Miraculous Brothers: Episodes 9-10

by quirkycase

No longer able to maintain all his lies, our writer tries honesty on for a change and prepares himself to face the consequences. Not only is he juggling a plagiarism scandal, mysterious meetings, and hunting for clues, but he’s also got an angry superpowered teen to take care of. Meanwhile, said teen digs deeper into his unique situation and starts to attract unwanted attention.

 
EPISODES 9-10

This week, Dong-joo’s not-so-carefully constructed lies start crumbling around him. His greatest fear comes true when an article is released about him plagiarizing. Myung-seok couldn’t get the director’s family to sell the rights to the screenplay Dong-joo supposedly plagiarized, and they refuse to settle – they want to take Dong-joo to court. Since he did plagiarize (from someone else), he of course doesn’t have the receipts to exonerate himself.

Myung-seok suspects the plagiarism might be true, but he really doesn’t care so long as his publishing house doesn’t get dragged into Dong-joo’s mess. His solution is for Dong-joo to create evidence, but falsifying documents is a step too far for Dong-joo. Then, help arrives from an unexpected source: Hye-kyung. Hearing about the pending lawsuit, she digs up dirt on the director and passes it along to Tae-man to give to his brother.

Now that Kang-san has recovered much of his memory, it’s time for him and Dong-joo to have a serious discussion. Dong-joo realizes he can’t keep lying, especially not if he truly cares about Kang-san, and finally comes clean about stealing Ha-neul’s manuscript from Kang-san’s backpack. Dong-joo swallows Kang-san’s anger and disappointment, more worried about Kang-san finding out about Kai’s murderous revenge plan than anything else. Because while he’s honest about the rest, Dong-joo can’t bring himself to tell Kang-san about Kai yet, even though he has a meeting with him the following day.

Dong-joo is tense when they meet, expecting to face an enemy. Instead, Kai tells him he’s not upset about the novel and has no plans to out him as a fraud. He only wanted to warn Dong-joo about the danger the novel puts him in and even apologizes. Dong-joo wants to work together to find the videotape – his father was killed because of all this – but Kai is not the teamwork type. Plus, he doesn’t want Dong-joo in further danger.

Dong-joo tries to tell Kai the insane-sounding truth about Kang-san, which of course Kai doesn’t believe. When Dong-joo swears his little brother really is living with him, Kai leaves him with a, “how do you know I’m Ha-neul?” It seems like he’s just trying to get Dong-joo to back off, but he does later visit an elderly man he calls “father” and calls himself Chang-eun. I still think he’s Ha-neul, but this man has a lot of secret identities.

Despite Kai’s skepticism, he can’t get Dong-joo’s assertions about Kang-san out of his head. After spending some time brooding while staring at his magic rock (aha, he is the one who has the glowing rock!), he decides to check things out for himself. He stakes out Dong-joo’s house and sees Kang-san with his own eyes, tearing up while he watches Kang-san from the shadows.

Kang-san, meanwhile, has been busy catching up on everything that’s been hidden from him, starting with the novel. He stays up all night reading, angry and heartbroken over what his brother has been through. Kang-san takes a trip to the cursed lake where yet another body surfaces, but this one seems old. Kang-san has a brief vision of a man being stabbed by someone with a cross tattoo on his hand. When the cops arrive, they find Lee Ha-neul’s student ID with the body.

Even without knowing about the ID, Kang-san is overwhelmed by everything and breaks down once he gets back home to a worried Dong-joo. He lets Dong-joo comfort him, and then Dong-joo promises they’ll solve the mystery and bring the perpetrators of the 1995 case to justice together. Kang-san opens up about his time at the abhorrent children’s home and the evil pastor who ran it. The tattoo he saw in his vision looked just like the cross on the wall of that repentance room; it’s also the same tattoo Dong-joo saw on the wrist of the man who approached him recently, the one who saw Kang-san disappear through that wormhole.

Complicating matters, more people around them start to recognize Kang-san. After seeing Kang-san at the lake, Byung-man remembers the photo he saw of Ha-neul’s brother in the case file and shows Hyun-soo. They can’t deny that he has the same freaking face and name, but it’s not like their first guess is that he’s a time traveler. For now, they’re working off the theory that the name Kang-san remembered is actually his father’s. More troubling is the fact that Tae-man has been watching Dong-joo and finds Kang-san familiar. When he shows Hye-kyung a photo, it’s clear she recognizes Kang-san, but she keeps that to herself.

Hye-kyung is hiding quite a bit from Tae-man, it would seem. The men mentioned that she had a crush on Ha-neul in the past, but it looks like she was closer to him than they realized. Even after Ha-neul went on the run, he kept in touch with her secretly. She was with him the night he supposedly died and watched him get taken by the tattooed man who was in cahoots with Jong-il who was in cahoots with the evil pastor.

The tattooed man was ordered to kill Ha-neul, but in a twist, he instead killed his colleague and put Ha-neul’s ID with the body. (So that’s the body Kang-san found that somehow is only now washing up at the lake.) Seeing Kang-san get sucked into a wormhole was a come-to-Jesus moment for the tattooed man who saw it as a sign the brothers were touched by the Almighty.

In the present, Hye-kyung pays Dong-joo a visit at home while Kang-san hides in another room. They assume she’s an enemy, but she might just turn out to be an ally. She informs Dong-joo that Tae-man has had him under surveillance and warns him he’s got a hard fight ahead of him. In the closing scene, Hye-kyung leaves Dong-joo a parting gift: a flash drive. It looks like Dong-joo and Kang-san might have just found the missing 1995 video footage.

I like this secret alliance brewing between Hye-kyung and Dong-joo. She’s privy to all the secrets of the rich and powerful given her proximity to Tae-man and her role as the madam of Fortuna. Hye-kyung is clever and knows how to play the game, so she would make a great mole. And I’m pretty sure she’s been waiting all this time for an opportunity to take Tae-man down.

Speaking of moles, Assemblyman Jong-il unsurprisingly has someone planted on the murder investigation team, which certainly isn’t helping them solve anything. Jong-il really does get up to all sorts of shenanigans and might end up being as much of a threat as Tae-man. According to Myung-nam (and CCTV footage), Jong-il is behind the somewhat recent death of the fake witness from the 1995 case. A coincidence that Hyun-soo’s partner happened to be looking into that bit of intel right when he died? I think not. Oh, and Jong-il was also the cop in charge of Dong-joo’s father’s hit-and-run case, so naturally all the records are missing.

With Dong-joo determined to publicly expose rather than avenge the crimes spearheaded by the unholy trifecta (Tae-man, Jong-il, and the evil pastor), I have a feeling that’ll put him in conflict with Kai’s master revenge plan. But now that Kai knows Kang-san is alive and with Dong-joo, I’m not sure how that will impact things. Seeing as he didn’t want Kang-san to see him and is determined to go solo, I imagine Kai is in agreement with Dong-joo about keeping Kang-san out of the revenge business as much as possible. It looks like Dong-joo will be playing guardian for a while yet.

 
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