I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment ― perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been. huruki murakami
Sometimes, while watching SCK live, I have moments where I get very angry at a character or a situation and then I watch with subtitles and that emotion dissipates, but sometimes it doesn’t. With watching episode 41, I was very frustrated with Serkan for bullying Eda into coming to Istanbul and working with him but after watching with the subtitles, I came to understand what the nature of the situation really was so that although I don’t like overly confident Serkan, it’s masking a deep well of pain and suffering. I still don’t like the cocky behaviour but it isn’t because he thinks that it’s a done deal that she will agree to get back together with him as it appeared when I had only watched in Turkish.
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This particular episode was a bit of a letdown after how spectacular episode 40 was but with the subtitles, there was a lot more plot movement than I first thought. Serkan has thrown caution to the wind, and disregarding Eda’s wishes, has chosen to stay in Şile and take over the hotel project from Piril. Eda is not pleased with this turn of events and is even less please when Serkan easily convinces Deniz that he should take over the design of a whole new complex at the back of the property, which will interfere with what Eda had plans for the garden. Deniz is completely smitten with Serkan and will say yes to anything at this point. I must say though that I am pleased that the writers have done away with the old Serkan who would pretend to either not notice that a woman is after him or that it’s not a big deal, that was a very frustrating personality trait that I’m happy is gone. It was a funny bit when he said to his cousin/assistant Pina that she had to stay and have breakfast with him and Deniz so that Deniz would have the omelet for breakfast and not him.
It was unfortunate that we spent so much time with the secondary characters this week, my guess is that they don’t want to progress the Eda and Serkan story too quickly so they had to provide some ‘filler’ scenes. I would be happy to spend some time with Melo and her pursuit of the massage therapist fellow who doesn’t seem to own a shirt, or the new romance blooming between Kerem and Pina, or even the marital hijinks of Engin and Piril, but I am reaching my limit of the Aydan nonsense.
What I loved
Serkan is a character that I love but there are episodes where I don’t know which impulse is stronger, the one to smack him or the one to hug him. He does not do emotions well, nor has he ever figured out how to woo someone because he has never wanted to do it until Eda came along. He browbeat her and made her crazy enough that she finally relented and went to Istanbul. This was initially really frustrating to watch, we don’t want to see our heroine give in to the hero who doesn’t yet deserve her. On further reflection, I realized that this is how Serkan expresses his love, this is his love language, and it’s one that he knows works with Eda. She comes to Istanbul because, despite everything that has happened between them, she loves him as much as she always has. He presents a joint work project to her because they both love their work and it’s one of the things that drew them together and it means that they will be spending time together. It’s very telling that one of the most significant things that Eda tells Burak about the disintegration of her relationship with Serkan was that he didn’t want to work in the same place as her.
Episode 41 Serkan paralleled Episode 9 Serkan completely. Episode 9, if you remember, was Serkan desperately trying to keep Eda in his life by insisting that she work with him on the eco-hotel project. She doesn’t want to because he had just accused her of selling his design for a chandelier to Kaan a few days before. He spent the whole episode chasing her and trying to convince her that she had to do the project rather than just apologizing to her. Episode 41 Serkan is insisting that Eda has to consult with him about her landscape design for the hotel in Şile, and she must come to the Art Life offices to work on the plans for their joint venture. The difference and the character growth here is that he admits that this is his plan, tells her that he wants her back, tells her that he still loves her, and apologizes. This is what we, as the audience have always craved from his character. To be honest, to tell her what he is feeling, to tell her that he loves her, and to not be afraid.
We got to see some of the breakup scenes in flashback, Serkan’s anger at anything to do with marriage or having children, and Eda’s eventual breakdown. We didn’t yet get to see the actual breakup or any scenes to fully illuminate why Serkan forced her out of his life. He tells her that he was confused and didn’t want her to have to go through things with him, but I am hoping we get more of what was going through his mind, why he was so adamant that she should leave him and never come back. It’s such a drastic reaction that the explanation we have got up until now isn’t satisfying. Aydan does say he was devastated after Eda left and didn’t leave the house for months, so if he still loved her that much why did he break her heart? Why didn’t he go after her when he started to feel better? I understand that he has abandonment issues but I think the fact that she stuck with him through his cancer treatment would make him a little more confident in her love for him.
The relentless need to know about her relationship status and then telling her that he wants her back and has always loved her was classic Serkan. He has the ability to just forget everything that has gone previously and want to jump back in. I both love and hate this about him. He has her pick and feels that is enough of a sign that she’s kept it for them to just get back together. Putting aside the issue of Kiraz, I think Eda is going to be a lot more reluctant than he thinks to resume their relationship. It will take some time for her to trust him again after all the times he’s broken up with her when things got hard.
Poor Eda is fighting a losing battle between her heart and her head. She loves Serkan will all her heart, but he has hurt her so badly and she now has Kiraz’s heart to protect too. I don’t think it will be easy for her to forgive him for the last devastating breakup. She will know that it was his insecurities and the terror of the disease that causes him to push her away but that doesn’t help lessen the pain that she felt when the man that she loved abandoned her and locked her out of his life. Regardless of his reasons, she experienced this pain because of Serkan and his issues, and it is reasonable to think that she may not want to risk being in a relationship with him again given his track record for breaking up with her when things get hard or emotional. Eda will have to also consider Kiraz’s feelings but the universe seems determined to bring father and daughter together.
Whether it was right or not for Eda to keep Kiraz’s existence from Serkan is something that might never be agreed upon. My view is that, with the information that she had, that Serkan vehemently didn’t want to have kids, that he didn’t want her or to even hear about her, she made a difficult decision to protect herself and her child. She didn’t know that he was struggling, they broke up over several weeks (months maybe) so it wasn’t a rash decision on his part and she had no reason to think that he hadn’t just fallen out of love with her. The onus isn’t on her to dig any deeper than what’s at face value and that is that he distanced himself from her in every way possible and told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to have kids so, again with the information that she had at the time, she left and never told him they share a child. She’s protecting herself and her child from feeling unwanted and Serkan from feeling like he has to be involved with her when he didn’t want to be. Did she owe him to tell him anyway? Maybe but I think that it’s too easy to judge someone without having lived in their situation, and I think we will see that she struggled with it, but she chose her wellbeing and that of her child over Serkan and I won’t fault her for that.
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I wasn’t sure how the child story was going to go, to be honest. But Maya and Kerem are so great together as Kiraz and Serkan, and they toned down her ‘brattiness’ in this episode. I love that she has a lot of his characteristics and even seems to have some of Hande’s mannerisms, she’s perfectly cast as their daughter. It’s going to be so interesting to see if Serkan figures things out on his own or, if not, who tells him.
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mundonita has more Sen Çal Kapimi animation at https://youtu.be/4l43NTLV2AQ
What I liked
Engin and Piril as a married couple are a joy to watch. I never really enjoyed them before episode 40 and their characterizations of a shrill woman and a clueless man were all the bad kinds of stereotypes in relationships. But they have matured into a couple who talk about their problems and work through them, such a nice bit of character growth for both characters, so while Piril is still driven and fast-talking, she listens and understands Engin better and he has seamlessly slid into stay at home dad because he knows that Piril would be miserable being at home full-time. A very nice change to a couple I didn’t care for before.
All the new characters so far are tolerable! Deniz is good for comic relief, like the fact that she’s claiming that she wants to prove herself to the men in her life by doing it on her own, but agrees to everything Serkan says. Burak is in love with Eda, let’s hope he doesn’t turn into a psychopath. Kerem is a gem with a chip on his shoulder and Pina doesn’t take after her aunt so far, and they could make a cute couple, so it’s a win across the board.
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What I didn’t like
There were too many scenes with the secondary characters for my liking, especially Aydan.
They are making no attempts to redeem this character and are actually making her worse. Her resistance in telling Serkan about her 5-year relationship with Kemal is ludicrous, she hates Eda for leaving when Serkan threw her out of his life and told her he didn’t even want to hear about her, and she continues to meddle in her son’s life. I have sympathy for her in that she’s had one son die and the other survive a serious illness but that doesn’t excuse her terrible behaviour. I have never really liked this character, at times she is kind to Eda and seemed to have a solid friendship with Ayfer before episode 40, but they have regressed Aydan back to her original snobby, shallow self who calls Eda the ‘flower girl’ again and is only interested in herself and Serkan’s well-being. They have flip-flopped on this character so many times I’ve lost count, I dislike her more now than I ever have before, and frankly, I am tired of watching her scenes. I’m hoping they give some of the other characters more to do and keep Aydan to a minimum.
I didn’t like that Eda made her daughter lie. I get that it’s just a writing mechanism to keep the secret of her parentage for a while longer, but coupled with Eda not telling Serkan about Kiraz before she was born, having Kiraz lie to everyone now is not great. Eda does seem genuinely ashamed of doing it but how are both Serkan and Kiraz going to feel when they find out the truth.
Ayfer is as delusional as ever when it comes to just how much Eda loves Serkan. She justifiably hates Serkan, but also can’t bring herself to realize that Eda doesn’t hate him and never will. Ayfer is trying to push Burak on Eda, which is annoying as in the early days of SÇK she was always telling the Kizlar that they didn’t need a man to be happy.
What needs to happen next
- Way back at the beginning of the series I used to ask in every review for Eda’s grandmother to show up and that took 21 episodes and was a disaster, so I’m not asking for Kiraz’s parentage to be revealed but I hope they don’t drag it out too much
- Less Aydan, way less Aydan
- We need to see some flashbacks of Serkan’s state of mind both before and after he drove Eda away, I need to see some of the anxiety and depression because we are only being told about it second hand
Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life. Charlotte Brontë
A less thrilling, but still enjoyable episode this week with too little time spend on Serkan and Eda interactions. It’s going to be challenging to keep the momentum going week after week until a reveal happens, I get that, but I hope we are not subjected to a rushed conclusion as we have seen in so many of the other romantic dizi. I am hoping that because they have a predetermined set of episodes that they already have the story paced out and we won’t have a rushed ending to Sen Çal Kapimi.
