God’s Gift – 14 Days: Episode 7

by javabeans

You thought you had the story all figured out, and then God’s Gift goes and pulls out the rug from under your feet. Again.

The story takes another turn in this episode, when you get to the bottom of one mystery, only to have that open up the doors to about three new ones. I guess it’s a good thing for the narrative that we never appear to run out of murderers in this world. Y…ay?

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EPISODE 7 RECAP

While snooping in the home of the stationery shop owner, Soo-hyun hits pay dirt: a room wallpapered in creepy surveillance photos of Saet-byul, packed with kidnapping accoutrements like rope and plastic tarp.

The doorknob rattles, giving Soo-hyun just enough warning for her to duck under the bed before the owner enters. But the killer had heard Soo-hyun dropping her phone seconds before, so it’s unnervingly uncertain whether he knows she’s here. He drops to the bedside and starts feeling under it, his fingers just inches from her, though it turns out he’s looking for something else. He pulls out a furry-looking toy and talks to it in a creepily soothing tone: “You should have just listened to me. Then I would have loved you instead of killing you.”

Then the camera pans down, and the fur is stained red. And dripping blood on the ground. Holy shit it’s a dog.

The puppy-killer discards the carcass, flicks on the light, then leans down to wipe up the blood. As he does, his eyeline is directed under the bed—does he know she’s there? Soo-hyun shrinks back into the darkness but she’s just seconds from discovery…

The door pounds. Oh thank god. He heads out to answer it, and Soo-hyun breathes a sigh of relief.

It’s Jenny at the door, and she bursts in with the excuse of needing the bathroom, heading for it before the killer can stop her. She notices that the bathtub is filled with water and rubber duckies, curiously, then takes a call from Dong-chan confirming her actions.

The killer lets Jenny leave, though he takes note of the fact that she flushed the toilet but left the seat up. Aieee, I hope that Jenny’s efforts in saving her team don’t end up making her into a target.

Thankfully this gives Soo-hyun the opportunity to escape—though not without first swiping a photo of Saet-byul from his wall collage. Gah, did you have to take one in the very center, trumpeting to the killer that Someone Was Here? He certainly doesn’t miss the gaping hole when he returns to his room.

Soo-hyun rushes home and wakes Saet-byul up to ask what happened to her watch. Saet-byul groggily says that she lost it, and Soo-hyun gets a little intense in questioning whether she went to the stationery store owner’s house, prompting Saet-byul to cry.

Hearing the crying, Ji-hoon interrupts. Soo-hyun shares her new theory: that the son of a wrongly convicted killer will kill Saet-byul out of revenge for Ji-hoon mishandling the case. She suggests that they reinvestigate and maybe even beg for forgiveness.

Ji-hoon bristles, first of all at the suggestion that he did his job badly, and second of all because the man kidnapped a child to rape her, then killed her brutally. He adds that the criminal didn’t deserve to die peacefully—he should have lived in daily fear of execution.

It gets worse when she mentions the email she read and he asks if she’s snooping. Soo-hyun frantically points to the photo with Saet-byul still missing and Ji-hoon explodes, shouting that he gets hundreds of emails like that a day, crumpling the photo and throwing it in the trash. Whoa. Most of the time I’m sympathetic to Ji-hoon’s frustration, but today that anger definitely notched up a level.

Saet-byul retrieves the photo and smooths it out, tucking it into a book when Dad drops by. He has concert tickets for them to see Snake tomorrow, which makes her night.

The next morning, Young-gyu’s grandma arrives to babysit. She looks at Ji-hoon for an extra beat—does she recognize him from her son’s trial? Soo-hyun leaves her with instructions to not let Saet-byul step a foot outside, or to let anyone in.

Soo-hyun brings coffee to a sleeping Dong-chan, who has staked out the stationery shop all night. He won’t wake up, but the sight of keys in his pocket gives her an idea. A flashback informs us that Soo-hyun and Dong-chan had gone to the police last night, only to be told that they need actual evidence, like that dead dog or the stolen watch.

So Soo-hyun makes a call to the stationery shop to make a delivery order, then sneaks up to the owner’s apartment to retrieve the watch. But the cuckoo clock is empty.

Grandma and Saet-byul head out to buy popsicles, joined by Young-gyu at the gate outside. In the store, Saet-byul rifles through the freezer case outside while Young-gyu gets hit in the head by toppling boxes. Grandma rushes to him in concern… leaving Saet-byul unattended as a motorcyclist stops and calls out to her.

Soo-hyun finds that the serial killer wall is also gone, replaced with ordinary-looking pinups. See what you get for leaving obvious traces? In a panic, she tears down the bikini photos, looking for evidence, and gahhhh I want to shake her for being so careless.

But Soo-hyun does find a scrap of Saet-byul’s photo tucked behind the wall mirror, which then swings open. There’s a hidden room inside, where all the murder tools have been transferred. Then her light shines on something in the corner. Someone.

A little girl has been tied up and gagged, and is sleeping… or worse. This is Saet-byul’s friend Eun-joo, the puppy’s owner, and Soo-hyun hurries to untie her.

The girl is thankfully alive, but then her eyes widen in fear just as a sound comes from behind Soo-hyun. Fuuuuuu….

Soo-hyun is grabbed violently by the stationery shop owner, and to make everything a touch creepier, the camera pulls back to take us outside the secret room while we hear the struggle going on inside it.

When Dong-chan wakes up, he makes the simultaneous discoveries that his keys are gone and that his coffee was left by Soo-hyun. With a sigh (she does have a way of courting trouble), he heads off to find her.

Stationery Man looms over his captives and reveals that he saw her creeping into his room via the camera he had planted there. He hadn’t been fooled by her delivery stunt, either. He shushes her quickly when Dong-chan and Byung-tae enter the bedroom looking for her, and they wait tensely while the men look around outside.

The guys assume she’s not here and start to head out, but something grabs Dong-chan’s attention and he turns back, walking toward that one-way mirror. Please tell me it’s your police expertise kicking in.

Dong-chan looks straight at Soo-hyun (or he would, if he could see her), then smooths his hair as he casually places a hand on the glass. Please tell me you see something.

He lets Byung-tae pull him away, though, and the moment they leave, the killer gloats that her saviors have left. Soo-hyun starts pleading for him to let the girl go, who has nothing to do with her or her husband. She says she knows he’s out for revenge against Ji-hoon and that she read his email, and the killer looks at her with new interest.

Soo-hyun promises to help clear his father’s name, but the killer says that his father is already dead. She watches in horror as he turns his attention to the little girl, giving her a creepy smile and caressing her face.

Soo-hyun surreptitiously picks up a glass bottle in her bound hands and pours the liquid over the ropes. Whatever the chemical is, it smokes and burns. Soon the rope frays, then gives.

While he’s distracted with the girl, Soo-hyun flings the rope around his neck and tries to strangle him with it. He’s too strong, however, and in no time he’s reversed the situation, turning the rope on her with a vicious hold. It’s not looking good.

Suddenly, a body comes flying through the mirror—Dong-chan. Thank god for Dong-chan, forever and always. He frees Soo-hyun while the killer fires at them with a nail gun, and then the fight turns hand-to-hand as they crash into equipment and trade blows.

Dong-chan eventually ends up pinning the killer down and throws punches at his face. The killer reaches for a bottle of chemicals, and Soo-hyun shouts a warning. Dong-chan rears back and the liquid splashes all over the killer, who lies there with burning skin.

The cops are called to handle the rest. Woo-jin asks how Dong-chan knew about the hidden room, and Dong-chan rattles off the clues: The lights were mounted in a way to suggest a split room. Plus, a one-way mirror has a slightly different reflection than a regular one.

Woo-jin interrogates the suspect (named Jang Moon-soo), who confesses to the story as we know it: He was out for revenge against Ji-hoon and wanted to clear his father’s name, and the tattoo on his hand represents his desire for vengeance.

He says he thought Eun-soo was Ji-hoon’s daughter and had no intention of actually killing her, acting meek and penitent in a way that does not assure me in the least. Face stained with tears, he says that although he did make revenge plans, he couldn’t muster the courage to actually do it.

A voice cuts in over the speaker, scorning, “Oy, you psycho killer bastard, where do you get off acting the victim?” Ha, thank you Dong-chan. He sarcastically praises his acting skills (“Song Kang-ho would see this performance and cry”), not buying it in the least. Woo-jin cuts off the mic and continues with his questioning.

As the killer explains that he poured the hydrochloric acid on himself in a suicide attempt, Soo-hyun is hit with a thought. She darts into the interrogation room and orders the killer to draw the tattoo on his hand—the tattoo that is conveniently covered by bandages at the moment.

The killer takes the pen and starts drawing. It’s a match with the one caught on video, which pegs him as our killer. With this confirmed, Soo-hyun tries to throw herself at him wielding a ballpoint pen, screaming that he ought to die. And yet, once he’s alone in the room, the killer smiles to himself. Clearly there’s more to the story, but what?

Outside, Soo-hyun tells Dong-chan she was afraid this killer would get let go too. He tells her they only need to find the victims’ belongings in his house for them to nail the guy, and reminds her that they’ve changed fate again—Eun-joo was saved. Saet-byul will be, too.

Just as she’s leaving the station, Grandma and Young-gyu come up in a panic—Saet-byul has disappeared. Grandma’s so worried she doesn’t even see that her leg is bleeding from having fallen down.

Before they can report the disappearance, Ji-hoon calls to rip into Soo-hyun for leaving Saet-byul at home alone. Turns out Saet-byul made it back safely, and for now the crisis is averted. Grandma and Young-gyu apologize profusely, but Soo-hyun tells them it’s not their fault. Saet-byul explains that the deliveryman stopped her to ask for an address, and upon recognizing it as theirs, she showed him there to drop off Dad’s package.

At home, Dong-chan puzzles over the facts of the case, ignoring Grandpa Byung-ho’s demands to be fed. He lights up to get word that a ring has turned up and heads out in high spirits. He orders Grandpa Byung-ho to prepare his 10 billion won, since he’s about to earn it. Grandpa wonders, “What’s so important about other people’s cases? What about his brother…?”

Soo-hyun takes Saet-byul to visit her friend in the hospital, where Eun-joo admits to stealing the watch from Saet-byul. Saet-byul tries to cover up for her thinking that her mom will get upset, but Soo-hyun doesn’t scold. As they leave, Saet-byul says she wants to be smart and courageous like Mom when she grows up.

On their way out, they spot Soo-hyun’s co-worker Min-ah in the waiting area. That reminds Soo-hyun of the fact she’d learned in that other reality, that Min-ah is pregnant and her boyfriend pressuring her to abort.

So while they take Saet-byul to a birthday party, Soo-hyun asks Min-ah about her situation. Min-ah wants to have the baby, but Soo-hyun recalls how this had prompted the boyfriend to hit her in the other reality. Min-ah’s not bruised (yet), but Soo-hyun warns her that the guy is a bad egg.

She shares her own story, explaining that she’d been abandoned by her own mother and therefore had no faith in her ability to be a good mother. She married Ji-hoon after agreeing they wouldn’t have kids, only to find herself unexpectedly pregnant with Saet-byul. “Looking back, it’s the best thing I did in the world—having Saet-byul. A world without her is unimaginable.”

And then, the eeriest flicker crosses Min-ah’s face. Oh crap. Literal chills down my spine.

Saet-byul takes a break from the face-painting session and comes up to her mother, who takes one look at her face and goes pale: Saet-byul is wearing that tattoo on her cheek. Saet-byul says that this design is all the rage these days, and even the delivery ajusshi had one.

Connecting the dots, Soo-hyun hurries out to check on the package left for Ji-hoon. She leaves Saet-byul at Min-ah’s house and arrives home just as Ji-hoon is pulling out old files of those murder cases. Hm, having doubts after all?

She opens the recently delivered box and flips through the contents, but doesn’t find anything. She tries to tell herself that what she’s fearing can’t be since the culprit has been caught.

Meanwhile, Ji-hoon pulls out a few photographs from an envelope (we don’t see what they’re of) and locks them in his desk drawer. He makes a call… and then we cut to Min-ah, ignoring a call. Gah, why does this drama make me suspicious of everyone, all the time?

The doorbell rings and Min-ah gets up to answer it… and Saet-byul sees the tattooed wrist on the visitor. She tries to get a closer look, but Min-ah blocks her view and steps outside quickly. Saet-byul decides to tell Mom about it and goes looking for her phone, but it’s gone.

Dong-chan scours CCTV footage of Jang Moon-soo’s stationery store, but doesn’t find what he’s looking for. So then he convinces Ho-kook to sneak him files of the ten-year-old case of Jang Moon-soo’s father, a baker who allegedly lured a child with promises of bread, then killed her when she ran. Pictures of the dead child show patterned burns on her arm from a waffle iron.

Dong-chan looks into Jang Moon-soo’s old medical records, and something in them makes him keen on a solo visit with the killer. Woo-jin agrees to let him visit in a monitored and recorded session, and watches from the other side of the observation glass. Of course, the first thing Dong-chan does is whip out one of those folding canes and give the camera a disabling whack. Ha.

The cops hurry next door, but Dong-chan secures the knob and figures that he’s bought himself three minutes to talk. He starts with mention of those rubber duckies floating in Jang Moon-soo’s bathtub and waggles a finger at Moon-soo, revealing a ring that makes the killer’s eyes widen in recognition. Ah, did he hide it in a duck? Dong-chan tells a story of a girl who was killed by a monster while wearing that ring. But the story contains an even more monstrous other person, and Dong-chan points that finger at Jang and asks, “Who do you suppose that was?”

Dong-chan shows Jang Moon-soo the photos of the victim’s waffle iron burns. Next to them he places Jang’s medical records from the same time, showing burns on his arm in the same pattern.

Now Dong-chan connects the dots: They assumed Jang Moon-soo burned his arm to cover his tattoo, but in reality he did it to cover up the fact that he killed the little girl ten years ago.

Flashback to the murder. In a bakery, a little girl tries to run from a man, and her captor tries to force her arm onto the waffle iron. In the struggle, the man accidentally burns himself instead, and we see the face—a younger Jang Moon-soo.

This revelation seems to break something in him, and Jang Moon-soo insists to Dong-chan that his father did it, not him. Dong-chan points out that it was his father—who was terminally ill with cancer—who took the fall. Repressing that guilt just made his sickness worse, however. Then along came this ajumma spouting all this stuff about Ji-hoon’s case and a tattoo, and it gave him the opportunity to get off lightly.

Trembling for real, Jang Moon-soo begs for mercy. But when Dong-chan asks how he knew what the tattoo looked like, Moon-soo just laughs. “You’re looking for him, aren’t you?” he asks. He tries to bargain: He’ll tell Dong-chan about the tattoo if he burns these photos.

Dong-chan makes the deal, and lights the medical record on fire. Now talk.

Jang Moon-soo leans in to whisper into Dong-chan’s ear, but we don’t hear what he says. A few seconds later, the door bursts open as the cops spill into the room, and Dong-chan makes his nonchalant exit.

Meanwhile, the president meets with his advisers to prioritize the list of death row inmates, to choose who’ll go next. Tick-tock.

Dong-chan heads to the stationery store, and now we hear Moon-soo’s tip: The tattooed man is one of his regular customers. The man was wearing a hat and a mask, but the clues suggest he lives in the neighborhood. Among his recent purchases was a telephoto lens, and Dong-chan finds the relevant receipt. Aha.

When Soo-hyun hears that Jang Moon-soo isn’t the guy, she races for the security booth to check the CCTV footage. Watching the deliveryman pulling up with Saet-byul, she realizes that the package he left wasn’t a box, but an envelope, and hurries back to Ji-hoon’s office to look. Ah, but Ji-hoon already locked those photos in his drawer…

All Soo-hyun finds is an empty envelope.

Dong-chan puts Byung-tae to the task of hacking the credit card company website to find who bought the telephoto lens. Jenny turns on the TV, and happens to catch a newscast showing a familiar scene: It’s Dong-chan interrogating Jang Moon-soo and hearing his confession. We’d all thought he’d disabled the recording in the room… but nobody had seen the tiny camera he’d snuck into his briefcase. Ha.

Jang Moon-soo sees this report and realizes what must have happened. It sets him seething, and he growls, “I’ll get you for this…”

Jenny and Byung-tae wonder how a father could take the fall for his son, and Byung-tae quotes (or misquotes) a famous saying about not believing everything that’s in front of your eyes. This triggers something in Dong-chan’s mind—and now, finally, he turns his attention to his brother’s case. Oh noooo. You don’t mean…

Flashback. Dong-chan watches as his brother is cross-examined and admits to killing the child and dumping the body. When Ji-hoon asks if he also killed two others, though, Dong-ho shakes his head and sends Dong-chan a pleading look. He cries that he didn’t.

Dong-chan reads over the file now, which tells us that Dong-ho confessed to killing the first child upon arrest, but did not admit to killing the other two girls until a year later, at which point he was sentenced to death.

In prison, Dong-ho hears that his brother is here for a visit and practically skips to the room, eager to see Dong-chan. But his face falls when he gets there and the visitor’s chair is empty. Aw, sad.

Dong-chan leaves the prison, unable to face his hyung after all. Despite his momentary hesitation at the words not to believe everything as they appear, he renews his long-held credo: “I’m only going to believe what I see. That is the truth.”

Jang Moon-soo’s case thrusts Ji-hoon into the spotlight as reporters hound him with questions of possible mistakes made during the trial. He states firmly that he made no mistakes, and that he’ll take responsibility if it’s called for.

But in the midst of the full-on media frenzy, Soo-hyun pulls up in her car and grabs Ji-hoon by the lapels, asking accusingly what he did with those materials. Okay lady, I get your panic, but sometimes you are the worst.

She hounds him all the way home for that envelope, until finally he yells at her to give it a rest. He blames her for making trouble for him and says that if she’s so worried about Saet-byul, she ought to stay home.

He storms out, and Soo-hyun digs through his bag for the papers, to no avail.

Dong-chan calls with a break in the case, however, and the next thing we know they’re arriving outside an apartment door. Using the food delivery next door as their excuse, Dong-chan rings the door of their quarry, then bursts inside. The man gets a bowl of noodles in the face, but the simultaneous reaction is hilarious as he and Dong-chan recognize each other.

Turns out that the guy is another investigator, working on a cheating wife case—this apartment has the best view of the one across the way. The man Dong-chan has handcuffed isn’t our tattooed killer, but the investigator’s client.

Taking a look through the telescope at the cheater’s home, Dong-chan recognizes the sight: They’re looking at Soo-hyun’s building. She confirms that it’s the home next door to hers, and the client recognizes her as his neighbor.

The investigator shows Dong-chan what he’s found, saying that he didn’t find the clues he was looking for but tapped into a different story. Apparently in his month-long stakeout he had noticed the pretty ajumma next door, and caught footage of something spicy going on—and we see Ji-hoon in the arms of another woman. Min-ah?

It’s only now that the investigator sees that Soo-hyun IS the ajumma next door, just as she recognizes her husband. Dong-chan demands the photos, but the investigator says all his files were stolen in a recent burglary.

Soo-hyun rushes home to tear through Ji-hoon’s office again, filled with dread and fear. She breaks the lock on his desk, and finds the photos he’d hidden: Ji-hoon and Min-ah, embracing.

And now she recalls Min-ah telling her, “The pain I’m feeling because of that bastard, I’ll repay in kind.”

“That pain?” Soo-hyun realizes. “She lost her child.”

Min-ah drags Saet-byul along in the street, clearly in an agitated state. Knowing something’s wrong, Saet-byul breaks free and runs for it. Min-ah chases after her, both of them heading into an intersection, just as a car barrels toward them. It screeches to a halt.

 
COMMENTS

Trust no one, indeed. When this drama started, I thought we were getting a bevy of suspicious characters who might be murderers, but instead what we’re getting is a string of people who are shady for different reasons, which leads us down a twisty path of red herrings and wild goose chases.

The drama does a solid job of turning a corner and revealing a fresh new conflict at every point along the way, so despite minor scene transition awkwardnesses (it feels like a live-shoot byproduct, with occasional jarring cuts), we’re being served up a well-planned and -plotted story. That much is clear from the way the show has me on the edge of my seat and simultaneously trying to figure out the mystery while being able to enjoy not knowing the answer just yet. It’s a case where the gratification comes as much in the process of discovery as it is in the payoff.

The more glimpses we see of Dong-chan’s past and his brother’s case, the more I’m left wondering how it all fits together. Dong-chan may have hopped onto Soo-hyun’s mystical coattails when she got her second chance at life, but it’s entirely possible that his return is just as intentionally granted as hers, given how neatly everything seems to be coinciding with Dong-ho’s case. And what is Grandpa’s link in the whole thing? I don’t know if our resolution is to solve everything that went awry in the first lifetime, and frankly I’m not even sure if I’d be satisfied with that—I’d be happy for the characters, but there’s always a bit of fear in the back of my head that Fate/God/The Universe is going to want payment for its gifts, because in my head Fate is a stingy bastard and gives nothing for free. I want there to be a cost, even as I want our heroes to end up on the happy side of this conundrum.

So now we’re on to culprit #3, with Min-ah playing mastermind after her lousy boyfriend insisted on abortion, sending her into revenge mode to inflict upon him the loss of a child. I think. And the tattooed motorcyclist is the guy she’s hired to do the job, or is otherwise connected to her somehow. It seems a little crazy to think that we’re dealing with three separate killers here (two of them of the serial variety), but I guess it’s a twisted world we live in.

I find Soo-hyun an alternately amazing and frustrating character, because she is ballsy and fierce and yet her one-track mind (admirable!) leads her to do a lot of stupid things (arrrrgh). Let’s just be glad that she has Captain Awesome on her side, always ready for a brawl and sharp on the uptake. I do wish she were a smarter character, because even though she’s trying to do her damnedest to save a life, she often doesn’t try very hard to sound sane. I don’t blame Ji-hoon for his reaction to her harebrained ideas, because she’s not even trying to explain them in a way that isn’t nonsensical.

I suppose that’s moot now that Ji-hoon is a lying cheater and possibly also domestic abuser. I wonder if this is the extent of his villainy, or if that violent streak hints at more badness down the line. I’m well aware of the fact that we’re not even halfway through the show yet, though, which means that there’s clear room for another twist or two to come at us. Given how much the story has changed from the outset to now, it’s probably too early to call anything a done deal at this point. Except for maybe Dong-chan being Captain Awesome, because unnerving blackouts aside, he’s absolutely rocking as the smart-talking, smart-thinking cheeky investigator who’s always a step ahead of the rest. Not a bad place to be.

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