You’re All Surrounded: Episode 2

by girlfriday

You know what’s funny about this show is that it’s a comedy for everyone else and a thriller for Seung-gi, but somehow it works because he’s playing the humorless hero of his own revenge tale who isn’t aware that the meta situation is funny. It’s the same dissonance we saw in the backstory when Ji-yong was being chased by a killer while Soo-sun was making jokes over the PA system, and it turns out to be their overall dynamic even now—everything for him is life and death, while everyone else is just trying to get through their day. And at the Gangnam Police Station, one day is pretty damn eventful, to say the least.

Ratings-wise, You’re All Surounded premiered in first place with 12.3% yesterday, and solidified its lead with Episode 2 bringing in 14.2%. (A New Leaf is second and Golden Cross third, both in the 8% range.)

 
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Memory Trees – “LOST” [ Download ]

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EPISODE 2: “The reason we are not detectives”

Our team heads out on their first case, and we rewind a bit to the drive that led up to the thug chase. The police van gets stuck in gridlock traffic, and Team Leader Pan-seok asks for the siren.

The ever-so-eager, not-so-bright Soo-sun grabs what looks like an orange Starbucks cup and throws it on the roof, where of course it immediately falls and shatters. And the rookie mistakes are just beginning. Pan-seok tells them to dangle their handcuffs out the windows, and sure enough, people start to move their cars out of the way. Sometimes lo-fi works.

When they get to the front of the traffic jam, they finally see that no one’s moving because two tattooed men are sitting on stools in the middle of the street. It looks to be some sort of standoff, er sitoff, though they hurry and get back in their car at the sight of Pan-seok.

We cut to the chase (literally) and catch up to the moment when one of the thugs grabs scared little Ji Gook as a hostage. Everyone else panics, but Dae-gu is as cool as a cucumber as he takes out his gun and aims it at the pair of them.

Everyone screams no, and he looks like he might shoot anyway, but then he puts the gun back in the holster and swaps it out for the taser. They still protest, but he shoots anyway, and it shocks Ji Gook and takes the thug down with him.

When they return from their outing, the precinct is buzzing with activity. The typical Gangnam arrests? Let’s see, there are rich entitled Korean-American kids, clubbers, and sasaeng fangirl wars.

The fangirls immediately stop arguing when pretty boy Tae-il walks in though, and tell Gook to hurry up and move so they can get a clear picture of him. Tae-il looooves the attention and strikes a pose or three.

They even fawn over Soo-sun and Dae-gu, and every time another picture gets snapped, you can hear Pan-seok’s last nerve snapping along with it. He finally cracks and storms into Section Chief Cha’s office to demand a rookie swap—at least two of the newbies for two cops with some detective experience.

But Chief Cha is clearly enjoying this moment of superiority, as he points out the nameplate that makes him the detective section chief. He calls Pan-seok a gangster and washes his hands of the rookie allotment, and tells him to take it up with the police chief if he has a problem with it.

Clearly this guy is going to be a bureaucratic pain in the ass, and it’s worse because he seems to have a personal grudge when it comes to Pan-seok.

So back to Team 3 he goes, where Eung-go has lined up the rookies to see if Pan-seok wants to say anything else to them. He introduces himself as “The Legendary Seo Pan-seok; you will have heard of me.”

He says that he doesn’t raise just anyone as his children, so they ought to quit now. “For the citizens of Gangnam! And for my mental health… quit now.” He points to Soo-sun and Gook in particular, urging them to pack their bags quickly.

But Pan-seok’s demeanor changes rapidly when Sa-kyung, the new missing persons team leader, walks into the room. He walks up sheepishly and asks when she arrived in Korea.

She answers him with a slap, and he takes it, forcing the same light tone as he says he’s doing well. She says he should be suffering or dead for all the wishing she did, and asks if he even knows why she hit him.

He nods and says that day just turned out that way, and she slaps him again, so hard that everyone else in the room flinches. She spits back that he should’ve just said he forgot, and barks orders at another detective before stomping out.

Pan-seok shows a totally different side as he struggles to contain what he’s feeling. It’s raw enough a moment that everyone averts his gaze for fear of being caught watching the very public argument.

The rookies ask Eung-do what Pan-seok’s relationship is to Sa-kyung, but he says they’ll find out in due time. Eung-do turns his attention to his team and pairs them off as partners.

He pairs Tae-il and Gook together and of course Soo-sun and Dae-gu. He tells them partners are one body and they have to learn to trust each other. Tae-il and Gook are adorably happy to be paired and share a little fist-bump. Soo-sun offers up a friendly handshake, and Dae-gu just looks away.

He asks who wants the first assignment, and everyone but Dae-gu raises a hand. He looks around and cautiously raises his too, just to play along.

Police Chief Kang and her detective section chief go to see an assemblyman, whom they still call Commissioner Yoo because he used to be their boss.

He takes note of Chief Kang’s risky experiment taking on so many rookies, and just tells her not to fail. The way she smiles with her mouth but glares with her eyes tells me either he’s evil or she is, but they’re not on the same side.

Soo-sun gets tasked with interrogating the thug they caught, and she robotically asks questions like she’s reading out of Interrogation 101. According to the suspect, they were sitting in the middle of the street to have an endurance contest. Well that explains nothing except for the size of your brain.

While she’s busy with that, Gook is unloading supplies behind her, and puts his box-cutter down on her desk. Eek, don’t do that.

The thug doesn’t miss a beat and palms it while no one is looking. Eung-do tells Soo-sun to tie the suspect up and change out of her slippers before taking him to holding.

Dae-gu and Soo-sun take him to the cell together, and she asks Dae-gu if they know each other from somewhere because he seems familiar. He says no. The thug cuts through his ropes by the time they get to the stairwell, and he pushes them down a flight to break free.

They land in a pile on top of each other, and Dae-gu goes running after their baddie, while Soo-sun hops around looking for her other slipper.

The thug actually manages to get behind the wheel of one of the police vans in the lot, and he’s just about to make a clean getaway when another van slams right into him.

The smoke clears and Pan-seok comes into view. Oh no, of all the people. He comes out to survey the situation, and all it takes is one look at the thug and Soo-sun ineffectually holding out her slipper for him to know what happened.

He lines up his team inside and launches into an epic tirade, asking Soo-sun if she didn’t learn the rules of interrogation at the academy, if she didn’t know not to put a weapon on her desk like an open invitation for criminals, or if she didn’t hear her squad chief reminding her to change her shoes.

She apologizes profusely, but swears the knife wasn’t her doing. It doesn’t appease Pan-seok any for her to pass the blame, not that she knows whose knife it was anyway.

He turns his attention to Dae-gu, who doesn’t seem the least bit contrite for his part in the debacle. Sure enough, when asked, Dae-gu says the only thing he did wrong was overestimate his partner’s skills, and then he says it’s really the team leader’s fault for not supervising the rookies better. Oh no he di’n’t.

Pan-seok can only laugh as he steps closer and closer: “Where did this crazy son of a bitch roll in from?” Just as the smile fades from his face and he’s about to launch into an ass-whooping, Eung-do holds him back and then Chief Cha walks in, foaming at the mouth.

He pitches a fit, and the rookies get to witness what happens to their team leader when they make a mistake: he gets reamed by the boss, and after being called every name in the book, he has to bow in apology. Chief Cha still wants someone to take responsibility, and tells him to resign immediately.

Her teammates buy Soo-sun a soda to try and calm her down, but she’s pissed at Dae-gu for being so disloyal to his partner. She swears she wasn’t the one who put a knife there, and Gook doesn’t say a word.

Police Chief Kang tells Pan-seok that no one needs to resign, and asks him to take care of the rookies. She knows he isn’t happy about the newbie onslaught, and he tells her it’s too risky.

He says that detectives don’t have the luxury of making mistakes, because in this department, mistakes mean lives lost. “You can’t save someone who’s already dead!”

She wisely points out that he was once a rookie too, and the full weight of what that means isn’t lost on either of them. His eyes flicker with vulnerability, and she says that experience is what made him the detective he is today. I’ve decided she’s the good guy.

That night, Dae-gu walks down a shady street and dons a shady hat. He walks into a store and asks for a duplicate of a cell phone, and then he sneaks into someone’s apartment and puts a spy camera into the light fixture. How very Bond of you.

Soo-sun is doing her own investigating in the precinct, where she finds the x-acto knife she was accused of leaving around. She takes it to the lab and begs the tech to get fingerprints, and he agrees.

Dae-gu returns to the precinct and slides Pan-seok’s phone back on his desk, and jumps when Soo-sun calls his name. She tries to smooth things over, but he says it’s really his own fault for not having deduced that he had a birdbrain for a partner. Ouch.

He has the most offensive way of speaking—it’s barbed but oozing with equal parts apathy and superiority. He points out that her assessment that detectives make the most money was calculated without considering the long hours and the sleepless nights.

When you factor in time on the job for an hourly pay rate, a detective gets crap pay. Though really, his takeaway from all this is that she’s too stupid to have figured this out, which makes her an unfit partner. He tells her to quit now, and leaves her sputtering in his wake.

Dae-gu finds a large envelope in his mailbox when he gets home, and home turns out to be a police dorm apartment that he shares with Gook and Tae-il. Gook is just as surprised that they’re all roomies, and hops in excitement when Dae-gu chooses his room to share.

He follows Dae-gu in and opens his arms wide like he’s waiting for a hug, and can’t even finish his welcome speech before Dae-gu cuts him off: “Don’t talk to me.” Heh. I’m going to enjoy the roommate shenanigans.

Gook guesses he’s tired and reaches for a scented candle. Dae-gu: “Don’t make anything smell.” Gook starts to hang a wall clock. Dae-gu: “Don’t make any noise.” So he puts that down and starts getting into the bunk bed. Dae-gu: “Don’t think about sharing a bed with me.”

This goes on until eventually Gook trudges into Tae-il’s room with his pillow and blanket, ha, and Tae-il puts away the photo he was looking at. (A brother? Friend? Boyfriend?) Gook says he’s too Type A to handle a prickly Type B like Dae-gu, as if he didn’t just get passive-aggressively kicked out of his own room.

Tae-il is as easygoing as always and lets him pick the bottom bunk (because Gook is afraid of heights, lol) and tells him, “It’s not where you sleep, but the person you sleep with that matters.”

Pan-seok comes home to his bare apartment filled with nothing but instant ramyun containers and beer cans, and of course his is the apartment that Dae-gu bugged earlier that night.

Now that he has the room to himself, Dae-gu opens his laptop and watches the live feed from Pan-seok’s house, though all he sees tonight is Pan-seok opening up his phone and sighing over somebody he wants to call but doesn’t.

Dae-gu then busts out his Big Board—a computer file he projects onto the wall, which is pretty smart. It’s everything surrounding the original Masan murder case that Pan-seok was working, the one that Mom witnessed. It includes a missing persons report on Kim Ji-yong.

He answers a call from someone named S, and says that he got the report in the mail, and that Pan-seok doesn’t recognize him at all.

One thing does have him concerned though—there’s someone from Masan on his team, which is a wrench he wasn’t expecting. He doesn’t seem overly concerned about Soo-sun since she isn’t all that bright, but it’s still not a good thing for whatever plan he’s cooking up.

Then he opens up the file he got in the mail, and it’s the original police report of Mom’s murder. It shakes him to see her in the photographs, and he struggles to hold back tears. In the morning he goes to the cemetery, and this time he can’t fight the tears. His country accent slips out as he says, “I’m here. I’m here, Mom.”

At the precinct, Eung-do tells Pan-seok about a new case involving girls from a nightclub who are involved in a credit card scam with a fancy restaurant. They get rich guys to spend, and skim a little off the top.

When Pan-seok sits at his desk, Soo-sun interrupts with an evidence report on the x-acto knife and says that her fingerprints weren’t on it, and this was the only way to prove her innocence, and there’s no need to apologize. Haha.

An apology is the last thing on Pan-seok’s lips, but the whole thing is so ridiculous that he doesn’t have a retort handy. Soo-sun just awkwardly sits down at her desk and goes over her entire speech, written on the post-it in her hand.

The whole team gets up to go work this new case, but Pan-seok benches them and says that their skills are perfectly suited for sitting at a desk. He brings up the death of one of the other squad chief’s partners to drive the point home, and says that if they’re going to be concerned about getting their pride wounded over being blamed for things they didn’t do, they should just stay here.

Gook asks why Soo-sun had to go and bring up the x-acto knife, and she spits back that his fingerprints were on it but she left that part out of the report. They bicker back and forth passing the blame, until Dae-gu finally erupts and says that the point is that they just got left behind.

Meanwhile, Pan-seok and Eung-do go on a man-date at the restaurant where the credit card scam is happening, but one look at their table sends the con artist running away. They lose her, and Eung-do nags Pan-seok that they should’ve brought the rookies like he said, because their faces have Detective written all over them. Pfft, is true.

Pan-seok doesn’t want to hear it, but Eung-do says there’s no other way to get close to the operation if they don’t use their fresh-faced team. The rookies stew at their desks wondering if their detective careers are already over, when Eung-do calls.

The van parks outside a club and the rookies are dressed to go undercover. Pan-seok tells them that their cover is the most important thing, and their goal is to identify the con artists and try to get dates with them. He adds one rule: under no circumstances are they to engage in a fight.

The team struts in, and everyone takes up a different position. Soo-sun sits in the women’s restroom with a recorder on hand, waiting for a juicy conversation. Gook goes to a waiter and asks to book the best girls, and Tae-il walks through the club like he’s done this a hundred times. Immediately girls clamor for his attention.

Dae-gu parks it at the bar, and goes shopping for watches online. Huh? Oh, it turns out to be lightning fast research, because after scanning the crowd, he starts seeing every person as a sum of their net worth, via diamonds, watches, and shoes. Lol, the fake brands—Hermeni, Cartigi.

Tae-il asks what he’s doing, and Dae-gu shares what he’s deduced thus far about the women on the dance floor based on their gait, the length of their nails, and the clothes they wear: the size of their bank accounts, and whether or not they’ve ever had to work a day in their lives to get it.

Tae-il is impressed, and when Dae-gu moves onto sizing up the next girl, they both recognize the watch she’s wearing as the one charged to one of the stolen cards. Despite Gook’s interruption over fashion advice, Tae-il manages to get her number.

Soo-sun overhears a conversation in the bathroom, and pretends to be drunk to get a good look at the two girls.

It’s the one who ran away from Pan-seok and Eung-do at the restaurant, and the watch girl that Dae-gu and Tae-il spotted. They’re partners, and they talk about how many unsuspecting dates they managed to snag tonight.

Soo-sun follows one of them out of the restroom, and watches in horror as a rich snotty girl picks a fight with the con artist because she stepped on her designer shoe. She’s a nasty piece of work, and Soo-sun almost intervenes, but Gook holds her back and reminds her of Pan-seok’s rule.

But then she starts beating the girl with her purse, drawing blood, and Dae-gu steps in to try and stop her. Bad idea! Bad idea!

He goes about it the wrong way naturally, and his attempt to be logical just backfires and she grabs him by the hair and throws him down like he’s not twice her size. It’s hysterical.

The entire team gets dragged into it, and the fight spills over onto the dance floor. What the rookies failed to notice was a pair of cops (at least they look like cops) sitting at a booth and filming something with their phones. They’re waiting for some sort of exchange to go down, but the fight causes a ruckus and they lose their shot.

The brawl gets out of control and Dae-gu tries to crawl out of the mess, when he suddenly spots a man lying on the ground and bleeding from the gut. The sight of the bleeding body, the blood on his hands—it sends him spiraling back to the day he found his mother’s body.

It’s just like before with Mom lying in a pool of blood, but this time it’s grown-up Dae-gu who finds her. He reaches out with a shaky hand, “Mom?”

Soo-sun sees the body and runs over to ask Dae-gu for a phone, but he’s still in shock and can’t register what she’s saying. She calls out to him over and over, but he just sits there like a stone.

The party reaches its peak and the air cannons shoot confetti everywhere. Soo-sun realizes that she can’t get anyone to help her in this commotion, and that’s when she notices one of the cops in the middle of the fray.

She reaches for the gun in his holster. She aims it up at the DJ stand, but can’t steady her nerves. Dae-gu takes the gun out of her hand and shoots without hesitating. The sound system short-circuits and the club comes to a grinding halt.

Pan-seok and Eung-do have no idea what’s going on, and watch slack-jawed from their van as the rookies get hauled off in handcuffs. Dae-gu is the first to get interrogated by the other cops, but since the two con artists they’re trying to nab are sitting behind him, he doesn’t say a word.

The rest of the team follows suit, and soon all four are locked up in cells. Pan-seok and Eung-do come by a little later to claim the idiots as their own, and the other cop laughs to hear that those bozos are detectives. Still, he refuses to let them out since they blew his cover when he was minutes away from cracking a drug case that he’s lost months of sleep over.

Eung-do wonders what they do now, and Pan-seok sighs, “Call the toad.” HA, you guys call him a toad too? They mean Chief Cha, of course, and the rookies hang their heads as they’re released.

Back at their own precinct, Pan-seok grabs the scariest stick—it’s basically a wooden beam—and demands to know who started the fight. Dae-gu steps forward and says it was him, but immediately Soo-sun says it was her, and then Tae-il, and then Gook.

Eung-do can’t help but smile that they’re already covering for each other, though it just pisses Pan-seok off more not to get a straight answer. He repeats his rules about not fighting, and reminds them that this was their last chance. He says they’ve failed, so now he never wants to see their faces again.

They’re ordered to pack up and go: “And if I ever, ever see one of your faces ever again, it’ll be your funeral! I never want to see your faces again, you sons of bitches!” At that, he drops the wooden beam with a loud clang.

Without a word, Dae-gu takes out the recorder in his pocket and plays the file of the two con artists talking about nabbing guys, and they mention a boss by the name of Kim. Eung-do asks if they recorded that, and Gook says that Soo-sun sat in the restroom all night to get that tape, and they even got a date with one of the girls for tomorrow.

He starts to blubber through his tears, and cries that they worked really really hard, and didn’t reveal their identities at the police station because those girls were right there and the case came first. Soo-sun silently wipes away a few tears.

Pan-seok and Eung-do are floored, and it’s for a tiny second, but Pan-seok looks impressed and a little sorry for screaming.

He looks like he’s about to say something nice, but then his phone starts vibrating. A second later, Dae-gu’s phone starts vibrating in his pocket. Uh. Oh. You’re carrying the clonephone in your pocket when you’re standing two feet away from the guy??

Pan-seok doesn’t think much of it at first, but then his phone stops ringing and so does Dae-gu’s, at exactly the same moment. One excruciatingly long silent beat later, Pan-seok’s phone starts to ring again. And so does Dae-gu’s.

Dae-gu tenses up and drops the recorder in his hand to reach for his phone. The team notices his nervous reaction, and worse yet, Pan-seok can tell something is not right. He whirls around and looms in Dae-gu’s face, the tension between them growing more taut with every buzz from their phones.

 
COMMENTS

I fear for Dae-gu’s life once Pan-seok realizes he’s been spying on him, but I enjoy that the tension between them is ever-present, since right now Dae-gu has the upper hand because of his anonymity. He’s being pretty brash with the cameras and the cloning of cell phones, but I suppose he didn’t insert himself into Pan-seok’s life to take his time and play it safe. He’s probably only in mortal danger if Pan-seok is actually a dirty cop, which I don’t believe he is (or okay, I don’t want to believe he is, because naturally I’m rooting for the bromance).

But Pan-seok seems like a genuinely good guy—someone who might not respect his superior but takes his lumps and obeys the chain of command anyway. He’s responsible for his rookies’ mistakes, and he doesn’t ever pass the buck. That’s what he teaches them by example, and in no time they absorb what they see and mimic it, like little sponges. And it pays off because their moment of growth as a team—sticking up for each other right after selling each other out just earlier in the day—was really sweet.

It was fun to see the rookies take on their first case that involved actual police skill (and thankfully they’re not actually terrible at their jobs). It felt rewarding to see them succeed as a team, especially after bungling things up with the taser arrest and x-acto interrogation. There’s a nice complementary energy when everyone’s on the job and sharpening their various skills. I’m still not sure what Gook’s strengths are, but I’m sure we’ll find them eventually. For now he’s great for comic relief, especially whenever he tries to talk to Dae-gu.

I’m looking forward to lots of hilarious roommate conflicts (it totally hadn’t occurred to me that they’d also be living together), and I can’t wait for the partnerships to start breeding loyalty and trust, against all efforts to remain detached. Is there anything better than reluctant friendships? Maybe it’s Pan-seok’s secret plan to be so mean that they band together. Okay, maybe not, but I’d like to think that at least Mama Bear Eung-do wants that for them.

What I like most about the newest case is that it shows that Dae-gu’s temperament could either make him a really good cop, or a really really terrible one, and he’s not actually as in control of things as he’d like. It’s impressive when he’s using his brain, but he’s clearly still traumatized by Mom’s death, and he’s a loose cannon and a hothead like Pan-seok, which is just one more reason there are going to be fireworks when they face off. You’d better get your story straight, Dae-gu, or you’ll be sleeping with the fishes.

 
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