Red Moon Blue Sun: Episodes 7-8

by odilettante

Getting away with murder seems laughably easy when the only proof a detective has is based on a hunch — or a hallucination. But sometimes hunches and hallucinations are enough reason for someone to continue an investigation, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In order for Woo-kyung to be taken seriously, she must prove that the little girl in the green dress is real.

 
EPISODES 7-8 RECAP

Woo-kyung finds the secret room in the storage closet, and stares in shock at the mummified woman. The police are called in, and Ji-heon and Soo-young arrive as the forensics team are investigating the room. They determine that the woman, whose ID reveals is named Lee Hye-sun, died about a month ago and became mummified due to the cool, dark, dry air in the hidden room.

Downstairs, Woo-kyung stares in mesmerized horror at the now-fixed spot on her ceiling where the leak used to be. Ji-heon startles her, but he’s just curious about how she found the woman’s body. Woo-kyung seems more rattled by the snippet of poetry on the wall:

Life that is rotten and crumbled…
The weight of the crimes

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Life that is rotten and crumbled

But Soo-young corrects her — the last line written in the poem by Cheon Sang-byeon is “The weight of the flesh.” The person who spray-painted the poem upstairs simply reworded it for their purposes.

Ji-heon asks why Woo-kyung went upstairs to the storage room in the first place, but Woo-kyung’s distracted by the fact that there’s yet another dead body with poetry next to it.

Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi arrives at the children’s center, and stands with the crowd of curious onlookers as the now-shrouded body is carried out. When he sees Ji-heon also walk out of the building, Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi quickly turns around and walks away.

Ji-heon asks if Woo-kyung is okay to drive, and she insists that she is, but Ji-heon grabs her car keys, anyway, deciding that she might still be in shock from the trauma of finding a dead body. It’s also an excuse to tell her that they saw footage of So-ra’s father buying charcoal, which confirms that it was suicide.

He adds that they’ve also long-apprehended the person who killed Ji-hye, and since both cases are closed, that means it’s pointless to focus on the poetry that was left behind. It’s all just a coincidence.

Woo-kyung asks if he really believes that, and Ji-heon simply says that they must trust in the evidence, and the evidence indicates that the deaths aren’t related, despite the poems.

Ji-heon ends up driving her to pick up Eun-seo at Woo-kyung’s mother’s house, and Eun-seo worries that Ji-heon is arresting them since Woo-kyung tells her he’s a police officer. Ji-heon pleasantly says he’s just helping Woo-kyung — he only arrests bad people.

Eun-seo then wonders when her father will come back home — it’s been a few months since he’s been gone. Woo-kyung awkwardly comforts her daughter, telling her that Min-seok will be back soon. Mmm-hmmm. Sure.

When Ji-heon drops them off at home, he wonders who is taking care of her younger child, since he’s still under the impression that Woo-kyung gave birth earlier this year. Woo-kyung doesn’t say anything about her miscarriage, but instead blurts out that she and Min-seok are now divorced — she just hasn’t told Eun-seo about it yet. Then she hands him the keychain she found with the photo of him and Yeon-soo.

Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi is apparently a jack-of-all-trades, since he’s also the night security guard at the children’s center. He’s allowed to live at the center provided he makes a few rounds each night, since the center can’t afford a dedicated security guard.

He tells Soo-young that he doesn’t remember seeing anyone suspicious recently, but the center is also a pretty busy place during the day. She asks him to download all the footage he has available, and then she explores his living quarters.

It’s a tiny room down the hall from the security office, and Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi has it decorated with various toys and kids’ drawings. He explains that a lot of the kids from the center like to come there and play, and he’ll fix their toys or make them new ones.

He hands over the CCTV footage, explaining that they only keep it for a month so he’s not sure how helpful it will be. Soo-young is curious about how much he knows regarding the hidden storage room, and he says that it’s so out-of-the-way that not even the staff really know it’s there.

Soo-young muses that if he didn’t even know about the hidden storage room, then it’s odd that the dead woman was able to find it, and that she could have been living there for so long without him knowing. Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi seems surprised to discover that the dead person is a woman.

Ji-heon and his team look over the evidence they’ve found. The CCTV footage shows Hye-sun going in and out of the center during the day, but because it was a building that often was busy with parents and children coming and going, her presence wouldn’t have particularly been noticed by anyone. When they look into Hye-sun’s records, the only thing they discover is an ex-husband — no other family or history.

Ji-heon and Soo-young go to the address they have for Hye-sun’s husband, which is an isolated property that’s run-down and cluttered with random junk and cages filled with dogs. It feels like it could be abandoned, except Hye-sun’s husband pulls up on his bicycle with a dog crate attached, demanding to know why they’re there.

He seems genuinely surprised to hear that Hye-sun is dead, and he tells the detectives that he hasn’t seen in her over a year.

Min-seok picks up Eun-seo to take her away for the weekend, much to her delight since it’s been so long since she’s seen her father. They’re going to his family for their ancestral rites, and since Woo-kyung is technically no longer a part of his family, she doesn’t need to attend.

This does mean that Min-seok will have to explain why she’s not there, and Woo-kyung says that he might as well tell Eun-seo the truth about their divorce, too, since she hasn’t had the courage to explain it to their daughter.

Concerned, Min-seok asks if Woo-kyung doing okay, and she reassures him that she’s fine — she’s seeing her doctor, taking medication, and hasn’t seen the little girl in the green dress. Lies!! But it at least makes him feel better as he and Eun-seo drive away.

Woo-kyung heads to the care facility, where her mother is already attending to Se-kyung. Mom invites her and Min-seok over to dinner, and Woo-kyung awkwardly explains that Min-seok and Eun-seo are with Min-seok’s family. Mom is surprised that Woo-kyung didn’t go with them, and Woo-kyung nonchalantly confesses that they’re now divorced.

Mom sighs in annoyance, assuming that it’s all Woo-kyung’s fault because she undoubtedly made Min-seok’s life difficult with all her mental troubles. Mom can’t blame Min-seok for cheating on Woo-kyung, and says it wouldn’t have happened if Woo-kyung had treated him better.

Furious, Woo-kyung demands to know why Mom always blames her for everything — not just for Min-seok leaving her, but for Se-kyung’s accident and her father’s death. Mom slaps Woo-kyung, telling her not to scream around her sister.

Woo-kyung quickly becomes contrite, pleading with her mother to forgive her, but Mom just glares at Woo-kyung. She refuses to accept Woo-kyung’s apology and instead orders her to focus on caring for Se-kyung. After Mom leaves, Woo-kyung is shaken and rattled, but Se-kyung continues to be wide-eyed and comatose.

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I’m obsessively sorry, Mom!

At the police station, Hye-sun’s ex-husband gives his statement, not that he’s much help to the detectives since he says his wife was an orphan and didn’t have any friends. They never talked after they got divorced and she left. Ji-heon asks if she had any sicknesses, and the husband remembers she had a cough that was due to some kind of asthma.

Ji-heon wonders why they divorced, and the man says that he just got tired of her and that she was no longer any fun. It’s not his fault that they fell out of love.

Woo-kyung returns to the children’s center, where she sees Shi-wan sitting on a bench, watching the other kids play. She thanks him for the dollhouse he made, and asks him how he likes his new counselor.

Shi-wan’s more curious about the body that was found, and then asks if it was the little girl who lived nearby and who used to draw pictures in the park. He describes her and it matches the little girl in the green dress. Woo-kyung is shocked, but Shi-wan is dragged away by his mother before Woo-kyung can ask him any more questions.

So-ra’s mother is brought back in to the police station to confirm that it was indeed her husband in the CCTV footage buying charcoal. All the evidence officially points to suicide, and the woman nervously repeats that he always talked about wanting to die.

Then she hesitantly asks if she’ll still get the money that was left in the car, and smiles in relief when Soo-young confirms that they’ll release the money once the case is closed. Ji-heon hands her a form to claim her husband’s body, and the woman asks if she has to — if she officially claims her husband’s body, then she’ll have to pay for the burial, which is an expense she can’t afford.

Since she refuses to claim his body, that means he’ll be treated like an unknown person without family. Soo-young is furious about this, but Ji-heon just sighs and says that they should take this as a life lesson: don’t become someone who isn’t worth the cost of a funeral.

Woo-kyung calls the detectives, wanting to know if the mummified woman’s body has been identified. Ji-heon tells her that he can’t release information in an on-going case, but Woo-kyung desperately asks if the woman had a daughter. Ji-heon at least tells her that the mummified woman was childless.

That’s not the answer Woo-kyung was expecting, and she hurries upstairs to investigate the storage room herself. She studies the poem on the wall.

Meanwhile, So-ra’s mother delights over the evidence from her husband’s car that has now been released to her. She grins as she counts the money, but her smile fades when she sees the note that says, “It’s all my fault.”

So-ra’s mother calls Woo-kyung, happily telling her that her husband committed suicide and that life is so much better now that he’s dead — which is something Woo-kyung had told her before. So-ra’s mother cheerfully thanks Woo-kyung, since this all happened because of her.

Bewildered, Woo-kyung stares at her phone after the So-ra’s mother hangs up. But Woo-kyung’s attention is soon distracted when she spots a child’s bracelet in the storage room.

She takes the bracelet to Ji-heon, insisting it’s evidence that a child was living there. It’s a trendy bracelet that only became popular with kids in the past couple of months, so there’s no way it could have been in the storage room for long. Woo-kyung says that they need to look for the missing child.

Ji-heon points out that the police didn’t find any evidence of a child living in the storage room, and even hauls out Hye-sun’s official case file, attempting to prove to Woo-kyung that it’s impossible that the woman had a child or that there was any child associated with the woman.

But Woo-kyung is convinced the person who killed Hye-sun kidnapped the unknown child, and desperately pleads with Ji-heon to find the child. Irritated, Ji-heon tries to brush her off, but Woo-kyung stops him in his tracks when she points out all the cases so far that dealt with death and poetry also involved children.

Ji-heon’s medical examiner buddy reveals that Hye-sun didn’t have any injuries, and the time of death would be difficult to ascertain due the state of her body — she could have died a few weeks ago or a few months ago. Ji-heon asks if Hye-sun ever gave birth, and is surprised when the medical examiner says that, based on the shape of her pelvis, she did indeed give birth some years ago.

Soo-young looks into Woo-kyung’s records. She reveals to Ji-heon that the shock of hitting a kid with her car led to Woo-kyung miscarry her child, and that Woo-kyung only recently returned to work despite her boss being worried about her mentally unstable state.

Having stolen Hye-sun’s information from Ji-heon’s desk, Woo-kyung goes to the ex-husband’s property. No one is home, so she pokes around the various run-down buildings, startled when she sees a pile of fur and bones between all the dog cages. She spots a building that has empty cages and butcher’s equipment, then notices that the cloth plugging a broken window is actually a child’s shirt.

The ex-husband finds her on his property, and Woo-kyung lies that she’s there to get more information about Hye-sun since she’s working on a research project about homeless women. The ex-husband doesn’t seem to mind since he’s talking to such a “pretty lady,” and Woo-kyung does her best not to recoil in disgust due to his creepy advances.

The ex-husband says that he first met Hye-sun when she was homeless and sleeping on his property. He felt sorry for her, so he gave her some work, and they eventually ended up living together. Woo-kyung tries to ignore the man’s leering behavior as she asks why they got divorced, and he says that Hye-sun just wanted to leave after living with him for seven years.

But he stops short when Woo-kyung asks about their child. He insists that there wasn’t a child, and Woo-kyung points out the crayon marks on his coffee table. He blusters that it’s second-hand and those marks were already there, insisting that he and Hye-sun never had a child together because he hates kids.

A customer distracts him, and while he goes out to attend to his livelihood as a dog butcher, Woo-kyung slips out to investigate the building where she saw the little girl’s shirt. Behind the butchering room is a secret, locked room that looks like someone used to live there, based on the empty cot in the middle of the room.

Woo-kyung finds broken crayons on the floor and some drawings on the wall that are at a child’s height, and in the closet are women’s clothes and a book on pregnancy.

The ex-husband discovers Woo-kyung in the secret room and demands to know why she’s there. She tries to run away, but he grabs her and throws her to the ground. Woo-kyung manages to escape by hitting him in the head with a brick, but it only makes him angrier when he catches up to her and pins her to the ground.

Ji-heon arrives at the man’s home in time to see Woo-kyung being escorted away by the police. The man is furious, and tells Ji-heon that some thief tried to snoop on his property, so he had her arrested.

Ji-heon doesn’t seem to fully buy that explanation, but he doesn’t press the issue, and instead tells the man that Hye-sun’s autopsy revealed she had had a child. The man says he doesn’t know anything about it, and scoffs that Hye-sun must have had a kid with someone before he met her.

He finds it suspicious that the snooping thief and Ji-heon both asked about Hye-sun having a child, and assumes that Ji-heon must have leaked information. But Ji-heon just wants information about Hye-sun’s child, which the man insists he knows nothing about.

Later that night, Ji-heon waits outside the police station for Woo-kyung to be released. She tries to ignore him, but Ji-heon stops her by telling her that Hye-sun’s ex-husband is suing him for leaking information. So they’re both in trouble. Then he offers to buy Woo-kyung dinner.

As Woo-kyung slurps down her noodles, Ji-heon watches in amazement, asking how long it’s been since she’s had a meal. She begins to cry, and Ji-heon, flustered, asks if he said something wrong, and Woo-kyung simply says she feels like she’s really turning into an animal.

Ji-heon hands over some tissues, saying that sometimes being an animal isn’t too bad. After all, that’s healthy and straightforward, without any backstabbing. Woo-kyung tells him about what she found on the man’s property.

Curious, Ji-heon asks what led her to go upstairs to find Hye-sun’s body in the first place, and what is now causing Woo-kyung to go to these extremes to find Hye-sun’s supposed missing child. Woo-kyung hesitatingly tells him that she went to the storage room because the little girl told her a body was there. That doesn’t seem to be the answer Ji-heon was expecting.

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The phantom kid told me

At the police station, Captain Hong goes line-by-line through Hye-sun’s autopsy, pointing out to Ji-heon that there was no foul play with her death. Hye-sun died of natural causes — case closed. But Ji-heon pleads with with Captain Hong that the existence of a child potentially means foul play.

Captain Hong isn’t having it, though, and yells at Ji-heon for continuing to get the department in trouble — not just because Ji-heon leaked information about Hye-sun, but also that he’s bothering all the other departments by insisting So-ra’s father’s death wasn’t suicide.

Disgruntled and dejected, Ji-heon returns to his desk. Soo-young starts to show him what she’s found so far in the missing children’s database, but Ji-heon grumps that the case is closed so she can just forget about it, and sends her home for the night.

As she leaves, Soo-young warns Ji-heon that she thinks Woo-kyung is too emotionally unstable to be a reliable source, but Soo-young can’t stop thinking about Woo-kyung’s point that all these deaths where there was poetry somehow also involved children. Soo-young’s not convinced these closed cases are truly closed.

So-ra’s mother dumps all of her husbands belongings from the police station into a bin and lights it on fire (except for the money, of course). After erasing all the evidence, she heads to the insurance company to get her husband’s payout.

Ji-heon calls, letting Woo-kyung know that he found Hye-sun’s daughter. He’s stunned that the child actually exists, and tells Woo-kyung that if this girl is the same one Woo-kyung saw in her hallucination, then Woo-kyung should give up her day job and become a fortune teller.

At the children’s center, Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi sits with Shi-wan in the park. Shi-wan asks him where the girl that the ajusshi used to draw with has gone, but Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi pointedly doesn’t answer.

Ji-heon and Woo-kyung nervously wait at an orphanage to see Hye-sun’s daughter. Woo-kyung explores the office, and spots a framed poster hidden in the corner. She pulls it out to reveal a poem — Seo Jeong-ju’s “The Leper.” Both she and Ji-heon are shocked to see it there, but a knock at the door gets their attention.

A woman stands in the doorway, and a little girl shyly peeks out from behind her.

 
COMMENTS

Is Hye-sun’s little girl really the the little girl in the green dress? I feel like we’re expected to believe that it’s so, but we haven’t gotten a full look at her to confirm it yet, so part of me is convinced it’s just a red herring. I can’t imagine the little girl in the green dress, which has been such a powerful image for Woo-kyung, being figured out so easily, so soon. Then again, I’m not sure what to expect with this show just in general, so perhaps Hye-sun’s daughter really is the same little girl, and the red herring is actually a red herring of a red herring. Er, or something like that.

I still believe that the little girl in the green dress is somehow related to the unknown boy that Woo-kyung accidentally killed. While I previously thought that the little girl in the green dress was just a manifestation of Woo-kyung’s inner psychological issues (and based on that heated moment with her mother in Se-kyung’s room, there’s definitely some dramatic history that we don’t know about yet), I’m now swinging back to the other side and am currently convinced the little girl in the green dress could actually be the dead unknown boy’s little sister. If she’s really the girl that Shi-wan saw in the park, when she was drawing pictures with Handsome Truck Driver Ajusshi (who continues to set off all sorts of red flags despite how helpful and pleasant he appears to be), then she might be the one who drew the picture that was found in the boy’s shoe. Maybe he kept it not because it was his drawing, but because it came from his sister.

Then again, the little girl in the green dress could be connected to Hye-sun, since the little girl told Shi-wan that she lived nearby — “nearby” could also mean “squatting in an unused room in the center.” But it is odd, then, that there would be such little evidence of a child living there (except for the bracelet). Or maybe Hye-sun was living in the center because she knew her daughter was nearby. Maybe she gave her daughter up for adoption and she wanted to know if her daughter was doing well. Except that would mean the unknown boy would also be her son, if I follow my previous logic that the little girl in the green dress was the boy’s younger sister. So obviously that can’t work. Yet somehow both theories make sense to me. As does the theory that the little girl might not really exist at all except in Woo-kyung’s psyche.

Oh, little girl in the green dress, you are driving me almost as crazy as you are Woo-kyung. Are you real? Will we find out your true identity soon? Or are you just a mysterious manifestation that only appears to reveal all the horrible parents out there that leave abused and neglected children in their wake? Whoever you are, you have me hooked on this grim show, and more determined than ever to solve the mystery as I follow the little girl down the rabbit hole into a terrifying and unknown wonderland.

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