Forest of Secrets: Episode 3

by SailorJumun

Oh, these two are great together. Shi-mok is most definitely the yin to Yeo-jin’s yang, and though they’re still taking their sweet time learning to trust each other, I’m already liking what I’m seeing with them. With barely any time on his hands, Shi-mok has no choice but to display his suspicions regarding the case to the public. Those above him will do whatever it takes to hinder his efforts, but he may come to find that his superiors aren’t the only ones he should be watching out for.

 
EPISODE 3 RECAP

Stunned by Shi-mok’s suggestion for him to lead the way and drag him along, Deputy Chief Lee wonders if Shi-mok has been this power hungry all along.

“Once the audit begins,” Shi-mok says, “I’ll need to find a way to survive too.” Deputy Chief Lee tells him to shoulder this case then, since he’s the one who started it.

As soon as Shi-mok nods in compliance and heads out, the deputy chief swipes the contents from his desk in frustration.

Shi-mok walks by a pojangmacha, noticing Eun-soo drinking alone. He almost turns away, but hearing her order another soju makes him stop and approach her. She stares him down accusingly, asking if he gave her the CEO Park case on Deputy Chief Lee’s orders. When she asks if he even gave her manipulated footage, Shi-mok bluntly says that she’s exaggerating because of her own self-pity.

Eun-soo finds it hard to believe this was all a misunderstanding, especially knowing that her sunbae never makes mistakes. However, Shi-mok admits that he really is unsure of what’s going on around him. (That makes two of us.)

That admission breaks a bit of Eun-soo’s defensive wall. She drops her gaze and admits that she couldn’t even tell her father where she worked when she became a junior prosecutor, because just hearing the name “Lee Chang-joon” would make his blood boil. Tears fill her eyes as she tells Shi-mok that she can’t get fired, because her family depends on her.

She asks for him to help her, but he just gets up to leave. As he walks away, Eun-soo’s expression turns grave and she mutters, “They should’ve committed the perfect crime. Why did they have to kill that bastard?” Hearing this, Shi-mok glances back at her for a second.

At home, Shi-mok considers his possibilities as Deputy Chief Lee’s words weigh down on him. Finally, he comes to a decision, and the next thing we know, he’s entering a broadcasting studio. He’s clearly uncomfortable in this setting, but the host gets him to relax before they’re put on the air.

Once the cameras are all on them, the host reads through Kang Jin-sub’s suicide letter and asks if Shi-mok is the prosecutor Kang mentioned – the prosecutor who ignored him when he swore he was innocent. Without hesitation, Shi-mok says that he is.

The host, as well as the audience, are shocked to hear this, so Shi-mok explains that he was the initial prosecutor while his co-worker was the prosecutor that stood in court. Eun-soo watches hopefully as she sits by her mother and father in the hospital.

Moving right along, Shi-mok says that he volunteered to be on this program because of Kang Jin-sub’s testimony. He informs everyone that Kang Jin-sub’s claim was that CEO Park was dead by the time he reached the house.

Switching on the black box footage, he points out the figure by the window. The host figures that Kang Jin-sub’s claim was false then, but Shi-mok reveals that they found evidence of the victim’s blood in a place that Kang Jin-sub never went.

Therefore, Shi-mok explains his conclusion that the person by the window wasn’t CEO Park, but the culprit. In his home, Deputy Chief Lee watches Shi-mok elaborate that the culprit put on a show to make it seem like the victim was alive. Shi-mok admits that he should’ve listened to the defendant instead of relying on the footage.

With the culprit still out there, clearly playing games with the law enforcement, Shi-mok states that the culprit must be found within two months. Shi-mok turns toward the camera and vows to find this person himself – if he doesn’t, he’ll resign.

After a moment of silence, Shi-mok is showered with applause from the studio’s audience.

The police station welcomes an eager new recruit named PARK SOON-CHANG. Once everyone gives their greetings and piles out, leaving Yeo-jin alone, she hops on the internet to find Shi-mok’s name as the #1 searched item. His popularity has blown up since the television broadcast.

Shi-mok surprises Yeo-jin by appearing behind her (nice ninja skills there, sir), and he asks where CEO Park’s mother is. Yeo-jin smiles, knowing that today marks the first day of his self-imposed two-month search, and gets up to escort him to the jimjilbang Mom is staying at.

He keeps insisting on going alone until Yeo-jin shuts him up by saying, “She’ll be in the women-only section though.” As they leave together, a shady-looking officer spots them from behind.

Yeo-jin tries to make small talk in the car, though she’s only given dead-serious answers from Shi-mok. When she questions his old-fashioned manner of speaking, Shi-mok genuinely wonders if the way he speaks is that strange. Aww.

Yeo-jin also questions why Shi-mok didn’t reveal who CEO Park really was. He answers with another question: Why didn’t she reveal that Officer Kim Soo-chan tried to conceal the blood sample?

She sighs that Soo-chan has a wife and kid overseas, so he must’ve had his reasons. In return, Shi-mok explains that two people in the prosecutor’s office were once caught for their corruption — but the two still went off to have rather comfortable careers.

Yeo-jin scoffs at the fact that they got off so easy – surely all people aren’t like that. “Right?” she asks hesitantly. Shi-mok says that in all of CEO Park’s years of corruption, only two people refused his offers, and Yeo-jin correctly guesses Shi-mok was one of the two.

The duo finds CEO Park’s mother at the jimjilbang and pull her aside to talk. She’s noticeably comfortable with Yeo-jin but anxious with Shi-mok, specifically with his rapid-fire questions. When he asks if there was any suspicious activity the day before her son’s death, Mom does remember one thing: “He fought with someone.”

Mom thinks back to when CEO Park had received and ignored several calls in the middle of the night. Irritated, he’d finally answered, only to start yelling at the person on the other line. Mom had even caught him cursing at the person for trying to blackmail him. She tells Shi-mok and Yeo-jin that he’d briefly went out after that, probably to meet that person.

Still noticing Mom’s fidgeting, Shi-mok asks why she’d be so affectionate toward her son when he left her in a pile of debt, earning him a mixed look from Mom. Shi-mok tells her that he called her younger brother (who she’d claimed she’d been with the day her son died), and according to him, her alibi was false. Still unable to look Shi-mok in the eye, Mom admits that she’d been working elsewhere.

Horrified by his line of questioning, Yeo-jin yanks Shi-mok outside and chides him for saying those things. But he merely states that nowadays, it’s not at all rare for parents to kill their children, or vice versa.

Yeo-jin argues that he should concentrate on catching the culprit instead of accusing the victim’s family, especially an old woman who can’t even walk well, despite his claim that this is him trying to catch the culprit. “The murdered one isn’t the only victim. Everyone who’s been wounded by the crime is a victim,” she adds.

In an attempt to get her point across to an unresponsive Shi-mok, she likens his actions to a hit-and-run: “Suppose she [Mom] had a hit-and-run incident on the street, and you just hit her again with a car, saying that you’re doing it to catch the culprit. Get it?” In response, Shi-mok cites alarming statistics about family violence, finally adding, “Not everyone feels pain just because their family member died.”

Yeo-jin rejoins Mom inside, all smiles and in full jimjilbang attire. She notices Mom sulking over her food and blurts out that she’s craving a home-cooked meal, so she takes Mom all the way to her rooftop apartment. (Mom sees Yeo-jin’s drawings on the walls and assumes she has a child, heh.)

But to Mom’s surprise, Yeo-jin leaves her the key and tells her not to wait up before hurrying out. Yeo-jin peeks into the window, relieved to see Mom unwind inside. Aww.

Shi-mok is called in by the section chief, who gives him an earful for humiliating the prosecutor’s office on national television. As always, Shi-mok politely apologizes.

He’s called in to see Deputy Chief Lee next, but he finds himself waiting patiently by the secretary’s desk for what must be hours.

It’s not until the secretary gets a call that the deputy chief will meet him sometime later that Shi-mok finally leaves, though he expresses zero frustration at having been made to wait in vain.

To top it all off, he finds an impossible amount of work piled on his desk when he returns to his office — but again, he doesn’t react to this newest form of punishment and just dutifully gets to work.

Eventually, Shi-mok heads out to lunch, ending up in the same restaurant as Dong-jae and the Special Regulatory Team. He eats alone while Dong-jae’s team scoffs at his shamelessness from afar, none of them aware that Shi-mok literally cannot care less. Eun-soo, however, can’t help but watch Shi-mok with pity.

Afterwards, Eun-soo finds Shi-mok back at the office and apologizes for her team’s immature behavior. She offers him a warm smile, saying that she heard her father had been impressed with Shi-mok as a law student.

Shi-mok gets a call from Yeo-jin just then – she’s tracked down the last phone call CEO Park had and discovered that it came from the Civil Affairs section of the prosecutor’s office. Upon hearing this, Shi-mok races to Civil Affairs with Eun-soo right behind him.

They spot a CCTV right across from the phone used and ask security for the footage. But the guard informs them that the footage was deleted after fifteen days (despite proper protocol requiring that they wait sixty days).

Eun-soo tries to stop Shi-mok before he hurries out, wondering if he thinks that the person who called CEO Park last is the culprit. Shi-mok says that he’s just a suspect for now, but one who used an office phone so as not to expose his phone number. And, he adds, that suspect is the last person to have seen CEO Park alive.

Shi-mok sits in his car to sift through all the black box footage from the night before the murder. He pauses when he lands on footage of CEO Park throwing a coffee cup into the trash while passing by. Upon zooming in, he sees that the logo on the cup is a rabbit.

And the hunt is on. Shi-mok starts at CEO Park’s house, calculating that the shop must be around sixteen minutes away, since CEO Park was out for a total of thirty-two minutes.

He tries to retrace the steps until he lands on the sixteen minute mark, and then he goes through every coffee shop in the area to find the exact logo. (The directing here is pretty cool, with the map Shi-mok’s using being superimposed on walls and roads as he goes from shop to shop.)

After a while, he finds the right place and gets a hold of the owner. While the owner doesn’t have CCTV footage from that far back, she is willing to have him meet with the employee who’d been working that night.

As the owner tries and fails to reach the employee, Shi-mok turns to the back, envisioning CEO Park arguing with someone. He wonders who that someone could be, though the figure in his imagination resembles Deputy Chief Lee.

We see Deputy Chief Lee with his head down for once, apologizing to his father-in-law (ah, is this the chief prosecutor?) for allowing Shi-mok to appear on TV. His father-in-law thinks he should be sorrier for missing his chance of going on TV himself and becoming a hero, acknowledging that Shi-mok was smarter than his son-in-law for doing so.

His father-in-law says that what happened to CEO Park is Deputy Chief Lee’s doing, though his son-in-law refuses to agree. Hm, is he in denial, or is he telling the truth?

Either way, his father-in-law wants him to take care of this the old-fashioned way: by blaming someone else. His father-in-law knows that Shi-mok is untouchable right now because of the broadcast, and knows that’s exactly why Shi-mok did it. He orders Deputy Chief Lee to create a criminal for Shi-mok to catch, but adds that he has to make sure that the true criminal isn’t caught alive, otherwise, they’ll spill everyone’s corrupt ties to CEO Park.

His voice a mixture of disappointment and annoyance, the father-in-law swears to cut Deputy Chief Lee out of the picture if he can’t clean up his own mess.

And if things go wrong, his father-in-law suggests he get Shi-mok back on the broadcast and start all over, so that Shi-mok will lose the trust of the public he’s just cultivated. His father-in-law adds that Young Il-jae (Eun-soo’s father) collapsed recently, which gets Deputy Chief Lee’s attention.

Deputy Chief Lee visits the hospital, watching Eun-soo and her father casually look over a case file together. He thinks back to when her father had first been appointed as Minister of Justice – Deputy Chief Lee had come to the ceremony with a bouquet, smiling proudly. He bows to her father before leaving, though Eun-soo catches his retreating figure.

Deputy Chief Lee grabs a few drinks with the officer who’d spotted Shi-mok and Yeo-jin at the station. The officer teases him that he could’ve avoided his situation if he’d just married a girl from their hometown. (Deputy Chief Lee reminds him that he had to change his identity.)

The officer brings up Shi-mok, and Deputy Chief Lee simply downs his drink, saying he’ll do whatever it takes to step over the prosecutor. “It took me too long to reach this point,” he mutters. The officer advises him to dig up some dirt on Shi-mok, bringing up what he saw at the station. Deputy Chief Lee is surprised to hear that Shi-mok might be working with someone else, since he always works alone.

While working at home, Shi-mok gets a call from Eun-soo urging him to watch the TV special covering CEO Park’s murder. Shi-mok switches it on to hear the host bring up an anonymous post to their forum that claimed to know Shi-mok from middle school.

And according to the post, Shi-mok had actually been expelled from middle school for being a violent student who would hit kids for no explicable reason. The person making the claims, their face blurred for the camera, goes into detail about Shi-mok’s violent tendencies, repeatedly calling him a “psycho.”

Yeo-jin watches the report in shock as the reporter continues that they visited Shi-mok’s school and even his relatives, only to be turned away. But they did receive one statement from a relative (from behind a locked door) that Shi-mok had already been “fully treated.”

Late that night, Shi-mok visits the very relatives shown in the broadcast. He sits down with his mother and apologizes for the ruckus, though all she’s worried about is him and whether or not his past blowing up will harm his career. “I told you to live quietly!” she stresses.

Shi-mok merely tells her to pretend she doesn’t know him if the reporters return. Mom looks up at him and asks about his hearing pain, and he answers that he’s fine now. But before Shi-mok leaves, Mom asks about his father, though he says he hasn’t heard from him. He gestures to the man behind them – presumably his stepfather, and the one who said he was “fully treated” – and urges her inside.

As Shi-mok heads over to his car, Stepdad tells Mom that it’s not safe to be around a “psycho” like him. Mom storms off, saying that her son isn’t like that.

Once he gets home, Shi-mok’s hearing suddenly goes haywire – he clutches his ears in pain as a high-pitched noise pierces through them. He collapses to the floor, unconscious.

Yeo-jin returns home after work and rests outside as she recalls the broadcast earlier. She scoffs, thinking the post must belong to someone who was jealous of Shi-mok’s instant fame. But she can’t shake the image of Shi-mok when he’d tried to re-enact CEO Park’s murder, though she quickly shakes it off when CEO Park’s mother comes out to greet her.

Shi-mok wakes up some time later, back to his old self. And elsewhere, in a PC bang, we see the classmate Shi-mok had run into in the first episode typing out a new anonymous post.

The next day, Shi-mok quickly learns that the news of his past spread fast, which earns him stares all the way to work. As usual, he doesn’t react to any of it.

Dong-jae is absolutely ecstatic about the news as he tells Deputy Chief Lee all about it, though the deputy chief is having a difficult time believing that the claims of violence are true. If they are true, however, he thinks it could be portrayed both negatively and positively – the public could see it as a touching story about a troublemaker who overcame his flaws to become a prosecutor.

“I pushed him off a cliff,” Deputy Chief Lee states, “but he fell onto a gold mine.”

This seems like nonsense to Dong-jae, but the deputy chief just chides him for not managing his own team well. Dong-jae promises that he can handle any task he’s given, but this time, the deputy chief orders him out… just as Shi-mok comes in. Dong-jae reluctantly leaves, only to whirl around and enter a nearby conference room.

Deputy Chief Lee cuts right to the chase and asks Shi-mok if the report was true. Shi-mok easily admits that it was, even revealing that he had surgery to fix the issue, though the deputy chief seems skeptical that surgery can fix the issues Shi-mok had.

Regardless, Deputy Chief Lee urges him to fulfill his mission in two months, making Shi-mok remind him that he intends to take the deputy chief’s position. He asks if all he has to do is follow orders, starting with pushing Dong-jae out of his position.

With that in mind, Shi-mok asks why he’s trying so hard to get rid of his right-hand man anyway. Deputy Chief Lee explains that he needs to cut his right hand off in order for a newer and better one to grow.

So, Shi-mok figures that Dong-jae knows something that could hurt Deputy Chief Lee, making him (Shi-mok) the only resourceful option. The deputy chief just tells him to do his job and to catch the real culprit this time.

As Shi-mok exits the office, he notices Dong-jae hastily leave the conference room right next door. He steps into the conference room, freezing when he realizes he can hear Deputy Chief Lee’s voice through the open window. “Seo Dong-jae heard everything,” he thinks.

Dong-jae marches into his office for a file he has hidden under his desk and folds a photo of a young woman in his jacket pocket.

Shi-mok finally gets in contact with the coffee shop employee and heads over to the shop to hopefully get a face to go with his suspect. He shows the employee Deputy Chief Lee’s picture first, followed by Dong-jae’s, but the employee doesn’t recognize either of them.

But when he zooms out of the group photo, the employee is able to point out the suspect. And Shi-mok actually looks shocked as he turns around to envision the meeting – it was Eun-soo.

 
COMMENTS

Um… what?? That was one twist I did not see coming. Sure, there were plenty of warning signs that I should’ve caught onto, such as Eun-soo’s drunken words in the beginning and her sullen reaction to Shi-mok discovering CEO Park’s last call. But in all honesty, I’d fallen into the trap this episode set up – it had me thinking that I’d misjudged Eun-soo.

After coming out as a naive prosecutor craving success and then crumbling down along with the consequences, there was a lot of instant sympathy there. I thought that perhaps she’d just gotten involved with the wrong people and that with the right person willing to help – Shi-mok – she could be steered back to the right path. But this I was not expecting. Now I’m not sure where the lies begin or end with her – clearly, she plays some part in CEO Park’s downfall, but just how much of a role does she play? Is she truly just an innocent prosecutor trying her best to survive, or is she just as corrupt as the others? One thing’s for sure: She’s quickly becoming one of the most interesting characters thus far. The fact that the detail-oriented Shi-mok can’t seem to read her makes her all the more fascinating.

With that said, I love how much depth these characters are given. Not just our good guys, but the villains, too. Deputy Chief Lee seemed like the Big Bad of the bunch, and yet we’ve come to realize – this early, no less – that he may just be another victim of the manipulation of the prosecutor’s office. He’s certainly a player in all of this, but it was interesting to see the man who’s been toying with our hero show a sliver of his weak side.

I want to know more about his story with Eun-soo’s father, because there seems to be so much history there. And surely Eun-soo herself is included in that history. It would be so easy to make characters like the deputy chief, Eun-soo, and even Dong-jae disposable villains, but they’re each given just enough humanity for me to understand why they might’ve stepped into the dark side (and maybe got a little too cozy over there). I don’t approve of their actions in any way, but I understand them. And what Forest of Secrets is doing so well is that it makes me want to understand everyone’s actions the darker they seem to get.

We got to hear just a little more on Shi-mok’s past, and it was just enough to leave me satisfied but craving for more. His childhood is piecing together to what seems like a rather disturbing picture – I mean, that story with the little girl who’d gotten scared in class and screamed? And little Shi-mok was most likely in so much pain that there was nothing he could think of to do but hit her repeatedly? Just thinking about it sends a shiver down my spine, but it’s little details like that that draw me even closer to this character.

But I must say that after this episode’s reveal, I’m truly at a loss for who to put my trust in. I totally thought it was safe to trust Eun-soo again, and that backfired. I thought it was safe to trust CEO Park’s mother, but now Shi-mok’s made me doubtful. Hell, when Shi-mok discusses his plan to rise to power with Deputy Chief Lee, I sometimes doubt him. I know he may not be able to feel greed, but the overwhelming desire to reach the top can be a tricky thing. I’m crossing my fingers that I won’t ever have to worry about our hero truly stepping over to the dark side — especially since Yeo-jin is there to balance out the light and the dark around him — but at this point, I think anything is possible.

 
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