You’re All Surrounded: Episode 4

by girlfriday

This is a great episode that hits a nice balance between emotional heft, situational comedy, and heartwarming growth for our main characters. The case of the day gets used in a thoughtful way that brings the team together and forces them to act as one whether they want to or not. It’s like mandatory group therapy. At gunpoint. But some people need a little shove to work out their issues.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Monni – “눈물이 마르면” (When My Tears Dry) [ Download ]

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EPISODE 4: “It’s okay… It’s not okay”

In the aftermath of the stalker stabbing case, Dae-gu and Soo-sun watch speechlessly as the emergency team takes the victim away on a stretcher.

Their squad chief Eung-do is there with the missing persons team leader, Sa-kyung, who’s been after the stalker for some time. Thankfully for them, she caught the guy as he was fleeing. The stalker gives a little nod to Dae-gu as he’s hauled away, just to make the guilt land with extra oomph.

Eung-do wonders what they’re doing here, and then Sa-kyung asks if the tape recorder and camera found in the victim’s purse belong to Eung-do’s team. Suddenly they realize the two rookies aren’t here by coincidence.

Pan-seok races back from his police academy conference as furious as expected, and tears into the precinct. Gook and Tae-il greet him with an update that the victim is in surgery and they’re awaiting news on whether she’ll survive.

It just gets worse when Sa-kyung is the one to cut him down for letting two rookies handle such a delicate case without even checking on them. He just takes her lecture without a word.

Dae-gu and Soo-sun sit in an interrogation room, and Soo-sun tries to convince herself that the surgery went well and the victim is strong enough to survive. She turns to Dae-gu for some kind of reassurance—anything to make her believe her own words.

But he just spits back angrily that he said they should go by the book and do nothing, but she was the one who had to be all gung-ho and offer to nab the stalker in the first place.

Soo-sun counters that he’s not exactly free of blame either, since he’s the one who swore the stalker wouldn’t show and convinced her to leave for the night. By now she’s crying, and of course right in the middle of their bickering is when Pan-seok storms in.

Soo-sun jumps up from her chair and stands at attention, waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Pan-seok just silently walks past her… and goes straight for Dae-gu with an enormous kick that knocks him off his feet.

Dae-gu grits his teeth as the defiance builds, and Pan-seok launches into a tirade about provoking a stalker, and acting without checking in with their squad chief at all times. “Did I not tell you?! You can’t save a person who’s dead but you CAN kill a person who’s still alive!”

He says that one moment’s mistake, one inexperienced decision, can end a person’s life. It’s why he told them never to act alone. Suddenly Dae-gu snaps and suggests that he should’ve explained it so kindly before. Ack.

He starts ranting right back, arguing that Pan-seok never taught them any of these things, and just let them loose on cases to do as they wanted, only to revert to lecturing now. He adds with derision that even a three-year-old is more consistent than that.

And then he calls Pan-seok out for using physical violence, pointing at the cameras that are recording everything. He shouts that he’s going to report him, which of course the veteran cops find utterly ridiculous. He caps off the rant with one final doozy, in banmal: “Seo Pan-seok, I could end you!”

Pan-seok tells him to go ahead, and he’ll make sure they capture all the proper angles on camera. At that, they come to blows, as Dae-gu slams him down on the desk and starts choking him.

Pan-seok wrestles him down to the ground, but Dae-gu gets the upper hand again and strangles Pan-seok with alarming strength.

It takes everyone else just to pull him off, and even Pan-seok looks startled at the level of rage. Well, he looks shocked in between the, “You son of a bitch!” and Hold me back, hold me back!

Dae-gu just keeps digging his grave, even as his teammates are yanking him out of the room, and screams in banmal that Pan-seok has no right to say these things. The team finally manages to separate them, thank goodness, and Dae-gu storms out. Pan-seok calms down long enough to sit down, but then he flips a table before leaving.

Gook can’t believe Dae-gu’s reaction when begging on his knees might not have been enough in the situation. Soo-sun is too distracted to listen, and rushes back to the hospital to wait for word on the victim.

Tae-il sighs and tells Gook that he doesn’t like it here. He came here to avoid table deaths (ah, so med school, or even time spent being a doctor?) but this job isn’t any different.

Gook asks what table deaths are, and Tae-il leans in close and asks teasingly for him to guess. I can’t tell if he’s flirting or just messing with him, but it’s cute. Gook gets uncomfortable and walks away, and Tae-il chases after him, “Gook-ah, were you always this cute?” Hee.

Soo-sun waits all night at the hospital, but can’t bring herself to go inside. She just stands at the door watching the victim’s mother clutch her daughter’s hand desperately.

Dae-gu heads to the train station and buys a ticket to Masan. He sits on the empty platform just playing the mistake over in his head, until it leads him to memories of Mom’s murder.

In the morning, Soo-sun waits for Pan-seok to arrive at the precinct and hangs her head in apology. He doesn’t let her off the hook and says he should’ve stuck to his guns about not having any longhaired teammates, and tells her she can’t come inside.

She follows him in anyway, and they find the station filled with murmurs and eyeballs all pointed at them. The press is doing a number on the police force because of the incident, and are questioning Chief Kang’s decision to accept so many rookie detectives.

Chief Toad comes out to address the violent crimes unit, and tells Pan-seok to go ahead and die because that’s what he thinks the situation calls for. Pan-seok apologizes, ready to take responsibility for his team.

The meeting is interrupted when the victim’s mother walks in and slaps Soo-sun across the face for daring to come to the hospital after what she did. Ouch.

Meanwhile, Dae-gu arrives in Masan and walks down that familiar ocean-side road as children pass by on their way to school. He makes his way up to his old house and stands at the front gate, but just being there brings back the memories of Mom’s final moments so vividly that he recoils.

He runs down the beach and lets out a scream. After sitting in the sand for some time, his phone starts to ring, and suddenly Mom’s sitting there next to him, asking why he’s not picking up.

His accent comes back as he says shakily, “Mom?” She asks if he did something wrong and ran away, and he denies it like a little kid about to get in trouble. But she says it’s written all over his face, so he admits it.

He says he almost killed someone again. He’s furious with himself for such a stupid lapse in judgment and calls himself a bird-brain too. He sighs that even if he doesn’t want to be a detective and is only there to get close to Pan-seok, he of all people—”Me, who sent you away like that”—shouldn’t have let this happen.

She tells him he can just do better from now on, but he shouts that someone almost died because of him, again, after Mom died that way. Aw, poor buddy. Mom tells him her death wasn’t his fault, and sighs that her smart son has just accumulated another painful memory he won’t be able to forget.

She tells him he did wrong, but he can’t run away like this. She says he’s bad at it anyway, since running away is done by people who have the capacity to forget: “You’re too smart, so you can’t forget, can you?”

He asks if she’s sure, and asks her again and again. She swears that it’s as true as the earth revolving around the sun. It’s the same expression he uses, which he must’ve gotten from Mom.

He doesn’t look convinced, and suddenly seems very small as he cries, “Mom, you’re mad at me, aren’t you? You hated me a lot, didn’t you?” His lip quivers as he cries, and he wipes at his tears. A soccer ball rolls over to him and a group of little boys ask for their ball back. He throws it over to them, and when he looks back, Mom is gone and the moment has passed.

Police Chief Kang looks over the articles that are slamming her policies, and says in a thinly veiled warning to Chief Toad that the level of detail in the articles suggests that someone on the inside is leaking information to the press. Hm, maybe the Toad is a rat? She pretends it’s just her overactive imagination at work and leaves it alone for now.

Soo-sun walks on eggshells at work, and is treated like an invisible girl as far as Pan-seok is concerned. When his team gets called out for a case, she runs out with them, but he orders them to shut the car door and leave her behind.

With nowhere else to go, she heads back to the hospital, and this time Sa-kyung is there. She says that luck must be on Soo-sun’s side because the victim is alive, and recovering out of the ICU. Tears pool in Soo-sun’s eyes and she sinks into a seat in relief. That night she drafts her resignation letter, and hesitates as she looks at a photo of Dad sitting on her desk.

She narrates, “When you died, I learned one thing—that a world without Dad continues to turn. And I gave up two things—college, and my dream. It’s okay, being a detective wasn’t my dream anyway. It’s okay.” She leaves the resignation letter on Pan-seok’s desk and walks out.

Dae-gu walks along the pier and passes by the spot where he first met Soo-sun in that big brawl where he defended his crush’s honor. He scoffs that she’s exactly the same now. Just then, Soo-sun’s oppa passes by on a bike and pauses, wondering where he’s seen that guy before.

Back at the precinct, Tae-il stops Sa-kyung with a knowing smile and asks, “Don’t you remember me?” She flatly says no, but he doesn’t seem convinced. A second later, Gook comes up and wonders why she and Pan-seok got divorced, and Tae-il is surprised to hear that they were married in the first place.

Soo-sun tells the boys that she’s quitting, and they kick up a fuss to try and convince her to stay. They argue that none of them were in this for some big lifelong dream; they’re all just trying to make it.

Dae-gu shows up in the middle of their conversation and grouses at Soo-sun for quitting, as if he didn’t just disappear and reappear after detonating a Pan-seok-sized bomb. Soo-sun rails at him for his flippant attitude and screams at him to apologize for disappearing on her without a word.

He tells her to take back her resignation letter before he has to quit too, and she says he should be fired. They call each other bbagasari (another fish, hur, but also slang for pain in the ass). It’s hilarious that in the middle of this heated argument, Gook tries to intervene, and gets slapped away by Soo-sun.

She remembers him rooting around in Pan-seok’s desk and decides she might as well tell on him before she quits, and Dae-gu snatches the phone out of her hand. Suddenly the serious argument turns into a childish game of keep-away.

He holds her phone out of reach, so she yanks on his hair, pwahaha. Gook just gets battered trying to stop them, and they go in circles like that until suddenly Tae-il walks over, handcuffs them to each other, and takes the phone. HA. I love it.

He tells them he’s tired of their bickering, and decides he’s hungry for lunch and he’ll un-cuff them once they’ve made up. With no other choice, they tag along to go eat lunch still handcuffed to each other.

It’s seems like something’s going to happen in this restaurant, because we spend some time with the guy sitting at a nearby table alone. He’s a cranky down-on-his-luck sort, perhaps a salesman, and he’s clearly avoiding calls from collection agencies and complaining to the owner that she got his order wrong. The ajumma doesn’t seem to care much, and even kicks his box of hairspray because it’s in her way.

The only other table in the restaurant is a trio of schoolgirls of the smart-mouthed bratty variety, and our cops. Soo-sun complains that she can’t ever make up with an asshat like Dae-gu, but no one is listening. Gook sings along to idol group Apink on TV, and asks Tae-il which is the prettiest. Tae-il: “You are.”

The salesman’s day just gets worse and worse, as he gets sauce on his shirt trying to pick up his cans of hairspray, then finds a hair in his food (which the ajumma digs out with her fingers, gross). He fumes, wondering why the universe is doing this to him, and then the straw that breaks the camel’s back: one of the girls trips on a can of hairspray and knocks him face-down into his plate of food.

She isn’t the least bit apologetic, and the guy just silently gets up, goes to the kitchen, locks the front door, and then grabs the girl who tripped with a knife at her throat. The other girls scream and he orders them all to raise their hands.

The ajumma returns after running out for a delivery, and finds the front door locked. She peers inside and panics, and thankfully it isn’t long before Pan-seok and the other cops get the call and race to the scene.

Pan-seok wonders where the rookies ran off to, and their phones ring like crazy all at once. Dae-gu just eyes Tae-il to hand over the keys to the handcuffs, and he searches his pockets, but comes up empty. Great.

The salesman sees them moving around and notices that Dae-gu and Soo-sun aren’t raising both hands, and shouts at them to lift both. Dae-gu grabs Soo-sun’s hand behind him, trembling, and then suddenly she shouts, “We’re in love!” Dae-gu: “What?”

But he recovers half a second later and says it’s their hundred-day anniversary today and asks for everyone’s congratulations. He makes a heart over his head with his one free arm, and Soo-sun does the same. I’m dying.

And then Soo-sun suddenly starts straining to breathe, and Dae-gu doesn’t miss a beat: “My baby’s heart is weak. Can’t I just hold her hand?” He puts an arm around her and she leans in: “Oppa.” Pfft. He kicks Tae-il, and he and Gook immediately start clapping and singing in congratulations.

Gook asks the salesman if he has a girlfriend, and the guy says all he has to his name is a room in a gosiwon and mountains of debt, so she left him to marry a lawyer. At that, one of the other schoolgirls stands up and scoffs that she can solve all this and asks how much money he wants. Augh, spoiled rich kids.

Soo-sun covers her mouth and tries to tell the girl not to provoke the hostage-taker, but the girl just wriggles free and keeps mouthing off. The salesman scoffs when she throws out figures in the millions as if it’s chump change to her, and it only angers him more that he’s worked so hard while some people have all that excess.

It sets him off that they’re treating him like a beggar, and he cuts the gas line, declaring that they might as well all die together. He holds a lighter up to the line.

Outside, Pan-seok arrives on the scene and hears that the suspect, named Choi Woo-shik (ha, the actor’s real name) is a cosmetics company salesman and there are seven hostages inside. He orders other detectives to look into the salesman’s background and get the gas turned off.

He peers inside with binoculars and sees the three schoolgirls, and then lands on Dae-gu and Soo-sun… and Tae-il and Gook. Ha, I know they might die, but of all the bad luck, I swear. Eung-do asks about the situation inside and Pan-seok just hands him the binoculars, “It’s incredible is what.” Chief Toad arrives and blows a gasket.

Inside, the rookies try and figure out what to do next, and Dae-gu scans his memory for any clues he can use. He thinks back to the moment they walked into the restaurant, and now remembers seeing a date circled in the salesman’s calendar: Mom’s memorial.

Meanwhile, one of the schoolgirls starts coughing more violently, and Tae-il guesses that she’s asthmatic and she won’t last long with all this gas. Pan-seok’s voice comes blaring out of a bullhorn, and the rookies light up at the sound of his voice.

He tries to get the salesman to pick up the phone, and says that it must’ve been hard to lose his job after spending all that time at the company. But the salesman scoffs, “Since when has the world listened to what I have to say?” and lets the phone go unanswered.

He gets riled up, so Dae-gu interjects to try and get him to list his demands if he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. That doesn’t work, so then Dae-gu takes a guess that he was planning to get his big promotion and show up to his mother’s memorial at the end of the month.

The salesman freezes and asks how he knows that, and Dae-gu admits to seeing the date marked in his planner. He says he understands because his mother died too, when he was fifteen. His teammates look over at him in surprise.

Dae-gu urges the salesman to answer, because for the first time, the entire world is waiting to hear what he has to say. It works, and he calls Pan-seok to say that he has one demand: get his ex-boss here to apologize.

While they’re on the phone, all hell breaks loose when the schoolgirls’ mothers arrive in hysterics, and then inside, the asthmatic girl collapses. Tae-il rushes over to her and orders Gook to find her inhaler. He helps her, but warns that if she doesn’t get to a hospital soon she could die.

Suddenly Pan-seok hears Soo-sun’s voice come through loud and clear: “I’ll be your hostage!” She tells him the truth—that she’s a cop—and shows him her hand cuffed to Dae-gu’s. She says that she can’t do anything to him like this, so he should take her as his hostage and let these girls go.

The salesman thinks this is some trick, so then Dae-gu takes out his handcuffs and cuffs his other hand to the pipes on the wall. Gook takes out his handcuffs and says he’s a cop too, and offers to be the hostage since Soo-sun can’t be untangled from Dae-gu anyway, and he’s been a hostage once before.

And finally Tae-il cuffs himself to Soo-sun and asks if they can be trusted now. It’s like an accordion doll with cops. A few tense seconds pass by, and then the salesman says he’ll let the girls go. He tells them they have three hours to get his boss here or he blows the detectives up. The schoolgirls get released, and Chief Kang breathes a sigh of relief that the rookies succeeded.

Next, Pan-seok crawls through the ventilation duct and takes a gas reading from above the restaurant. Dae-gu is the only one standing because he’s cuffed to the pillar, and he locks eyes with Pan-seok looking down at them. Pan-seok mouths, Are you okay? but Dae-gu just darts his eyes over in the salesman’s direction as a warning, and Pan-seok narrowly avoids being spotted.

He crawls back out and tells them the gas level is dangerously high, and Eung-do gives him worse news: the salesman’s boss is in Japan. The other officers are ready to chance it with a breach, but Pan-seok steps in to ask for more time: “They’re detectives. Maybe they’ll create an opportunity for us.”

The other guy argues that they’re just rookies who can’t be relied upon, but Pan-seok defends them and says they got the students out.

Inside, everyone’s looking pretty sapped. The salesman sighs that his boss probably isn’t coming. He’s apparently a lowlife who promised an entire staff of part-time workers a salaried position if they bought caseloads of expensive product and sold them off in a year.

He worked so hard to earn the measly commission just so he could be an official salaried employee, and then the boss fired them all with a month left on the deal and ran off. Dude, that’s not a boss; that’s a con man. They ask why he didn’t demand money instead of an apology, and the guy admits what he really wanted was to be reinstated at his job.

While all this is going on, Dae-gu is the only one who notices that the salesman has put his lighter down. He eyes it just waiting for an opportunity. But salesman picks it back up when he decides that government employees like them wouldn’t understand his pain, and they should just die together.

Soo-sun urges him not to give up so quickly since there’s still time left on his deadline. She says that giving up is never the answer, and that she had to take the civil service exam seven times before she passed it. Dae-gu turns to her in disbelief and solidifies his opinion of her chicken-brain.

The salesman thinks he’d rather just end it now than go through finding another job all over again, and starts getting twitchy. Soo-sun shouts, “Judo!” like it’s some kind of magic word, and then follows it up with a story about how her father is a judo instructor and the first thing you learn in judo is how to fall.

First you learn to fall, and then you learn how to fight; she says that he’s just learning how to fall. The rest of the boys all turn to look at her incredulously, and she wonders why.

Dae-gu: “Do you not know why we’re looking at you? You say that, and this morning you handed in a what?” She blinks and then spits back, “That was because of you, you jerk! Because you ran away! Do you know how scared I was those two days you disappeared on me?!”

She tells him everything—how frightened she was every time the phone rang thinking it was bad news about the victim, how she berated herself for being so stupid, how she wished she had been punished instead of being treated like an invisible person, but didn’t know how to apologize to Pan-seok or make it right. “I spent two days like that alone!”

Tears stream down her face: “The case turned out that way, but it began with a sincere desire to help her. And you’re the only one who knew that! And I’m the only one who knew that about you. Because we’re partners! So apologize! Apologize, you jerk, for leaving me all alone!” Aw.

The salesman agrees: “Hey Pillar, apologize to her.” And more importantly, he puts the lighter back down in that moment. Soo-sun is still too busy fighting with Dae-gu to notice, but then Tae-il accidentally trips over a stray hairspray can.

They go tumbling, and Dae-gu knocks over the box of cans with the lighter on top, and everyone goes diving for it. Tae-il ends up with a can of hairspray in his hand, and the salesman with the lighter. Dammit.

But then a split second of recognition passes between them, and Tae-il sprays right into his eyes. That gives Gook a chance to tackle him, and then Dae-gu slips his hand out of the handcuffs on the pillar.

The threesome counts to three and they dive in. It’s a mess of limbs everywhere, and I’m pretty sure they’re suffering as much pain as they’re giving, but they’ve got the guy. Gook body-slams him just to be sure, and yells, “Don’t move! You’re totally surrounded!”

Eventually Eung-do sees what’s going on through the binoculars and the team finally storms in to rescue them.

The rookies sit outside drinking in oxygen from tanks, and Eung-do comes by to check on them. He chuckles that it’s nice to see Soo-sun smiling for the first time in days, and endearingly calls Dae-gu a moron. Dae-gu apologizes and Eung-do just wags a finger and says it’s okay as long he knows he was wrong. Somehow I don’t think it’ll be this easy with Pan-seok.

Eung-do laughs that they sure do have good luck when it comes to landing interesting cases, and asks why they were there in the first place. Gook says that the start of the whole thing was Soo-sun’s letter of resig— and he trails off as they all realize the letter is still in play.

They look at each other and wonder what to do, and Dae-gu is the first to say, “What do you mean, what do we do? We go reclaim it!” They go running, and from a distance, Pan-seok smiles to see them run off together.

They burst through the doors and run to Pan-seok’s desk, and phew, the letter is exactly where she left it, untouched. They jump for joy and even Dae-gu looks pleased, though he’s still too cool for school and walks out before anyone can hug him.

They walk together that night, still buzzing with excitement. Soo-sun narrates in voiceover as she throws her arms around the boys:

Soo-sun: Being a detective wasn’t my dream, but I wasn’t okay at all. I didn’t want to give up and I didn’t want to run away. I may be learning nothing but how to fall for twenty-seven years, but it’s okay, because I have these guys next to me who helped me realize that fact, and because that’s youth.

Dae-gu falls back from the group when his phone rings, or rather when Pan-seok’s clonephone rings. They pick up at the same time, and Dae-gu listens in. On the other end of the line, a man arrives at the airport. Ack, it’s Combat Boots, Mom’s killer.

We only see his chin and the scar behind his ear, as he says ominously, “It’s been a long time, Team Leader Seo. You haven’t forgotten my voice, have you?” It’s clear from the looks on their faces that neither of the boys has forgotten this killer’s voice.

 
COMMENTS

The implosion between hotheads today was impressively brutal. I’m surprised that Dae-gu still has a job after being so outrageously insubordinate, but then maybe I underestimated Pan-seok’s tolerance. Their confrontation was such a great scene because Dae-gu was all hate, and Pan-seok alternated every second between bewilderment and fury, not knowing what to make of him but still pissed off that it was happening. I was shocked because I expected it to remain a simmering tension between them for a long time, given that Dae-gu has a vested interest in hiding his identity. But we get great character moments when he crosses the line, so I’m all for more dangerous brawls that push the boundaries, just as long as everyone keeps their limbs and their jobs.

Dae-gu’s trip to Masan and his scene with Mom was a much needed character beat for him, because he’s so silent and angry most of the time. He’s immediately fifteen again when he talks to her, and the way he imagines her is speaking to him as if he’s fifteen too. There’s no edge to him when he’s that way, and he suddenly seemed so tiny and innocent and trusting, begging for Mom to swear something is true as if that makes it so. The way he talked about Mom’s death—as if it’s a thing he caused—made me grateful that the stalker’s victim survived in the end. It seems that they learned the gravity of their mistakes without her needing to die, and at this point if he had to carry that guilt too, I don’t know that he would’ve gone back.

I really loved the case of the day, because it fits so well with our rookies thematically, and highlights that regardless of what line of work they’re in, twentysomething young adults feel the same—lost, set loose out in the world to sink or swim on their own, and terrified of failing. There was a nice camaraderie they had with the crazy hostage-taking salesman, because he was strangely a lot like them, and he forced their fears to the surface. Of course their differences are what matter in the end—they have each other, while he was alone, and they took responsibility for their actions instead of blaming the stupid universe.

Tae-il’s flash of genius in cuffing the two stooges together was priceless. I’m not greedy—those two minutes of Fish Called Oppa and Birdie Baby’s rom-com adventures are enough to sustain me through more hair-pulling and name-calling. Not that I’d say no to a few minutes of that every week. What really hit home was of course her tear-filled rant at him to apologize for leaving her all alone when he’s supposed to be her partner. That tugged the heart in all the right ways, and he sprang into action when it counted, to reclaim her resignation letter and preserve their partnership. I love the feeling in the closing scene that we’re at the beginning of a great friendship between these four young people who are finding their way in the world. That’s a story I want to see through to the end.

 
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