God’s Gift – 14 Days: Episode 5

by girlfriday

No, I did not kidnap dramallama or solabelly and lock them in a shed so that I could recap this episode. They’ll be back to continue recapping, provided I get my ransom at the trashcan drop by the Han River. Please be patient; it takes time to prepare that many unmarked bills and a paper bag.

Soo-hyun has the chance to change the future when the killer’s fate rests literally in her hands. Does saving her daughter mean becoming a killer herself? Well we know what Jang Hye-sung would have to say about that.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Song Ji-eun – “너에게 갈 수 있다면” (If I Could Go To You) for the OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 5 RECAP

The killer’s life hangs in the balance as he dangles from Soo-hyun’s outstretched hand over the ledge of the third floor in an open construction site. He begs for his life, but Soo-hyun remembers the words of the mystery café owner: “That fate ends when one of two disappears.”

She murmurs aloud that he has to die for her daughter to live, and does the unthinkable: she lets go.

The killer starts to fall. Dong-chan races to catch up from the floor beneath them. And just as the killer gets his foot caught in a rope on the way down, Dong-chan grabs the other end.

Dong-chan yanks him back up by the leg, and the killer scrambles over him once he’s safe. Of course, it only takes him about two seconds to then turn the tables and attack Dong-chan, because he’s evil.

He catches Dong-chan off-guard and strangles him halfway off the ledge, and that finally jolts Soo-hyun out of her daze and gets her running down to them. Dong-chan struggles to breathe, but manages to reach up to push the killer off of him.

Dong-chan pounces with fury, screaming that he just saved his life and this is what he repays him with. By now he’s actually angry, and when the cops finally reach them, Dong-chan is punching the daylights out of the killer and actually has to be dragged away, kicking and screaming.

Lead detective Woo-jin takes over and has the killer arrested. He tells Soo-hyun to go home and get some rest before coming to the station tomorrow to give her account. He thanks Dong-chan, who brushes it off like he’s being patronized.

Woo-jin asks him to see Soo-hyun home, using her name very familiarly like he’s always done. Dong-chan notes how weird it is and gets cutely protective: “Soo-hyunie? Aren’t you being a little inconsiderate, calling someone else’s wife by name?”

Then Dong-chan notices the killer staring Soo-hyun down, and steps in between them to block his view and be threatening right back.

Once the police clear out, Soo-hyun’s legs finally give out. She sits in a daze and asks, “You knew, didn’t you—that I would let go?” Dong-chan pretends not to know what she’s talking about.

She asks why he saved the killer, when it could’ve all ended there. But Dong-chan says that doesn’t give her the right to kill him—that’s for the courts and the law to decide. Dong-chan: “I can’t make you a killer, can I?” Wow, I didn’t think it was possible for you to be hotter, but there it is.

She worries that something will go wrong and the killer will be released, but he assures her that it’s all over now. My episode count says differently, but I’ll let you have your moment.

Tears spill out, and she finally lets herself believe it: “My baby is alive.” He smiles up at her and says she looks pretty damn cool right now, and she bursts into tears and leans on him as she sobs.

But the clock just continues to count down, and tells us that it’s now 12 days until the incident.

While waiting in the street for Dong-chan to pull the car around, Soo-hyun calls her husband Ji-hoon and asks to speak to Saet-byul. He’s exasperated that she’s been gone all day and night without a word, but she just pleads with him to let her hear Saet-byul’s voice.

So he rouses Saet-byul from sleep to answer the phone, and Soo-hyun apologizes for nagging her to study, and promises to let her go to Snake concerts and quit all her tutoring classes, and even cheat on tests. Ha.

But Saet-byul is already fast asleep, and Soo-hyun sighs, wishing she could hear her voice one more time. Dong-chan interrupts to tend to her bleeding neck, fussing over it until she complies.

He runs off in high spirits though, and then tells her the good news: the last victim made it through surgery and is still alive. He beams: “You and I—we changed fate!” She breathes a sigh of relief and repeats the words, “We changed fate…”

He runs back to the car with medicine for her scrapes, and tries to direct her as she applies it before getting so exasperated that he just does it himself. She looks at him intently as he gets really close to her, and he decides that she must be wowed by how handsome he looks up close.

She thanks him for helping her and asks what made him change his mind. But he just changes the subject and tells her she might want to go to the hospital tomorrow to get checked out, just in case.

That’s when she notices that he’s scraped up everywhere worse than she is, and starts tending to his cuts: “You’ll have scars all over your already ugly face!” He corrects her: his sexy face.

He looks adorably smitten when she blows on his bruised hand like a mom, and she deadpans that that makes him her bratty rebellious son. He’s still impressed by her badass fighting skills back there against the killer, and she just says matter-of-factly, “That’s what a mom is.” She says his mother would’ve done the same in that situation, which gives him pause.

Hubby Ji-hoon is waiting for her in the garage when she arrives with Dong-chan, and it makes for an awkward homecoming. She takes Ji-hoon inside, and Dong-chan lingers for a moment, wondering where on earth he’s seen that man before. He mutters that it’s not on TV—he just can’t place it.

Ji-hoon flips out to see her bruised and dressed like she’s been on a clubbing bender, and asks what’s going on. But she just hugs him and sighs that his embrace feels so warm.

She apologizes for everything she’s put him through, and promises that she won’t be running around like a crazy person anymore. He’s careful about bringing up her fear of Saet-byul dying, but she calls it a nightmare that she mistook for reality, and says it’s all over now. He hugs her back in relief.

Dong-chan has another of his recurring nightmares about a man dumping a body in the river, and wakes up in a cold sweat

Soo-hyun has a happy breakfast at home, and Saet-byul gasps when Mom lets her eat whatever she wants and agrees to take her to the Snake concert with her friend Yong-gyu.

She even says she’s going to quit her job so she can play with Saet-byul all the time now, and thinks to herself, “Thank you, God, for bringing Saet-byul back to me.”

Grandpa Byung-ho is basically living with Dong-chan now, and complains about all the heart-healthy foods Dong-chan keeps serving, insisting he’d prefer something for male stamina. Ew, halbae!

Dong-chan asks him to hand over the money now since he did a good deed, and begins to recount in detail how he caught a serial killer with nothing but his bare hands and ninja stealth skills.

Grandpa whaps him upside the head and calls him a liar. He agrees to believe it if Dong-chan can bring forward a witness as proof, and shows him the contract that says just that.

So Dong-chan goes straight to Soo-hyun’s house to pick up his spy gear, and says that he doesn’t plan to go down to the police station when it’ll be an open-and-shut case once they test the killer’s DNA.

He brings up Grandpa and asks if she’ll tell an old man that he’s a good person and talk him up like he saved the day. Soo-hyun guesses he’s trying to impress his girlfriend’s father or something, but insists, “No, I don’t have a girlfriend!”

She laughs and agrees to tell Grandpa the truth. Still, he harps, “I said, I don’t have a girlfriend!” Lol, she’s not even asking about that anymore. All I’m getting from this exchange is that he really really doesn’t want her to think he has a girlfriend.

They’re interrupted with bad news from the precinct though, and when they rush down there, Woo-jin tells them that they’ve found no trace evidence that ties the killer to the victims. The blood on his clothes doesn’t even match the last girl, and Soo-hyun realizes that it’s her blood from their struggle in the car.

Dong-chan remembers that the killer was wearing different clothes when they fought in the apartment earlier that night, but he still doesn’t understand how they didn’t find any of his DNA at the scene. Crap, this is looking bad.

The killer looks pleased with himself, not even sweating the interrogation, and in flashback we see why: he circled back to the apartment after Dong-chan ran after him, and wiped the place clean and changed his clothes.

Woo-jin sends his detectives back out into the field to find something, anything, that’ll tie him to the crime scene before they run out of time and have to release him. Dong-chan gets up in Woo-jin’s face to ask how he could mess this up when he handed him a killer on a silver platter, but he knows the same thing that Woo-jin does—without concrete evidence, their hands are tied.

Soo-hyun stops in the bathroom and gets peeved when a woman splashes water on her while fiddling with her ring, but it jogs a thought and she runs out to ask Dong-chan if it’ll count as evidence if they can find the victims’ belongings in the killer’s home. She remembers that the second victim had a ring that got caught on her sweater, but it wasn’t in the evidence photos after the crime. They decide to check it out.

Meanwhile, the killer gets food delivered to the interrogation room and pickpockets the deliveryman’s cell phone while no one is looking.

Saet-byul runs out when she sees Yong-gyu hanging around at the gate, and when he asks dejectedly if she has a new friend now, she takes out her extra special super ddak-ji that Dong-chan made for her and gives it to him as a present. Aw. He lights up and happily agrees to go to the Snake concert with her.

Ji-hoon is just about to leave the office early so he can go to the concert, when he gets an urgent call… from the killer. OH NOES. He’s not going to end up being the killer’s defense attorney, is he??

Dong-chan and Soo-hyun go digging around in the killer’s house, being careful to wear gloves as they search for murder trophies. As he digs underneath a drawer, Dong-chan finds a seemingly innocuous gold ring and a picture that alarms him: it’s his mother with his nephew Yong-gyu. He hides it from Soo-hyun, not knowing what to make of it yet.

They check the bathroom last, and then suddenly two cops come into the house answering a call that someone broke in. Dong-chan jumps into the tub with Soo-hyun and pulls the curtain shut, insisting that they can’t get caught like this. The officers come so close that there’s nothing but a wafer-thin shower curtain between them, and while they’re right there Soo-hyun accidentally knocks an hourglass off the shelf above her.

Dong-chan catches it like the ninja cat that he is, and they thankfully avoid being caught tampering with evidence. He sticks the hourglass back on the shelf as they get ready to leave, when Soo-hyun sees something shiny sticking out in the sand. Yahtzee.

Ji-hoon arrives at the police station and sure enough, he’s here to see the murder suspect who was detained without evidence and brutally beaten without cause. Well when you say it like that, it makes your wife sound like the bad guy. This is going to be terrrrrible, isn’t it?

He asks to see the client and immediately starts arguing with Woo-jin about beating up a suspect during interrogation. (It’s hard to wrap my head around the timelines, but they haven’t met yet. Right?) Woo-jin insists that the cops aren’t responsible for his injuries, but the killer swears they were the ones to beat him.

While sitting down with the killer, Ji-hoon answers a call from Saet-byul and apologizes for missing the Snake concert, and the killer looks way too keen on learning this tidbit about him. (And Saet-byul is a strange enough name that even if he didn’t know who Ji-hoon was before calling, which is already unlikely, that name should ring a bell.)

He’s about to force Woo-jin’s hand and get the suspect released, when Soo-hyun and Dong-chan rush in with two pieces of jewelry they found at the house. I’m confused about them needing to hide in the bathroom if they were going to present the evidence themselves anyway, but whatever. Details, shmetails.

That stops them from releasing the killer with seconds to spare, and Woo-jin takes the jewelry to have the victims’ family members identify it. That’s when Ji-hoon passes by in he hallway and screeches to a halt when he sees his wife standing there.

Soo-hyun is understandably at her wit’s end when she hears that he’s representing the killer she just risked her life to capture, and cries that Saet-byul will die if he goes free. He rails when she brings up that crazy idea again, but she doesn’t care if he believes her.

He tries to tell her that he’s not saying that the man is innocent—he just isn’t being treated fairly according to the letter of the law, and his job is to protect human rights. I know it’s totally reasonable when he says, “I’m just doing my job,” but I’m with Soo-hyun when she looks up at him like he just betrayed her.

Things go from bad to worse when the victims’ family members don’t recognize the jewelry. She pleads with them to look again, but no dice.

The order comes down from the top of the food chain, and Woo-jin is ordered to release the suspect. Soo-hyun looks at him smirking from the other side of the glass, and flashes of Saet-byul’s body at the lake and her funeral come flooding in, until she just goes blind with panic.

She looks down at the table where Woo-jin’s gun is sitting, just asking to be picked up. She waits for her moment and then before anyone can react, she grabs the gun and runs into the room and locks herself inside with the killer.

She disables the camera and stops the audio recording in the blink of an eye, and raises the gun in the killer’s face. He actually enjoys it, asking for details about how he kills her daughter, and promising to fulfill all her wishes by doing just that.

Soo-hyun tells him to confess because it’s all over—his last victim survived, and once she wakes up, she’ll put him away. But he just tells her to confess first about why she let go of his hand. In the end he refuses to say a word: “I have so much that I need to do once I get out of here.” Shudder. She shuts her eyes and screams at him to die, and pulls the trigger… but he gets up and pulls the gun in closer: “You have to disengage the safety first.”

She manages to get the gun back after losing it in the struggle, but Dong-chan rushes in and holds her back before she can shoot. He drags her outside, kicking and screaming. She pounds on his chest and cries that it’s his fault for saving that bastard and letting him live.

By the time they trudge back inside, Woo-jin is undoing the handcuffs to let the killer walk free. Soo-hyun loses it again and grabs him by the leg, refusing to let him go. She screams that he’s going to kill Saet-byul, and by now I’m more terrified that she’s giving him motive.

They have to peel her off of him and let him go, and then they get hit with yet another disaster when another detective rolls in to arrest Dong-chan for the third victim’s attempted murder. What. He gets hauled away, and Dong-chan just tells Soo-hyun to go protect her daughter first.

She runs home in a panic, and sighs in relief to hear that Saet-byul is studying in her room. But then the note on her door reminds her that she did the exact same thing in the past timeline when she went to the Snake concert without permission. The room is empty, just like before.

She rushes to her car, and trips and falls in her haste. She ends up dropping her keys underneath the car and has to reach for them, but something stops else her short. Blood?

We cut away to Saet-byul and Yong-gyu in line for the concert, and she goes to the bathroom alone where a man stops her on the way out. Eep.

Soo-hyun arrives at the venue and she and Yong-gyu scour the place looking for her. Panic mounts, but then they see Saet-byul approach, and oh phew, it’s Dad she ran into earlier. He just got there faster than Mom did.

Snake arrives to a crowd of fans, and Saet-byul wants to join them and give her oppa a birthday present. Soo-hyun refuses to let her go or see the concert at all, and when Saet-byul pitches a fit, Soo-hyun accidentally knocks Yong-gyu over, breaking his camera. Uh-oh, things are still happening the same way. She clocks the moment with recognition.

At the same time, the killer has decided on a different target altogether, and creeps up to a hospital bed. Ugh, I knew telling him that his last victim was still alive was a bad idea.

He opens the curtain… and out jumps Dong-chan. Hey, tricksy, when’d you have time to do that?

A flashback to Soo-hyun’s discovery under her car reveals more than just blood. She finds the bag with the knife and clothes that the killer stashed there in a hurry while being chased by Dong-chan, knowing that this way it wouldn’t be found in his neighborhood by the police.

Dong-chan smirks that he’s done for now, and then takes out the photo of Mom and Yong-gyu. He demands to know what the killer is doing with a picture of his mom, and the reaction is legitimate surprise: “Your mother?” But the cops break it up before Dong-chan can get any answers.

Dad lifts Saet-byul’s bad mood by reading her Hansel and Gretel, and she smiles to hear the happy ending at the end. Ever the human rights defender, Dad wonders if the witch was really a child murderer, because what if she wasn’t and was wrongly burned at the stake? You WOULD interpret it that way.

Woo-jin has enough evidence to hold the suspect this time, but the killer asks to speak to Soo-hyun. He says he was planning to take this secret to the grave, but she changed his mind and he wants to tell her what he knows. He’ll only tell Soo-hyun, and he adds that they’ll regret not hearing what he has to say.

She agrees to come down to the station to talk to the killer, and ignores Ji-hoon’s pleas for her to understand his side of things. To her, it was a simple betrayal, and she shuts him out. When she leaves the jewelry they found in the killer’s home sitting out, Ji-hoon looks at it curiously.

When Soo-hyun gets to the station, Woo-jin tells her that she can talk to the killer once he’s back from the crime scene reenactment. He’s being transported as they speak, and Dong-chan is following in his own car, intent on keeping a hairy eyeball on the guy. Good, because I don’t trust the police to get him back like they promised.

Sure enough, the police van turns down a windy country road, and suddenly a truck pulls out of nowhere and slams into it. The van goes tumbling down a hill, and Dong-chan runs down to help everyone out of the car.

In the chaos, he doesn’t see that the killer has gotten out on the other side. Before he even thinks to look up, Dong-chan gets whacked on the back of the head.

I don’t know how, but it’s not enough to put him down. Despite bleeding from his head, Dong-chan gets up and chases the killer on foot. Go, go, go!

At the station, Woo-jin gets a call that makes him yelp. And then Soo-hyun’s phone rings just seconds later. It’s Dong-chan: “He’s dead.”

He drops a bloody baseball bat, and it lands on the ground with a clack… beside the killer lying there, in a pool of blood. Holy crap.

Soo-hyun picks up her wallet that the cops just returned to her. She pulls out the photo of her and Saet-byul from the mystery café. There’s still no Saet-byul.

Woo-jin comes over and adds even more bad news—the third victim just died at the hospital.

 
COMMENTS

Ohgod, they haven’t changed fate at all, have they? What a great triple-twist episode. It actually started to feel like a rake gag when they lost the killer for the zillionth time in the car crash, but him ending up dead is a fantastic twist. Now there’s no doubt and we’ve cleared him from the roster; he’s a killer, but he’s not our killer. And worse yet… Dong-chan has now killed somebody.

It’s really starting to scare me that the case seems to be building for Dong-chan to have a dark side, which terrifies me because I love him. It’s entirely due to Jo Seung-woo, of course, who is nothing short of amazing. I can’t rave enough about what he’s doing in this drama, from smarmy to gleeful to righteous to dangerous loose cannon, all with such believable nuance. He makes my day, Ki Dong-chan. I even love the name—a pun on “awesome”—because I believe that he’d name himself Captain Awesome if he could.

But he’s got a violent streak and blackouts that we can’t ignore, right? I refuse to think badly of him until someone puts a gun to my head with irrefutable evidence, but what I love about this drama is that no one is safe from suspicion. It’s a good kind of unsettling, as far as storytelling goes, because the second you get attached to someone and feel like there might be a bunch of good guys on the same side, we get the reminder that no one’s in the clear except for Mom. She’s our only good guy.

I trust Dong-chan because he had the presence of mind to keep Soo-hyun from becoming a killer. That to me says enough about his character. But I admit to gasping aloud when he dropped the bloody baseball bat. Because killer or no, I’m not sure he was asking to be bludgeoned to death with a bat. Did he tell Dong-chan the secret he was going to tell Soo-hyun? Does it have something to do with Dong-chan’s family, or the murders his hyung is in jail for? And ack, does that bring us back to the possibility that Dong-chan didn’t somehow accidentally brain him with a bat while trying to do the right thing? Say it ain’t so.

I love the way Ji-hoon is being used in this new timeline as well. You don’t think there could be a downside to marrying a human rights lawyer. But as it turns out, when you’re trying to put a killer away, he becomes a new adversary. What’s great about it is that he’s technically in the right, and I totally buy that he’s the idealistic sort of man who believes in what he does. It makes the conflict so rich because Soo-hyun doesn’t give a crap about ethics when her daughter’s life is on the line, and it puts them in opposite corners. It’s a much more interesting way to explore the rift between them, rather than just having them fight over her disappearing all the time for her crazed mission. For that alone, it might’ve been nice to have this killer around a little longer.

Yunno, ’cause it’s not like the show’s about to let us off the pins and needles anytime soon. Might as well embrace the anguish and go for broke.

 
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