Post by humblestudent2 on Sept 26, 2007 22:18:48 GMT -5
Episode 14 recap
Begins: Friday evening, April 27, Day 19
"I have forsaken the world"
As episode 13 ended, Seung-ha had attempted to have a nice dinner with Hae-in and her mother, but he just wasn't able to endure an ordinary domestic noodle dish - it was like serving garlic chicken to Dracula. He dashed out to the alley and started gagging and was in an awful state. Hae-in fetches his coat and sees him on his way. But as he thanks her for her attempt at hospitality, something clicks in her mind: she links him with the boy who gave her an umbrella many years ago (seen in Seung-ha's flashback in Episode 12).
Seung-ha goes back home and remembers the betrayals of his past. He remembers coming back from scattering his mother's ashes at the family memorial tree to find Kim Yeong-cheol hanging around the Seong house. Tae-seong was angry at Yeong-cheol - Oh-soo has been exonerated, his murdered brother was slandered as a knife-wielding assailant, his mother is dead, and all because Yeong-cheol never spoke up and told the truth about being harassed by Oh-soo's gang and about Tae-hoon sticking up for him. As Yeong-cheol stammers and whimpers, Tae-seong tells him he has no right to come to the house. "The world forsook us," he says, "so I have forsaken the world."
Kim Yeong-cheol blurts out that he knows the truth about Tae-hoon's murder - that he was at the scene and witnessed it. Tae-seong is first shocked, then angry again on account of Yeong-cheol's silence, and then taken by a moment's hope: if Yeong-cheol comes forward as a witness, the case can be reopened. But he won't do it. "If I tell what happened," he says, "my mother and father will become bad people (nappeun saram)".1
At this point, Seung-ha's memories are interrupted by a call from Detective Kang Oh-soo, who wants to meet down by the river. Oh-soo asks Seung-ha why Joon-p'yo might have had the address of Oh Seung-ha's blind sister Seung-heui on a paper in his pocket. Seung-ha says he has no idea. Oh-soo asks if it would be okay to talk with Seung-heui about this. Seung-ha doesn't object, although he warns him that stress is bad for her.
They discuss the case some; Seung-ha conveys Kwang-doo's idea that Joon-p'yo was attacked because he knew who the mastermind was; Oh-soo agrees with that. However, Seung-ha suggests that Joon-p'yo was killed for some other reason; he endorses Hae-in's idea that "the mastermind wants to be found" and doesn't care if his identity is revealed.
At this point, Seung-ha asks Oh-soo if the event from 12 years ago was really an accident. "No offense meant," he says, "I was just curious because it seems to have aroused such resentment." "I killed Tae-hoon," Oh-soo says, but "whether it was an accident is between Tae-hoon and me."
"Student Training Camp Invites Death"2
Now, let's get back to the case of the supposed "accident" that has left reporter Seong Joon-p'yo in a coma. At the end of Episode 13, Jae-min turned up an article (with the above headline) by Joon-p'yo which might have been a motive for truck driver Hwang Dae-bil to kill him.
As they eventually piece it together (I'm collapsing a couple of scenes here, running into the next day), this is what happened. Dae-bil ran a "student training camp (facility?)" which I infer to have been one of those things that gives extra study time after school or on evenings or weekends, so that students can get high exam scores and get into the good schools and so on. Dae-bil's father was a school principal. There was a minor fire in the facility's kitchen which actually did not kill anyone and only injured a couple instructors.
However, Joon-p'yo's article, which was "very distorted" according to Detective Lee's source, implied that it was a money-grubbing firetrap operation and falsely implied that the principal, Dae-bil's father, had pressured students at his school to attend the training facility. The furor aroused by this article was apparently enough to force Dae-bil's father, who was approaching retirement age and had had a good reputation, to resign early, and he then committed (the d-addicts translator says) "pessimistic suicide"! This also caused Dae-bil's fiancee to break off their engagement. Dae-bil apparently confronted Joon-p'yo personally after all this.
So Hwang Dae-bil, at first glance an innocent truck driver, was at least lying when he said he never met or heard of the man he ran down, and furthermore had a clear motive to kill him.
Under questioning (really this takes place on Saturday) Dae-bil finally admits that he knew and hated Joon-p'yo and wanted him dead, but still claims it was an accident. In fact, he says, he lied about not knowing Joon-p'yo precisely because he knew what the police would think. "Put yourself in my shoes," he says. "Wouldn't you have done the same?"
"What was on the flash drive"
Now, Oh-soo also knows from Hae-in's vision that Joon-p'yo had sent someone a t'aekbae containing a flash drive, and concludes that he sent it to Oh Seung-heui, and spends the night searching through receipts at convenience stores. (This man is the Korean Jack Bauer! He hasn't slept in a bed in three or four days now.) And on Saturday morning he finds the receipt and heads on over to the nursing home to ask Seung-heui about it.3
This business has caught Seung-ha off guard, though, which is unusual. In the morning - after Hae-in has brought over some leftovers from last night, and asked him if they might have met in her old neighborhood (which he denies) - he calls out to the nursing home to talk with Seung-heui, but she is asleep when he calls. In the event, he goes out there and arrives about a minute after Oh-soo starts talking with Seung-heui, who is speaking in a very calm and detached manner. As Seung-ha looks on, his level of apprehension steadily escalating, she says that, yes, she received a delivery with no return address; it was a flash drive; yes, she will play it for them. They go back to her room. She produces a flash drive. Oh-soo puts it in the computer's USB port.
There is a moment of silent suspense - then, it begins playing (European) classical music.
She says that it is very nice music and she has played the file all the way to the end. Oh-soo can't believe it and voices his bafflement. Seung-ha isn't as vocal but he is really as shocked as Oh-soo is.
Oh-soo eventually takes off with the flash drive, having confirmed that, yes, it is nothing but music. Seung-ha and Seung-heui exchange some empty pleasantries, she in the same detached manner, he with incomprehension and even fright in his eyes. They exchange good-byes. Then, Seung-heui calls him back: "Tae-seong..."
"That is your name, isn't it?"
She knows that her brother Seung-ha is really dead. She says that he ran away from home in middle school, hoping to find work and take care of her. Then, she says, "he called and said he was staying with a great friend named Tae-seong.... Three years later, you came to visit, and I knew your voice was different, but I wanted to believe you were my Seung-ha. Was he in much pain when he died?"
Seung-ha is now on the verge of bawling like a child, showing more emotion than we have ever seen from him. "The last thing he said was, 'Take care of my sister.'"
Seung-hui says that she "sees with her heart, not with her eyes" and knows he is a good man who has suffered a lot of pain. That's why she lied to the police. She knows that he can't possibly have done anything so wrong, and is her good brother. Seung-ha seems to still be very much in emotional turmoil over this. But then, standing outside the facility in the daylight, he gets a particularly cheerful expression on his face.
"Telephone tag"
As Oh-soo goes back to the station, he gets the news that Two-knives has been arrested at his girlfriend's place. They try to question him, but he is an experienced crook, won't say a word, and immediately lawyers up.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kang has already figured out that there is too much stuff he doesn't know about Joon-p'yo's supposed accident, stuff that might come back to bite him. He knows from Kyeon's surveillance that Joon-p'yo made a call from a public phone that evening (as we know, this was his last conversation with Seung-ha before his injury). Kyeon says he has someone who can find out who was called from that phone.
(Kang also checks with Na Seok-jin about Jeong Tae-seong's supposed death. Seok-jin has not gotten as far as everyone else - he has seen the official documents and is satisfied that Tae-seong is dead. This both relieves and puzzles Mr. Kang, who had thought that only he could be behind all these strange events.)
Later, though, the news that Two-knives, whom Kang knows to be one of Kyeon's men, was arrested by police, and that they have his fingerprints on something found at the scene, makes Mr. Kang suspect that Kyeon went beyond his instructions.
In fact, though, the team is working their way through the maze pretty well. Checking Two-knives' own phone records, they know that he got several calls from a single phone (which they later determine to be a clone of the old Lee Bong-kyu phone which was used to set up Lawyer Kwon's death and to make the false blog in the name of Joon-p'yo). (Around this point, we see Seung-ha pitch the phone in a trash can.) They conclude that the "mastermind" was in touch with both Two-knives and Dae-pil, separately, and got information about Joon-p'yo's location from Two-knives and fed it to Dae-pil. The mastermind, they conclude, now wants the "accident" pinned on Two-knives and, through him, on Kyeon, and, through him, on Kang Dong-hyeon himself. So they are properly suspicious of the lighter and are willing to believe that the "mastermind" dealt with Two-knives directly, without going through Kyeon at all. And so far as we can tell, this is all pretty much right. (In fact, Two-knives called Kyeon before his arrest to discuss the money that Two-knives received from some unknown person who apparently hasn't contacted him even though he would be expected to.)
Oh-soo is convinced that the key evidence is in Dae-bil's place, and would like a search warrant. Team Chief Ban says that's out of the question at this point.
(By the way, as to the cigarette lighter, there is an extra scene in the screenplay that didn't make it onto the air, unfortunately! In this scene, Boss Kyeon is talking with one of his underlings and fuming about Two-knives being so stupid as to drop one of the night club's disposable lighters with his fingerprints on it, no less! "That's really weird," says the underling. "What is??" "Two-knives never carries a disposable lighter. He says it's bad for his look (literally, "It wrinkles his form")(!) He sometimes uses one in the club, but he never takes it with him." "What about the rest of you noms?" "We quit smoking!")
"What the flash drive said"
Oh-soo drops by the library and tells Hae-in what happened with the flash drive, and loans her the drive he got from Seung-heui. He also wants to be filled in on the meaning of the "Tower" card, which was missing from Joon-p'yo's tarot deck. She says that the card can be read two ways. Negatively, it means "inevitable disaster because someone has seen what he shouldn't have." Taken the other way, it means to "abandon the existing rules and find a new direction." (I wonder which way Seung-ha took it? There were a couple scenes in which he looked at the card and then reversed it end-for-end.)
That evening, at the tarot café, she does a reading on the flash drive. She doesn't see anything - but she hears voices!4 It is part of the conversation between Joon-p'yo and the old man at the Dongmun store (at the end of Episode 10), which, as we know, was on the original flash drive that Seung-heui listened to the previous day.
She calls up Oh-soo and tells him that she heard a conversation between a young man and and an old man, maybe the old man she saw in her vision from the "Moon" card. "They kept mentioning the name Tae-seong," she says.
"The lovers"
Earlier in the day, Heui-soo called his secretary, Seok-jin, into his office to have a semi-frank conversation with him. Heui-soo delicately tells him that he doesn't like the fact that he got into this business of secret meetings with Boss Kyeon without telling him; that he works for Heui-soo, not for his dad. Also, he drops this into the conversation: "I've trusted you all these years. That's why I've trusted you with my wife ... I won't ask you to drive her to the hospital any more. I feel bad having burdened you with my affairs. I'll drive her myself from now on." (This refers to Na-heui's frequent trips to the gynecologist, which have come up in earlier episodes, which have apparently served as opportunities for the two to get together. It's not clear to me how many of these trips have been real trips.)
Heui-soo now meets his wife for lunch and tells her the same thing - he can take her to the gynecologist after lunch, and Mr. Na won't be doing it any more. She nervously tries to talk him out of this - "you'll feel nervous meeting my gynecologist".
At this delicate point, Soon-ki, who has been trying to use his knowledge of Seok-jin's affair with his boss's wife (obtained from the "mastermind") to blackmail his way into a juicy position, now decides to go to the boss directly. He plops himself down at the table with Heui-soo and Na-heui and starts acting in his usual menacing friendly manner. Na-heui excuses herself, and Soon-ki starts talking with Heui-soo, making insinuations. I'm not sure whether he is hoping Heui-soo will reward him for information, or whether he hopes this will make things hotter for Seok-jin. But Heui-soo isn't interested in giving him what he wants, and, when Soon-ki tells him "the husband is always the last to know," Heui-soo responds with a proverb of his own: "When the oil has run out, the flame in the lamp will die of itself." (More or less.) (The d-addicts translator renders this as "The husband will have the control at the end.") Soon-ki, caught off guard, asks, "So you know about it?" Heui-soo is done chatting, and chases him off.
Later, back at the apartment, Soon-ki lets Seok-jin know about the conversation and asks if Heui-soo might know about the affair. Seok-jin says he needs more time to get him what he wants.
In the evening, Oh-soo stops into a bar and sees Heui-soo sitting there (he might have called Oh-soo to come by). Heui-soo takes the opportunity to reassure Oh-soo that their dad did not have Joon-p'yo whacked; yes, he had him followed, but he called the men after they had come to an agreement; he was going to pay Joon-p'yo off. Oh-soo is not entirely convinced but seems to mostly believe it.
Oh-soo then takes off - in fact, he goes out to stake out Hwang Dae-pil's place (he owns a little market (sup'a) and lives in a basement apartment underneath), hoping to find something useful or maybe get into it. But Heui-soo is still in the bar, and we see what he is really brooding about. He apparently has received a red envelope (which we saw pulled out of a subway locker earlier in the day). He has a copy of the photograph of his secretary smooching with his wife. Despite his blasé front with Soon-ki earlier, he seems pretty troubled .. perhaps he is not such a Sarkozy-ish sophisticate after all.
At this point he gets a phone call and a male voice – seemingly from a subordinate5 - says, "Sir, it seems that a person named Kim Soon-ki is blackmailing your wife." Heui-soo doesn't seem surprised to hear this. “Thanks for your work (Sugohaesseoyo)”, he says.
"Jeong Tae-seong is already a dead man."
In the morning, Seung-ha comes by Hae-in's house to pick up Sora and take her out to stay with his brother, Soo-gon. Hae-in will come along for the ride. Hae-in takes the opportunity to ask Seung-ha if he ever lived in her old neighborhood, but he denies it. As they drive off, Yeong-cheol, lurking, utters silent thanks to Sora for keeping her promise to lie and pretend not to know him.
Meanwhile, Oh-soo is still camped outside Dae-pil's place, watching him drink soju in the twilight before dawn and trying to make sense of things. Then something clicks. He remembers Joon-p'yo telling him personally - in Episode 11 - that "The man you are looking for ... is already not alive." He hooks that in with what Hae-in saw in her vision last episode: Joon-p'yo saying "Jeong Tae-seong is already a dead man." He makes the connection: the person whom Joon-p'yo believed to be the "mastermind" was Jeong Tae-seong.
Inspired, he calls Kwang-doo. Now, the previous day, while Oh-soo was out at the nursing home, Kwang-doo had tried to look up the old man from the Dongmun store, who is apparently now in intensive care with a cardiopulmonary ailment. The nurse says he is in and out of consciousness. She adds that they nearly had to put him out, but some other man, not a relative,6 had shown up and asked about him and had paid for his expenses.
Now, Oh-soo asks about Tae-seong's death, and hears that Kwang-doo's friend identified the body from his student ID and possessions, because his face was too messed up. Oh-soo would continue the conversation, but he sees Dae-pil leaving his basement apartment, apparently leaving the key behind.... Oh-soo can't resist. He snags the key and gets into the dim apartment. His eyes adjusting to the dim light, he sees, posted on the wall, a copy of Joon-p'yo's article about the fire. Then, he finds something else: a pile of letters in envelopes. Just like the ones Jo Dong-seop got in prison. He pulls one of them out of the envelope and sees that, just like the letters to Jo Dong-seop, it concludes with the words "God makes destiny, but people change destiny."
But as he gets up, somehow he gets whacked in the head and knocked senseless!
End of Episode - Sunday morning, April 29, Day 21.
1. Of course this refers to the fact that his parents got a healthy bribe for Yeong-cheol's silence. But it's not clear to me whether this means "my parents will become abusive" or "without the restaurant, my parents will sink back to the level of derelicts and street criminals". I would vote for the latter, though of course the former may also be implied. (I am ruling out the "Chicago" translation, that is, that "if I talk it will make my parents bad for taking a bribe and not staying bought"!)
2. "Invites" is my own translation, and, I think, the correct one, since nobody actually died. The d-addicts translator had "brought".
3. He also asks the clerk for the security tapes for April 26. I wish I could forget about this, because if April 26 was the date that Joon-p'yo sent the flash drive then it makes a mess of my calendar
April 26 was a Thursday, and by my calendar the day of his traffic sago (Day 18 of the action) was a Sunday. However, a calendar using the April 26 as the gold standard reference date doesn't quite work either. I'll write more on this in the calendar thread.
4. Makes sense, no? Because the person who provided the flash drive was Seung-heui, she gets only auditory impressions.
5. To be precise, the caller says “It seems that Samo-nim (a term for a superior’s wife) is being blackmailed by a person named Kim Soon-ki.”
6. Guess who? The murky rear-view flashback image we get is no great shakes, but you still only get one guess.
Begins: Friday evening, April 27, Day 19
"I have forsaken the world"
As episode 13 ended, Seung-ha had attempted to have a nice dinner with Hae-in and her mother, but he just wasn't able to endure an ordinary domestic noodle dish - it was like serving garlic chicken to Dracula. He dashed out to the alley and started gagging and was in an awful state. Hae-in fetches his coat and sees him on his way. But as he thanks her for her attempt at hospitality, something clicks in her mind: she links him with the boy who gave her an umbrella many years ago (seen in Seung-ha's flashback in Episode 12).
Seung-ha goes back home and remembers the betrayals of his past. He remembers coming back from scattering his mother's ashes at the family memorial tree to find Kim Yeong-cheol hanging around the Seong house. Tae-seong was angry at Yeong-cheol - Oh-soo has been exonerated, his murdered brother was slandered as a knife-wielding assailant, his mother is dead, and all because Yeong-cheol never spoke up and told the truth about being harassed by Oh-soo's gang and about Tae-hoon sticking up for him. As Yeong-cheol stammers and whimpers, Tae-seong tells him he has no right to come to the house. "The world forsook us," he says, "so I have forsaken the world."
Kim Yeong-cheol blurts out that he knows the truth about Tae-hoon's murder - that he was at the scene and witnessed it. Tae-seong is first shocked, then angry again on account of Yeong-cheol's silence, and then taken by a moment's hope: if Yeong-cheol comes forward as a witness, the case can be reopened. But he won't do it. "If I tell what happened," he says, "my mother and father will become bad people (nappeun saram)".1
At this point, Seung-ha's memories are interrupted by a call from Detective Kang Oh-soo, who wants to meet down by the river. Oh-soo asks Seung-ha why Joon-p'yo might have had the address of Oh Seung-ha's blind sister Seung-heui on a paper in his pocket. Seung-ha says he has no idea. Oh-soo asks if it would be okay to talk with Seung-heui about this. Seung-ha doesn't object, although he warns him that stress is bad for her.
They discuss the case some; Seung-ha conveys Kwang-doo's idea that Joon-p'yo was attacked because he knew who the mastermind was; Oh-soo agrees with that. However, Seung-ha suggests that Joon-p'yo was killed for some other reason; he endorses Hae-in's idea that "the mastermind wants to be found" and doesn't care if his identity is revealed.
At this point, Seung-ha asks Oh-soo if the event from 12 years ago was really an accident. "No offense meant," he says, "I was just curious because it seems to have aroused such resentment." "I killed Tae-hoon," Oh-soo says, but "whether it was an accident is between Tae-hoon and me."
"Student Training Camp Invites Death"2
Now, let's get back to the case of the supposed "accident" that has left reporter Seong Joon-p'yo in a coma. At the end of Episode 13, Jae-min turned up an article (with the above headline) by Joon-p'yo which might have been a motive for truck driver Hwang Dae-bil to kill him.
As they eventually piece it together (I'm collapsing a couple of scenes here, running into the next day), this is what happened. Dae-bil ran a "student training camp (facility?)" which I infer to have been one of those things that gives extra study time after school or on evenings or weekends, so that students can get high exam scores and get into the good schools and so on. Dae-bil's father was a school principal. There was a minor fire in the facility's kitchen which actually did not kill anyone and only injured a couple instructors.
However, Joon-p'yo's article, which was "very distorted" according to Detective Lee's source, implied that it was a money-grubbing firetrap operation and falsely implied that the principal, Dae-bil's father, had pressured students at his school to attend the training facility. The furor aroused by this article was apparently enough to force Dae-bil's father, who was approaching retirement age and had had a good reputation, to resign early, and he then committed (the d-addicts translator says) "pessimistic suicide"! This also caused Dae-bil's fiancee to break off their engagement. Dae-bil apparently confronted Joon-p'yo personally after all this.
So Hwang Dae-bil, at first glance an innocent truck driver, was at least lying when he said he never met or heard of the man he ran down, and furthermore had a clear motive to kill him.
Under questioning (really this takes place on Saturday) Dae-bil finally admits that he knew and hated Joon-p'yo and wanted him dead, but still claims it was an accident. In fact, he says, he lied about not knowing Joon-p'yo precisely because he knew what the police would think. "Put yourself in my shoes," he says. "Wouldn't you have done the same?"
"What was on the flash drive"
Now, Oh-soo also knows from Hae-in's vision that Joon-p'yo had sent someone a t'aekbae containing a flash drive, and concludes that he sent it to Oh Seung-heui, and spends the night searching through receipts at convenience stores. (This man is the Korean Jack Bauer! He hasn't slept in a bed in three or four days now.) And on Saturday morning he finds the receipt and heads on over to the nursing home to ask Seung-heui about it.3
This business has caught Seung-ha off guard, though, which is unusual. In the morning - after Hae-in has brought over some leftovers from last night, and asked him if they might have met in her old neighborhood (which he denies) - he calls out to the nursing home to talk with Seung-heui, but she is asleep when he calls. In the event, he goes out there and arrives about a minute after Oh-soo starts talking with Seung-heui, who is speaking in a very calm and detached manner. As Seung-ha looks on, his level of apprehension steadily escalating, she says that, yes, she received a delivery with no return address; it was a flash drive; yes, she will play it for them. They go back to her room. She produces a flash drive. Oh-soo puts it in the computer's USB port.
There is a moment of silent suspense - then, it begins playing (European) classical music.
She says that it is very nice music and she has played the file all the way to the end. Oh-soo can't believe it and voices his bafflement. Seung-ha isn't as vocal but he is really as shocked as Oh-soo is.
Oh-soo eventually takes off with the flash drive, having confirmed that, yes, it is nothing but music. Seung-ha and Seung-heui exchange some empty pleasantries, she in the same detached manner, he with incomprehension and even fright in his eyes. They exchange good-byes. Then, Seung-heui calls him back: "Tae-seong..."
"That is your name, isn't it?"
She knows that her brother Seung-ha is really dead. She says that he ran away from home in middle school, hoping to find work and take care of her. Then, she says, "he called and said he was staying with a great friend named Tae-seong.... Three years later, you came to visit, and I knew your voice was different, but I wanted to believe you were my Seung-ha. Was he in much pain when he died?"
Seung-ha is now on the verge of bawling like a child, showing more emotion than we have ever seen from him. "The last thing he said was, 'Take care of my sister.'"
Seung-hui says that she "sees with her heart, not with her eyes" and knows he is a good man who has suffered a lot of pain. That's why she lied to the police. She knows that he can't possibly have done anything so wrong, and is her good brother. Seung-ha seems to still be very much in emotional turmoil over this. But then, standing outside the facility in the daylight, he gets a particularly cheerful expression on his face.
"Telephone tag"
As Oh-soo goes back to the station, he gets the news that Two-knives has been arrested at his girlfriend's place. They try to question him, but he is an experienced crook, won't say a word, and immediately lawyers up.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kang has already figured out that there is too much stuff he doesn't know about Joon-p'yo's supposed accident, stuff that might come back to bite him. He knows from Kyeon's surveillance that Joon-p'yo made a call from a public phone that evening (as we know, this was his last conversation with Seung-ha before his injury). Kyeon says he has someone who can find out who was called from that phone.
(Kang also checks with Na Seok-jin about Jeong Tae-seong's supposed death. Seok-jin has not gotten as far as everyone else - he has seen the official documents and is satisfied that Tae-seong is dead. This both relieves and puzzles Mr. Kang, who had thought that only he could be behind all these strange events.)
Later, though, the news that Two-knives, whom Kang knows to be one of Kyeon's men, was arrested by police, and that they have his fingerprints on something found at the scene, makes Mr. Kang suspect that Kyeon went beyond his instructions.
In fact, though, the team is working their way through the maze pretty well. Checking Two-knives' own phone records, they know that he got several calls from a single phone (which they later determine to be a clone of the old Lee Bong-kyu phone which was used to set up Lawyer Kwon's death and to make the false blog in the name of Joon-p'yo). (Around this point, we see Seung-ha pitch the phone in a trash can.) They conclude that the "mastermind" was in touch with both Two-knives and Dae-pil, separately, and got information about Joon-p'yo's location from Two-knives and fed it to Dae-pil. The mastermind, they conclude, now wants the "accident" pinned on Two-knives and, through him, on Kyeon, and, through him, on Kang Dong-hyeon himself. So they are properly suspicious of the lighter and are willing to believe that the "mastermind" dealt with Two-knives directly, without going through Kyeon at all. And so far as we can tell, this is all pretty much right. (In fact, Two-knives called Kyeon before his arrest to discuss the money that Two-knives received from some unknown person who apparently hasn't contacted him even though he would be expected to.)
Oh-soo is convinced that the key evidence is in Dae-bil's place, and would like a search warrant. Team Chief Ban says that's out of the question at this point.
(By the way, as to the cigarette lighter, there is an extra scene in the screenplay that didn't make it onto the air, unfortunately! In this scene, Boss Kyeon is talking with one of his underlings and fuming about Two-knives being so stupid as to drop one of the night club's disposable lighters with his fingerprints on it, no less! "That's really weird," says the underling. "What is??" "Two-knives never carries a disposable lighter. He says it's bad for his look (literally, "It wrinkles his form")(!) He sometimes uses one in the club, but he never takes it with him." "What about the rest of you noms?" "We quit smoking!")
"What the flash drive said"
Oh-soo drops by the library and tells Hae-in what happened with the flash drive, and loans her the drive he got from Seung-heui. He also wants to be filled in on the meaning of the "Tower" card, which was missing from Joon-p'yo's tarot deck. She says that the card can be read two ways. Negatively, it means "inevitable disaster because someone has seen what he shouldn't have." Taken the other way, it means to "abandon the existing rules and find a new direction." (I wonder which way Seung-ha took it? There were a couple scenes in which he looked at the card and then reversed it end-for-end.)
That evening, at the tarot café, she does a reading on the flash drive. She doesn't see anything - but she hears voices!4 It is part of the conversation between Joon-p'yo and the old man at the Dongmun store (at the end of Episode 10), which, as we know, was on the original flash drive that Seung-heui listened to the previous day.
She calls up Oh-soo and tells him that she heard a conversation between a young man and and an old man, maybe the old man she saw in her vision from the "Moon" card. "They kept mentioning the name Tae-seong," she says.
"The lovers"
Earlier in the day, Heui-soo called his secretary, Seok-jin, into his office to have a semi-frank conversation with him. Heui-soo delicately tells him that he doesn't like the fact that he got into this business of secret meetings with Boss Kyeon without telling him; that he works for Heui-soo, not for his dad. Also, he drops this into the conversation: "I've trusted you all these years. That's why I've trusted you with my wife ... I won't ask you to drive her to the hospital any more. I feel bad having burdened you with my affairs. I'll drive her myself from now on." (This refers to Na-heui's frequent trips to the gynecologist, which have come up in earlier episodes, which have apparently served as opportunities for the two to get together. It's not clear to me how many of these trips have been real trips.)
Heui-soo now meets his wife for lunch and tells her the same thing - he can take her to the gynecologist after lunch, and Mr. Na won't be doing it any more. She nervously tries to talk him out of this - "you'll feel nervous meeting my gynecologist".
At this delicate point, Soon-ki, who has been trying to use his knowledge of Seok-jin's affair with his boss's wife (obtained from the "mastermind") to blackmail his way into a juicy position, now decides to go to the boss directly. He plops himself down at the table with Heui-soo and Na-heui and starts acting in his usual menacing friendly manner. Na-heui excuses herself, and Soon-ki starts talking with Heui-soo, making insinuations. I'm not sure whether he is hoping Heui-soo will reward him for information, or whether he hopes this will make things hotter for Seok-jin. But Heui-soo isn't interested in giving him what he wants, and, when Soon-ki tells him "the husband is always the last to know," Heui-soo responds with a proverb of his own: "When the oil has run out, the flame in the lamp will die of itself." (More or less.) (The d-addicts translator renders this as "The husband will have the control at the end.") Soon-ki, caught off guard, asks, "So you know about it?" Heui-soo is done chatting, and chases him off.
Later, back at the apartment, Soon-ki lets Seok-jin know about the conversation and asks if Heui-soo might know about the affair. Seok-jin says he needs more time to get him what he wants.
In the evening, Oh-soo stops into a bar and sees Heui-soo sitting there (he might have called Oh-soo to come by). Heui-soo takes the opportunity to reassure Oh-soo that their dad did not have Joon-p'yo whacked; yes, he had him followed, but he called the men after they had come to an agreement; he was going to pay Joon-p'yo off. Oh-soo is not entirely convinced but seems to mostly believe it.
Oh-soo then takes off - in fact, he goes out to stake out Hwang Dae-pil's place (he owns a little market (sup'a) and lives in a basement apartment underneath), hoping to find something useful or maybe get into it. But Heui-soo is still in the bar, and we see what he is really brooding about. He apparently has received a red envelope (which we saw pulled out of a subway locker earlier in the day). He has a copy of the photograph of his secretary smooching with his wife. Despite his blasé front with Soon-ki earlier, he seems pretty troubled .. perhaps he is not such a Sarkozy-ish sophisticate after all.
At this point he gets a phone call and a male voice – seemingly from a subordinate5 - says, "Sir, it seems that a person named Kim Soon-ki is blackmailing your wife." Heui-soo doesn't seem surprised to hear this. “Thanks for your work (Sugohaesseoyo)”, he says.
"Jeong Tae-seong is already a dead man."
In the morning, Seung-ha comes by Hae-in's house to pick up Sora and take her out to stay with his brother, Soo-gon. Hae-in will come along for the ride. Hae-in takes the opportunity to ask Seung-ha if he ever lived in her old neighborhood, but he denies it. As they drive off, Yeong-cheol, lurking, utters silent thanks to Sora for keeping her promise to lie and pretend not to know him.
Meanwhile, Oh-soo is still camped outside Dae-pil's place, watching him drink soju in the twilight before dawn and trying to make sense of things. Then something clicks. He remembers Joon-p'yo telling him personally - in Episode 11 - that "The man you are looking for ... is already not alive." He hooks that in with what Hae-in saw in her vision last episode: Joon-p'yo saying "Jeong Tae-seong is already a dead man." He makes the connection: the person whom Joon-p'yo believed to be the "mastermind" was Jeong Tae-seong.
Inspired, he calls Kwang-doo. Now, the previous day, while Oh-soo was out at the nursing home, Kwang-doo had tried to look up the old man from the Dongmun store, who is apparently now in intensive care with a cardiopulmonary ailment. The nurse says he is in and out of consciousness. She adds that they nearly had to put him out, but some other man, not a relative,6 had shown up and asked about him and had paid for his expenses.
Now, Oh-soo asks about Tae-seong's death, and hears that Kwang-doo's friend identified the body from his student ID and possessions, because his face was too messed up. Oh-soo would continue the conversation, but he sees Dae-pil leaving his basement apartment, apparently leaving the key behind.... Oh-soo can't resist. He snags the key and gets into the dim apartment. His eyes adjusting to the dim light, he sees, posted on the wall, a copy of Joon-p'yo's article about the fire. Then, he finds something else: a pile of letters in envelopes. Just like the ones Jo Dong-seop got in prison. He pulls one of them out of the envelope and sees that, just like the letters to Jo Dong-seop, it concludes with the words "God makes destiny, but people change destiny."
But as he gets up, somehow he gets whacked in the head and knocked senseless!
End of Episode - Sunday morning, April 29, Day 21.
1. Of course this refers to the fact that his parents got a healthy bribe for Yeong-cheol's silence. But it's not clear to me whether this means "my parents will become abusive" or "without the restaurant, my parents will sink back to the level of derelicts and street criminals". I would vote for the latter, though of course the former may also be implied. (I am ruling out the "Chicago" translation, that is, that "if I talk it will make my parents bad for taking a bribe and not staying bought"!)
2. "Invites" is my own translation, and, I think, the correct one, since nobody actually died. The d-addicts translator had "brought".
3. He also asks the clerk for the security tapes for April 26. I wish I could forget about this, because if April 26 was the date that Joon-p'yo sent the flash drive then it makes a mess of my calendar
April 26 was a Thursday, and by my calendar the day of his traffic sago (Day 18 of the action) was a Sunday. However, a calendar using the April 26 as the gold standard reference date doesn't quite work either. I'll write more on this in the calendar thread.4. Makes sense, no? Because the person who provided the flash drive was Seung-heui, she gets only auditory impressions.
5. To be precise, the caller says “It seems that Samo-nim (a term for a superior’s wife) is being blackmailed by a person named Kim Soon-ki.”
6. Guess who? The murky rear-view flashback image we get is no great shakes, but you still only get one guess.
