Post by humblestudent2 on Sept 19, 2007 20:38:37 GMT -5
Episode begins: Late Saturday night, Day 17.
"This appears to be a case of coming to the wrong house... since the person called Jeong Tae-seong, whom Reporter Seong Joon-p'yo is looking for, is not living here."
"That's correct, of course. Because Jeong Tae-seong is already a dead person."
We start off with a great conversation between Joon-p'yo and Seung-ha which is a lot like one of those old swordfight scenes between Basil Rathbone and maybe Errol Flynn. I swear, I'm tempted to write down every word.
Reporter Seong Joon-p'yo has gone to Lawyer Oh Seung-ha's place in the middle of the night, in a triumphant yet magnanimous frame of mind. He has found out Seung-ha's secret - that he is the supposedly-dead younger brother of Jeong Tae-hoon, killed 12 years ago by Kang Oh-soo. He congratulates Seung-ha on his "heaven-sent chance" to switch identities with an orphan with only a blind sister.1 He has concluded that Seung-ha is the mastermind behind the tarot crimes. But he doesn't want to turn Seung-ha in to the police. He himself wants to bring down his enemy, Mr. Kang, and is willing to let Seung-ha be his partner, or tool, in this. He offers to let Seung-ha go on with his work and protect his secrets, writing a big article about it all after it's over.
Well, Oh Seung-ha isn't buying what Joon-p'yo is selling. He meets him with unflappable composure, unfailing politeness, precise use of language, and a diamond-hard refusal to admit to anything Joon-p'yo is suggesting or to accede to any of Joon-p'yo's schemes. "If you believe I am the mastermind, shouldn't you go to the police?" he asks with a smile. "Even if I am Jeong Tae-seong, that's not proof that I am the mastermind. You don't have any evidence any mastermind exists."
Joon-p'yo gives Seung-ha a "UBS chip" (flash drive)2, and tells him to listen to it and make up his mind - if Seung-ha is cooperative, Joon-p'yo might turn over the original. "About the tarot card you sent me...", says Seung-ha. "I was imitating you," says Joon-p'yo. "How did you feel when you got it?" "I was irritated," says Seung-ha, "because it seemed to me that you chose wrongly in sending that card."3
"Did you send me a tarot card intending to kill me?" Joon-p'yo asks finally. Continuing to choose his words with extreme care, Seung-ha responds, "It seems to me that if indeed I were Jeong Tae-seong, I would want to give you a choice, a last chance to do right." "I've made my choice," responds Joon-p'yo; "it's your turn." Neither of them seems willing to budge.
Back at his apartment, Seung-ha plays back the flash drive and find that it contains a digital recording of the old man's statements from the end of Episode 10. Seung-ha is getting himself a beer, and, at the instant the old man mentions the name of Seung-ha, he cuts his finger on the pop-top. He looks at the cut with a grimace, as if mocking his own momentary vulnerability; then, the file having finished up, he takes a swallow of beer, crosses the room, opens a drawer, and gets out a cell phone .... well, we don't know what else he does now.
Shortly thereafter, however, something else happens...
Now, I want you to try to remember back to Episode 1. Remember that, when we first met Detective Kang, before there were any tarot cards or anything, there was a scene where he was trying to catch some bald crook called "Two-Knives" (Ssang-k'al), and he chased him out of a bar and chased him in a taxi and then didn't catch him because the taxi driver wouldn't let him run off without paying? Remember that?
At the time I thought this was just to let you get to know Oh-soo and Min-jae and give him an opportunity to introduce his trademark phrases, "I'm going crazy" and "There are two kinds of people, bad guys and people who catch bad guys". I thought it was just "atmosphere" and I didn't mention it in my recap even. However, now we are at the bank of lockers in the subway station, and who should turn up but our old friend "Two-Knives" from Episode 1, accompanied by two thugs. These thugs are even more unpleasant than Boss Kyeon's henchmen, because in the screenplay Kyeon's two subordinates are described as "1 and 2 Suha" (underling), whereas Two-Knives's guys are "1 and 2 Keondal" (rogue, good-for-nothing). Anyway, they come in, 1 Rogue finds a hidden key, and Two-Knives uses it to open the locker and pull out a briefcase. He looks inside it, likes what he sees, closes it, and calls someone on his cell phone: "It's me, boss (hyeong-nim)... Just like he said .... Leave it to me."
"An interlude of flashbacks"
Yeong-cheol goes by his mother's restaurant in the evening, but doesn't go in. Remember in the last episode when Soon-ki said that he knew why Yeong-cheol had never told the truth about Tae-hoon's death, and mentioned the restaurant? Yeong-cheol now has a flashback: he remembers Lawyer Kwon coming to visit his poor parents in his fancy car. It's reasonable to infer that this restaurant is the fruit of a hefty bribe for Yeong-cheol's silence.
Meanwhile, Hae-in, who is still taking care of little Sora, has an unintended vision while moving the bear that she was given by Yeong-cheol. She sees Sora and Yeong-cheol as he exacts her "pinky promise" not to tell on him. The next morning, she tells Oh-soo about this, and asks if Sora's testimony - if she can be induced to tell the truth - would be enough to make a case against Yeong-cheol. "Probably not," he says. "If she had identified him, I was hoping it would be enough to get a search warrant." Anyway, he says with reason, "if Yeong-cheol is taking things out of lockers, there's someone else who is putting things in lockers."
Later that day, Hae-in goes to Yeong-cheol's office and tries to talk him into telling the truth. She gets nowhere.
Also, Seung-ha (after his other business which we'll get back to in a minute) comes by Hae-in's library, but doesn't go in - he just watches from a distance. In a flashback, we see that he actually met her - at least once - at the record shop, when she was a kid and he was the young Tae-seong. He loaned her his umbrella so she could walk home in the rain. Maybe he had a little crush on her then. Certainly he has feelings for her now. But, back in the present, he puts them aside and walks away.
"The detective's day"
Earlier in the morning, we saw Seung-ha with TWO identical yellow envelopes. One, presumably, is the envelope in which he got the "Tower" card sent by Joon-p'yo. The other, presumably, he has procured himself.
(I will pause here to note that this is the moment where Seung-ha really formally takes off the mask in front of the viewers. Up until now, if you believed that Seung-ha was the mastermind, it was based on inference, at first from the directors' hints given in music and voice-overs and such, and the fact that, as Oh-soo put it, “you are involved in all of these cases”, and then, since Episode 7, from the fact that he is really Tae-seong and has hidden it for years while cultivating an association with other people involved in the case. But now we start to really see him at work, lying and juggling evidence.)
Now, using Cha Kwang-doo as an intermediary, he goes to Team Leader Ban and tells the team that he apparently has gotten a mysterious delivery. He gives them a yellow envelope (presumably the new one) and a set of photographs (he doesn't mention any tarot card). The photographs are shots of the meeting between Boss Kyeon and Oh-soo's father, Kang Dong-hyeon, in Mr. Kang's car!!4 We can't see Mr. Kang himself, but we can see Mr. Kang's license plates, Mr. Kyeon getting into the car, and Na Seok-jin standing outside it! Oh-soo recognizes them both, and identifies Seok-jin as "my friend". Kyeon Jong-cheol is identified as having been involved with Mr. Kang in some scheme in the past, maybe the bribery business that Joon-p'yo wrote about three years ago.
Now, Seok-jin has other problems to deal with at the moment - Soon-ki is putting on the blackmail pressure, and won't accept anything less than a job at the new Kang casino in Jeju. (In fact, he has strongly suggested that it would be a good idea if Seok-jin were to loot the Kang treasury "like Robin Hood", split it with him, and take off to foreign parts with Na-heui.) So Seok-jin meets Heui-soo to suggest that it might be possible to train Soon-ki to be the pit boss. Heui-soo sees this as an insane idea - "You want to put Soon-ki in a job where he has to speak foreign languages and deal with rich people?" and asks what Soon-ki has on him. Seok-jin tells a half-truth - he says that Soon-ki is threatening to blow the whistle on Oh-soo's old crime. Heui-soo refuses to give in to this.
At this point, Oh-soo finds Seok-jin, tells him about the photographs, and asks him what the heck this meeting with Boss Kyeon was about, and if in particular it had anything to do with Seong Joon-p'yo. Seok-jin honestly doesn't know, and tells Oh-soo that Heui-soo doesn't know anything about the meeting at all, but says that it looked as if Mr. Kang wanted Boss Kyeon to do something for him. Alarmed by this, Oh-soo meets his father in the hotel coffee shop and tells him basically that if he has any plans to have Joon-p'yo rubbed out or something, he should call it off. Mr. Kang says basically that he knows Joon-p'yo's motives well enough that he doesn't need to resort to such means.
"The reporter's bad day"
Now, whether or not it is true that Mr. Kang is planning to have Joon-p'yo killed, it is certainly true that he has Joon-p'yo under Boss Kyeon's surveillance. So, when Joon-p'yo calls up his editor to tell him about the big story he has coming up soon, this call is being taped by Boss Kyeon and his underlings in a van. He tells his editor that he might have his article ready that evening, and says something to the effect that he was tempted to go easy on "one of the two". (As we know, he is talking about Mr. Kang and Seung-ha.) In the middle of the call, however, a little "beep" puts the reporter wise that he is being bugged, and he quickly gets off the phone and starts playing classical music. (Accident or on purpose? Maybe he is supposed to find out he is being bugged, to unnerve him and set him up for what follows. Although on the face of it it looks like Kyeon and the underlings are unhappy that he caught on.) Kyeon later takes this recording to Mr. Kang and plays it for him. Kyeon asks Mr. Kang if he wants Joon-p'yo taken care of (in a sinister way). Kang confidently tells him that won't be necessary, and then sets up a meeting between himself and the editor of Issue & Issue.
Later, Joon-p'yo digs up Oh-soo's old teacher, Mo In-ho, expecting to get some juicy quotes from him about how Oh-soo beat the rap because of his father's influence. However, In-ho won't co-operate. He thinks that if anyone is to be blamed for what happened to Tae-hoon, he himself is the first in line because he didn't deal with the bullying situation before it was too late. Other people were also at fault, including, of course, Joon-p'yo himself, who wrote that article on his uncle's instructions.
Leaving this unsuccessful (from his viewpoint) interview, Joon-p'yo sees that he is being followed by Boss Kyeon's underlings! (Accident or on purpose?) He hails a taxi and calls up Mr. Kang (he apparently has his cell phone number!) and complains of this; Mr. Kang denies any knowledge, but asks him if, when he met him yesterday, Reporter Seong meant to threaten or to negotiate - and urges him to make a "wise decision". Meanwhile, while Joon-p'yo is focused on the car containing Boss Kyeon's underlings, *another* car pulls up next to him - it is "Two Knives" and his rogues. (Just to get it out of the way, I will tell you right now that nowhere in this episode is there any hard indication that "Two Knives" is working either for or with or even with the knowledge of Boss Kyeon or Mr. Kang.)
Toward the evening, Joon-p'yo calls up Seung-ha from a public phone and asks if Seung-ha has decided to accept his offer of a joint venture. "I have no reason to accept," he counters, "but what have you decided? You still have a choice."
Joon-p'yo meets with his editor over drinks, only to discover that the editor has been "turned" by Mr. Kang - there may not be room for the article, it might not be reliable, and could you give me the draft please? Joon-p'yo takes off; apparently running out of plans, he calls up Mr. Kang again. Now, having shown his power to thwart Reporter Seong's plans, Mr. Kang baits a hook. Wouldn't he like a large bribe? Large enough to get his "musically gifted children" the education they need? Joon-p'yo thinks about it - and agrees - although apparently with his fingers crossed. He makes arrangements for a meeting. Mr. Kang orders Seok-jin to get a pile of money ready.
Meanwhile, however, Joon-p'yo makes other arrangements. He books a flight to Australia for the next day (his ex-wife and kids are there, remember). Then he calls Oh-soo. Oh-soo and his team have been worried all day that Boss Kyeon will try to make some kind of hit on Joon-p'yo, so some of them have been watching Kyeon in a night club while Oh-soo has been trying without success to find Joon-p'yo himself.5 Now Joon-p'yo wants to meet Oh-soo. He wants Oh-soo to come with him because he is going to meet with "someone he doesn't trust". Afterwards, he promises to give Oh-soo the man he is looking for.
After he rings off, Joon-p'yo goes to a convenience store - and sees Two-Knives and his rogues hanging around outside! - and gets a new t'aekbae package of his own ready. He puts a flash drive in an envelope and addresses it to "Oh Seung-heui" (that's Seung-ha's blind sister) at the nursing home where she lives.
As Seok-jin meets Boss Kyeon and they head off to meet Joon-p'yo (followed by Jae-Min and Min-Jae, who trailed Kyeon from the night club), Joon-p'yo goes off through the alleys of Seoul to meet Oh-soo - and is accosted by Two-Knives and his rogues. They order him to give him what he is carrying. Rightly or wrongly assuming that they are working for Mr. Kang, he asks them, "Haven't you talked with your boss? Everything is settled." They won't listen. They intend to rob him. Two-knives pulls out one of his eponymous weapons. The reporter somehow manages to break away from them - accident or on purpose??? - and runs down the street. Pursued by Two-knives and his rogues, he runs into an intersection. He gets run down by a truck! 6
Joon-p'yo, lying in the intersection, terribly injured, reaches in his inside jacket pocket, looking for something. The driver, looking aghast, comes out to see how he is. A guy in a suit walks up and says that an ambulance should be called. The driver dashes back to the truck to get his phone. Two-Knives and his rogues look on from a safe distance, apparently surprised by this development. Joon-p'yo, his vision blurred, making a supreme effort, pulls out what he was looking for - his pocket digital recorder. He reaches up toward the guy in the suit and says, "Give this to the police."
"I'll keep it myself," says the guy in the suit. The guy in the suit is Lawyer Oh-Seung-ha.
"I gave you a choice," he says. "But you chose wrongly."
As people begin to cluster around, all eyes on the fallen reporter, Seung-ha walks off unhurriedly. Two-knives and his rogues take off back down the alley; Seung-ha strolls off in the same direction. Oh-soo arrives and sees Joon-p'yo lying there, and runs up and cradles him in his arms and urges him to hold on. Joon-p'yo, with his last reserves, points in the direction in which Seung-ha left, and then loses consciousness. Yeong-cheol is also visible, skulking about in the background behind a phone booth. Oh-soo runs off toward the alley, but finds nothing and no one except a disposable lighter lying on the pavement. 7 He screams out his frustration.
Seung-ha, somewhere else, pops a piece of peppermint candy in his mouth.
Episode ends: late Sunday night, Day 18.
Joon-p’yo is not dead (yet?), so the poll is still open!
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(1) This supports my belief that Soo-gon, Seung-ha's "older brother", is a late addition to the family.
(2) If you haven't seen one of these, it's an external drive (storage unit) in a very small package, smaller than your thumb; it plugs into a USB port on your computer. A Wikipedia page with pictures is here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive
(3) "K'adeu seont'aegeul chalmo(s)t hasin keo(s)t kat'aseo.", or, literally, "Card choice wrongly made <--- that <--- it seemed." What does "card choice" mean? The d-addicts translator made it "you chose the wrong card" - that is, that a card other than "The Tower" would have been better - but could it mean "sending me a card was a bad idea"?. Either one would make sense.
(4) All right, how did he get these photos?? First, how did he know where the meeting was going to be? I don't know, maybe he has a mole in the Kyeon organization. But even if he knew where the two cars were going to meet up, how did he get these pictures physically? They look like they were taken from about 20 feet overhead! Low flying plane with infrared camera??? Did Chloe (from "24") send some satellite images to his cell phone?
(5) I have NO idea why they can't find Joon-p'yo, since it appears that two separate criminal teams (underlings and rogues) have no trouble following him. Furthermore, Jae-min and Min-jae were actually parked in front of Joon-p'yo's apartment at the beginning of the episode, and then Joon-p'yo came back home and went out, and somehow they managed to miss this!! I can't figure this out, unless it's because they all had to go back to the station to deal with Seung-ha's envelope?
(6) Uh-oh - zorro isn't going to like this
(7) I'm amazed at the implication that the streets of Seoul are so clean that a disposable lighter would stand out like this, so that Oh-soo would think to pick it up!
"This appears to be a case of coming to the wrong house... since the person called Jeong Tae-seong, whom Reporter Seong Joon-p'yo is looking for, is not living here."
"That's correct, of course. Because Jeong Tae-seong is already a dead person."
We start off with a great conversation between Joon-p'yo and Seung-ha which is a lot like one of those old swordfight scenes between Basil Rathbone and maybe Errol Flynn. I swear, I'm tempted to write down every word.
Reporter Seong Joon-p'yo has gone to Lawyer Oh Seung-ha's place in the middle of the night, in a triumphant yet magnanimous frame of mind. He has found out Seung-ha's secret - that he is the supposedly-dead younger brother of Jeong Tae-hoon, killed 12 years ago by Kang Oh-soo. He congratulates Seung-ha on his "heaven-sent chance" to switch identities with an orphan with only a blind sister.1 He has concluded that Seung-ha is the mastermind behind the tarot crimes. But he doesn't want to turn Seung-ha in to the police. He himself wants to bring down his enemy, Mr. Kang, and is willing to let Seung-ha be his partner, or tool, in this. He offers to let Seung-ha go on with his work and protect his secrets, writing a big article about it all after it's over.
Well, Oh Seung-ha isn't buying what Joon-p'yo is selling. He meets him with unflappable composure, unfailing politeness, precise use of language, and a diamond-hard refusal to admit to anything Joon-p'yo is suggesting or to accede to any of Joon-p'yo's schemes. "If you believe I am the mastermind, shouldn't you go to the police?" he asks with a smile. "Even if I am Jeong Tae-seong, that's not proof that I am the mastermind. You don't have any evidence any mastermind exists."
Joon-p'yo gives Seung-ha a "UBS chip" (flash drive)2, and tells him to listen to it and make up his mind - if Seung-ha is cooperative, Joon-p'yo might turn over the original. "About the tarot card you sent me...", says Seung-ha. "I was imitating you," says Joon-p'yo. "How did you feel when you got it?" "I was irritated," says Seung-ha, "because it seemed to me that you chose wrongly in sending that card."3
"Did you send me a tarot card intending to kill me?" Joon-p'yo asks finally. Continuing to choose his words with extreme care, Seung-ha responds, "It seems to me that if indeed I were Jeong Tae-seong, I would want to give you a choice, a last chance to do right." "I've made my choice," responds Joon-p'yo; "it's your turn." Neither of them seems willing to budge.
Back at his apartment, Seung-ha plays back the flash drive and find that it contains a digital recording of the old man's statements from the end of Episode 10. Seung-ha is getting himself a beer, and, at the instant the old man mentions the name of Seung-ha, he cuts his finger on the pop-top. He looks at the cut with a grimace, as if mocking his own momentary vulnerability; then, the file having finished up, he takes a swallow of beer, crosses the room, opens a drawer, and gets out a cell phone .... well, we don't know what else he does now.
Shortly thereafter, however, something else happens...
Now, I want you to try to remember back to Episode 1. Remember that, when we first met Detective Kang, before there were any tarot cards or anything, there was a scene where he was trying to catch some bald crook called "Two-Knives" (Ssang-k'al), and he chased him out of a bar and chased him in a taxi and then didn't catch him because the taxi driver wouldn't let him run off without paying? Remember that?
At the time I thought this was just to let you get to know Oh-soo and Min-jae and give him an opportunity to introduce his trademark phrases, "I'm going crazy" and "There are two kinds of people, bad guys and people who catch bad guys". I thought it was just "atmosphere" and I didn't mention it in my recap even. However, now we are at the bank of lockers in the subway station, and who should turn up but our old friend "Two-Knives" from Episode 1, accompanied by two thugs. These thugs are even more unpleasant than Boss Kyeon's henchmen, because in the screenplay Kyeon's two subordinates are described as "1 and 2 Suha" (underling), whereas Two-Knives's guys are "1 and 2 Keondal" (rogue, good-for-nothing). Anyway, they come in, 1 Rogue finds a hidden key, and Two-Knives uses it to open the locker and pull out a briefcase. He looks inside it, likes what he sees, closes it, and calls someone on his cell phone: "It's me, boss (hyeong-nim)... Just like he said .... Leave it to me."
"An interlude of flashbacks"
Yeong-cheol goes by his mother's restaurant in the evening, but doesn't go in. Remember in the last episode when Soon-ki said that he knew why Yeong-cheol had never told the truth about Tae-hoon's death, and mentioned the restaurant? Yeong-cheol now has a flashback: he remembers Lawyer Kwon coming to visit his poor parents in his fancy car. It's reasonable to infer that this restaurant is the fruit of a hefty bribe for Yeong-cheol's silence.
Meanwhile, Hae-in, who is still taking care of little Sora, has an unintended vision while moving the bear that she was given by Yeong-cheol. She sees Sora and Yeong-cheol as he exacts her "pinky promise" not to tell on him. The next morning, she tells Oh-soo about this, and asks if Sora's testimony - if she can be induced to tell the truth - would be enough to make a case against Yeong-cheol. "Probably not," he says. "If she had identified him, I was hoping it would be enough to get a search warrant." Anyway, he says with reason, "if Yeong-cheol is taking things out of lockers, there's someone else who is putting things in lockers."
Later that day, Hae-in goes to Yeong-cheol's office and tries to talk him into telling the truth. She gets nowhere.
Also, Seung-ha (after his other business which we'll get back to in a minute) comes by Hae-in's library, but doesn't go in - he just watches from a distance. In a flashback, we see that he actually met her - at least once - at the record shop, when she was a kid and he was the young Tae-seong. He loaned her his umbrella so she could walk home in the rain. Maybe he had a little crush on her then. Certainly he has feelings for her now. But, back in the present, he puts them aside and walks away.
"The detective's day"
Earlier in the morning, we saw Seung-ha with TWO identical yellow envelopes. One, presumably, is the envelope in which he got the "Tower" card sent by Joon-p'yo. The other, presumably, he has procured himself.
(I will pause here to note that this is the moment where Seung-ha really formally takes off the mask in front of the viewers. Up until now, if you believed that Seung-ha was the mastermind, it was based on inference, at first from the directors' hints given in music and voice-overs and such, and the fact that, as Oh-soo put it, “you are involved in all of these cases”, and then, since Episode 7, from the fact that he is really Tae-seong and has hidden it for years while cultivating an association with other people involved in the case. But now we start to really see him at work, lying and juggling evidence.)
Now, using Cha Kwang-doo as an intermediary, he goes to Team Leader Ban and tells the team that he apparently has gotten a mysterious delivery. He gives them a yellow envelope (presumably the new one) and a set of photographs (he doesn't mention any tarot card). The photographs are shots of the meeting between Boss Kyeon and Oh-soo's father, Kang Dong-hyeon, in Mr. Kang's car!!4 We can't see Mr. Kang himself, but we can see Mr. Kang's license plates, Mr. Kyeon getting into the car, and Na Seok-jin standing outside it! Oh-soo recognizes them both, and identifies Seok-jin as "my friend". Kyeon Jong-cheol is identified as having been involved with Mr. Kang in some scheme in the past, maybe the bribery business that Joon-p'yo wrote about three years ago.
Now, Seok-jin has other problems to deal with at the moment - Soon-ki is putting on the blackmail pressure, and won't accept anything less than a job at the new Kang casino in Jeju. (In fact, he has strongly suggested that it would be a good idea if Seok-jin were to loot the Kang treasury "like Robin Hood", split it with him, and take off to foreign parts with Na-heui.) So Seok-jin meets Heui-soo to suggest that it might be possible to train Soon-ki to be the pit boss. Heui-soo sees this as an insane idea - "You want to put Soon-ki in a job where he has to speak foreign languages and deal with rich people?" and asks what Soon-ki has on him. Seok-jin tells a half-truth - he says that Soon-ki is threatening to blow the whistle on Oh-soo's old crime. Heui-soo refuses to give in to this.
At this point, Oh-soo finds Seok-jin, tells him about the photographs, and asks him what the heck this meeting with Boss Kyeon was about, and if in particular it had anything to do with Seong Joon-p'yo. Seok-jin honestly doesn't know, and tells Oh-soo that Heui-soo doesn't know anything about the meeting at all, but says that it looked as if Mr. Kang wanted Boss Kyeon to do something for him. Alarmed by this, Oh-soo meets his father in the hotel coffee shop and tells him basically that if he has any plans to have Joon-p'yo rubbed out or something, he should call it off. Mr. Kang says basically that he knows Joon-p'yo's motives well enough that he doesn't need to resort to such means.
"The reporter's bad day"
Now, whether or not it is true that Mr. Kang is planning to have Joon-p'yo killed, it is certainly true that he has Joon-p'yo under Boss Kyeon's surveillance. So, when Joon-p'yo calls up his editor to tell him about the big story he has coming up soon, this call is being taped by Boss Kyeon and his underlings in a van. He tells his editor that he might have his article ready that evening, and says something to the effect that he was tempted to go easy on "one of the two". (As we know, he is talking about Mr. Kang and Seung-ha.) In the middle of the call, however, a little "beep" puts the reporter wise that he is being bugged, and he quickly gets off the phone and starts playing classical music. (Accident or on purpose? Maybe he is supposed to find out he is being bugged, to unnerve him and set him up for what follows. Although on the face of it it looks like Kyeon and the underlings are unhappy that he caught on.) Kyeon later takes this recording to Mr. Kang and plays it for him. Kyeon asks Mr. Kang if he wants Joon-p'yo taken care of (in a sinister way). Kang confidently tells him that won't be necessary, and then sets up a meeting between himself and the editor of Issue & Issue.
Later, Joon-p'yo digs up Oh-soo's old teacher, Mo In-ho, expecting to get some juicy quotes from him about how Oh-soo beat the rap because of his father's influence. However, In-ho won't co-operate. He thinks that if anyone is to be blamed for what happened to Tae-hoon, he himself is the first in line because he didn't deal with the bullying situation before it was too late. Other people were also at fault, including, of course, Joon-p'yo himself, who wrote that article on his uncle's instructions.
Leaving this unsuccessful (from his viewpoint) interview, Joon-p'yo sees that he is being followed by Boss Kyeon's underlings! (Accident or on purpose?) He hails a taxi and calls up Mr. Kang (he apparently has his cell phone number!) and complains of this; Mr. Kang denies any knowledge, but asks him if, when he met him yesterday, Reporter Seong meant to threaten or to negotiate - and urges him to make a "wise decision". Meanwhile, while Joon-p'yo is focused on the car containing Boss Kyeon's underlings, *another* car pulls up next to him - it is "Two Knives" and his rogues. (Just to get it out of the way, I will tell you right now that nowhere in this episode is there any hard indication that "Two Knives" is working either for or with or even with the knowledge of Boss Kyeon or Mr. Kang.)
Toward the evening, Joon-p'yo calls up Seung-ha from a public phone and asks if Seung-ha has decided to accept his offer of a joint venture. "I have no reason to accept," he counters, "but what have you decided? You still have a choice."
Joon-p'yo meets with his editor over drinks, only to discover that the editor has been "turned" by Mr. Kang - there may not be room for the article, it might not be reliable, and could you give me the draft please? Joon-p'yo takes off; apparently running out of plans, he calls up Mr. Kang again. Now, having shown his power to thwart Reporter Seong's plans, Mr. Kang baits a hook. Wouldn't he like a large bribe? Large enough to get his "musically gifted children" the education they need? Joon-p'yo thinks about it - and agrees - although apparently with his fingers crossed. He makes arrangements for a meeting. Mr. Kang orders Seok-jin to get a pile of money ready.
Meanwhile, however, Joon-p'yo makes other arrangements. He books a flight to Australia for the next day (his ex-wife and kids are there, remember). Then he calls Oh-soo. Oh-soo and his team have been worried all day that Boss Kyeon will try to make some kind of hit on Joon-p'yo, so some of them have been watching Kyeon in a night club while Oh-soo has been trying without success to find Joon-p'yo himself.5 Now Joon-p'yo wants to meet Oh-soo. He wants Oh-soo to come with him because he is going to meet with "someone he doesn't trust". Afterwards, he promises to give Oh-soo the man he is looking for.
After he rings off, Joon-p'yo goes to a convenience store - and sees Two-Knives and his rogues hanging around outside! - and gets a new t'aekbae package of his own ready. He puts a flash drive in an envelope and addresses it to "Oh Seung-heui" (that's Seung-ha's blind sister) at the nursing home where she lives.
As Seok-jin meets Boss Kyeon and they head off to meet Joon-p'yo (followed by Jae-Min and Min-Jae, who trailed Kyeon from the night club), Joon-p'yo goes off through the alleys of Seoul to meet Oh-soo - and is accosted by Two-Knives and his rogues. They order him to give him what he is carrying. Rightly or wrongly assuming that they are working for Mr. Kang, he asks them, "Haven't you talked with your boss? Everything is settled." They won't listen. They intend to rob him. Two-knives pulls out one of his eponymous weapons. The reporter somehow manages to break away from them - accident or on purpose??? - and runs down the street. Pursued by Two-knives and his rogues, he runs into an intersection. He gets run down by a truck! 6
Joon-p'yo, lying in the intersection, terribly injured, reaches in his inside jacket pocket, looking for something. The driver, looking aghast, comes out to see how he is. A guy in a suit walks up and says that an ambulance should be called. The driver dashes back to the truck to get his phone. Two-Knives and his rogues look on from a safe distance, apparently surprised by this development. Joon-p'yo, his vision blurred, making a supreme effort, pulls out what he was looking for - his pocket digital recorder. He reaches up toward the guy in the suit and says, "Give this to the police."
"I'll keep it myself," says the guy in the suit. The guy in the suit is Lawyer Oh-Seung-ha.
"I gave you a choice," he says. "But you chose wrongly."
As people begin to cluster around, all eyes on the fallen reporter, Seung-ha walks off unhurriedly. Two-knives and his rogues take off back down the alley; Seung-ha strolls off in the same direction. Oh-soo arrives and sees Joon-p'yo lying there, and runs up and cradles him in his arms and urges him to hold on. Joon-p'yo, with his last reserves, points in the direction in which Seung-ha left, and then loses consciousness. Yeong-cheol is also visible, skulking about in the background behind a phone booth. Oh-soo runs off toward the alley, but finds nothing and no one except a disposable lighter lying on the pavement. 7 He screams out his frustration.
Seung-ha, somewhere else, pops a piece of peppermint candy in his mouth.
Episode ends: late Sunday night, Day 18.
Joon-p’yo is not dead (yet?), so the poll is still open!
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(1) This supports my belief that Soo-gon, Seung-ha's "older brother", is a late addition to the family.
(2) If you haven't seen one of these, it's an external drive (storage unit) in a very small package, smaller than your thumb; it plugs into a USB port on your computer. A Wikipedia page with pictures is here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive
(3) "K'adeu seont'aegeul chalmo(s)t hasin keo(s)t kat'aseo.", or, literally, "Card choice wrongly made <--- that <--- it seemed." What does "card choice" mean? The d-addicts translator made it "you chose the wrong card" - that is, that a card other than "The Tower" would have been better - but could it mean "sending me a card was a bad idea"?. Either one would make sense.
(4) All right, how did he get these photos?? First, how did he know where the meeting was going to be? I don't know, maybe he has a mole in the Kyeon organization. But even if he knew where the two cars were going to meet up, how did he get these pictures physically? They look like they were taken from about 20 feet overhead! Low flying plane with infrared camera??? Did Chloe (from "24") send some satellite images to his cell phone?
(5) I have NO idea why they can't find Joon-p'yo, since it appears that two separate criminal teams (underlings and rogues) have no trouble following him. Furthermore, Jae-min and Min-jae were actually parked in front of Joon-p'yo's apartment at the beginning of the episode, and then Joon-p'yo came back home and went out, and somehow they managed to miss this!! I can't figure this out, unless it's because they all had to go back to the station to deal with Seung-ha's envelope?
(6) Uh-oh - zorro isn't going to like this
(7) I'm amazed at the implication that the streets of Seoul are so clean that a disposable lighter would stand out like this, so that Oh-soo would think to pick it up!
