Marriage Contract

What to expect, before you press play.

CompletedCONTRACT-MARRIAGE MELODRAMA PICK

Marriage Contract

결혼계약 (Gyeolhon Gyeyak) · 2016 · South Korea

WriterJung Yoo-kyung

DirectorKim Jin-min

Episodes16 eps · ~64 min each

Where to Watch✅ Viki, KOCOWA, OnDemandKorea, Netflix

⏱️

Binge Time17h 4m

AiredMar 5 – Apr 24, 2016

GenreMelodrama · Romance · Family

Content RatingTV-14

VikiKOCOWAOnDemandKoreaNetflix

Contract MarriageTerminal IllnessSingle MotherChaebolTearjerker

The TL;DR, boxed and ready.

The family on both sides of a marriage that started as a contract.

Lee Seo-jin

Han Ji-hoon

Lead

Uee

Kang Hye-soo

Lead

Kim Yong-geon

Han Sung-kook

Supporting

Park Jung-soo

Yoon Sun-young

Supporting

Lee Hwi-hyang

Oh Mi-ran

Supporting

Kim Young-pil

Han Jung-hoon

Supporting

Shin Rin-ah

Cha Eun-sung

Supporting

Kim Kwang-kyu

Park Ho-joon

Supporting

Pyo Ye-jin

Hyun A-ra

Supporting

Kim Yoo-ri

Seo Na-yoon

Supporting

Jung Kyung-soon

Sim Young-hee

Supporting

Kim So-jin

Hwang Joo-yeon

Supporting

Recaps that jog the memory, not spoil the ride.

EP 01

Two Kinds of Debt

Mar 5, 2016

The premiere sets its two debts side by side. Kang Hye-soo is a widow working herself past exhaustion to clear her late husband’s loans and raise seven-year-old Eun-sung; Han Ji-hoon is a chaebol’s son whose mother is dying for want of a liver. On the day Hye-soo goes to ask for a job at a restaurant called The Promise, she pulls Eun-sung out of the path of a car. The episode is quiet groundwork — two people who will each need something only the other can give.

EP 02

Volunteering Herself

Mar 6, 2016

Hye-soo overhears Ji-hoon laying out what he actually wants — a wife on paper, a partial-liver donation his mother can legally receive — and volunteers herself before she has thought it through. What forces her hand is the same day’s other crisis: loan sharks turn up at The Promise looking for her. The show is blunt that this is not a romantic decision. It is a woman doing arithmetic on her daughter’s future.

EP 03

A Relationship on Paper

Mar 12, 2016

The deal is struck: Hye-soo will marry Ji-hoon and give up part of her liver, and in return Eun-sung will be provided for until she is grown. Neither of them expects the hard part to be the performance. To satisfy the hospital’s donor review and the people watching them, the new couple has to build a relationship convincing enough to survive scrutiny, and they are both bad at it in different ways.

EP 04

Winning Over Eun-sung

Mar 13, 2016

A hospital caseworker wants to meet Eun-sung before signing off on the donation, which means Ji-hoon — stiff, impatient, no idea how to talk to a child — has to win the girl over. His attempts are graceless enough to be funny and just sincere enough to land. This is where the drama’s real engine turns over: not the marriage, but the slow business of a closed-off man being pulled into a family he agreed to rent.

EP 05

Introduced as the Fiancée

Mar 19, 2016

Seo Na-yoon arrives at Ji-hoon’s apartment while Hye-soo is there, and the fake marriage gets its first outside pressure. Na-yoon is engaged to Ji-hoon’s older half-brother but has never quite let go of Ji-hoon, and he shuts her down by introducing Hye-soo as his fiancée. Saying it out loud, even as a lie, changes the temperature between them.

EP 06

A Warmhearted Man

Mar 20, 2016

Ji-hoon’s father, Han Sung-kook, takes the couple out to eat, and Hye-soo has to keep their story straight under a suspicious patriarch’s questions. She covers by telling him Ji-hoon is a warmhearted man — a description that is still mostly untrue, and that both of them can hear her starting to believe. The restaurant scenes do a lot of the show’s quiet character work while the plot idles.

EP 07

Leaving Without Treatment

Mar 26, 2016

Hye-soo runs a fever and Ji-hoon takes her to the hospital, but she leaves without being seen — a full workup would expose the tumor she has told no one about, and the contract depends on her looking healthy enough to donate. It is the first time her secret actively endangers the plan. The episode trades on the audience knowing what the characters around her do not.

EP 08

The Surgery, Stopped

Mar 27, 2016

Sung-kook learns what his son has arranged — a bought marriage, a donor procured by contract — and shuts the surgery down. Oh Mi-ran, Ji-hoon’s mother, is blamed to her face for nearly ruining her son’s prospects. This is the peak-tension midpoint: the plan that justified every compromise so far is off the table, and the people who made it are left holding the cost.

EP 09

Looking for Mi-ran

Apr 2, 2016

Mi-ran decides she would rather live out what is left of her time in her hometown than be the reason Ji-hoon’s life comes apart. Ji-hoon goes after her, and he does not go alone — Hye-soo and Eun-sung come with him. The image of the four of them searching for a dying woman together is the episode’s argument that this arrangement has quietly become something else.

EP 10

Admitting It

Apr 3, 2016

Back in Seoul without Ji-hoon, Hye-soo finally goes to the hospital and agrees to be treated for the tumor. In the same stretch, Ji-hoon stops pretending to himself and admits he has feelings for her. The drama lets both things happen off to the side rather than in a big scene, which is its way of insisting they were always coming.

EP 11

The Rest of the Money

Apr 9, 2016

Hye-soo accepts the remainder of the contract money from Sung-kook, and Ji-hoon is thrown by it — to him it reads as her choosing the deal over him. She also decides to stop working at The Promise. The conflict here is pride and money standing in for the thing neither of them will say, and the show is honest that a signed contract makes that especially hard to untangle.

EP 12

Don’t Leave

Apr 10, 2016

Ji-hoon apologizes and tells Hye-soo plainly that he wants her to stay, not as a contract but for real. Eun-sung, who has understood more than the adults gave her credit for, cries and asks Hye-soo not to leave. The episode stacks the case for staying while Hye-soo, knowing what her prognosis is, keeps looking for the exit that hurts everyone least.

EP 13

I Won’t Give Her Up

Apr 16, 2016

Hye-soo turns down Ji-hoon’s plea against the divorce, and he takes it to his father — telling Sung-kook outright that he will not give her up. It is the first time Ji-hoon has picked this family over the one he was born into in front of the man who runs it. Hye-soo’s resistance is not coldness; it is her trying to spare a widower and a child a second loss.

EP 14

The Ring, Again

Apr 17, 2016

After a rare happy day together, Ji-hoon offers Hye-soo the ring again. Almost immediately a rumor starts circulating that he is mixed up in illegal organ trading — the contract donation, reframed by someone who wants to use it. The episode pairs the couple’s private turn toward each other with the public machinery that could still take it apart.

EP 15

Faster Than Expected

Apr 23, 2016

Ji-hoon starts talking about finding a home for the three of them to share, planning a future out loud. Then the medical news lands: Hye-soo’s tumor has grown faster than her doctors expected. The show puts the domestic daydream and the shrinking timeline in the same episode on purpose, so the plans read as both hopeful and unbearable.

EP 16

Time Enough

Apr 24, 2016

Hye-soo collapses on the way to the new place and goes into emergency surgery. She comes through it — no longer critical — but the tumor is still there and could drop her again without warning. They bring her home, Eun-sung runs to her, and Hye-soo accepts Ji-hoon’s proposal for real. The finale offers no epilogue and no promises, only a family choosing to treat whatever time they have as enough.

Spoilers ahead — the finale, broken down in full.

Does Hye-soo survive? The contract that opens the show — marry Ji-hoon, donate part of her liver, secure Eun-sung’s future — is built on Hye-soo hiding an inoperable brain tumor. In the finale it nearly kills her: she collapses and is rushed into emergency surgery. She survives and is taken off critical status, but the tumor is not gone, and the doctors are clear that another crisis could come at any time. The drama ends without telling you how much time she has.

What happened with Oh Mi-ran’s transplant Ji-hoon’s whole scheme exists to get his dying mother a liver. Han Sung-kook halts the operation in Episode 8 once he discovers it was arranged through a paid marriage, and later a rumor paints Ji-hoon as an illegal organ trader. Those obstacles are worked through rather than dramatized to a head — by the end the family is no longer fighting the donation, and Mi-ran’s life is no longer the ticking clock. The remaining danger is Hye-soo’s, not hers.

Ji-hoon and Hye-soo Ji-hoon acknowledges his feelings around Episode 10 and spends the back half refusing to let the contract end in a clean divorce — telling his father directly, in Episode 13, that he will not give Hye-soo up. Hye-soo resists longest, not out of doubt but to spare a widower and a child a second loss. In the finale she stops resisting and accepts his proposal as a real one, and they bring her home to the house he wanted the three of them to share.

The threads the finale leaves open The ending is deliberately unfinished. There is no time-skip and no epilogue: Han Jung-hoon’s rivalry with Ji-hoon is dropped without resolution, Seo Na-yoon is handed a soft landing she arguably has not earned, and the restaurant regulars simply fade out. Critics at the time flagged this as the show flinching from its own darker material. What it commits to instead is the small domestic picture — the four-person family, intact for now.

What the title means The marriage contract starts as a transaction with an expiry date, priced in a liver and a child’s school fees. By the last episode the paperwork is beside the point: Ji-hoon has chosen Hye-soo and Eun-sung over the family he was born into, and Hye-soo has decided that a future measured in uncertain months is still a future worth signing for. The happy ending the show lands on is not a cure. It is a choice to treat borrowed time as enough.