'Start-Up' Episode 3 Promo: Bae Suzy as Dal-mi is being set up to be fooled by Do-san, can she forgive him?
'Start-Up' Episode 3 ended with the real Nam Do-san (Nam Joo-hyuk) walking up to Seo Dal-mi (Bae Suzy) at the networking party that was organized by the country's hottest startup called Sandbox which is more of a think tank that identifies the best of the ideas that should be funded. Initially, Do-san asks Han Ji-pyeong (Kim Sun-ho) who is a part of Sandbox to help find funding for his startup that programs software about Artificial Intelligence. This is in return for helping Ji-pyeong who doesn't want Dal-mi to learn that her pen pal from childhood who helped her move on from grieving her father's loss was not the person she thought he was.
Ji-pyeong and Dal-mi's grandmother had come up with the plan of introducing Dal-mi to a pen pal so that she wouldn't feel lonely. However, as an adult, Dal-mi begins to search for this pen pal, whose name matches a person alive in real life and that is Nam Do-san. So initially, Do-san wants to take advantage of the situation but when he learns that Ji-pyeong is not as moved to help Dal-mi as he thought, he decides to help her anyway after reading her letter.
However, this is after Ji-pyeong insults Do-san and says that his idea nor his company will never succeed. Turns out, however, that an American company is very interested in Do-san and his work in the field of designing and he can succeed without Sandbox's help. So meeting Dal-mi at this time is his own decision. How this will tangle the three of their relationships is something that the end of episode promo hints at will unravel in the upcoming episodes.
For instance, Dal-mi is ecstatic to have found Do-san at the party and the two of them head out to talk things over. She tells Do-san that she wants to learn more about him, arrives at the company that Do-san claims he worked at, and even goes to the extent of quitting her job just as he did. However, all of this is momentary because very soon it also seems that Do-san may just confess the truth to Dal-mi. He apologizes to her and might also reveal the truth about how her pen pal was not him.
Will this alienate Dal-mi from her only living relative and the few friends that she had managed to make? It is also possible that Dal-mi might just stumble upon something extremely shocking and that is the fact that Do-san, the man that she had trusted with everything is not the one that she has been talking to all this while.
Dal-mi has no intention of reuniting with her mother who abandoned her and left to remarry a rich person. Instead, she hopes that she can succeed in a field that she chose to study so that she can show her sister, who made a different choice that the one who made a mistake is not Dal-mi. In that attempt, she attempts to do what her father had almost succeeded in before his untimely death. To start a business. He had managed to get an investor who believed in the same things as him but because of an accident, he couldn't see his and his daughter's dreams come true. He died, however, knowing that his daughter loved him and that is what helps Dal-mi move on from grief. That and of course, the letter from Ji-pyeong that he wrote as Do-san.
What would a betrayal by someone so important to her mean? That is exactly what we would be finding out in the upcoming episode of the tvN show. 'Start-Up' will air on tvN on Saturdays and Sundays at 9 pm KST, and can be streamed on Netflix in the US.
