You’re All Surrounded: Episode 3

by girlfriday

It’s time for our young grasshoppers to learn a few harsh truths about protecting and serving. Perhaps there’s no such thing as rookie detectives because you have to face the same consequences whether you’ve been on the job two days or two decades. True, calamity does seem to follow our team around more than most, but it’s the stakes—no matter what you do, they’re always life and death.

 
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Blue Paprika – “긴긴밤” (Long Long Night) [ Download ]

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EPISODE 3: “There are no rookie detectives”

Eun Dae-gu is about to get his ass fish-fried when Team Leader Pan-seok notices a peculiar pattern with the cell phone in Dae-gu’s pocket that seems to be ringing in lock-step with his.

He looms over Dae-gu, who could not look any more suspicious right now. He sweats bullets for what seems like the longest pause ever, when suddenly Gook’s phone rings too and he answers it to tell his mommy to call later.

Phew, it’s enough to break Pan-seok out of the paranoid reverie, and Dae-gu breathes a sigh of relief once he gets to his room.

The next morning, the rookies on Team 3 press their ears against the door of the conference room while awaiting the final verdict: did they screw up enough to get axed, or will they live to see another day?

Inside, Chief Toad is obviously in favor of making them pay for their egregious mistakes. But thankfully Police Chief Kang is the boss, and she defers to Pan-seok to make the decision himself—if he wants to give them another chance, that’s enough for her.

She practically hands them a free pass by doing that, and then all eyes turn to Pan-seok. He gets all fired up and declares (with zest, no less) that those fish-brained rookies need to be fired at once. See, everybody likes fish jokes! (Technically, he calls them carp-heads.) He huffs that he hardly knows how they passed the exam to become cops in the first place, and that allowing them to continue as detectives is an affront to taxpayers. Ha.

This is definitely not going the way Chief Kang intended. The rookies’ faces fall as they listen in, and Dae-gu is the first to start walking away. But then Pan-seok’s rant winds down, and he lets out a quiet “But…”

“…Give me a few months.” His partner Eung-do finally cracks an adorable smile, and Pan-seok says that since they’ve been put under his care, he’ll at least get their umbilical cords off and teach them to walk before making a decision.

The rookies jump for joy out in the hallway, and Soo-sun runs over to Dae-gu for a high-five. He walks away and leaves her hanging.

Pan-seok lines them up outside and can tell by their faces that they already heard the news for themselves. Soo-sun eagerly asks if this means they’re his kids now, but Pan-seok tells them the only thing he’ll be teaching them in the next three months is: “You will never be detectives.”

He’s decided that the sole purpose of gracing them with his unrivaled awesomeness is to prove this statement as fact. He encourages them to quit at any time, but then adds that the violent crimes unit is a team, and if one goes, the rest get fired too.

Dae-gu pipes up for the first time and argues that it’s unfair—there’s no official rule that they have to take responsibility for each other’s mistakes to that extent. Pan-seok cuts him off: “Unfair? You can go then.” He looks right into Dae-gu’s laser stare: “And why do your eyeballs look like that again?” Dae-gu begrudgingly lowers his gaze, and everyone is ordered into the car. Woohoo, training montage time?

They stop in the middle of a neighborhood in their district and Pan-seok confiscates their phones. He kicks them out in the middle of the street with nothing but a building number and the order to catch the hypothetical criminal there.

The rookies split up and everyone goes about it differently. Dae-gu searches his brain for the giant map of Gangnam back at the station, like a live GPS. Soo-sun goes straight for the real estate office, which is smart, but she gets caught in a loopy conversation with the old man who asks if she’s looking for a rental.

Tae-il wanders about until a woman in a sports car stops to ask him if he needs directions. Heh. Life is so different for the pretty. And Gook flails about until he spots a deliveryman on a scooter and chases him down.

Pan-seok saunters over to the address to wait, and Dae-gu is the first to run up, with the rest of this teammates only seconds behind. I’m impressed that they all made it, but Pan-seok scowls and says he just got through telling them how they’re supposed to be a team, and they all came separately. He climbs into the van and makes them follow on foot.

The next lesson is Stakeout 101: he says that to catch a raccoon, you either go in after it, or you wait patiently until the raccoon comes out on its own. Basically they have to stay in the van, and if one of them comes out before twelve hours are up, they go straight to the next lesson without rest.

Gook is already regretting his choice to be a detective, while Tae-il suggests they think of it like a long flight to Paris. Dae-gu snatches the water bottle out of Soo-sun’s hand and reminds her sternly that they have twelve hours to go.

Four hours later, they’re trying to distract each other with small talk. Seven hours later, they’re desperately trying not to pee their pants, and a silent but deadly smell makes everyone pinch their noses and turn accusingly towards Dae-gu.

Eleven hours later, everyone’s got a screw loose. Gook asks if he’s already peed his pants because he can’t tell, and the others have to hold him back from running out with one hour left to go. When he can’t get past Soo-sun, he tries Dae-gu’s door.

It opens, and HA—Dae-gu is the first one out. Pan-seok enjoys the moment thoroughly and doesn’t hide the gloating.

As promised, they go straight to their next mission, where Pan-seok shows them CCTV footage of a man coming out of an apartment building and throwing away a chewed-up wad of gum in a wrapper.

He says that this is the last piece of DNA evidence they have left in this fake case, so they have to find the gum. They all look at him like he’s crazy. If you only knew how many cigarette butts this man once collected voluntarily.

The foursome faces off with the mound of trash, pink gloves at the ready. Gook and Tae-il immediately complain that this isn’t worth it, Soo-sun sighs that she has it the worst because she’s got a dog’s sense of smell, but again Dae-gu is the first to give up and walk away. Soo-sun runs after him to point out that this is his fault for leaving the stakeout van early.

He tells them it’s pointless anyway, since Pan-seok can’t fire them as easily as he’s letting on. He reminds them that they heard Chief Kang back them up during the meeting—it means she has a vested interest in their survival.

The boys are quick to take Dae-gu’s side, arguing that they could very easily go home right now and return to the precinct later and lie that they searched every bit of trash and came up empty.

Soo-sun rails at them for taking the weasel’s way out, and all it takes is one whip-cracking And you call yourselves men?! for Tae-il and Gook to shuffle back to trash duty. Haha, she’s so the boss of them. Even Dae-gu is a little amazed at how quickly they fold at her order, but he just turns around and walks away.

She seethes at his disloyalty, and grabs the nearest trash bag and just starts pounding him in the back of the head, lol.

Hilariously, the thing she calls him out on: “Did you think I wouldn’t know that you’re the one who farted?!” They all argue back and forth over the stakeout fart, and she just keeps hitting him until the bag finally bursts and trash flies everywhere.

But among the shower of debris is a gum wrapper—the very one they’re looking for. The whole group comes to a screeching halt, and then everyone dives for it, leading to an all-out war over who gets to claim the gum wad.

It’s a hair-pulling, trash-flinging mess of a dogpile, and the gum wrapper changes hands like a hot potato until finally Soo-sun gets a hold of it and stuffs it in her bra before the boys can reach her. Her victory smile is priceless.

They slo-mo walk into the precinct, covered in trash and making everyone recoil at their stench. Pan-seok is rendered speechless as Soo-sun holds out the gum wad and says with full-on crazy eyes that she found it.

Pan-seok tries not to gag and tells them to clean up because they’re going to go wrap up the nightclub case. Yay, they passed!

The team busts in on the ringleader, who’s actually teaching an academy-style class on how to con sugar daddies to a room full of girls. During the arrest, Soo-sun picks up on a peculiar smell from one of the girls, and Pan-seok finds marijuana in her purse.

Her teammates acknowledge Soo-sun’s self-proclaimed dog nose, and she robotically recites the girl’s Miranda rights as she cuffs her. Pan-seok finds even more drugs in her possession, and Dae-gu notices a picture of her boyfriend on her phone.

He thinks back to the club, and it dawns on him that he saw the boyfriend—likely her drug supplier—talking to the stab victim just before he was found bleeding to death. He chooses not to say anything.

At the other precinct, Pan-seok hands over the drug dealer’s girlfriend to the narcotics task force and asks to call it even now. The other detective isn’t impressed, but then Dae-gu hands him the phone and says the boyfriend should be the dealer he’s looking for.

That’s the guy they were trying to catch in the club before all hell broke loose, and the detective says Dae-gu is better than Pan-seok. Eep.

Pan-seok flips his lid and asks why Dae-gu didn’t say anything about it earlier, and he spits back defiantly that Pan-seok didn’t ask, “And I figured you wouldn’t trust the word of an infantile carp-for-brains anyway.”

Everyone braces for impact, but Pan-seok just barks at them to return to their own station. When he gets there, Pan-seok sees Sa-kyung walking by and follows her.

He peeps at her through the blinds which is a little skulky, especially when she takes off her shirt to try and put a patch on her back.

That’s when he sees her back covered in giant bruises, and he reaches for the door, but can’t bring himself to open it. Instead he just watches heartbroken from the window, until she finally notices him and tells him to help if he’s going to watch.

His voice turns so meek when he’s with her. He asks how she got so bruised, and she doesn’t give much of an answer, but the two-second touch is pretty much all that needs to be said.

He hesitates, as if the three-square-inch space of the menthol patch is his only safe zone for touching her. It’s so unexpectedly timid and tender. He asks if she’ll have dinner with him, but she turns him down and says she wouldn’t be able to digest her food with him around.

Soo-sun comes by the evidence room and her jaw drops to see them together like that. Pan-seok catches her snooping, and tells her she’s dead if he catches her one more time.

Gook wakes up in the middle of the night and comes into Dae-gu’s room because he hears the TV on. He goes to shut off the projector that’s playing a drama on his ceiling, and nearly loses a hand when Dae-gu wakes up with a start. He growls at Gook to get out, and leaves the TV on like he can’t sleep without it. D’awww, watching him curled up in fetal position breaks my heart.

Soo-sun heads home and she narrates that she’s been living in this gosiwon village for the last three years with the simple goal of becoming a full-fledged member of society. She doesn’t know if this is her dream, but she feels proud of a hard day’s work.

But when she gets to her gosiwon, there’s a ruckus outside and she learns that the building has been sold to a new owner, and their deposits have disappeared along with the previous landlord. Her face falls—she paid three months in advance, and has nowhere to go. Heyyyyyy, I know someone who has a bunk bed!

Dae-gu arrives at the precinct early the next morning, and takes the chance to dig around in Pan-seok’s desk. He doesn’t notice Soo-sun coming around the corner (she must’ve slept here), and she watches him curiously.

Once people start filing into the office he stops, and belatedly notices she’s been there the whole time.

Pan-seok lines them up and hands each set of partners their first official cases where they’re the lead detectives. Dae-gu and Soo-sun get a stalker case, and Tae-il and Gook get a plastic surgery office theft. Pan-seok is going to be away for two nights on official business, and warns them not to ever act alone.

Dae-gu nags Soo-sun the whole time she’s driving (she does drive like a granny) and takes her phone away when she answers a call about her lost gosiwon deposit. When she takes it back insisting that it’s okay because they’re stopped at a light, he honks the horn and tattles on her to the two traffic cops standing at the intersection. Pfft.

She ends up with a ticket for talking on her phone while driving, and fumes in silent outrage. They meet with their stalking victim, who tells them about the man she met on a blind date who won’t stop calling and following her.

It escalated when she met a new guy on a blind date, and the stalker started stealing things and making death threats. Dae-gu asks if she has any evidence, because they can’t proceed otherwise since stalking is a misdemeanor. He says coldly that that’s all they can do and gets up to leave.

But Soo-sun can see how scared the woman is, and offers to get the evidence so they can nab the guy. Dae-gu drags her outside to lecture her on thinking first, or at least keeping her mouth shut if she can’t fire up her brain.

She just wants to help people and do the right thing, but he has no desire to lift a finger to do anything above and beyond the very minimal, by-the-book call of duty, and tells her he won’t be a backup dancer to her one-woman overzealous show.

He tells her to do it all herself if she’s so eager, and starts to walk away. But Soo-sun stops him in his tracks with a very familiar string of insults—the exact childish words she spewed at him when they were tweens and he made her miss her idol audition.

She adds that she could also tell Pan-seok about Dae-gu snooping around in his desk this morning, and counts to three with her phone dangling out. He scoffs, “Do you think that’ll get me to work?” Cut to: Dae-gu retrieving CCTV footage of the stalker.

They get to work, and Dae-gu half-heartedly goes along with Soo-sun’s plans to try and catch the stalker in the act.

Meanwhile, Tae-il and Gook head to the plastic surgery office, and Gook gets ushered to the face consultation line by the receptionist. Ha. As they walk away, a man comes up to the desk to ask if Tae-il is a patient here because he wants to look like that guy.

The case involves propofol theft, which the clinic believes was committed by a patient. Gook watches the live CCTV feed of the multiple exam rooms, and says this patient is suspicious because she keeps going from room to room and changing her clothes.

The receptionist points out that they’re different women. Gook: “But they look the same!” HA. Okay, that made me laugh out loud.

On their way out, a young doctor runs up and surprises Tae-il with a kiss on the cheek. Gook watches slackjawed as Tae-il pushes the man away brusquely and tells him to stay away from him. There’s an edge to his voice that makes it seem like they aren’t just overly affectionate friends.

Dae-gu and Soo-sun stage a meeting with the stalker, waiting to pounce the second he gets violent. But despite being highly delusional (he talks as if he’s the woman’s boyfriend, which he clearly is not), he doesn’t show any outward signs of being aggressive.

The woman tells the stalker in no uncertain terms that they were never together, and she’s with someone else now. The stalker wrings his hands nervously, but doesn’t give the reaction they were expecting. So Soo-sun texts Dae-gu to go play the boyfriend to try and get a reaction out of him.

He rolls his eyes but complies, and even as he leads the woman away, the stalker just stews silently. Is he not as violent as they think or just building up a scary amount of inner rage?

Outside, Soo-sun assures the woman not to worry because they’ll keep watch over her 24 hours a day. Now it’s Dae-gu’s turn to fume silently.

Pan-seok’s work trip turns out to be a lecture at the police academy, where he was invited as the sunbae students most want to meet. After an uncharacteristically encouraging lecture, he opens it up for questions, and a young man asks what his first unsolved case was and why it remains unsolved.

Pan-seok’s face dims as he tells them about the unsolved murder case of an eyewitness to a murder, and the disappearance of her fifteen-year-old son. Chief Kang comes by after the lecture and wonders if he’s feeling nostalgic, and he admits to being asked about that case from eleven years ago.

She worries that he’s still so fraught over a case that’s ancient history, and asks if he won’t forget and move on. He sighs that he’ll have to, especially since the statute of limitations on it is winding down soon.

Soo-sun and Dae-gu bicker during their stakeout, and she pretty much has to blackmail him into talking to her. But she’s surprised when he shows her that he’s reading the stalker’s entire online history while they’re sitting here.

She dozes off while he continues to read, and at first he just seems annoyed at her snoring, but then when he sees her shivering from the cold, he sighs and takes his jacket off. Aw, you softie.

He swings the jacket over to her side… and carelessly chucks it over her head. Pfft. His alarm rings at midnight, and he takes his jacket back and opens her window until her face slides out of it and she jerks awake.

His analysis is that the stalker is a meticulous OCD type, who never misspells a word or ever posts after 1 AM. He’s thorough and consistent, which Dae-gu concludes means one very important thing: they can go home now.

Soo-sun is wary of calling it a night, but Dae-gu swears that it’s a fact that the stalker won’t show this late, and packs up his things to go. Soo-sun hesitates but can’t really argue since he sounds so sure, and gets ready to leave for the night.

She pauses when she gets a call about her gosiwon deposit, which is right when the stalker drives past her. Ack. The woman looks out the window to make sure the detectives are still there. Assured that they are, she agrees to meet the stalker, who asks her to meet him one last time.

She heads out armed with a tape recorder, and sends Soo-sun a text about meeting the stalker at a café to secure the evidence they need. This is a terrible idea. She’s nervous as she gets into the stalker’s car, but sees Soo-sun’s car waiting just up ahead.

What she doesn’t know is that Soo-sun has seen none of this, and a wave of panic washes over her as they pass her car and Soo-sun doesn’t even glance her way. Craaaap.

Meanwhile, Dae-gu has walked to the convenience store, and he pauses to thoughtlessly straighten a few milk cartons that are sitting askew. It triggers an idea and he stops to check the stalker’s posts from tonight just in case.

He finds a string of messages, all the same as before, except for one crucial detail—words are misspelled. He’s changed his routine, and that can only mean bad things.

He runs back to the victim’s house and bangs on the door, and Soo-sun rushes up after him. It’s then that she checks her phone and sees the message, and they tear out of there to get to the coffee shop.

They’re aren’t there, and Soo-sun panics that this is all her fault. Pan-seok calls, which freaks her out even more, and Dae-gu tells her not to answer it. He barks at her to keep quiet for a second while he figures this out, and he starts scanning his brain for the stalker’s messages, sweat gathering on his face.

He recites the stalker’s creepy threats one after the other in rapid-fire succession, and then gets to the one they need: he keeps mentioning the place where they first met, and in one post he names the park.

Dae-gu whips the steering wheel so fast that Soo-sun gets pressed against her window as they u-turn. They run through the park, and then stop when they see a small crowd gathered around a tree. Oh no.

They push their way past the people… and find the woman they promised to protect lying at the foot of the tree, a knife wound in her stomach. She’s dead, isn’t she?

 
COMMENTS

Damn, what a harsh lesson to learn on your first case. I can’t believe she died on their watch, right after they set her up as bait, provoked her stalker, and then promised to protect her. Augh. I don’t mind it as story turn though, because it’s what Dae-gu needs to knock him off his high horse and make him less complacent. He might have taken this job for other nefarious reasons, but as long as he’s actually working as a cop, he can’t keep risking people’s lives by just doing the minimum amount of work required to get by.

It also opens up a crucial parallel between Dae-gu and Pan-seok, and maybe now that Dae-gu has experienced how decisive one misstep can be, he will consider the possibility that Pan-seok was just a rookie detective who made a terrible mistake that cost a life. I don’t expect it to be a quick revelation (and certainly not a welcome one, since he seems to be surviving on hate), but we’re setting the stage for him to walk in Pan-seok’s shoes until he’s forced to consider it from the detective’s point of view. I like the poetry in that—that he becomes a detective to catch Pan-seok, but will in all likelihood come to understand him because of the job.

With the clock set on the statute of limitations on Mom’s murder, not to mention Pan-seok’s self-imposed three-month deadline to scare the detective dreams out of our rookies, we’ve got a good setup for our overarching mystery to coincide with the rookies earning their stripes. I really like all the different personalities on the team, and I hope there’s more training torture in store.

Dae-gu and Soo-sun are fantastic together (Is it wrong that I love it most when they’re hating each other?) and I cannot wait for them to be bunkmates. ‘Cause that’s happening, right? I mean, we’re not going to let potential roommate monkey business just lie there untapped, are we? Now that would be a crime.

 
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