You’re All Surrounded: Episode 5

by girlfriday

Despite our hero’s attempts to remain a cold fish, the team starts to gel in its own bumbling way when a case becomes more important than petty arguments. Pan-seok starts to show a softer side that recalls a glimmer of the young earnest detective he once was, and in turn the rookies start to show a more capable side and prove that they can come through. And us? Why we get rewarded with nekkid shenanigans of course.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Kim Gun-mo (and Psy) – “딸기” (Strawberry) [ Download ]

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EPISODE 5: “Sometimes you embrace and live!”

In his room, Dae-gu replays the phone call between Pan-seok and Combat Boots over and over in his head. Pan-seok asks if he’s back for good, and Combat Boots wants to meet.

Dae-gu gets a call from his accomplice S, and swears up and down that he would never forget that man’s voice, whether it had been eleven years or a hundred and eleven—it’s his mother’s killer, and he’s back in the country.

Dae-gu vows to watch Pan-seok around the clock to make sure he doesn’t miss any suspicious activity, and watches the live feed from the spy cam inside Pan-seok’s apartment.

But his spy session is quickly interrupted when his roommates come bursting into the apartment with Soo-sun in tow. He tries to shush them, but Soo-sun just comes running up to Dae-gu with her arms outstretched. He rebuffs her with a finger to the forehead, heh.

She’s amazed that their place is so nice, which it isn’t, except compared to her tiny gosiwon room. Her eyes light up when she hears that they even have two rooms and that Dae-gu has his bedroom all to himself, but he blocks her from trying to take a peek inside.

She launches into her sales pitch about how great it would be for them to have a roommate who can cook, but Dae-gu shuts her down cold. But she promised smoothies and everything!

Many beers later, the whole group is reliving their (self-proclaimed) heroism during the hostage situation and how great it was to actually do something right on purpose for once.

Soo-sun asks if anyone else felt this way when they were launching at the perp all together and wrestling him to the ground—this thumping she felt in her chest, at first from being out of breath, and then from sheer excitement.

She wonders which it was, and looks around the room to see all three boys dozing off. She murmurs quietly, “I think I may have finally found the work that makes my heart race.” She closes her eyes too, and then Dae-gu opens his to gaze at her.

In the morning, Dae-gu takes a shower and mulls over what Soo-sun said. The others are still strewn around the living room asleep, and Soo-sun stumbles up to head to the bathroom. You mean the bathroom where Dae-gu is currently nekkid?

He beats her to it and comes out shirtless and drying his hair, when Soo-sun walks smack into his chest, lips first. HEE.

He stands there frozen while she’s basically kissing his chest, and then when she disengages, she says the most hilarious thing: “Mmmm, strawberry? Do you use strawberry-flavored body wash?” Pwahahaha.

She continues to shuffle towards the bathroom like nothing happened, and Dae-gu finally stops being shocked long enough to drag her by the collar and shove her out the front door. He’d be clutching his pearls if he weren’t naked from the waist up.

On a different, less hungover morning, Soo-sun wakes up in a tent on what looks like the roof of their precinct. Dude, you’re living in a tent? She washes up in the bathroom at work and checks out her newly shorn hair.

Dae-gu goes on a stakeout at Pan-seok’s house, and follows him out that morning. But instead of going somewhere shady, Pan-seok goes to see Sa-kyung.

He happens to witness the embarrassing confrontation at her door where she rejects the young man who’s been waiting outside for her all night. She tells him coldly that she was just having fun and he’s taking this way too seriously.

She then sees Pan-seok waiting for her at the elevator, and he joins her. Around the corner, Dae-gu is clearly shocked that they’re romantically involved. In the elevator, Pan-seok asks how old that kid was and if she’s going to keep living this way. She points out that it’s his fault.

At the precinct, the missing persons team gets moved into the pit with the other detectives and Gook asks Eung-do about the backstory on Pan-seok and Sa-kyung and why they got divorced.

That’s news to Dae-gu and Soo-sun, but then the conversation comes to a screeching halt when the guys see Soo-sun’s short hair. Eung-do compliments her and says she’s pretty no matter what length her hair is, while Gook looks totally smitten, suddenly seeing her in an angelic backlit haze.

Soo-sun wrist-grabs Dae-gu outside to talk, and Dae-gu complains that she changed the only thing about her that he liked. Liar, you think she’s purty. Adorably, it just makes her smile to hear that he liked anything about her.

But her mood turns sour when she hears that he has no intention of apologizing to Pan-seok. She tells him that she was shut out of the team the whole time he was away, and begs him to apologize with her so that she can do this job right: “I want to do a good job, and to do that, I need your apology.”

She says it’s possible that she won’t make it on her own, but she wants to earn the right to quit herself if that time comes and the only way to do that is to try her best till the very end.

She sees him waver for just a split second and goes in for the kill with the most adorable oppa-pout-wiggle that she can manage, only with “partner” instead of oppa. Dae-gu backs away slowly in horror: “If you ever do that again, you’re dead!”

Pan-seok arrives and Soo-sun greets him with an apology. She points out that she’s no longer a longhaired teammate, and that she’ll continue to prove herself to him if he just gives her another chance.

The room fills with silence as everyone turns to Dae-gu to hear his apology. Soo-sun pinches him over and over again as the seconds tick by, and then he finally opens his mouth to give a half-assed, “Sorry about that.”

Still, Pan-seok must realize how much effort it takes for him to say that much, because he seems pleased. He tells the rookies that his instincts are never wrong… but the way they dealt with that hostage situation and saved the students proved him wrong, fair and square.

He says it like it’s the first time he’s trying out new words: “Goood… Job.” He even smiles a little.

That night they go to a department celebration where Chief Kang toasts to a job well done by the rookies. The MC even gets Pan-seok up to the stage to sing karaoke, and the rookies join him and Eung-do as they do an embarrassing dance.

From elsewhere in the bar, a man complains about the noise and comes sauntering up to Pan-seok with an air of superiority and general assiness. Pan-seok greets him in jondae as Prosecutor Han.

Prosecutor Han clearly belittles cops as a blanket rule, since he doesn’t even bother to appear respectful of Chief Kang. He tells Pan-seok to go fetch him a blood sample for a case right this minute, probably because he gets off on throwing his weight around, and he’s a killjoy who hates puppies. Or something.

Pan-seok counters that the victim he’s talking about committed suicide, but Prosecutor Han refuses to back down on the stupid errand. Pan-seok grits his teeth and says politely that he’ll go, and Eung-do and the rookies follow him out.

As they go to the hospital morgue to retrieve the blood sample, Soo-sun narrates that on the first day she was praised by the legendary Seo Pan-seok, she also saw him brought back down to earth, much like realizing as a child for the first time that your dad isn’t Superman.

Tae-il tells them that Pan-seok and Prosecutor Han went to school together but basically clash over every case they have to work together. The team parts ways at the hospital, and Soo-sun drags Dae-gu away to go see their stalker stabbing victim.

She’s on the mend and greets them with a smile, and tells them she feels bad because they keep coming to visit all the time, showing them the stacks of cakes that Pan-seok has brought her every single day since the incident. Aw.

Soo-sun continues her narration: “But even without a red cape and blue tights, Superman is Superman, and Seo Pan-seok is Seo Pan-seok.”

Sa-kyung gets called back into the precinct that night for a missing child case, but as she retraces the boy’s steps with her team, she gets the sinking feeling that it won’t end well. She finds fresh skid marks on a bridge and on a hunch, decides to search the ravine down below.

It goes from bad to worse when she finds the little boy unconscious and lying in a pool of blood. She carries him in her arms to the hospital, but he dies in the emergency room. Augh, but he’s so tiny. Sa-kyung can’t contain her tears.

By the morning, it’s Pan-seok’s case, now a suspected hit-and-run manslaughter. Based on the tire treads and traffic cam footage, they manage to narrow the list of suspects down to a handful of people who own a luxury import car.

At the top of their list is a particularly assy rich douchebag, who’s screaming at his chauffer when the detectives arrive to question him. Dae-gu takes the lead and tells him they’re here to ask if he knows anything about a hit and run last night.

The guy dismisses them like he’s too important to be spoken to by people of low social standing. When Soo-sun steps up to try and stop him from getting into his car, he has the gall to call her a bitch and then asks if she’s the kid’s mother here to get paid.

Soo-sun is stunned speechless, but Pan-seok catches the very important clue that none of them ever mentioned that the hit-and-run victim was a child—that means that he must’ve been the driver. The guy challenges them to prove it and drives off.

Gook finds that the suspect’s car wasn’t brought in for repairs, though he does think that the body shop is hiding something. Pan-seok decides to go to Prosecutor Han to put their suspect on the no-fly list for now, just in case he tries to bolt.

Dae-gu uses the opportunity to sneak into Pan-seok’s apartment, but Pan-seok drops by unexpectedly to pick up his cell phones. He stops to open the closet and grab something out of a box, which is just inches away from where Dae-gu is hiding.

Prosecutor Han tells someone over the phone that they should send the hit-and-run suspect out of the country because he can’t exactly risk his career to let him off the hook. Two seconds later Pan-seok comes by to request the overseas flight restriction, and of course Prosecutor Han just waves it off without even reading it.

He busies Pan-seok and Eung-do with useless tasks, and Pan-seok finally drops the formalities and lights into Prosecutor Han. Eung-do holds him back and urges him to calm down, and Pan-seok spits back that he can’t abandon his kids and walk away, so he hopes that the refusal to even glance at the no-flight request isn’t what he thinks it is.

The rookies sit at their desks chasing down different angles on the car repairs, and Dae-gu spends a moment gazing at Soo-sun’s pursed lips, which of course sends him back to their morning collision. He pounds his chest where she kissed it, like he’s trying to rid himself of the sensation.

Behind them, the child’s divorced parents arrive at the station and start blaming each other for what happened to their son. Sa-kyung grows increasingly agitated by their conversation, and finally has an outburst directed at the mother for neglecting her son and letting this happen.

She screams that she has no right to blame anyone else, and Pan-seok walks in on the scene and tries to stop her. Sa-kyung just turns to him and screams again, “What right do you have?!” It leaves everyone floored.

The rookies wonder if Sa-kyung and Pan-seok experienced something similar, and Tae-il says he heard that they had a son and lost him in a very similar case—Pan-seok was supposed to pick him up from kindergarten but was late because of work, and he died in an accident just like this one.

Sa-kyung takes a moment to collect herself outside, and Chief Kang comes out to check on her, musing that she wondered if Sa-kyung had moved on when she agreed to take the job here. Sa-kyung says that mothers who lose their children hate being asked if they’ve dusted themselves off, as if that loss could just be brushed off like dirt.

Chief Kang just gives her a silent pat on the shoulder and lets Sa-kyung cry it out on her own. Pan-seok goes for a drive and flashes back to the moment he arrived at the hospital and found Sa-kyung cradling their son in her arms.

She wails that mommy’s here, but he’s already gone. Pan-seok’s legs give out and he just crashes to the floor in shock. (He’s notably wearing the same outfit we met him in eleven years ago, but I don’t know how closely the timelines match up yet.)

At home, Pan-seok opens the box he took out earlier that day, and fishes out a toy robot. He hears his son’s voice bragging about how his dad catches the bad guys, and cries for a moment before putting it away and forcing himself to go back to work.

He finds the team sprawled out on their desks, and yells at them to stop being such babies about a few all-nighters. He demands new witnesses and leads, and tells them to search all the footage until they can find just one eyewitness to corroborate their hunch.

He knows they’re all worked to the bone, but he pleads with them not to give up—they might not be able to save this little boy, but they can help make his death not utterly meaningless.

The team puts their noses to the ground, and Dae-gu combs through all the neighborhood CCTV footage to zero in on a few locals who pass the bridge on a daily route at the time in question.

Gook goes through shots sent in from other cars’ black box cameras, and they catch a break with a picture taken of the suspect’s car before he took it into the shop. The headlight is smashed in.

Pan-seok gets sent on more time-wasting errands by Prosecutor Han, but still manages to use every other waking minute scouring the crime scene with a flashlight strapped to his forehead and a broom, like a crazy homeless highway spelunker.

He spends the entire night that way, and then his teammates catch a break when Dae-gu spots one of the potential witnesses on the street. They take the grandpa out to lunch and he tells them he heard a crash and saw the car, but then when he goes to the bathroom, a man in a suit approaches him.

Pan-seok runs into the station and asks where the witness went, and they hang their heads and tell him it makes no sense—the grandpa said he saw everything, then went to the bathroom and came out saying he didn’t remember a thing. Eung-do guesses that it was Prosecutor Han’s doing.

Ever the dogged cop, Pan-seok simply tells them they keep at it until they find someone else, and goes back to his foraging. This time he spends all night searching the ravine, and ignores a request from Prosecutor Han’s office sending him on another evidence run for a different case.

By morning the team calls with the good news that another witness came forward on his own after seeing their public notices. This time the detectives swarm the high-schooler and stick to his side so he can’t change his story.

As Pan-seok gets ready to leave the ravine, he spots a shard of plastic, and then another. He takes out the picture of the car’s headlight after it was smashed in, and it looks like they’re a match.

Pan-seok takes the whole case, from witness accounts to matching headlight pieces—all but the silver platter—and drops it on Prosecutor Han’s desk with a satisfied thud. Thankfully a less corruptible prosecutor is there to look at the case and commends Pan-seok on delivering airtight evidence. Prosecutor Han seethes knowing he’s been outmaneuvered.

The only thing he can do is throw Pan-seok in lockup for disobeying a direct command, which is futile in the grand scheme of things. But Prosecutor Han isn’t above being petty for petty’s sake, and tells Pan-seok he’s messing with the wrong people.

Prosecutor Han: “Don’t you know that above the person who runs is the person who flies?” Pan-seok smiles: “Don’t you know that above the person who flies is the one who’s ardent?”

 
COMMENTS

Pan-seok is such a great character with so many uphill battles to win. There’s something so endearing about his slow but steady collect-all-the-cigarette-butts way of doing things. I laughed when I saw that after eleven years he still goes out into the field with that broom and dustpan like it’s his first day on the job, but it also speaks volumes about how he’s still the same guy at heart. His way of doing things is not particularly smart or efficient, but it’s thorough and dedicated and tireless; most of all, it’s thankless work and though he never puts a name to why he does this, it’s clear that he feels a personal duty to uphold justice at the expense of all else.

It’s hard to imagine him having done anything remotely corrupt in the past when he’s the guy spending the night in the street to go up against the dirty prosecutor. I won’t rule it out completely, but there has to be some other reason why Combat Boots is in contact with him. It WILL make sense, because it has to, because Pan-seok is pretty much the embodiment of everything you want the good guys to be.

His backstory was a surprise, since I expected his divorce with Sa-kyung to be something simpler like his workaholic nature driving them apart. It makes a lot more sense how their rift got to be so vast once we learn that they lost a child, and that they both blame him. Gee, and here I was thinking he carried a lot of remorse for Dae-gu’s mom when that’s just the tip of his iceberg of guilt. It’s amazing that Dae-gu doesn’t see how similar they are, though his perspective is obviously skewed. With Soo-sun idolizing him as Superman, they’ll probably both have a rude awakening when they discover that the real Pan-seok is somewhere in the middle—neither hero nor villain, but just an earnest man.

It wasn’t a particularly action-packed episode, but I like where we are with the characters for the time being. Phase 1 of the Roommate Gambit seems locked and loaded, now that Soo-sun is homeless and angling for an invite to join the boys. I mean, we’ve already got naked bathroom run-ins and accidental kissing collisions, and she hasn’t even moved in yet. I’ll take that as a good sign that roommate privileges will only up the ante with more unexpected surprises. I mean, who knew that strawberry-flavored Eun Dae-gu would be something not gross?

 
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