Have we found the most wholesome slice-of-life show of 2023? Maybe. Twinkling Watermelon hasn’t disappointed just yet, and we’re even more excited to see where the show takes us in the future. The adorable show follows a CODA who happens to time travel to 1995, the year his parents met. We’re not quite sure why he’s been sent there just yet, but it may be to learn about his father’s accident that caused him to go deaf or to save him from said accident. In the previous episode, Eun-Gyeol met with his own accident when he got electrocuted by a microphone due to heavy rains. On the way to the hospital, he wished to be back home with his parents, and he did wake up in the future. Or so he thinks.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in episode 7?

As we predicted in episode 6 of Twinkling Watermelon, Se-Kyung isn’t actually Se-Kyung but her daughter. Eun-Yoo was sent back to 1995 because she had suicidal thoughts, and the “Master” thought it was best she see how her mother’s life was before she made the jump. Eun-Yoo’s goal is to make Se-Kyung’s first love come true so that her parents never meet, and she’s never born. What she doesn’t realize is that it would mess with the other guy’s family too. Just like Se-Kyung’s adoptive mom made her a trophy, Se-Kyung did the same to her daughter. Eun-Yoo’s parents got divorced when she was 18 after changing their minds 100 times over the years. At 18, Eun-Yoo has had enough and wants to get away from her mother, who parades her around for being her own twin as a child (in all senses). When Eun-Yoo returns to the US with her father, he’s already moved on to a new woman, so she feels completely alone. She finds the La Vida music store and decides to sell her cello to Master. He gives her the same conditions as Eun-Gyeol and tells her that before she dies, she should go on an interesting trip. That’s how she ended up in 1995 and is very different from the original Se-Kyung.

Now, Eun-Yoo tells Master her plan when he calls her, but he asks her a confusing question: Is Yi-Chan really her mother’s first love? Se-Kyung had heard stories of the guy, but she never heard a name. There’s only one test that will help her figure it out– the spice test. She gets all the band members to eat spicy food to see if, like her mother’s story, they could eat spice like it was ice cream. In the hospital, Yi-Chan tells Chung-Ah to rest while he brings her medicine. He finally apologizes for how he’s treated her thus far without knowing the truth. Yi-Chan asks Chung-Ah to treat him to a meal because he paid her hospital bills. She obliges, and Yi-Chan tells her to call him anytime she needs help. He tells her they’re friends now and walks her home too. Chung-Ah is quite certain she has feelings for Yi-Chan now. Back at home, Yi-Chan notices that Eun-Gyeol still hasn’t returned.

Everyone fails Se-Kyung’s (Eun-Yoo’s) test except Yi-Chan, of course, but she has one member left to test, and that is Eun-Gyeol. At his grandmother’s hostel, Yi-Chan finds out that Eun-Gyeol has been doing odd jobs for all the boys in order to make some money to buy Yi-Chan a guitar and give him all the help he can get. Yi-Chan is touched by this and decides it’s time to find his lead guitarist. He puts up flyers everywhere and gets a call from a stranger saying they know where Eun-Gyeol is. These men are goons, and they want money from Yi-Chan, but the high schooler has none. They beat him up terribly, and Yi-Chan hears ringing in his ears. He remembers the times Eun-Gyeol said Yi-Chan should not leave his side for just one year. He had promised to protect him for one year, but he’s not here to do it. These are the last thoughts Yi-Chan has in his mind before he loses consciousness. Chung-Ah saw him running to the location, though, and so we can hope she finds him. Eun-Gyeol, on the other hand, has made it back to 2023.

What happens in episode 8?

Eun-Gyeol returns to 2023 when he gets defibrillated. He rushes home to his family, whom he has been desperately missing. His dad and brother are shocked by his affection and call him out for being weird. He’s overjoyed when he finds his mother has returned, only to see that it’s old Se-Kyung who is his mother now. The shock frightens him, and he wakes up in 1995 again in a random place. It’s Yoon Gun-Hyeong’s home, the chairman of Jinsung School. Elsewhere, Chung-Ah finds Yi-Chan and tries to get help for him because she can’t make a call herself. She bumps into Se-Kyung, but it’s Eun-Yoo, so she doesn’t know of Chung-Ah’s existence. Still, Chung-Ah shows her Yi-Chan, and they get him to the hospital. Eun-Gyeol has to sign an agreement so that the Chairman’s son isn’t held accountable for his accident. Eun-Gyeol signs it at first, but then he finds out that his mother lives in the same house. He rips up the agreement and decides to stay put in the house.

Eun-Gyeol overhears Chung-Ah having a fight with her stepsister (Chung-Ah is an illegitimate daughter). She tells her mother that Chung-Ah stole the key chain Se-Kyung gave her on her Europe trip. The mother slaps Chung-Ah, but Eun-Gyeol interrupts by beating up his bodyguard and getting out of the room. He stops the mother from slapping Chung-Ah and uses sign language to communicate with her. Chung-Ah doesn’t know sign language, though, and the mother says sign language is banned in their house. Eun-Gyeol demands to speak to the chairman, and he shows up just then. Eun-Gyeol tells the chairman that he won’t make a scene about being electrocuted if the chairman allows him to teach his daughter sign language. It turns out the chairman didn’t want anyone to know that his daughter was “disabled,” so he never allowed her to learn. Additionally, he thinks Eun-Gyeol is an orphan, so he allows him to stay with them for the time being.

Yi-Chan gets his best friend Ma-Joo to take care of the hospital bills so that his grandmother doesn’t find out what’s really happened. His band shows up to check on him, and while he tells them an elaborate lie about how he fought some goons and didn’t just get beat by them, Se-Kyung shows up too. She tells him that Chung-Ah saved his life, and she finds out that she’s supposed to be friends with her. Eun-Yoo finds her dad in the same hospital and feels guilty for thinking about setting her mom up with someone else, but she sees him flirting with the nurses there, and the guilt vanishes. She finds Eun-Gyeol on her way out of the hospital and tells him to join her for a meal. They try to tease information from each other, with Eun-Gyeol trying to get to know if she will really end up becoming his mother and Eun-Yoo trying to find out if Eun-Gyeol was her mother’s first love. He refuses to eat the spicy food, and she refuses to answer his questions, leaving them both with no answers. At night, Yi-Chan tries to thank Chung-Ah for saving his life, but she dismisses him from the house because she doesn’t want to get closer to him. Eun-Gyeol returns and starts teacher her. He tells her that his mother taught him when he was a child and starts to cry. The next day, he goes to school with her too as her official learning help!

Did Eun-Gyeol Join The Band Again?

Se-Kyung informs Yi-Chan through a voicemail that Eun-Gyeol is at Chung-Ah’s school and he should not worry. This is while the band is still trying to figure out where their lead guitarist has gone. Yi-Chan and Ma-Joo have made “missing” T-shirts for them to wear too. Yi-Chan gets the pager notification from Se-Kyung and is overjoyed to hear the news. He tells the band that they need to do something big, while Eun-Yoo finds her mother’s old uniform so she can go in and talk to him. Eun-Gyeol is the new obsession of the school thanks to his good looks. He’s called to the principal’s office when Se-Kyung interrupts and takes him away to talk. She tells him that Yi-Chan met with an accident while trying to find him, but before she can finish, Yi-Chan shows up too.

The band has prepared a song for Eun-Gyeol, and many students, including Eun-Gyeol and Se-Kyung, show up when they start singing. Yi-Chan calls out for Eun-Gyeol to come back, and when he sees him, he leaves the stage and apologizes for hurting him. He promises to keep his earlier promises made to him. At the end of Twinkling Watermelon Episode 8, Eun-Gyeol agrees to join the band again on the condition that Yi-Chan stop meeting Se-Kyung. He says he likes her too, so Yi-Chan should give up. Now that all his tactics have failed, Eun-Gyeol has no option but to pretend to like Se-Kyung so that Yi-Chan and Chung-Ah can get together and his family will remain the same. We all knew this was coming, but it’s more unnatural than we expected. Either way, the two future kids already have a spark, so why not? We’ll know Yi-Chan’s response in the next episode.