Go Mi-Ja’s fate is up for a tosser at the end of Welcome to Samdal-ri episode 8, and as she drowns amid a heart attack and an ongoing storm, her loved ones and neighbors all gather up to rescue her.
Go Mi-Ja puts up a tough facade for her daughters and the whole world. It is not to say that she’s not a tough woman — she is — but that she prefers to hide some of her vulnerabilities from others.
Go Mi-Ja’s three daughters live in Seoul, away from their humble little stream of a town called Samdal-ri on Jeju Island.
One day, all three of them come back knocking at the door, uninvited and unexpected. She soon learns that it’s because the middle daughter Sam-Dal’s career has been derailed by fake allegations.
Disease and the drapes over it
She has been suffering from a heart condition and has been hiding it from her daughters for a while, and when said condition leads to an accident at work, she faces a very real threat of death, leaving one and all shocked.
She knows that her daughters aren’t exactly doing swimmingly well in their lives right now. This is the reason why Mi-Ja doesn’t want to add to their list of worries by revealing to them that her heart is in a bad way.
She has been taking medicine for her heart and going to appointments, but she keeps it all hidden from her daughters, even asking her husband to not reveal anything to them because she thinks they’ll make a “big fuss about it.”
A fate ambiguous
Go Mi-Ja’s decision to keep her heart condition a secret from her daughters proves to be a bad one very soon. Additionally, she worsens it by not taking a break or a proper bed rest.
After suffering an attack at work and nearly drowning and hurting her hand, she goes back to work the next day.
At first, she doesn’t step into the waters because the weather acts up weirdly, but soon she does take all her haenyos with her for their usual dives.
When the weather gets worse, they all return to shore but Go Mi-Ja suffers a heart attack before she can make it, and drowns in the water. The bracken rain and the accompanying storm make the waves worse.
The whole village, including her daughters, husband, co-workers, and other familiar people turns up at the shore. The same thing, years ago, had taken her best friend and Yonh-Pil’s mother’s life away.
This time, though, the odds seem a smidge better as Yong-Pil works hard at the Meteorological Administration calculating the probability of her getting swept away and other factors, as many others stand ready to help find her.
As of now, Go Mi-Ja is not dead in Welcome to Samdal-ri, and her fate is left ambiguous, to be revealed later on in the upcoming episodes.
Also Read: Cho Pan-Sik: Welcome to Samdal-ri character explained