Two Weeks: Episode 8

by girlfriday

Awww yeah. This episode delivers the goods. It’s go go go from from start to finish, and we get satisfying confrontations, dramatic near misses, and every character learns a crucial piece of the puzzle. I’m watching with my heart in my throat and a skip in my step, and I must not be the only one, because ratings hit a new high at 11.5%.

 
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EPISODE 8 RECAP

It’s a two-for-one kidnapping extravaganza at the mobster hideout, when our prosecutor gets herself caught while trying to find Tae-san. Boss Moon hands Tae-san a gun and gives him the choice: kill Jae-kyung and live, or die with her.

Tae-san takes the gun and stands up as Jae-kyung screams and struggles against her ropes. He raises it… and fires.

But there’s nothing—just the click of an unloaded gun. Ohthankgod. Still, you totally shot at her. Boss Moon laughs, calling him an idiot, and raises his gun to shoot Jae-kyung himself. But Tae-san blurts that he’ll never get the camera if he kills that woman. He scoffs, “Did you think I wouldn’t know? I do have a brain in here.”

He calls their moves one by one—he knew they’d never give him a loaded weapon, but they could get his fingerprints this way, and pin Jae-kyung’s murder on him just like they did with Mi-sook. Look who’s learning, badass-to-be.

Boss Moon immediately swings his gun around and sticks it in Tae-san’s face. Thinking quickly, Tae-san bluffs that he should think carefully about whose hands that camera is in—and borrowing from Boss Han’s deductions about how high up this goes—calls it evidence of him and that big wig together.

That startles Jae-kyung, who wonders to herself how he knew that, and Tae-san answers her question aloud as if he hears it. He says he hasn’t seen it, but he knows what’s on it, because of the things Mi-sook told him. Ah, nicely played my friend.

Tae-san is on a roll, and bluffs that he’s made sure the camera will be made public if he doesn’t contact the person who has it. So basically, he’s made it his insurance and if he dies, he’s taking Boss Moon down with him. Now we’re talking. Tae-san: “Don’t think that what you’ve seen of me is all there is.”

Boss Moon asks if he’s planning to send it to the prosecutor or the police, and Tae-san wonders why he would do either when the world is littered with newspapers, broadcast stations, and websites.

He’s starting to enjoy pushing Boss Moon’s buttons, and turns to the two henchmen holding Jae-kyung, and asks which gang they’re from since they aren’t familiar and must be borrowed help. He tells them they weren’t paid enough for what they’re about to be involved in, and says that Boss Moon is about to become extremely rich, so they should ask for more. Ha.

He gets pistol-whipped for that comment, but that just adds more fuel to the fire, and he changes his tune—they’ll probably be killed off because they’ve already seen too much. He turns to Boss Moon, screaming: “Did they say they’d keep their mouths shut like me? Did they say they’d be framed and go to prison in your place like me? Did they say they’d be dumb like me?”

Boss Moon sticks the gun right in between Tae-san’s eyes, and he just rails: “Shoot! SHOOT!” Aaaack. Jae-kyung is the only one who sees that Tae-san’s hand is trembling.

Boss Moon pauses, and then lowers the gun: “You don’t have the camera, do you?” He sighs at himself for not thinking of this before, wondering why a person with that kind of evidence would be running away to the Philippines. Dammit. When’d you suddenly start being smart?

Tae-san tells himself to keep it together and not back down, and paints a believable picture of going abroad to meet a contact and get the contents of the camera unlocked. He says they’ll return to the previous deal: he’ll go get the camera, so they’re going to let him walk out of here to do it. Otherwise, they both go down.

Boss Moon orders both hostages put in separate rooms for now, mostly because his brain hurts from all the thinking. I love that he’s flustered and doesn’t know what to do, but he figures he’ll wait for Tae-san to fetch the camera, and then kill them both as planned.

As he’s being led away, Tae-san pretends to double over in pain so that he can get a lay of the land. He checks out the yard and the possible ways out, and also notes one of the henchmen stopping to use his breath spray.

When they go to tie him up, Tae-san complains of his shoulder, and asks them to wrap up his wound, suggesting a tie. The henchmen complain but comply anyway, and Tae-san uses the distraction to grab them with both hands and knock their heads together. Hahahahaha. That was straight out of Looney Tunes—violent AND funny.

And then while they’re reeling from the head-butt, he grabs the breath spray and douses their eyes with minty freshness. I love this, so so much. He knocks them down pretty swiftly, and then remembers to go back to dig around for some car keys.

He runs out and starts knocking down barrels, setting the stage for what looks like his escape route, complete with abandoned shoe. Once he does that, he runs back in the other direction.

It’s loud enough that all the henchmen come running out, leaving Jae-kyung alone to try and undo her ropes. The gangsters take the bait and run in the direction of Tae-san’s breadcrumbs, while he tries all the cars to find the one that’ll unlock with his key. The third time’s the charm, and he starts the car.

He’s about to drive off, but then he thinks of Jae-kyung, and also his backpack full of antibiotics that he needs to keep taking. So he turns around, takes a deep breath, and guns it, reversing straight into a brick wall. What the.

He comes crashing into the room where Jae-kyung is being held, and gets out of the car to grab his bag. He gets back in without her, and they lock eyes. You’re not… going to LEAVE HER THERE, are you? ARE YOU?

He opens the passenger door and tells her to get in. Phew. But Boss Moon isn’t far behind, and he walks up shooting. Tae-san just floors it back through the hole he made in the brick wall, and Boss Moon is forced to jump out of the way to avoid being roadkill.

They made it. I can breathe now.

Seung-woo is still retracing Jae-kyung’s last steps, and he starts to close in on the warehouse. He finally finds the neighborhood and gets ready to turn down the street, when Tae-san’s car comes careening past him. Jae-kyung’s head is turned so he only sees Tae-san, but it’s enough for him to turn right around.

He happens to cut off the car full of gangsters also in pursuit, and they call the boss right away to alert him that the cops are already onto them. Boss Moon has no choice but to run.

In the car, Jae-kyung is screaming her head off through the duct tape, but Tae-san is too injured to untie her and drive at the same time, and tells her he’ll pull over once they’re safe to untie her ropes.

He manages to lose Seung-woo around the bend while he’s busy calling for backup, and stops in an underpass. Jae-kyung is screaming in her head at him to hurry up and un-gag her so she can tell him he doesn’t have to run anymore, but he’s thinking in his head that he can’t trust anyone. Aaaaaaggggggh. Let her speak! She’s screaming I’m on your side through the freaking duct tape!

He turns to her, “I’m sorry about your father.” She calms down at that, and then he reaches over to pull off the tape and untie her ropes. She asks where the camera is, and he asks her to drive. Oh no, don’t get out of the car.

She thinks nothing of it and gets out of the car, and immediately he starts driving away. ACK. She’s already out in front and gets him to stop, but when she yanks at the driver’s door and screams her head off at him to stop and listen, he just pushes her away and drives off. Noooooooo.

She runs after him desperately, and Tae-san tells himself it’s not yet time to let her catch him. She’s still running when Seung-woo catches up to her, and it’s only then that he realizes she was the passenger in Tae-san’s car.

He freaks out to see her bloodied and bruised with rope burns around her wrists, and asks what’s going on. She tells him nothing, and just screams at him to hurry up before they lose Tae-san again.

But when the car full of gangsters nearly runs them off the road, he swerves, and Jae-kyung faints.

Meanwhile Tae-san is waiting to catch a ride on the ferry, and he waits until the last possible second to jump on as it’s pulling away. The gangsters are too late to follow, but they see him board.

Congresswoman Jo calls to find out if Jae-kyung and Tae-san have been disposed of properly, and Boss Moon has to deliver the unfortunate news that they escaped. She loses her icy calm for the first time, and flips her lid.

She screams that they’re only nine days away from the auction, and demands that he find and kill them. But Boss Moon says this is about him now—the prosecutor’s office will be hunting him down for kidnapping and attempted murder—and hangs up on her.

He goes straight into cover-my-ass mode, and calls the company to start pulling CCTV footage and construct an alibi. The minions report that Jae-kyung and Tae-san have split up, which is at least one bit of relief to them.

Tae-san takes a seat on the river ferry, but in no time the gangsters have commandeered two speedboats to come after him. Aw yeah, speedboat chase. He hunkers down to stay out of sight, but that’s not going to cut it, not when they hold up the ferry with guns and climb aboard.

One of the kids on the ferry actually recognizes him and calls him out as the fugitive on TV, and Tae-san has no choice but to run again. He hops out of the window by his seat, and just jumps over the railing into the river, with nowhere else to go.

The gangsters scan the water as he swims around to the other side, and gets the jump on the one minion still waiting in the speedboat. He yanks the guy into the water and climbs aboard. Hell yeah.

The gangsters jump into the second boat, and now it’s a James Bond high-speed river chase, with bullets flying as Tae-san tries to outrun them. They get close, so he decides to come to a full stop, and then when they turn around, he plays chicken with them.

They head straight for each other, and at the last second the gangster boat swerves, sending them overboard. Tae-san makes his getaway and ditches the boat in a remote area, and swims to shore. He runs the rest of the way, but it’s not long before his shoeless foot gets cut up on rocks, and he huddles in pain as he digs the rocks out of his soles.

The cops convene at a local station a little while later, near where the boat was found. They decide to focus their search there. Seung-woo pulls his captain aside to ask where the leak came from—could it really be their department?

The captain thinks it’s more likely that it’s the prosecutor’s office, since they were in the dark the whole time that Jae-kyung dragged them around without cell phones. True. I was more suspicious of you guys, but that’s a good point. OR, you’re the mole and you’re throwing suspicion the other way. At this point, I don’t trust anyone.

Jae-kyung wakes up in the hospital (she just passed out from exhaustion) and her partner Sang-hoon is sick with worry. She’s more upset to realize she’s been sleeping for thirty minutes, and tells him to call Boss Moon’s office posing as a contractor. Just as expected, the secretary says he’s asleep after being in meetings all night, alibi already in place.

After hearing what happened, Sang-hoon can’t believe she isn’t going to arrest Boss Moon for kidnapping and trying to kill her, but Jae-kyung isn’t about to lose sight of the big picture now, and plans to just sweep it under the rug.

Seung-woo comes to confront her, and demands a straight answer about what happened today. She plays word games with him, disregarding anything he says as pure speculation, and refuses to admit that she was with Tae-san.

He asks how she knew about Tae-san getting on a boat, which she doesn’t answer, and then asks why he was left out on purpose. Jae-kyung: “Because you’re chasing him with your emotions.” She tells him that she knows about the Tae-san/In-hye/Seung-woo love triangle, and he freezes. “Are you mad because Jang Tae-san is alive or because you can’t catch him?”

Seung-woo reels and asks how she knows, and Jae-kyung just tells him one thing: “Get rid of your emotions toward Jang Tae-san. He could’ve been framed.” She says that all the evidence points to him being the killer, but that’s what she believes. Seung-woo refuses to believe it, but she just tells him to be a detective and figure it out. Ha. I love her.

Tae-san stops in the woods to line his sock with leaves as padding (smart) and then realizes he could cut off part of his pants to wrap his foot. Meanwhile, Tae-san’s fugitive saga continues to make the headlines, and by now the various people he’s encountered along the way have given interviews. The girl who was held hostage with her mom says on TV that the ajusshi was really rather nice, and he didn’t do anything bad, and even fixed things for them before leaving.

The man who found him eating the chicken with the grandma says all he did was help her catch a chicken and eat it with her, and the woman with the newborn says if it weren’t for the fugitive, she’d have given birth to her child in a dirt ditch.

She says he even made her seaweed soup, and we see that In-hye is watching the broadcast. She literally gapes at the soup thing, like the woman said Tae-san had three heads or something. The doctor is sitting next to her, and muses that Tae-san must be really thoughtful.

As In-hye tells the doc about how Tae-san was back in the day, we go back to that first motorcycle ride, from her point of view. She narrates that she just assumed he was someone tough and very different from her, but then she felt his heart race, and knew he wasn’t very different.

In the flashback Tae-san swerves on the bike to avoid being hit, and when In-hye hugs him tightly, his heart starts to race. Cute. She holds on even tighter the rest of the way, and he gets all awkward and nervous.

Sometime later, she’s the one to seek him out at work (she’s seen him on his delivery truck outside her dance studio) and returns the helmet. He just takes it gruffly and expects her to leave, but she says she’ll buy him dinner as payment for the ride.

She takes him to eat shrimp, her favorite thing ever, and peels one to put on his plate. He looks at it like it’s a worm, and totally lies that he loves shrimp while taking the tiniest bite he can. She worries that he hates it, so he hurriedly shoves it in his mouth, insisting he loves it.

Halfway through dinner, he’s covered in hives. Oh no. Hahaha. You’re allergic? How sweet could he possibly be that he’s eating shrimp he’s allergic to, just to make her happy? Also dumb, but dumbly sweet.

She doesn’t really notice, and just wonders why he doesn’t talk much. She tries to make conversation, but he just silently shoves more shrimp in his mouth until he can’t really take it anymore, and just abruptly gets up and ends the date there.

The next day she goes looking for him again, and his co-worker is the one to tell her that the idiot ate shrimp for some godforsaken reason despite his allergy, and is home sick. She storms into his room and finds him sick to death in bed, and starts yelling at him.

At first he’s yelling back, but then he realizes that she’s actually worried about him: “Why are you such a weirdo? An allergy is a scary thing! Why didn’t you say you had a shrimp allergy? Why would you eat that many like an idiot? Why didn’t you say something? Didn’t you know you could die?!” Aww.

He gets all flustered, and she just shoves porridge in his face and tells him to eat it. Back in the present, In-hye tells the doc: “He was like that back in the day—zero calculations, and just pure and stupidly innocent.” They rest easy thinking that Tae-san is halfway to the Philippines by now, which is of course when breaking news hits that the fugitive has been spotted escaping via speedboat near Chuncheon.

Boss Moon gets his alibi squared away and just sits on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Congresswoman Jo listens to the black-box recording from the getaway car that Tae-san used, and finds out that Jae-kyung hasn’t been able to get Tae-san’s trust or the camera. She realizes that Jae-kyung isn’t coming after Boss Moon on purpose, and finds herself impressed at her nerve.

The chief prosecutor comes to see Jae-kyung at home, worried that her kidnapping is too big a thing to sweep under the rug. But she argues that without Tae-san, they get nothing, and Boss Moon alone on this charge leaves them no connection to Congresswoman Jo.

Jae-kyung: “Jang Tae-san will come to the hospital for his daughter’s surgery. I’ve waited eight years; can’t I wait nine more days?”

Teacher Kim is still making the rounds of every drugstore near Boss Han’s hideout, looking for the person who might’ve helped Tae-san.

Tae-san hobbles along in the woods, but it’s not long before he collapses from sheer exhaustion. He orders himself to get up, that he made a promise and has to keep going and find that camera.

It makes him think of Man-seok, and he breaks down thinking of his friend. He remembers how eager he was to use the camera on the trip with his girlfriend, and that makes Tae-san think of the first time Man-seok had introduced her. He tries to get up again, but just collapses and faints.

He assumes that the camera is at Man-seok’s body shop, but of course we know it’s in the girlfriend’s hands. We cut to her going through their vacation photos in tears, wailing that her boyfriend was too handsome to die. She clutches the camera, and her friend takes it away, saying that she’ll throw it away for her. Ack.

The police and prosecutor’s office face off at a disciplinary meeting, the police side mostly pissed off that they’re being used but kept out of the loop. Jae-kyung’s boss just covers her ass, and sticks to the vague line that Tae-san is an important witness in an ongoing investigation, and that’s all they can say.

The rest of the detectives head home for the night, but Seung-woo decides to stay behind and start over from the beginning. This time he thinks back to Tae-san’s insistence that he was being framed, and seems to consider it in a different light. There’s hope for you yet.

In-hye is a ball of nerves, just waiting for Tae-san to call and tell her that he’s okay. When Seung-woo calls instead, she cuts him off abruptly and lies that she can’t talk because Su-jin is sleeping, just to get off the phone and wait for Tae-san again.

Su-jin catches Mom in the lie, and In-hye explains that it’s because she’s waiting for an important call. Su-jin: “That means that it’s an important person, right?” Mom says it is, and that she’ll tell her about it after her surgery.

Tae-san is still asleep in the woods, and we return to the flashback post-shrimp allergy. Tae-san shovels the porridge, and they just have this cute exchange where she asks if his name is Tae-san, knowing it is, and tells him her name over and over, now thinking his silence adorable.

Imaginary Su-jin stands over him in the woods and calls out, “Daddy, Daddy, how long are you gonna sleep here?” She rouses him awake, and he smiles to see her. She asks why he didn’t go with that unni earlier, when she seemed to know that Dad was framed and would go after Moon Il-seok ajusshi.

But he says that’s why—because being captured would’ve meant being thrown in a cell with Boss Moon, which would mean his death. She tells him that Uncle Man-seok’s girlfriend is the one with the camera, and Tae-san realizes that she’s right (I love that Su-jin is the smarter half of his subconscious).

She looks down at him and wonders if he’s going to make it to Seoul in this condition, and he realizes he’s in bad shape. He hurriedly grabs his medicine and checks his bullet wound, and Su-jin points out he has no water.

He assures her that he can take the pills without any water, and she scrunches up her face: “They’re bitter.” Dad just smiles and lies: “No they’re not. Really.” And then he proceeds to take them while smiling up at her like a fool.

By morning he makes it down the mountain and waits for a grandma and grandpa to leave their house for farm work, and runs through the house collecting shoes and clothes and food. He ends up huddled outside shoving a bag of plain rice in his face, which is maybe the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

He waits by the gas station for anything to hitch a ride in, and sees a large truck roll in. He uses more movie inspiration to imagine hanging on the underside of the flatbed, but his arms aren’t strong enough. Thankfully this truck has a cargo cage, and it’s just big enough for him to squeeze inside.

Congresswoman Jo meets with a colleague and gives him news that makes his day: she’ll throw her hat in for the Seoul mayoral elections.

Jae-kyung’s staffer says that there’s nothing out of the ordinary in Congresswoman Jo’s routine, but that she’s extremely regimented—the lights go off at her house every night at 12:05 exactly. Jae-kyung tells him to start manning the hospital instead, convinced that Tae-san will contact In-hye.

Jae-kyung gets called to the head prosecutor’s office, where—whoa—Congresswoman Jo is sitting right there, smiling up at her. This woman scares the crap outta me.

She pretends not to know who Jae-kyung is, and accuses her of helping Jang Tae-san escape. Jae-kyung’s face hardens and she asks what she’s trying to do. Congresswoman Jo just turns her laptop around and asks how she’s going to explain this…

Traffic cam footage shows Jae-kyung sitting in the passenger seat of Tae-san’s getaway car—but not gagged and tied, just sitting there placidly, smiling. Fuck.

Seung-woo wakes up at his desk still buried in the case, and the chief arrives and gets the call that Jae-kyung is working with Tae-san, and that she’s about to get axed from the prosecutor’s office.

Seung-woo blazes out of the office at that, and just misses a phone call to their department. Il-do picks up, and it’s Tae-san on the other line: “You’re looking for Jang Tae-san, aren’t you?”

And in the hospital, Su-jin wipes away the tears that she drew on a portrait of Dad, and crosses off another day. D-8.

 
COMMENTS

That was good stuff. I’ve decided I like it when Tae-san and Boss Moon are together. He’s more effective as a villain because he has a hold over Tae-san, and I really like their twisted surrogate-father-like interactions. Boss Moon as a character is really interesting because he’s got some nice color to him—he’s kind of a simpleton and a puffed up gangster, which makes for some amusing power imbalances. He’s evil, but stupidly evil, the same way that Tae-san starts out stupidly naïve and good (later to become hoodwinked because of that same innocence, as we know). But it’s nice to see Tae-san step up and learn a thing or two, and turn the tables by being quick-witted. He figures out that this is just a bluffing game, and that he has to do whatever it takes to walk out alive, and it gave everything in the whole kidnapping scenario in the last episode and this one a nice crackle of energy.

Today’s backstory was especially endearing, and now that we’ve seen Tae-san and In-hye being so cute together, I’m a goner. Before I was okay if they just gave him his redemption through his daughter, but now they’ve made me greedy and I want it all—the happy family and the love of his life. And I say this as someone who likes Seung-woo, and totally blames Tae-san for his series of really terrible choices. I do actually think this is all his fault, and that In-hye has every right to hate him forever. But by now they’ve won ME over, and I think it was seeing how much she liked him once, and how being around her turned him into a flustered, awkward doofus. It’s just so different from the guy we met at the start of the series, and makes me root for his redemption that much more.

I really enjoyed the parallel between Tae-san’s shrimp-eating and pill-taking attitudes, in front of In-hye and Su-jin, and what it revealed about his character. There’s just something that clicks for me with that personality type and the noble idiot we know him to be later. If a guy is so adorably dumb as to eat something he’s allergic to because he’d rather you not feel bad about taking him there on your first date, you can actually see how that same guy would choose the self-sacrificing thing as a first instinct. I thought it was a really clever way to define his personality, and then of course just more endearing when he acts the same with Imaginary Su-jin, putting on a brave face and swallowing bitter pills while lying to her that they’re not bitter. And when she called him “Appa” today when she was waking him up, it just got to me, I don’t know why.

Jae-kyung continues to rock my socks off, even though I was screaming at her for getting out of the car before she could tell Tae-san what she knew. But I love that she has the same brand of throw-myself-headlong-into-it-and-pray-for-the-best brashness as Tae-san, but she’s consistently smarter. I’m trying to decide if losing her job might be a good thing (though I fully expect it to be a hiatus unless she finds a way out of this), because she might get more done by going rogue. I’m glad that Seung-woo might finally be aboard the framed-for-murder train, though with this new twist in the traffic cam footage, he might end up discounting everything Jae-kyung said, assuming she’s an accomplice. Bah, I just want to lock you people up in a room. But then, I guess we’d have no show.

 
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• Two Weeks: Episode 4
• Two Weeks: Episode 3
• Two Weeks: Episode 2
• Two Weeks: Episode 1