him the perfect choice for Nam Woo. I loved how he managed pulling off such effortlessly comical acting through Nam Woo’s complete obliviousness what was going on around him. I’ve said this before, but most of the time people who take themselves really seriously and don’t even try to be funny end up becoming the most comical characters, more so than people who are clearly trying to be funny. I really felt for him, especially when the truth was revealed that he had been stuck in a time loop for who knows how long and that it was already starting to affect the way he lived his life. To be gradually consumed by repeating the same four years over and over again without truly noticing it and just slowly but surely losing sense of everything around you, it sounds like an awful punishment and I just hope for his sake that one day he’ll manage to get out of it. Seriously, how much must is have stung that Hye Hwa couldn’t even bring herself to touch him despite it being possibly the only way of saving the planet. Poor guy. He performed really well in this episode, he kept surprising me with his comical timing and he really showed me a side to his acting I hadn’t seen before.

I actually saw Shin Eun Soo for the first time quite recently, in Summer Strike. I thought she was a really refreshing choice for the role of Hye Hwa. I kind of liked how she remained a bit of a mystery and we didn’t really find out that much about her backstory. I’d like to think that, if we’d been let in on another attempt from another loop, we might have gotten to see a different side of her, or found out more about her. What other superhumans did she know? Did she go in search of Mrs Yang out of her own volition or did she go at the order of others? What truly went through her head when she learned the truth about Nam Woo’s power? I was curious to find out what she was doing at Nam Woo’s apartment complex four years earlier, was she also studying for something? What was her life like before she discovered her power and her mother passed away? I have so many questions about Hye Hwa that I would’ve loved to see answered. Anyhow, the mystery of her character greatly contributed to the mystifying feeling this episode gave me, especially when we see her in a fragment of Nam Woo’s dream which suggests that the two managed to get closer in at least one previous attempt. I’m curious to see more of her acting now!

I’ve seen Hwang Jung Min in several dramas before as well. She’s in Uncontrollably Fond, Queen of the Ring, Revolutionary Love, The Great Seducer and The Light in Your Eyes. I really liked her as Mrs Yang, especially when her personality was established a bit better as she found out about Nam Woo’s power. I loved how she kept peeking while the two were preparing to kiss, and how she went “HUH?!” when Hye Hwa was like “I’m sorry I can’t do it 😭”, lol. She brought a really fun energy to the story at the end.

Bae Hae Seon is one of those actresses that pop up in every single as a guest appearance. I know her from Jealousy Incarnate, While You Were Sleeping, Wok of Love, Come and Hug Me, Hotel Del Luna, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, Start-Up, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, Crash Course in Romance, and I’m undoubtedly going to see her again in several more of my watchlist items. I think she always has a surprisingly comical side to her acting, and I like how that side also came out through this role, even though she too took herself very seriously and it never actually became a comedy act. As I mentioned before, I can’t help but feel like her character had a bigger part to play in the story. They wouldn’t have featured so prominently if there wouldn’t be more to her, right? The way her eyes pierced into the camera every time and how it really felt like she was trying to reach people (Nam Woo?) made me feel like she may have even been aware of the time loop or at least knew that the planet could be saved. I may just be making this up, but for some reason I can’t shake the feeling that her character may have been more than just a news anchor reporting the situation updates. It was nice how she still remained a bit of an enigma as well.

I haven’t even described his character in this review, but can I just say how glad I was to see Kim Kang Hyun again? It feels like ages since I saw him in anything, although I can see from MDL that he’s been doing shows on a regular basis, lol. He played Nam Woo’s colleague at the police station who told him to go with Hye Hwa. I also thought it was funny that he mentioned that that’s how he met his wife, because he thought she looked familiar. Could that have meant that more people experienced the déjà vus in a lesser extent than Nam Woo? I don’t know, but it was nice to see him again. I’ve seen him before in My Love From Another Star, Doctors, Cinderella and the Four Knights, The Sound of Your Heart, Legend of the Blue Sea, Just Between Lovers and Go Go Waikiki, and I see I’m going to see him in more of my future watches as well. Can’t wait!

So yeah, this review took me a while to finish because I actually found my thoughts on it changing while I was writing it, lol. As much of an anticlimax it was when I first finished, the more I’ve started to appreciate the capricious nature of the story. As a lover of time travel tropes, I’ve seen a lot of stories where a time loop occurs, but I’ve never seen one that only depicts one failed attempt, and that’s kind of cool in itself. This is the only episode of the anthology so far which doesn’t have a completely finalized and satisfactory ending. I mean, The Prayer didn’t have a clear ending but it still felt more like an ending than this – Baby It’s Over Outside really doesn’t have a proper ending.
Honestly, with the ironic tone of this episode, I wouldn’t even be surprised if it wouldn’t end even after they save the world. What if they save the world and Nam Woo unexpectedly get into another accident and he has to do the whole thing again? Cruel as it may be, I can actually imagine things playing out this way, looking at the cruel way this episode ended. I don’t want to jinx anything, though! 🤞🏻

This time, I wasn’t able to discover any references that linked to the previous episodes, and in a way that was also quite refreshing. It really made me feel like this happened in a different universe from the rest. After all, the other episodes all took places in the distant future, and according to this episode, no future could even be established as long as they didn’t manage to discover the meteorite sooner. It’s interesting to think about, because somehow you’re led to believe every episode at least takes place, be it at different times, within the same universe. It explored a whole different type of science fiction and I loved it.

And here I thought I couldn’t possibly be even more excited to move on to the next episode! My next review will probably appear within the next couple of days as I’m holding off on my final assignments until the year has ended. I deserve a break, lol.

See you soon! x