'No Tail To Tell' Episode 11 Recap: Does The Shaman Find Geum-Ho’s Fox Bead?

This week, Netflix’s No Tail to Tell finally comes to an end. The fantasy drama has certainly been one of the platform’s less-entertaining shows. This is such a shame, considering the young stars in the leading roles who should be making waves globally. Anyway, guess we’ll have to hope the final episode is actually fun. At the end of episode 10, we’d seen the shaman, Do-Cheol, use a cursed artifact called the vajra bell to establish his control over Geum-Ho. It was pretty obvious at the time that he intended to use her against her own sister, Eun-Ho, now a powerless human being, which leaves us to guess at how she’s going to survive going up against an eight-tailed fox under a shaman’s command. Also, it’s finally the day of the away game, so we’re going to get to see Daehung Citizens FC in action again. How’s that going to unfold? Let’s get into this recap of episode 11 to find out.

Spoiler Alert

How Do Things Unfold for Daehung Citizens FC in Their Away Game?

Ominously, the first scene of episode 11 shows evil CEO Lee Yoon get a brand new hunting gun out of a box, clutching it to himself after he wakes up from a nightmare, almost as if it’s a teddy bear. Now that he no longer has to fear Eun-Ho’s gumiho powers, Yoon has truly lost the plot. Meanwhile, the Daehung Citizens FC players are getting nervous in their locker room since it’s almost time for their away game, but the coach hasn’t shown up yet. He’d gotten off the bus at the end of episode 10 when he’d received a phone call about a sponsorship, and he has not been seen since. Suddenly, though, he does make a showing, and he says he has two pieces of good news for them.

First, the team has a new GM, none other than Yeon-Su, Si-Yeol’s old manager from his previous life and, until he’d rediscovered her just recently, a manager at a grocery store. The players are a bit surprised that the coach thinks that this is important enough to tell them about just before kickoff. Well, he probably just had to tell them about her because she’s responsible for the second piece of good news he’s about to tell them. Till now, as the bottom-ranked team of Korea’s fourth division, the players have been getting paid just 50k won as match fees and 300k on top of that for a win. Now, with new funding, their match fee gets bumped up to 200k per match, with the win bonus being a full million won. You can imagine this puts a pep in the team’s step, and they truly are playing like a team possessed (all without a strategy session or even pre-planned positions, somehow; I guess it’s a return to Total Football). 

This is when Yoon walks up to Eun-Ho while she’s in the stands cheering on Si-Yeol. When she asks him why he’s here, he reveals that he’s the new owner of the team and also that he now knows her secret; she’s got no powers anymore, she’s a regular human being. He says that he lived in fear for so long, not knowing when she’d act against him, but now it was her turn to worry about him because of all the influence he wields in the world of humans. This is when Si-Yeol spots them and runs into the stands, punching Yoon in the face (the second football player he’s taken a punch from recently). This results in him getting a red card and leaving the field and Yoon apparently pulling out of the team, meaning they can kiss their 200k a match goodbye. When the team gets back to the dressing room after losing the match, frustrated at Si-Yeol, Yeon-Su reveals what she knows of Yoon’s history with Si-Yeol. Did he still run over Woo-Seok in this timeline, now that Eun-Ho’s switched their fates again? It’s a little hazy.

Do Si-Yeol’s and Eun-Ho’s date go well?

After Si-Yeol walks off the field, he takes Eun-Ho to Suncheol station so they can catch a train back to Seoul. While they’re consoling each other outside the station, a ghostly apparition of Geum-ho appears, but neither one of them can see her. When they get on the train, Eun-Ho notices the pink sweater Si-Yeol’s wearing and realizes that the dream where she saw him stabbing her wasn’t a dream at all. She’s never seen the sweater before, which means what she saw was a premonition, given that the sweater appeared exactly as it is in real life. She decides they need to get off the train and just tells Si-Yeol that he promised her they’d explore the town, so he’d better keep his word.

Si-Yeol ends up taking her to a Joseon-era village, not realizing that this wouldn’t look interesting to her, given she’s actually lived through the period. But she says she enjoys the experience anyway, since it helps her pretend she knew him back then. They have an excellent date, where he shows off his natural sense of humor and she nerds out over a bunch of Joseon-era practices. They feed each other lunch and then cap things off by finally getting their very first picture together. As they’re walking around, and Eun-Ho expresses how this experience helps her make him feel like a part of her past, Si-Yeol replies that he should take her somewhere new so he can be a part of both her past and future, which should be enough to make any respectable lady swoon.

Almost as if his level of commitment unlocks something in her, Eun-Ho asks him if everything will be okay if they just stay the way they are and can’t go back to their old selves: her a gumiho and him a world-famous football star. After a pause, he says he would be okay with it but also lets her know that he can tell she has a secret she doesn’t want to tell him right now, and that that’s okay, because she’d only keep a secret if she knew they couldn’t do anything about it. Although Eun-Ho wants to tell him about that terrible dream, she doesn’t for now; she just tells him she’s scared and that she loves him, and then they kiss in what looks like an infinite wheat field. When they end up at the hotel later, it’s a double-bed rather than a twin-bed layout, and they both make a pretense of wanting to ask for a room change, even though it’s just the most perfect coincidence. Ultimately, they end up kissing again and go to bed together, a perfect end to a day-long date.

What Is Do-Cheol’s Plan?

Yoon has just been bankrolling Do-Cheol because he wants to take down the gumiho who ruined his life, but now that he knows Eun-Ho is a human, she’s not as much of a threat to him. Nonetheless, he handed Do-Cheol a whopping 2 billion won so he could get his hands on the vajra bell and put Geum-Ho under his control, letting him get his hands on the fox bead. The only problem? Now that he’s basically puppeteered Geum-Ho, she doesn’t have her fox bead at all, nor is it hidden anywhere that she can find. In trying to bind her, Do-Cheol used up all his shamanic power, meaning he only has a few days left to live unless he can find and swallow the fox bead. Is that all there is to his plan, though, just the will to survive?

No, Do-Cheol’s quest is driven by revenge; the fox bead won’t just keep him alive, it’ll essentially turn him into a deity himself, an immortal being. Once he has this power, he’s going to have his revenge. He explains to Yoon how he wiped out, one by one, all the minor deities he held responsible for his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, the former in a car accident and the latter by suicide after a long illness. Yoon says it sounds like Do-Cheol’s already had his revenge, but the shaman’s got his sights set higher; he wants revenge against the deities who could bring into existence a world where such cruelty could exist and maybe even against the world as a whole. Needless to say, this speech kind of scares Yoon.

How Does Geum-Ho Manage To Break Free Of Do-Cheol’s Control?

After Si-Yeol and Eun-Ho step out of the hotel the next day, Eun-Ho makes him take off his pink sweater and throw it in the bin, even though he says it was a gift from his grandma. But she insists, hoping that in this way, the events of her premonition will never come true. Right after he finally relents, they bump into Geum-Ho, except this isn’t the Geum-Ho they know; she’s a shell of herself, being controlled by the shaman. She demands Eun-Ho hand over her fox bead, and when he refuses, she throws Si-Yeol off his feet before putting her hand over Eun-Ho’s head and sending her into some kind of dream world. When she wakes up, she sees her sister, Geum-Ho, but in her avatar from before she got married and died, and she tries to convince Eun-Ho that all these things she was talking about (even her dating a mortal man) happened in a dream.

Almost as if it were unimportant, she asks for her fox bead back as well. This is when it’s revealed to us that Eun-Ho had pocketed the bead for safekeeping, even asking Geum-Ho to temporarily sever her connection to it so it couldn’t be traced. She almost reveals the location, which seems to be in Woo-Seok’s hospital room of all places, but then spirit Geum-Ho breaks into this dream and starts talking to her sister. After Eun-Ho realizes it was all a trick, possessed Geum-Ho tries to strangle her until she gives up the information. Somehow, in the real world, spirit Geum-Ho manages to get Si-Yeol to put the Sajia Ritual Blade, which was in Eun-Ho’s pocket, in her hand, and Eun-Ho stabs the possessed Geum-Ho in her dream, finally managing to wake up and letting Geum-Ho right back into her body.

At the end of No Tail to Tell episode 11, the shaman suddenly starts coughing up blood, and even though Yoon rushes him to the hospital, it’s clear it’s too late for this demented man. In his hospital bed, he’s surrounded by the spirits he knows are going to torment him and never let him have a peaceful death, and he begs to be killed. Meanwhile, after Si-Yeol and Eun-Ho get back home, Si-Yeol goes out grocery shopping, leaving Eun-Ho all alone back home. When she hears a knock on the door, she assumes it’s him coming back, but instead it’s Yoon with his gun, and he starts talking about how she’s going to get what she deserves now. Just as he pulls the trigger, Si-Yeol suddenly shows up and gets in the way, collapsing to the ground. Will he survive? From the preview for episode 12, there’s a chance he dies in the hospital, and Eun-Ho has to make some kind of sacrifice to bring him back. We’re just going to have to wait till tomorrow to find out in the finale of “No Tail to Tell.” Do you think Eun-Ho and Si-Yeol are going to get their happy ending? Or will circumstances split them up for good? 

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