Mysterious Il-seung: Episodes 3-4

by abirdword

These episodes are rich with backstory. We learn early on what connection our two leads have, what brought our hero to prison, and what tragedy led him down the path in the first place. It’s a lot of knowledge, and some of it overwrought, but I suspect that there are still a lot of twists and turns up ahead. And by the end of these episodes, we may even finally meet our show’s mysterious Il-seung.

 
EPISODE 3 RECAP

Escaped death-row inmate Jong-sam sits anxiously in the stolen car, stopped by the police for running a red light. The officer notes the damaged trunk—the one with the dead body in it—and moves to check it out.

Meanwhile, detective Jin-young is back at the police station requesting prints off the gun used by Jong-sam (while he was posing as detective Oh Il-seung). The gun is still wet, so it’s loaded into a dryer first before the prints can be taken.

Back on the road, the officer motions for Jong-sam to pop the dented trunk, and Jong-sam contemplates driving away as he watches the clock strike 9 P.M. There’s no need though, as the Men in Black arrive and smash into the police car with their own. They stop briefly to motion for Jong-sam to follow them, and then they speed away with the officer in pursuit.

Roll call officially starts at the prison, and there’s no signal from Jong-sam. He’s still trying to make it back, and he drives toward his secret entrance while the Men in Black lure the cops away.

To buy Jong-sam some time, his buddy Ddakji plugs the toilet so that it overflows into their cell. He struggles to keep the bathroom door shut while his cellmates and the guards try to tear him away.

The Men in Black have lost the cop and now search for Jong-sam near the hidden prison entrance, but he is unsurprisingly not there waiting for them. Instead, he’s further in the field, and he slams down a grate in the ground before making a run for the prison. Could he be hiding the body? Why?

Jin-young can’t shake the feeling that it’s Jong-sam she saw earlier, so she calls the prison to confirm that he’s still locked up.

The guards drag Ddakji over to solitary cell 2 and then head over to check in on Jong-sam in cell 1. When there’s no response, the guards open it up and find it empty. Their radio buzzes, the guard at the front desk asking them to confirm Jong-sam’s presence. They stammer, and then a drop of water falls on the radio. They look up, where they find Jong-sam wedged up near the ceiling. Whew, he made it.

The guards don’t appreciate Jong-sam’s Mission Impossible impersonation and keep him locked in solitary for another night.

With Jong-sam’s imprisonment confirmed, Jin-young moves on to her research on murderer-rapist Gil-choon. Detective Park arrives then to berate her for taking the case from the local police. The rest of the team barrel in for the meeting Jin-young has called, and she gets guff from Detective Park for that too.

She shares her thorough research with the team, and by tracking down every Song Gil-choon in the right age range, they find their suspect. They wonder how Gil-choon even managed to grab Eun-bi from a police station, and Jin-young’s tracked that info down too—in the pandemonium, the police assumed he was the detective sent to escort her into protective custody. Wow. These guys need to start checking badges.

Even with all her efforts, Jin-young hasn’t figured out Gil-choon’s connection to Eun-bi yet. Jin-young’s ears perk up when she hears Gil-choon was just discharged from Musan Penitentiary, the same one that currently holds Jong-sam.

Back in prison, Ddakji is relieved to hear that Jong-sam was able to intercede and save his sister Eun-bi. But he does wonder why Jong-sam didn’t just stay on the outside. Jong-sam knows how this game goes though, and says he had to return so that Ddakji wouldn’t take the blame. So Ddakji tells him to escape after tomorrow, when he’s released.

Jong-sam thinks back to his final moments of freedom, but even as he considered escape, he also saw how futile it would be with nowhere to go and no money. And so he returned.

Ddak-ji won’t let go of the idea of getting Jong-sam out somehow, so Jong-sam pivots and tells him about how hard it will be for Ddak-ji to adjust to all the changes in the world. Jong-sam mentions the pretty women he saw, especially the “crazy woman” he got the chance to talk to.

With time to kill in solitary, Jong-sam’s thoughts flee to 12 years ago, when he was just a teenager. This duo was still together even then causing trouble, as Jong-sam scaled the pipes of an upscale building to reach a balcony for a watermelon charm. Ddakji remained on the ground as lookout, his arm in a cast.

Jong-sam recovers the charm, but he’s surprised to find someone home. It’s Jin-young, and she’s on the phone, claiming that she left school because she was sick, an obvious lie that Jong-sam comments on under his breath.

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” starts to play as Jin-young flings the balcony door open and looks out. Jong-sam remains hidden until Jin-young’s water bottle cap falls and rolls over to his feet. Their eyes lock for a moment, and then he tries to come forward, only to be struck by a full water bottle.

Jin-young calls the police, and when Jong-sam tries to leave again, she throws a potted plant at him, which shatters at her feet. Jong-sam’s eyes catch on the water and dirt that saturates Jin-young’s socks, and this teenage Jong-sam takes us back to an even earlier flashback, when child Jong-sam cried over his mother’s body in the rain.

Jong-sam advances again, but then just warns Jin-young not to hurt her feet on the broken glass, before he heads over the balcony the way he came. Jin-young refuses to let him escape and pulls him back by the hair, ha. So Jong-sam tells Ddakji to flee first.

The music resumes as Jong-sam unleashes the ultimate threat—if she doesn’t let go, he’ll kiss her. Jin-young releases him to cover her mouth and he scrambles down. Jong-sam notices he’s lost his bracelet just as Jin-young spots it caught on the balcony bars, and she taunts him with it. There’s no time to squabble though, because the police have arrived.

A lot of cops arrive, and they corner Jong-sam in an alley. He briefly considers scaling the walls out, but instead he gives himself up.

They take him to the station, where a cheeky veteran cop, Detective Kang, grills him. Jong-sam refuses to talk, so the detective sits back and falls asleep. The station empties out until just the two remain. When Detective Kang finally wakes up, Jong-sam pushes his legs off the desk to help his foot cramp, while also swiping the keys to his handcuffs.

But Detective Kang is sharp and asks for both the key and the handcuffs back, and he marvels at Jong-sam’s ability to unlock the cuffs. He then asks why Jong-sam didn’t run today, and recounts the elaborate parkour path Jong-sam could have taken. But Jong-sam points out that the nearby school would have let out, putting the school kids at risk for injury in the middle of the pursuit.

Detective Kang can’t argue with such kindhearted justification, so he lets Jong-sam go without punishment.

Jong-sam reunites with Ddakji to turn over the watermelon charm—Eun-bi’s last gift to her brother before being adopted. The boys do their celebration handshake (it seems it’s a long-standing tradition) and Ddakji points out that he’s heard Detective Kang is a super strict cop.

The boys linger in the neighborhood until night, because Jong-sam is still waiting for the “crazy girl” so he can reclaim his bracelet. Jin-young finally walks down the street, headphones blaring their theme song.

Jong-sam yanks her headphones off and demands his bracelet back, but Jin-young doesn’t cooperate until Jong-sam admits that it’s from his mother. On cue, rain starts to fall. Jin-young scoffs at that and admonishes him for behaving the way he does while wearing a gift from his mom. She does return the bracelet though, and leaves him standing in the rain.

The rain brings Jong-sam back again to the night his mother died. Caught in a rain shower, she rushed across the street to get an umbrella for her son and was struck by a car. He raced to her side, the water filling up her socks. And on her wrist is the bracelet that teen Jong-sam wears.

The next morning, Detective Kang finds Jong-sam sleeping at a playground and takes him for jajangmyun. He has an offer for him—Jong-sam can either go to jail, or work for him as an informant.

Jong-sam thinks being an informant is a dishonorable job, but when the detective asks him if he’s going to continue down his current path, he can’t help but think of Jin-young’s same accusation. Jong-sam calls for more food and tells Detective Kang to take it out of his first paycheck, making the agreement official. But first, job training.

 
EPISODE 4 RECAP

The night is long in solitary, so there’s still more backstory to recall. Teenage Jong-sam gets started on his informant training right away. Detective Kang coaches him on the art of rifling through papers, trailing people, and leaving no trace. Soon, Jong-sam’s observation skills surpass his teacher’s.

Two years later, Jong-sam is still swiping information for Detective Kang. But Detective Kang also encourages Jong-sam to study for the police academy exam so that he can have a legitimate job. Of course, informing comes first, and the detective drops Jong-sam at his next spy job at a restaurant that serves as a front for a gambling house.

Jong-sam pouts about another job, but Detective Kang promises it’ll be the last. So Jong-sam gathers intel on guests at the restaurant while working as a server, and also finds time to take his exam at the police academy.

Ddakji finds his friend at the end of a shift and gleefully presents him with the results from the police exam—Jong-sam is in the list of successful candidates. Ddakji suggests a celebration, but Jong-sam stops short when he realizes he forgot his informant phone on the sink at the restaurant.

He’s about to turn back, but fate sends him another surprise—his “crazy girl” Jin-young walks down the opposite side of the street. He hands over his keys and asks Ddakji to grab the phone while he chases after Jin-young.

Jin-young heads into the Jinsung Group building, and Jong-sam wonders if she’s got a job (oh, naïve boy). He’s almost hit by a car trying to chase after her, and the delay means he doesn’t reach her before the gate closes.

By the time he catches up to Ddakji at the restaurant, the backdoor is ajar and the lights don’t seem to work. Something seems off, and suspicions are confirmed when Jong-sam finds Ddakji cowering on the floor. Someone bashed the kid in the head and then ran off. The police knock at the front door just then, and Ddakji says he didn’t call them.

Jong-sam slips in something on the floor, and finds that something to be a pool of blood, two bodies, and a bloody knife not too far away. He urges Ddakji to run, but the police have already opened the doors and come upon Jong-sam, his hands covered in blood.

The news announces the murder victims to be a prosecutor and the restaurant owner, who had called the police right before she died. At the police station, Jong-sam tries to ask for his detective friend before he’s hauled off to the prosecutor’s office. But on cue, a younger Detective Park runs in to share that Detective Kang has gone missing.

And where is Detective Kang? He flees to his car, a packed bag in hand. Before he can get away, though, a hand stops his car door.

In the prosecutor’s office, the interrogation technique is brutal, as the prosecutor’s men kick Jong-sam over and over. The prosecutor calls for them to stop, and leans in to demand Jong-sam’s confession.

Jong-sam denies everything, until the prosecutor says that Ddakji has already confessed. The prosecutor calls for his men to turn on the lights, and Ddakji is revealed on the other side of the two-way glass. He’s beaten as well, but he says over and over that he is the killer, and just asks them not to hurt Jong-sam.

Wanting to protect his friend, Jong-sam confesses to being the sole killer. Guys, this is the worst brand of noble idiocy! Jong-sam flies into a rage and attacks the prosecutor before he’s dragged away.

At the police academy, Jong-sam’s unclaimed uniform sits at his empty desk, representing the life that could have been, if things had gone differently.

Because this is the first murder of a prosecutor, the penalties are severe. For Ddakji as the accomplice, he is sentenced to 10 years, while confessed killer Jong-sam receives the death penalty. Oh, wow.

And thus, we finally return to the present on Ddakji and Jong-sam’s long night in solitary, the night before Ddakji will be released.

The next morning, Ddakji exits the prison, but he stops first to deposit his entire earnings from the last 10 years into Jong-sam’s commissary, save money for the bus.

While Jong-sam spent the night reminiscing, Jin-young’s squad pulled an all-nighter looking for signs of Gil-choon’s trail. It’s been a long night, but the team’s maknae, Dae-woong, finally spots Gil-choon on surveillance footage. More interestingly, Jong-sam (as Il-seung) is also in the footage, and they wonder if he was an accomplice. Detective Min-pyo deems him their best lead, and Jin-young promises the results of the fingerprint test as soon as she gets them.

Their flurry is interrupted briefly by Chief Jang, who is there just long enough to reprimand the team for scooping this case from the local police and warn them not to make him look bad.

Meanwhile, the Men in Black have been busy recovering their stolen car from the lake. A few crowbars later, they are disappointed to find the trunk empty. The older man makes a call to the same chairwoman he contacted previously for guidance. She calls him in from the field so they can form a plan.

The chairwoman slips away to a secret meeting with a mysterious man, joining him in his car to discuss the Il-seung situation. It seems that Il-seung was a cop that he thought was in his pocket but ended up betraying him, and now his attempt at “fixing” the situation has been bungled by Jong-sam.

He tells the chairwoman to kill Jong-sam, and as he says it, he moves from the shadows, revealing himself as DIRECTOR LEE, head of the Future Economics Institute mentioned in the news earlier.

Ddakji makes a stop at a payphone to fulfill the one request Jong-sam asked of him before he left, to call the police and tell Lieutenant Jin Jin-young where Oh Il-seung’s body is.

And speaking of Jin-young, she’s still in pursuit of Il-seung. She goes through several police profiles with no luck, but then finds a profile without a photo that indicates that this Il-seung is dispatched somewhere.

Ddakji’s phone call interrupts her research, and she heads out with her tip.

In prison, Jong-sam is on the move for one last field trip through his escape hatch. He scales the walls and pushes through a trapdoor in the ceiling that leads to a series of vent tunnels. As he lumbers through, he falls through the floor to a different set of tunnels, these with “emergency exit” signs on the walls.

He emerges on the outside, and then hightails it back to that hatch where he did indeed hide the real Il-seung’s body. He drags the body out to the lake where he told Ddakji to tip the police, nearly rolling it into the water, ha. He apologizes to the body before he runs back to his solitary confinement cell.

But Baek Kyung is waiting at the cell door when Jong-sam drops down, to ask how he figured out the escape. Jong-sam jokes about the easy clues he left behind, but Baek Kyung is all seriousness. He asks Jong-sam, “What did you do out there? You made such a mess.”

At that moment, an assailant drops from the ceiling of the cell and knocks Jong-sam out. The masked attacker looks at Baek Kyung with recognition.

Jin-young’s unit arrives at the lake and spots the body where Jong-sam left it. They declare him dead and pull out his badge. Just as Jin-young is about to look at the ID photo, she receives a call from her fingerprint guy. And just as he’s about to reveal his information, the body on the ground coughs and rolls. Not so dead after all, and he lifts his face to reveal… Jong-sam, dressed in the dead Il-seung’s clothes.

Jin-young flips the ID, and there is Jong-sam’s face, with the name Oh Il-seung. To further confirm, the fingerprints are confirmed to match this Detective Il-seung. Jin-young and Jong-sam (now officially Il-seung) gape at one another in disbelief.

 
COMMENTS

Through quite a bit of elaborate maneuvering, Jong-sam has officially assumed his new life as a detective. But who helped swap him out and save him from his early death sentence issued by the Economics Institute director? And what does that person want from Jong-sam in exchange?

Things are a little over the top and campy at times, but it’s not unenjoyable. There are some jumps in logic and some holes in the plot fabric, but they’re not quite disruptive enough to destroy the show’s charm. I spent a lot of time yelling, “Seriously?!” at the screen, but I still want to see how everything plays out for everyone.

I think the show knows that it’s doing it too. I noticed that every gap in logic that I yelled at in the first two episodes was somehow addressed in these episodes. And while some of the explanations are ridiculous (you’re seriously telling me no one checked for a badge when Gil-choon showed up to kidnap Eun-bi?), at least they know where they’re leaving the audience in disbelief and are prepared to at least try to explain it.

These episodes were about 80 percent exposition, with the smallest amount of movement in the actual plot. They’ve set up the reason our two leads know one another, the reasons our lead knows something about police procedure, the reasons our lead was down on his luck in the first place. Most of these reasons are pretty silly, but we’ve got our structure in place. Each element of the backstory just felt a little heavy-handed and cliched. Why does it always have to be a dead mom lurking in a man’s past? I just felt like we don’t know enough about Jong-sam yet to feel any emotional punch here.

I want to say that the idea of these two kids being convicted is ridiculous, but I’ve consumed enough true crime stories to know that it’s not always about the forensic evidence. Though kicking the crap out of a kid is quite the interrogation technique. The unwavering loyalty between Jong-sam and Ddakji seems to just ensure this pair suffers the most, and I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of it.

The backstory between Jong-sam and Jin-young, on the other hand, worked a little better for me. She’s uptight, rich, and righteous, and he’s all standoffish-yet-huggable street smarts. The two make a good pair even as young kids, so here’s to hoping that chemistry holds over to their adult selves.

I also liked how we couldn’t quite tell what kind of man Jong-sam’s mentor Detective Kang was. Was he really fleeing without offering any help to Jong-sam? Did he ever actually care for the kid, or did he just want to use him for information? It’s probably a little of both, and it makes him one of the most interesting characters so far, because he’s in that truly gray area.

I’m not quite sure about how I feel about getting all this backstory in the first week. While I hate when things drag out, I do enjoy a little mystery, especially when it comes to the motivations of my characters. If we lay everything on the table too early, the following episodes might feel too linear, just about the new cases and nothing about the circumstances that got our characters to this point. I need a good balance of both. On the other hand, I like the idea of it all pouring out of him while he’s stuck in solitary confinement. It’s the perfect time for the mind to wander and replay all of life’s tragedies.

And we’d better get an entire hour dedicated to Jin-young’s backstory as well. I didn’t mind spending the time with our affable male lead, but I really like what I’ve seen so far of our spunky leading lady, and I require equal character development time, please and thank you.

While the whole thing feels pretty silly so far, there’s been some interesting experimentation with the camera that I’ve appreciated. Some action shots have been really interesting to watch and they keep me fully invested, and the scene with the fog rolling through the field when Jong-sam considers not going back to prison was really lovely and haunting. The camera takes itself surprisingly seriously with its bizarre and goofy story, but again, I’d say the mismatch still doesn’t detract from anything yet.

Honestly, my favorite part of the show so far is the strong supporting cast. I spent the whole hour pointing out all of my favorite side characters from other shows. Our two leads are doing well on their own, but they’ll really excel with an amazing cast enhancing every scene.

[geolocator_show for=”SG”]

[geolocator_show for=”SG”][/geolocator_show]

 
RELATED POSTS

• Premiere Watch: Two Cops, Doubtful Victory
• Yoon Kyun-sang’s origin story revealed for Doubtful Victory
• Yoon Kyun-sang settles into prison life for Doubtful Victory
• Rooting for Yoon Kyun-sang’s Doubtful Victory and escape from prison
• Yoon Kyun-sang, Jung Hye-sung may be on the road to Doubtful Victory
• Six Flying Dragons PD returns with new thriller, but not with Yoon Kye-sang or Yoon Kyun-sang