God’s Gift – 14 Days: Episode 13

by girlfriday

This show’s modus operandi seems to be: take your worst nightmare, multiply that by a thousand, set it on fire, poke it and make it angry, and then turn off the lights so that it has the advantage in a fight. Just when we think our good guys catch a break, we find out that the only thing worse than not knowing is knowing too much. How can an episode full of answers only lead to more questions?

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Sandeul (B1A4) – “아파서” (Because It Hurts) for the God’s Gift—14 Days OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 13 RECAP

After being knocked out, Soo-hyun opens her eyes to find Jin-woo, the sole eyewitness left from the group photo, being strangled to death by another patient in his mental institution. I don’t think he’s our killer-killer, but he’s definitely trying to kill Jin-woo, which means he knows something.

Soo-hyun thinks quickly and grabs a glass shard from the bottle the man broke over her head, and slices at the killer’s Achilles heel. Ack.

He then turns his attention to her, but he’s injured and she’s a badass, so she manages to wail on him with a nearby IV stand until he’s on the ground.

It’s enough of a distraction for Jin-woo to get out of there, and the killer drags his bloody foot down the mental hospital corridor like a creepy horror movie psycho to go after him. But then he turns a corner and suddenly Keyser-Sozes out, straightening out his gait and looking very not crazy. He calls someone and says he failed.

Dong-chan has locked himself into a tiny corridor with all the henchmen in black suits (who knows if they’re here to guard Jin-woo or kill him), and he starts to regret the choice when the henchmen multiply.

As he fights them off, Jin-woo doubles back to his room armed with bleach. He’s not making much sense, but he grabs a glow-in-the-dark paint pen and shows Soo-hyun that he’s playing connect-the-dots on the wall. Now we see that the numbers scrawled there aren’t random or mad ramblings at all—they’re a pattern.

He urges her to connect the dots (pretty funny how literal that is), and once she’s done, they step back and he turns off the lights. It’s an outline of two bodies: one is lying on the ground, helpless, and the other is crouched above, strangling the other.

We had suspected as much, but this confirms that the boys in the photo were killed off because there were actually eyewitnesses to the original crime.

As Soo-hyun sees the outline glowing in the dark, it suddenly animates and the killer turns his head to growl at us. Yikes. The clock counts down to midnight. Four days before the incident.

Jin-woo turns the lights back on and pours bleach over the drawing. Soo-hyun wipes it down, while he draws something on her shoe and then traces a line of glow-in-the-dark paint out into the hallway.

He must sense that someone is coming, because he does it just in time for them to get away from two henchmen who have slipped past Dong-chan in the fray. She follows the line to where it stops, and just as the two men grab her, Jin-woo comes at them with a fire extinguisher.

Soo-hyun sprays the other down and they make a run for it though the air ducts. They get outside and scream for Dong-chan to join them, and ride away to safety. Soo-hyun asks again who took the photo, but Jin-woo just lets out a panicked scream, so Dong-chan suggests they wait until he’s calmed down.

They drive to Moojin and Soo-hyun calls Jin-woo’s mother to meet them if she wants to save her son. Dong-chan worries that she’ll call the cops, but she knows a mother won’t risk her child’s life like that. Unfortunately Jin-woo’s dad sees her leaving in the middle of the night, which can’t be good.

Soo-hyun tells Jin-woo’s mom that the person who took the group photo tried to kill her son and has kidnapped her daughter. Mom doesn’t know who the fifth friend might be, but she does recall now that it was around that time that things went horribly awry for Jin-woo.

He stopped going out and seeing people, and then years later when one of his friends died, he came home from the funeral worse than ever, and that’s when his father had him committed.

Mom tries asking Jin-woo about the photograph, but he just cries that he wants to draw again. Soo-hyun quickly hands him pen and paper, but this time he uses the pen to punch holes through the pages as he stammers, “Stabbed three times.” Soo-hyun picks up on the wording and asks if he means that the killer stabbed someone else, but Jin-woo says no.

Before he can explain, they’re bombarded by more henchmen. Dong-chan gets out to block them, and grumbles at one of them for having bad fight etiquette and punching him with a ring on.

It doesn’t take much for them to drag Jin-woo and Mom away, leaving Soo-hyun and Dong-chan empty-handed yet again.

Back at Soo-hyun’s gated community, we repeat that beat from the original timeline where two of the cops on the kidnapping case take a smoke break outside and get a tip from the well-meaning security ajusshi.

The conversation is slightly different, but the result is the same: he tells them about Dong-chan skulking around the family. Nooo. This is what led to his arrest the first time. People, you can’t lock up Captain Awesome when we have a killer to catch!

Soo-hyun recreates the drawing for Dong-chan at his house, but his reaction is quite different—he sighs that the killer in the drawing is his brother Dong-ho. A flashback to the crime scene reenactment confirms that Dong-ho was in that exact position as he replayed the events. It’s worse because Dong-chan actually envisions Soo-jung lying there in place of the victim mannequin, and shudders at his brother’s gruesome act.

Soo-hyun wonders why the clues don’t add up then, because Jin-woo should’ve named Dong-ho but he didn’t. Dong-chan remains bullheaded about the fact that his brother is the killer, and all it means is that someone else was an eyewitness to the crime.

He crumples up the drawing and goes out for snacks to avoid talking about it further. On the way back home, he does start to wonder why things don’t add up—why did Jin-woo say “stabbed three times” when Soo-jung was stabbed nine times? Did Jin-woo witness another crime entirely?

He takes out Saet-byul’s hairpin and sighs that this troubles him most of all. As he stands in the middle of the street talking to himself, a taxi honks to pass him by and he grumbles that it’s rude… which triggers another memory of that night. After the alley fight, he thinks he took a cab. But where?

But he doesn’t even have a moment to finish the thought because the two cops who arrested him the first time do it again, in the exact same spot to boot. Is it too late to start a drinking game for every time Dong-chan goes to jail?

Soo-hyun runs down to the station to insist that Dong-chan isn’t the kidnapper, but they say she’s under suspicion as well, namely because she’s not acting like a mother who just had her daughter kidnapped.

She rails at them for arresting the wrong guy and says she’ll sue them, and they half-joke that she and Dong-chan must be an item. Listen, we’re working on it, me and the universe.

Ji-hoon shows up to say that Soo-hyun is mentally unstable at the moment, and shows them the institution paperwork to prove it. He drags her away and tells her to stop because she’s fast becoming the prime suspect in this case. He takes her back home and makes the cops keep her under lock and key.

Soo-hyun sits in Saet-byul’s room and opens her lockbox, but there’s nothing new inside. That’s when she remembers the diary, which in the original timeline had its last page ripped out.

She finds the last entry that Saet-byul wrote the night she was kidnapped. She came home and wrote that the tattooed man chased her and she ran away like Mom told her to. She saw Dad arguing with someone so she was afraid to go to him, but was relieved when she saw the Snake van.

The manager kicked her out of the van even though she was scared, and the taxi driver kicked her out for not having enough money. But her mood was lifted when the camera shop ajusshi was nice to her, and gave her the pictures he developed.

She writes that she doesn’t understand what the pictures are, and that she’ll have to ask Mom about them. Soo-hyun realizes that this is all about those pictures, and she rips out the last page of the diary. Good thinking. But there’s one thing she forgot—the camera that’s recording everything in the room.

She wobbles out of the room and faints, which we know from the first timeline was a surefire way to get away from the cops taking up residence in her house. Ji-hoon rushes to the hospital and finds the bed empty, just like before. Serves ya right.

She goes straight for the camera shop and asks the ajusshi if he still has the film from Young-gyu’s camera. He says that the film was so old that he could only salvage two or three pictures, and at bad quality at that.

He develops them by hand in the darkroom to show her, and hangs them up to dry. She watches as the first starts to become clearer, and recognizes Dong-chan sitting with Soo-jung. These are pictures from the night she died.

The second one starts to develop, and Soo-hyun’s eyes widen when she sees it. Is that… Dong-chan strangling Soo-jung? Ohgodohgod. It’s the exact outline of the two figures that Jin-woo drew, and the exact thing that Dong-ho reenacted. Tell me it’s not Dong-chan!

Soo-hyun grabs the two photos and runs out, forgetting entirely that there’s a third photo floating in the tray. It’s another angle of the group photo by the river, this one from outsider Dong-ho’s perspective. But it means that he caught the whole group on camera—including the man taking the picture. We only see it half-developed though, so no faces for now.

Soo-hyun takes the two photos to see Dong-chan at the police station. He doesn’t quite understand them at first, wondering if someone snapped a photo of his brother as he was killing Soo-jung.

But Soo-hyun explains that Dong-ho was the one taking all these pictures. That’s when he snaps to attention: “Are you saying this is me?!” He swears that it’s not him, despite the very obvious connection that the two men in the photos are wearing the same exact jacket.

She says that if it is him in the second photo, that makes him the serial killer, the man who took the group photo, and Saet-byul’s kidnapper. Dong-chan can’t believe she’d accuse him of kidnapping Saet-byul, and points out that if that’s him in the photo he should have a big scar on his neck from being stabbed (it looks like Soo-jung fought back and got in a jab).

But Soo-hyun says calmly that she knows it’s not him. Oh phew. I don’t think I was breathing for the last five minutes. She points out that all she needs to do to clear his name is to confirm that he wasn’t at the crime scene. She remembers his story about leaving Soo-jung to go drink with friends that night, and gets Ho-gook to bring up the old CCTV footage from the case.

New cameras had been set up all over Moojin because of the serial killings, and the one above the local bar shows Dong-chan drinking with his buddies just like he said. More importantly, he’s not wearing his jacket.

Soo-hyun comes back to tell him that the person who’s wearing his jacket killed Soo-jung while he was drinking with his friends, and that Dong-ho is obviously not the killer either if he’s the one snapping the photo. So Soo-jung’s killer, the guy who framed Dong-ho to take the fall, and Saet-byul’s kidnapper are one and the same.

Yeessssssss, FINALLY!

Dong-chan’s face crumbles, and he stammers in a broken voice that he needs to get out of here to see his hyung. He keeps repeating, “What I did… what I did to my hyung…”

Ho-gook comes in to release him, and he races out of there with photos in hand. He goes to see Dong-ho and presses the photo up against the glass: “Who is this?” Dong-ho sticks to his story doggedly: “It’s me.”

Dong-chan screams at him for being an idiot—it can’t be him because he took the photo. Dong-ho realizes the mistake once he points it out, but doesn’t change his story. Dong-chan trembles, barely able to get the words out: “Is this… me?”

He makes his hyung look at the photo: “Is this me? Did I kill Soo-jungie? Is that why you said you killed her… in my place?” Oof, the look on Dong-ho’s face is answer enough—he confessed to the crime to protect his only brother.

It’s because of Dong-chan’s drunken blackouts that Dong-ho was able to believe his brother had killed Soo-jung, but Dong-chan wails that it wasn’t him. It’s even worse that in that moment, Dong-ho’s face breaks into a smile to know that his brother is innocent after all.

Dong-chan breaks down, screaming and crying at his brother for being such an idiot. I can barely watch, it’s so gut-wrenching. They have to be dragged apart, and in between screams, Dong-chan hangs his head and whispers, “I was wrong.”

Soo-hyun comes to pick him up on the same curb where she found him after the last time he visited his brother, and says it all makes sense now why they were sent back 14 days. She was sent to save Saet-byul and he was sent to save his hyung: “We were chasing the same guy.”

He’s calmed down enough to get his head back in the case, and wonders who killed all those women in Moojin if his brother wasn’t the murderer. Soo-hyun hands him Ji-hoon’s original file on Dong-ho’s case, complete with crime scene photos from the other women’s murders.

Soo-hyun recognizes the earring from the crime scene photo as one of the pieces they discovered in Cha Bong-seob’s hourglass. The other victim matches up to the inscribed ring. They realize that their first killer was in fact the Moojin serial killer after all.

She thinks it’s possible that Cha Bong-seob killed Soo-jung too, but Dong-chan says that the methods are different. Plus they know now that Cha Bong-seob had a clear motivation for going after mothers who abandoned their children. The first two Moojin murder victims match the profile, but Soo-jung doesn’t. That means that there were always two killers—Cha Bong-seob, and Soo-jung’s killer, the tattooed man.

Soo-hyun realizes now that this is what Cha Bong-seob was about to tell her the night he died. He was going to confess to being the Moojin serial killer, but also tell her the truth that he didn’t kill the third victim. And our tattooed killer stopped him before he could open his mouth.

Dong-chan says the puzzle pieces are starting to fit together now, and it makes sense why Cha Bong-seob had Young-gyu and Grandma’s photo. It had nothing to do with Dong-chan (because he did look genuinely surprised by that connection), and was because he felt guilty all these years for the fact that Dong-ho was in prison for his crimes.

So he stayed close to Young-gyu and Grandma to look in on them, which explains how he found out about Young-gyu’s birth mother Mimi abandoning him. Dong-chan remembers now that as he was dying, Cha Bong-seob kept asking him why he did “that thing.” In hindsight it becomes clear that he was asking why he testified against his own brother when Dong-ho never committed the crimes.

They start piecing together the things that the tattooed killer knew that he shouldn’t—the hideout where Dong-chan took Soo-jung that night that only he and his brother knew about, the fact that Cha Bong-seob had something to tell Soo-hyun the night he died, the number of times one of the victims was stabbed. It all adds up to one connection: cops.

Soo-hyun wonders if their killer could really be a cop, but Dong-chan argues that a tattoo that obvious wouldn’t go unnoticed in a precinct. Perhaps what they’re looking for is a police accomplice.

What they do know is that the timing now makes sense, because the killer feels that he isn’t safe until Dong-ho is executed for the crime. What he needed was to push for the death penalty, and they know that in the original timeline, Saet-byul’s murder is the final act that passes the law and leads to Dong-ho’s execution. The perfect crime is complete, and the case is closed forever.

Soo-hyun says that if they uncover the jewelry that links to the Moojin serial killings, that reopens the case, and the killer will come for them—that’s when they’ll get him. She searches her pockets because she remembers finding them in Saet-byul’s helmet the night of the attack.

They go back to the mental hospital where she last remembers having them on her, and the nurse is super shady about denying that anyone went through her stuff. Dong-chan is suited up (rawr) to play a cop, and one flash of his fake badge gets them access to the hospital’s CCTV footage.

Surprisingly, it isn’t Ji-hoon they see, but the killer, who must’ve arrived to search her stuff after Ji-hoon already absconded with the evidence. They don’t know about Ji-hoon, so they assume that the killer got away with the goods and sigh that they’re back to square one.

Dong-chan says they’ll go back to the first spot where the tattooed man revealed himself, and there in the street, he replays the moment when Cha Bong-seob was killed. As he searches his memory, he sees the car that hit the motorcyclist: it has a familiar bell logo on it. Aha.

So there’s yet another link to Grandpa Chu’s Angel Foundation, whatever the heck it really is. Dong-chan even remembers a bell keychain dangling from the rearview mirror in that car, and he wonders if maybe that keychain didn’t come from Saet-byul, but was dropped somewhere by the killer.

The driver of the Angel van is a dead end because his car was stolen at the time of the incident. The entire security team at the Angel Foundation has access to the vehicles, so Dong-chan calls Byung-tae to do some digging into the security staff.

Byung-tae and Jenny are camping out by the Moojin shack (literally, in a tent), and Byung-tae starts to complain about being tasked with a difficult hacking job but then thinks better of it and decides to show off his skills to look cool in front of Jenny.

Meanwhile, Dong-chan can’t get it out of his head that the only people who knew about the glove he left behind after Soo-hyun’s kidnapping were him, Ho-gook, and Woo-jin. He pulls Ho-gook aside to ask if he’s the dirty cop, and Ho-gook cowers when he realizes that the logical next statement is: Then your boss is.

He begs Dong-chan not to go there, because after Dong-chan, Woo-jin is the hyung he likes best. Dong-chan chases him down the hall, and then Woo-jin peeks out from around the corner, having overheard the whole exchange. Uh-oh.

But the look on his face is one of horror. He calls someone and asks the man on the other end, “Do you have that child?” The man tells him not to interfere and hangs up, and Woo-jin realizes he unwittingly aided in Saet-byul’s kidnapping.

Back at Dong-chan’s office, he and Soo-hyun go through the Angel Foundation’s security team profiles. He stops at one man that he recognizes as the guy wearing the ring, who took Jin-woo away.

They take the picture to the Angel Foundation and demand to see him, and Grandpa Chu watches from a monitor up in his office. While they’re getting the runaround, Soo-hyun flips through a brochure about the company and sees a man pictured next to Grandpa Chu… it’s the tattooed man.

Now that she sees his face, Soo-hyun recognizes him immediately. We go back to Day One of the original timeline, when Ji-hoon was attacked by tomatoes in the broadcast station. A victim’s mother had cried at his feet for letting a murderer go on living, and her husband had picked her up off the floor saying that the killer’s death wouldn’t bring back their child.

Tattooed Man is that husband and father. Ten years ago, Ji-hoon was the prosecutor in his child’s murder case, and the suspect—a man named Lee Min-seok—was declared innocent.

Soo-hyun says that it’s likely that Ji-hoon’s recent turnaround against the death penalty provoked this man to come after him. The killer must’ve been indicted for something else, because his name is on a roster of possible candidates for the death penalty, along with Dong-ho’s.

The man reviewing the list is a minister of justice, and Woo-jin comes into his office calling him father. He kneels down and confesses that he did something horrible, which is a relief—I was fully expecting that he was acting under shady orders from a shady father.

Woo-jin tells his father the whole truth about Young-gyu’s hostage situation, and in flashback we see that he fired a shot at the exact same time that Dong-chan did. It was he who misfired, and he let Dong-chan take the fall.

Someone knew about it at the time and had comforted him (we only see his hand), and then later Woo-jin was threatened with that information to cover up evidence. He apologizes to his father for shaming him, and says he’ll fess up.

Meanwhile Te-oh gets released from custody and his lawyer returns the Moojin group photo with the remark that he shouldn’t have let it get into “that person’s hands.” Te-oh asks whether the child has been found, and then his manager gives him the plane ticket he asked for.

Woo-jin’s father resigns from his post. I have a feeling that’s bad news where Dong-ho is concerned…

Soo-hyun and Dong-chan go to the tattooed man’s house (I guess we know his name now: Hwang Kyung-soo), and find their son’s room just as it was when he died. Among the boy’s belongings, they find that video game with the Nemesis image in it. An older couple works on the property, and they tell them that the dad has a mystery job in Seoul, but whatever it is he always dresses in black.

While they’re talking to the older couple, the radio broadcast interrupts for a special announcement from the Blue House. Right on schedule, the president announces that they’re going forward with the death penalty and the names of the prisoners on death row will soon be revealed. Crap, they’re running out of time.

The broadcast ends with an announcement that the victims’ families are being honored at a dinner tonight, and Soo-hyun and Dong-chan realize that’s where they’ll find the Hwangs.

Soo-hyun says that Dong-chan’s hunch was right about Saet-byul’s kidnapping being timed to push forward Dong-ho’s execution, but she doesn’t think that Hwang Kyung-soo could’ve acted alone. That’s what I’m sayin’. One vengeful father doesn’t explain the inside power needed to pull all this off. She says that someone with a lot more power is behind this, but Dong-chan says all the power in the world won’t stop him from killing the bastard when he finds him.

We cut to Grandpa, aka Chairman Chu, as he asks how Jin-woo is doing. He gets off the phone when our tattooed man, Hwang Kyung-soo, walks right into his office. Grandpa greets him familiarly by name.

Te-oh watches his home security footage and sighs when he sees Soo-hyun and Dong-chan finding the funeral DVD. Grandpa calls him into the office, and he’s there with the former Moojin mayor, Jin-woo’s dad.

Grandpa asks if Te-oh agreed to keep his mouth shut in exchange for being released, and Te-oh sighs that the chairman was right about it not ending with him. He tells them about “those people” finding his hyung’s funeral DVD, and Grandpa notes that it means they’re almost to the end. Of the mystery? Their lives? What, Grandpa?

Te-oh wonders if Dong-chan and Soo-hyun will really make it all the way. I honestly can’t decide, but it kind of sounds like you’re rooting for them in your own shady cryptic way.

Grandpa says Kyung-soo came by to warn him not to interfere. He apologizes since he thinks of the chairman like a father, but he warns him not to mess with his plan. Grandpa counters that Kyung-soo is doing what he needs to do as a father, and so is he: “This is my best that I can do, for my son.”

Te-oh hears the story and balks, calling Kyung-soo a traitor. Grandpa is the one who says that he’s at the point in his life where he doesn’t care anymore what happens to him if the truth gets out. The mayor starts to protest, but Grandpa reminds him that if it weren’t for Soo-hyun and Dong-chan, his son would’ve died.

Te-oh agrees, and says that he’s already sent “the child’s mother” away (I’m guessing the pregnant girlfriend), and that he’s prepared to go forward. Grandpa says it’s time to entrust the truth in “their” hands now. I sincerely hope you mean Dong-chan and Soo-hyun.

Soo-hyun gains entry into the presidential dinner for victims’ families, but Dong-chan is denied access. She tells him she’ll just check inside to see if Hwang Kyung-soo is there, and runs off before he can stop her.

Just then, Dong-chan gets a call from Grandpa, who says cryptically that if he wants to catch that guy, he should come to his office. Dong-chan rushes over and grouses when he finds the office empty, but then he notices an envelope sitting there waiting for him. He opens the file and his eyes widen. It’s a picture of the president shaking hands with our tattooed man, Hwang Kyung-soo.

Soo-hyun looks around the banquet hall but there’s no sign of the Hwangs. She’s told that they aren’t coming, but the president enters with his family, so she can’t leave. He goes around the room shaking hands with each of the victims’ families.

Soo-hyun gets a call from Dong-chan, who tells her that he thinks the president is in on this with Tattooed Man: “It’s all a political show!” She’s still so stunned that she can’t process what he’s saying, but Dong-chan keeps going, and says that the pattern that Saet-byul drew in the shack is a phoenix’s tail—as in, the bird on the presidential crest.

The president reaches her table just as this information starts to sink in, and Soo-hyun now notices that Tattooed Man is standing in the president’s entourage as a bodyguard.

President Kim takes her hand, and she looks down at the ring on his finger… with the same phoenix insignia on it. Shivers run down her spine (or is it mine?) and she stands there stunned as the president walks by.

That’s when she notices the president’s granddaughter about to walk past, and Soo-hyun suddenly whirls around and grabs the child with one hand and a steak knife with the other. Aaaaaaaah.

Everyone draws guns around her, and Soo-hyun demands the president return her daughter if he wants to save his granddaughter. She scoffs that she’s not afraid of guns—if Saet-byul dies she dies anyway, so death doesn’t scare her.

Suddenly someone tackles her. And at the same time, the lights cut out. Holy shit.

 
COMMENTS

Is that really the best plan? Go to prison for threatening the president’s granddaughter in a room full of armed secret service agents? We don’t have time for you to be locked up in another asylum! Crazy as the stunt is, I do think it’s effective in getting the president’s attention, but it also outs the fact that they’re onto the political scheme, which is the scariest thing of all. Because up until now, I didn’t really fear for Soo-hyun or Dong-chan’s lives, because they were in the business of saving Saet-byul. But now that there’s a government conspiracy to uncover—one that Grandpa and Te-oh ran away from uncovering themselves—I fear for their safety. I suppose it’s always a good thing to ratchet up the tension in the final act, but really, I was already on the edge of my seat. Now I have to worry about men in black hunting them down for knowing too much about the president too?

Not that I don’t want them to be big heroes and save the country while they’re saving Saet-byul, because frankly a president who agrees to aid in a child’s kidnapping to raise sympathy so he can leave a stronger political legacy is despicable in a whole new way. (Also, I have serious doubts that that’s all there is to the story, given how political gain doesn’t provide quite enough motivation to explain all sides of the conspiracy.)

Now that Soo-hyun and Dong-chan have caught up to the idea that Saet-byul’s kidnapper and Soo-jung’s murderer are one and the same, I’ve changed my mind about it because it seems too coincidental that one man killed Soo-jung, and then his child is murdered, but that murderer goes unpunished, which fuels a revenge scheme. It doesn’t add up. If you’re a killer, you’d get your revenge by killing, not by arguing for the justice department to legalize the death penalty.

It makes sense that Hwang Kyung-soo hates Ji-hoon for essentially switching sides—he goes from prosecutor to human rights lawyer within the lifespan of this one case—and becomes the symbol of all that is wrong with the justice system from this one father’s point of view. So I buy that he might kidnap Saet-byul and that the president would pull the necessary strings to make it happen. But the massive cover-up surrounding Soo-jung’s murder, while linked, can’t have been orchestrated by this same man. He’s someone who wants ONE of the killers on death row dead, but it’s not Ki Dong-ho. He’s a father fueled by revenge, not a killer trying to cover up his tracks who then also wants retribution. Either we’re back to the murderer and the kidnapper as two separate people (quite possibly in cahoots—frankly I think everyone’s in cahoots in this world), or he’s not the bad guy we’re after. My guess is that he’s a patsy, and his grief was used to manipulate him.

I’m far more curious about Grandpa and his son, and what this Angel Foundation really does. If there’s anyone more suspicious than a political leader, it’s the filthy rich people who control political leaders. But I still want to believe that Grandpa and Te-oh fall on the good side of the divide, even if it’s just inches away from the evil side. I’d like to think that Grandpa is helping Dong-chan, which by the way makes me question whether his heart attack in the first timeline is due to natural causes or is yet another murder.

In any case, I’m so glad that we finally cleared Dong-ho’s name and that Dong-chan is finally asking the right questions. It was so frustrating that he refused to believe that he might’ve been wrong about his brother, but their prison confrontation today was all the more moving because of it. His stupidly bullheaded façade melted in one heartbreaking moment when he realized that his brother suffered silently for so long out of love for him. I love the anger mixed with guilt in his reaction—because he didn’t kill her, but that doesn’t change Dong-ho’s act of love. I know a lot of this episode was just exposition as the dots were being connected, but there’s such a great synergy when Dong-chan and Soo-hyun are putting their heads together that I’m just enraptured and I don’t realize they’re rattling off plot to each other. If only every show could mask obvious exposition in a partnership like this one, dramaland would be a much better place.

 
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