Irreplaceable Episode 20 Recap
**SPOILER ALERT**
Table of Contents
TL;DR (Quick Overview)
Xu Chi saves the All Buy crisis with a bold livestreamed press conference, publicly naming herself project lead to protect Ye Xinzhi, but when he discovers he has been removed from the project, he leaves her a video and disappears overseas to figure out his future. After learning his father jumped to his death, Xu Chi blames herself, while Ye Xinzhi visits the Tower of Babel and realises he needs to talk to her. Shen Jin wins Lin Long back with soup and a ring, Bu Tianna starts learning to run Siwei, and Xu Chi and Ye Xinzhi find each other by chance in front of a Blue Hole poster at the airport, reuniting in a tearful embrace.
A Late Night Fight
Late at night, Shen Jin teases Lin Long about who she’s messaging, smelling jealousy, until she shows him it’s Xu Chi about All Buy. He complains she treats Xu Chi better than him and asks her to make it up to him by going paragliding this weekend, offering to teach her kayaking too. Lin Long reminds him she’s travelling for work this week.
Shen says foreign consulting firms are past their prime, consultants are no better than his project managers, and he’ll find her a well-paid, easy job at his company. Lin Long tells him this is the fourth time in two months he has disrespected her job, and three strikes means he’s out. Her career is her choice, good or bad, and he should keep his judgments to himself.
He keeps crossing lines. She has taken time off plenty of times to go out with him, but he ignores that she gets seasick and is scared of heights, first dragging her into the water and now paragliding. When he asks if she’s going through that time of the month, she shouts that yes, she is, and throws him out, tossing his shoes after him as he protests that it’s late, he has no phone and nowhere to go.
In the taxi, the driver tells him bluntly that he was out of line, and if it were his own wife, she’d already be talking divorce. When Shen asks to go back, the driver says apologising now will only make it worse. He should let her cool down and come back tomorrow with something to show he means it. If she sees him with flowers and a diamond ring, she’ll snap right out of it. The idea sticks.
Xu Chi Calls A Press Conference
At the press conference, Xu Chi and Mr. Su say the best crisis PR is honesty, which is why they’re showing a live feed of All Buy’s warehouse sorting operation the very next day. A host explains that Hezong worked with All Buy on an AI plan for its overseas operations, which All Buy has also brought into its domestic business.
A reporter fires back that they used the plan to push a man in his forties who had worked there for over a decade to the brink, and asks if she is Consultant Ye. Xu Chi says their team has never had a consultant surnamed Ye. The project lead has always been her, Xu Chi.
When asked if they’ve apologised to Mr. Liu, she says first, he’s out of intensive care, no longer in danger and will recover soon. Second, they don’t believe an apology is necessary. As the crowd reacts, she asks whether anyone uses smart editing, voice recognition or auto captions when making videos, and whether those AI tools have cost them their jobs.
All Buy’s AI is the same. It’s a tool to boost efficiency, not replace people. With the full AI strategy, delivery speed will rise by thirty seven percent and inspection pass rates by twenty one percent, meaning East Sea crabs will reach dinner tables two hours sooner and online fruit will be more reliably good.
When a reporter points out Mr. Liu still lost his job, she notes that only one percent of people over fifty can use ride hailing apps, so should ride hailing abandon them, or help them learn?She acknowledges they must reflect seriously. During the upgrade, they weren’t careful enough.
Their intention was to help employees upgrade with AI, but communication broke down, and Mr. Liu took it as an excuse to push him out. In reality, inspectors simply recheck the fresh goods the AI flags. Not apologising publicly doesn’t mean they aren’t sad or taking responsibility. All Buy will cover Mr. Liu’s hospital and rehab costs and pay him an extra 200 yuan a day until he returns to work.
No frontline employee will be fired over something like this for three years. And All Buy and Hezong will jointly donate ten million yuan to set up the All-He Digital Adaptation Fund for Senior Employees, helping workers over forty adapt to AI. In a company, people come first, and All Buy’s most irreplaceable asset isn’t its expensive AI equipment but every single employee.
Afterwards, Xu Chi wonders if Richard will be happy with the outcome. Her colleagues promise to explain that putting her forward as project lead was the whole team’s decision. They know she has staked her entire career to protect him, but emotionally, he’ll still be hurt. She confirms Mr. Liu’s family has received 209,700 yuan in donations, including 150,000 from her, and plans to visit him in a few days.
Ye Xinzhi Finds Out
Du calls Ye Xinzhi in the morning, thrilled at how everything turned around overnight. He praises Ye Xinzhi for sending his articulate, pretty girlfriend out there and for her brilliant idea of a livestream, then asks why she’s now called project lead. Groggy from three melatonin pills, Ye Xinzhi has no idea what he means.
He watches the coverage, hears her say there has never been a consultant named Ye, sees headlines calling her the most assertive future partner in consulting, and discovers he has been removed from the All Buy group chat. Her plea for him to stay offline and not be angry replays in his mind, followed by Wen Ruosen’s warning that she would one day kick him aside and take his place.
Ye Xinzhi suddenly goes into a panic attack and accidently knocks over a glass of water onto the rug. He grabs the tissues and proceeds to frantically clean up the spill, creating a mess of broken tissues paper. He then lies on his bed trying to process what just happened.
Two Men, Two Proposals
At a flower shop, Shen Jin runs into Zhao Heng, newly back from his trip and buying flowers for Bu Tianna. Shen has bought all the Ecuadorian roses but lets Zhao Heng have nine, warning that Bu Tianna only likes the expensive ones. Zhao Heng spots a huge diamond ring. Shen explains it’s 3.334 carats for three lifetimes of love, since the store didn’t have a 13.14 carat one in stock.
He plans to propose to Lin Long to apologise after their fight. Zhao Heng warns him that, knowing Lin Long, a public proposal would end things, because it isn’t really a proposal. It’s forcing her to say yes, covering up their problems with a one-sided gesture. That’s emotional blackmail and a cop out.
The Video
Xu Chi comes home to find Ye Xinzhi gone, a mess of tissues on the floor by his bed and calls Du in a panic. Then she receives a video message. Ye Xinzhi tells her that by the time she sees it, he may already be gone. He isn’t angry that she removed him from the group chat. He understands she was doing everything to protect him, standing in front of him when she saw his weakness.
But seeing the reports online left him with mixed feelings. When he lost control, she came up with a better plan. She has become an outstanding consultant, maybe even better than him. He’s happy for her, but also a little uneasy.
He has asked Mr. Kai for a long leave. He needs time to figure out whether he’s still cut out to be a consultant, and how they should be together going forward. Maybe one day he’ll find the answer. Xu Chi’s phone falls from her hand as she remembers him once explaining his periodic table collection.
As a child, he believed collecting all the elements would give him the whole world, then learned some are too dangerous to ever collect. He asked if he could share his world with her. She starts to think back again when she had to identify her mother in the morgue and how her father left her to get married. She breaks down, once again she has been abandoned.
Soup or a Ring
Shen Jin turns up at Lin Long’s door with a blood on his neck and a pot of soup made from a three-year-old hen from his friend’s farm, said to have laid over a thousand eggs, cooked with dates, goji berries and two big ginseng roots. Lin Long asks if he’s making an example of the chicken and tells him to leave.
When the soup fails, he kneels with the ring, telling her she must pick one. Neighbours watch, and the mortified Lin Long drags him inside. There, he kneels again and lists everything he did wrong. He runs his mouth. He shouldn’t have belittled her job, dragged her into activities she dislikes or told her to quit, even though he only wanted her to relax and was worried about her health.
And he shouldn’t have made her feel he had no plan for their future. He does have a plan, but since she was recently divorced, he worried she had baggage about family life. He has thought through everything for their future, and begs her to pick one.
Still kneeling, he hold up the container of soup in one hand and the diamond ring in the other. Lin Long looks at both trying to make a decision and then she says adults don’t have to make choices, so she’ll take both. Shen is completely taken aback that she said yes to his proposal. He hugs her and jokes that she should make it three and not forget him, and they share a passionate kiss.
The Truth About His Father
Over dinner, Xu Chi blames herself in front of Bu Tianna and Zhao Heng. She knew all Ye Xinzhi wanted was to apologise to Mr. Liu, but the moment Mr. Kai said another partner would replace him, she wavered, because her biggest fear is being replaced. She only thought about solving the crisis safely, never about how he felt.
As his assistant, subordinate and fiancรฉe, she feels like a traitor, and she doesn’t even feel she has the right to go after him. Bu Tianna says the video only says he needs to clear his head, and he’ll be back soon. Xu Chi doesn’t think he’ll come back for her. He only left her an out because he was worried about her.
Du later told her Ye Xinzhi’s father was also a quality inspector. After being laid off in the 1990s, he borrowed money to start a business but failed, then jumped from a rooftop in front of his son. That’s why Ye Xinzhi is afraid of heights. Yet he always stood on rooftops with her because she loved the view, and she never once asked what lay behind his fear.
Zhao Heng tries to cheer her up. She has been promoted, has her own team and the project is about to deliver, and she’ll make partner in a few years, while he doesn’t know how long he’ll be stuck as director on his new project. Xu Chi reveals that Bu Tianna’s father is now teaching her to run the company, and within two years she’ll be heading the new energy subsidiary on her own.
Zhao Heng says the biggest problem now is him. He wants to move into real business and asks Master Xu for a referral. Xu Chi turns to Bu Tianna and asks what she thinks of him. Bu Tianna asks what he wants, and he says he wouldn’t dare want anything. Despite the laughter, Xu Chi struggles to hold back her tears.
One Last Look
The agent Zhu has arranged for Xu Chi to enter No. 92 Yong’an Road during a fifteen minute window, since residents are being allowed in one at a time to retrieve belongings after the collapsed buildings were reinforced. He couldn’t get her the apartment, but wanted to make good on the big bonus she promised him.
Inside, Xu Chi remembers Ye Xinzhi telling her to buy the place and asking her to let him do what a boyfriend should. Zhu urges her to take a keepsake, since the building may be demolished next week. She admits she used to think the apartment was worth giving up everything for, but only now realises she doesn’t understand anything at all.
The Tower of Babel
In Iraq, Ye Xinzhi runs into his old classmate, who calls him Xiaoyezi while he calls her Ikkyu-san. She’s in charge of building a refinery two hundred kilometres away as part of the Belt and Road. She asks why he’s in the desert instead of at the Blue Hole he always wanted to see, saying he looks just like he did when he learned his ex-wife was determined to emigrate.
Is he heartbroken again? He insists he’s just clearing his head. She calls him a liar, since he used to brag about his girlfriend on WeChat and is now here alone. He explains that his girlfriend once said the Tower of Babel was the place she most wanted to go, so he came to see what drew her here.
He hasn’t found an answer, but after time alone, he thinks leaving may have been impulsive. He doesn’t regret it, he says, but his friend points out he used to smile a lot and has barely smiled since seeing her. She tells him the story from the travel guide.
In ancient times, people tried to build a tower to reach the heavens without asking God’s permission, so God made them speak different languages. Unable to communicate, they never finished the tower. Her point is simple. If he and his girlfriend have problems, why not talk them out? Don’t they speak the same language?
Sorry
Xu Chi hands over her mentoring duties and books a week off to visit the Blue Hole in Dahab. Bu Tianna is alarmed that someone who has never left Asia is going straight there, and suggests the Maldives instead.
Xu Chi says she has booked a local tour, and she only wants the Blue Hole. She wants to see how beautiful it is that he can’t stop thinking about it. With her flight delayed, Bu Tianna tells her to wait at the cafรฉ by Exit 12 so she and Zhao Heng can meet her.
At the airport, Xu Chi stops in front of a giant poster of Dahab’s Blue Hole. Just back from Iraq, Ye Xinzhi stops at the same poster. They see each other. In tears, Xu Chi runs into his arms, and they hold each other tightly as they whisper sorry at the same time.
Bu Tianna and Zhao Heng arrive to find them reunited, and Zhao Heng rests his head happily on Bu Tianna’s shoulder as they watch. The final words on screen: you are irreplaceable.
Irreplaceable Episode 20 Recap: My Thoughts
Let’s start with what I enjoyed in the finale. The corporate resolution was excellent, as expected. The fast paced crisis management has always been well written and engaging, and none of that faltered over twenty episodes. Xu Chi’s press conference was a great example of everything she has learned.
I enjoyed Shen Jin and Lin Long’s union, and he does so well playing the clueless boyfriend. His intentions are always good and he always puts her first, but he truly is clueless. Even the taxi driver was willing to risk a bad rating to tell a stranger off! But this arc felt so underbaked. How did we go from her kicking him out to an accepted marriage proposal and a kiss in one episode?
As for our leads, the premise of the storyline was fine. Xu Chi did the one thing she never wanted to be, and that is to make someone replaceable, only for her to do exactly that to him. Despite her good intentions, he was absolutely right to feel betrayed. He’s a partner at the firm, and she overstepped despite the good outcome.
Asking him to trust her even if he might be angry doesn’t stop the natural feeling of hurt. I understood his instinct to run. Too much happened in twenty-four hours, he was overwhelmed with emotion, and walking away to clear his head was okay, especially since he left her a video explaining himself. I also think he had to leave for the drama to land its message. Sometimes it takes losing someone to realise how irreplaceable they really are.
The ending was way too abrupt. I really wanted a proper conversation between Xu Chi and Ye Xinzhi, especially about his insecurities and his father. After everything they went through, that conversation would have added so much emotional depth and made the ending feel complete.
Instead, they meet by coincidence in front of a giant poster of the Blue Hole, the place they always promised to visit together. As they turn and see each other, there’s such yearning and love, and Xu Chi runs straight into his arms. What a waste it wasn’t a kiss!
I am disappointed by the finale. Too rushed, too abrupt. All the character development up until Episode 17 was doing so well and then there was this need to rush towards the finish line. I had os much potential!
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