You’re All Surrounded: Episode 6

by girlfriday

The good guys find out that the hardest thing about being the good guys is that the bad guys always cheat to win. Our rookies start to wonder if what they do will ever make a difference, and their superhero leader picks the worst timing to lose his cool. If his temper is any indication, he might be more Hulk than Superman, but ineffectual in any case if he’s not around to save the day.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Norazo – “치이고 박히고 무능상사” (Knocked Down and Stuck Incompetent Boss) [ Download ]

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EPISODE 6: “The ocean inside my worn-out drawer”

After spending the night in a holding cell after he beat Prosecutor Han at his own game, Pan-seok is rewarded with a visit from his entire team. But it’s only when he sees the arrest warrant for their hit-and-run suspect in Eung-do’s hand that he smiles in relief. Whoo, let’s go catch the bad guy!

They go together to arrest him, and Soo-sun sticks the warrant out and crooks her finger to get him to step out of the car. I love how much she enjoys this part of her job.

Dae-gu gets impatient and drags the guy out to make the arrest himself, and Soo-sun goes down the line for high-fives, with everyone except for Pan-seok that is. He almost high-fives Eung-do but they’re too embarrassed to follow through, which is even better. But he seems pleased in his own stoic fatherly way.

Later that night, Dae-gu goes to see someone—his accomplice S, perhaps, or a private investigator—and asks him to track down the man who issued the threat to Mom all those years ago when she originally agreed to testify in the young girl’s murder case. His trail went cold a few years ago.

Pan-seok waits on Sa-kyung’s doorstep, obviously very eager to tell her about catching the hit-and-run perp. She’s already heard and tells him he did a good job, but turns down his request for dinner. She turns to go, but then has seconds thoughts and suggests drinks instead.

He asks why she came to Gangnam when she knew he’d be there. She thinks he should know, but he admits that he’s never known anything when it comes to her. Why do I find that declaration so romantic, like he’s somehow telling her that she’s always owned him? Maybe it’s just Cha Seung-won.

She doesn’t answer and decides that drinks are as much as she can handle today. But then as she watches Pan-seok stand in the street and fail repeatedly to catch her a cab, her face softens and she quietly walks over and leans on him.

She cries as she admits aloud how much she misses their son, and he very carefully raises a hand to pat her softly on the back, trying not to cry.

Dae-gu stays up late watching TV as usual (Hey, you watch Feel-Good Day too?) and then the screen splits to show Pan-seok at home doing the same thing, and even wearing the same off-duty cop PJ uniform.

Their routine is eerily similar and equally lonely, from the instant ramyun to the filling of time with nothing in particular, to the popping of sleeping pills (I’m guessing), which is just followed by more insomnia.

Pan-seok takes out an old tape and pops it into the camcorder. It’s a video of his son with his toy robot, talking to Dad behind the camera and bragging about how he’s super brave and going to catch all the bad guys.

It’s not just that Pan-seok watches it that kills me, but that he talks back to the screen and plays dead when the boy shoots laser beams out of his toy, like he’s still there. He falls asleep to the sound of his son’s voice.

Dae-gu falls asleep to cartoons as usual, but tonight he has a nightmare about being chased by Combat Boots as a kid, which morphs into him being chased as an adult. The man corners him in a dark alley, and then Dae-gu wakes up in a cold sweat.

He can barely stop trembling, and then he realizes that he’s clenching his fist so tight that his nails leave bloody cuts on his palm.

In the morning Pan-seok gets called in with the alarming news that their hit-and-run suspect walked away scot-free. Of course. He storms into the holding area to find the chaebol’s chauffer sitting there with a hangdog expression on his face, after having confessed to the crime in his boss’s place.

Pan-seok goes straight for Prosecutor Han and yanks him up by his collar. He can’t believe they handed him an airtight case and he’s letting a man who killed a child walk away. Prosecutor Han doesn’t even try to appear remotely ethical, and just spits back that it’s not who died that matters, but who committed the crime. I think you mean, who lines your pockets, but same diff.

When Pan-seok finally lets go, Prosecutor Han punches him in the face. Pan-seok pops him right back… only Prosecutor Han actually passes out from the hit. Oh crap. You had to punch the weenie who’s going to faint, and now he’s probably going to sue you for obstruction of justice or something.

Pan-seok and Eung-do wring their hands nervously at the hospital, just hoping that Prosecutor Han wakes up. Is it too much to hope that he wakes up with amnesia accompanied by a newfound moral compass and a sudden sense of justice? What, it happens.

Thankfully he wakes up; sadly he’s still an asshole. He nearly faints again when he hears he had to get stitches, and declares that he’s going to make Pan-seok’s worst fears come true—he’s going to lose his job.

Dae-gu drives out of the city and tells S that he’s going to visit the orphanage to make sure Combat Boots doesn’t find him that way. We see in flashback as Ji-yong goes from orphanage to orphanage trying to find a place that’ll take him without alerting the cops.

He finally gets to one where the woman just asks him warmly if he’s had anything to eat, and takes him in without questions. Dae-gu comes to see her now and apologizes for not coming by more often. She assures him that he does enough by just being him, since he’s a role model to so many of the kids here.

He tells her that someone might come around asking questions about him, and requests that she not say anything. But she says someone already came, just a few minutes ago in fact, and said he was a cop. She gave him Dae-gu’s contact information as requested. Oh no.

Dae-gu goes running out when he hears that the man was just here, and scans the yard filled with kids and visiting volunteers. He spots a man in a black cap with a large scar on his cheek, and Dae-gu rushes him ready to attack.

But the man looks scared and surprised, and when he speaks, Dae-gu realizes it’s not the voice he remembers. He lets the man go and stands in the yard trying to get his bearings… and then the real Combat Boots peers out from around the corner. Great, now HE knows what YOU look like! Bah.

He confirms that the man who came asking about him didn’t have any facial scars, which is a surprise to him. He expected that Combat Boots would be easy to identify because of the scars (because of their chemistry room fight eleven years ago), but either Combat Boots had plastic surgery, or that acid he threw in his face wasn’t acid.

Dae-gu is still on edge when he returns to the precinct, and he senses someone creeping up behind him. He gets the jump on his attacker… and ends up pinning Soo-sun against the soda machine so hard he knocks the wind out of her.

He screams at her for playing childish games, and she’s left sputtering after him that she’s the one who should be mad. When they get back to their desks, Gook and Tae-il are amazed that they haven’t heard the news that Hit-and-Run’s chauffer confessed to the crime.

But they add that that’s the least of their troubles because Pan-seok is in the middle of a war with the prosecutor’s office. Police Chief Kang calls an emergency meeting to deal with the crisis, and rails into Pan-seok for making such a stupid mistake and reacting emotionally. He’s costing them years of effort behind the police branch gaining more investigative autonomy, not to mention fanning the existing flames of discord between cops and prosecutors.

Pan-seok can only hang his head and apologize over and over. The meeting is interrupted when the warrant for his arrest comes through, and Chief Kang doesn’t put up a fight.

She reassigns the hit-and-run case to another team, and Pan-seok’s only concern as he’s arrested is that the chauffer is a patsy. She yells at him that they have bigger problems. Chief Toad is especially gloaty, which surprises no one. Pan-seok gets taken away like a common criminal, and he can barely look at the rookies as he passes them by.

He gets locked up in a cell, and Eung-do says he’ll try to talk to Prosecutor Han. Pan-seok argues that there’s no need to bow down to that guy, but Eung-do says anything is better than losing his job over this.

Pan-seok says he’d truthfully love to tell Prosecutor Han to take his job and shove it, but then he sighs and tells Eung-do to take care of the kids and reassure them because they’ll be scared. Aw.

Dae-gu eavesdrops on all this from the hallway, and then sees that Combat Boots is calling Pan-seok right now, but of course his belongings are sitting in a box outside his cell. Dae-gu can’t believe the terrible timing, and watches in frustration as the call goes unanswered.

Chief Toad happily yanks the hit-and-run case out of Team 3’s hands and benches them from all cases and disbands the team. Eung-do takes them out to lunch to try and comfort them, but everyone’s in a funk to say the least.

Soo-sun asks if they can change Prosecutor Han’s mind, and Dae-gu scoffs that it won’t do any good—Pan-seok physically attacked a prosecutor, and there’s no getting out of that. Tae-il agrees that Pan-seok shouldn’t have lost control when he knew he was responsible for an entire team of rookies.

Eung-do doesn’t argue that it was a mistake, but he tries to get them to focus on the hit-and-run case. Gook sighs that there’s no point—they catch the bad guy and he’ll just walk away again.

Soo-sun is the only one who argues that there is a point, and they can’t let him get away with it. Gook asks if anything they do matters if the bad guys just keep slipping away and wonders if the world ever changes.

Soo-sun: “Of course! The world… changes…” She trails off, suddenly very unsure of how to finish the sentence when she doesn’t actually know anymore.

She narrates: “I didn’t have a quick answer to Gook’s question, because if the world doesn’t change, then why are we spending our nights investigating, unable to go home, and eating our first meal of the day at three in the afternoon?”

Chief Kang meets with Assemblyman Yoo and tries to sound convincing when she says that this crisis isn’t going to tear down all her efforts to get joint investigating rights with the prosecutor’s office. But she wrings her hands the whole time, and for once doesn’t look so sure of herself.

Sa-kyung comes down to visit Pan-seok in his cell, and when he makes a joke about her finally getting her wish that he’d quit his job, she gets furious at his cavalier attitude. She yells that he lost their son to this job, only to hold on for all these years and lose it to that idiot prosecutor, which of course only incenses her more.

She tells him he was a terrible father, but then adds that he’s decent as a detective. “It wouldn’t be so bad if the world had one detective like you. No… I would like it if there were.” She tells him to do whatever it takes to get through this and put that hit-and-run suspect behind bars.

The chauffer gets put back in his cell, which happens to be right next to Pan-seok’s. That ought to come in handy. Meanwhile, Tae-il and Gook trek through the chauffer’s neighborhood to get his family history and find out why he might’ve confessed to the crime.

Unsurprisingly, he has a sick little sister—a very young one, who looks up to him like a dad since they’re all alone in the world. The grandma who rents them a room says he recently scraped together enough money for her surgery. Bingo.

At the same time, Dae-gu lurks around Prosecutor Han’s hospital room and waits for an opportunity to sneak inside. He grabs the prosecutor’s wallet and one of the receipts inside catches his attention. I hope it’s something good. Do bribes come with receipts?

Tae-il goes to visit the chauffer’s little sister in the hospital, and she just assumes he’s her brother’s friend. She says she’s very close to her oppa, and asks if Tae-il has an older brother too. The way he can’t answer her question must mean that the man in the photo he keeps must be his hyung.

While she goes to the bathroom, Tae-il watches he busy hospital corridor lost in thought, and runs into Dae-gu who hands him an envelope. He says to give it to Pan-seok, since it should help him with his predicament.

Pan-seok chats with the chauffer now that he has some background info on his little sister, and says that he once thought along the same lines when it came to his son. He was determined to clean up the world and make it a better place so that his son could be proud of him.

He sighs, “But you know what, the world’s best father is the father who’s by your side. I learned that only after I lost my child.” He names all the things he missed out on, like his son’s first steps, his first day of kindergarten, the day he died. “You see, I always thought there would be a next time.”

He adds tearfully, “The moment that your little sister needs you the most isn’t next time. It’s always right now.” That’s a good speech.

Meanwhile, the team suddenly has to kick it into high gear when Tae-il finds out that the hit-and-run suspect just left for the airport an hour ago. Gook stands in the middle of traffic with a bullhorn to track down a deliveryman whose black box might have caught the hit-and-run on camera.

Dae-gu and Soo-sun have been demoted to traffic duty, and Dae-gu has a hilarious moment with a woman who signs her traffic ticket, “Son of a bitch.” He just processes the ticket and hands it to her: “Have a nice day, Ms. Son-of-a-bitch.” Lol.

Soo-sun comes running over to him in a panic with orders from Eung-do to go stop Hit-and-Run from leaving the country, so then they race to the airport and finally spot him in a lounge upstairs.

Tae-il gets back to the precinct and slips Pan-seok the envelope from Dae-gu. He takes one look at whatever’s inside and smiles, and immediately calls Prosecutor Han.

Gook finds his deliveryman and the black box footage from that night shows the child running into the street to chase after a ball. But just as a car comes into view about to hit him, the camera feed cuts out. Nooo.

At the precinct, the chauffer gets transferred in handcuffs, and Tae-il brings his little sister in a last-ditch effort to get him to change his mind. The little girl asks if her oppa did bad things to save her, and cries that she’d rather die then.

He looks like he’s going to ignore her cries, but then at the last second he changes his mind and asks to speak to Pan-seok. And whatever Dae-gu gave him in that envelope worked like a charm, because Pan-seok is walking around a free man.

Things aren’t going so well for Dae-gu and Soo-sun at the airport, since they can’t get into the VIP lounge and there isn’t any new evidence they can use to re-arrest the guy. Eung-do just tells them to do whatever they can to stall.

They catch a break when Hit-and-Run’s girlfriend arrives outside the lounge and calls him out. Seeing her only opportunity, Soo-sun just makes a run for it and when the couple moves to embrace, she dives in between them and sandwiches herself in. Pfft.

Dae-gu’s jaw drops, and the woman pitches a fit that her playboy boyfriend is at it again. Hit-and-Run insists he doesn’t know what’s going on, but Soo-sun just wraps her arms around his waist and coos, “Oppa! You’re not leaving like this are you?” I can’t wait to hear Dae-gu complain about this.

The girlfriend slaps him before stomping away, and Soo-sun does her best to cling like a monkey. She starts to draw unwanted attention though, and the airport security team comes after her.

But then Dae-gu comes careening out of nowhere with a luggage cart in tow, and scoops them both up in one fell swoop. He races them through the airport like that, screaming at old ladies to move out of the way. Hee.

The chauffer hands Pan-seok a flash drive and tells him that should be enough, and asks if it’s too late for him to make amends to his little sister. Pan-seok assures him that it isn’t, and promises to do his best to get him out before his sister’s surgery.

Dae-gu carts Soo-sun and Hit-and-Run around the airport like a chase right out of Looney Tunes, with Soo-sun wrestling the perp the entire ride. Eventually the security guards catch up to them, and the suspect has figured out by now that they’re the cops who came after him the first time.

He challenges them to go ahead and arrest him, knowing they have nothing to charge him with. It looks like they’re about to lose him when Eung-do arrives and sticks a video in the suspect’s face. Ha, it’s him admitting to the crime and paying off the chauffer to take the fall in exchange for his sister’s surgery cost. Nailed ya.

Eung-do charges him and Soo-sun gleefully pulls out her handcuffs to make the arrest. Go team.

When they make it back to the precinct, Pan-seok is there greeting the others and congratulating them on a job well done. Soo-sun is so excited to see him that she runs over and hops around on her feet until she can’t contain herself and bear-hugs him. Aw that’s cute.

Pan-seok freezes at the awkward display of gushinesss, and Dae-gu looks even more displeased than when she hugged the child-killing douchebag.

The team stands around awkwardly, and then Pan-seok tells them they all did a great job: “You are now rookie detectives.” He tells them to taste the moment when they finally put the bad guy behind bars, because this is what they live for.

He directs a smile at Dae-gu, but it’s rebuffed with another blank stare. This time Pan-seok follows him to his locker and sincerely thanks him for the envelope that proved mighty useful. Dae-gu just replies coldly that he didn’t do it for Pan-seok; he did it so the team wouldn’t be split up.

He says he’s still disappointed in Pan-seok’s actions, after all his speechifying about how detectives are a team. He asks how a man so strict on others can be so lenient on himself.

Pan-seok stops him as he’s leaving and admits that it’s embarrassing to ask this now, but he needs to know: “Do you have something against me? You’ve been that way with me from the start. Do you… know me?”

The air gets tense, but then Dae-gu just asks if there’s anyone who doesn’t know the legendary Seo Pan-seok, and walks out.

Pan-seok isn’t satisfied with that answer and stays late to look into Dae-gu’s personnel file. All that’s listed in his history is the orphanage where he grew up, and Pan-seok looks it up online.

He leaves it at that for the night, but then Dae-gu comes in early the next morning and sees his file on Pan-seok’s desk. Cat and mouse, here we go.

He gets to work filing evidence paperwork, and grabs a pair of reading glasses from his locker. Soo-sun walks in a moment later, and that’s what triggers her memory—those thick, adorably nerdy glasses… just like Ji-yong’s. She sees it instantly and calls out, “Kim Ji-yong?” Caught.

He can’t hide the look of surprise and recognition on his face for that split second, but he recovers quickly and takes the glasses off to try and get out of there. But she blocks the door and asks again, “You’re Ji-yong aren’t you?”

But what freaks him out even more is that Pan-seok is approaching the doorway behind her. She opens her mouth to ask it again, “You’re Kim Ji—”

So he plants a kiss on her lips to stop her from being overheard. Omo!

Pan-seok jerks back violently at the sight, like he just stepped in a pile of steaming poop. The horrified double take is priceless. And Dae-gu and Soo-sun stand there lip-locked and rooted in that spot.

EPILOGUE:

Prosecutor Han gets a peek at Pan-seok’s get-out-of-jail-free card: an enormous food and drink receipt for Long Night in Heaven (pfft) for 5 million won. But the kicker is that the amount is paid via “surplus tax.” Criminal AND skeevy. Pan-seok follows up the photo of the receipt with a text: “Shall I send this to your wife next?” He immediately makes the call to have Pan-seok released.

 
COMMENTS

I wasn’t expecting a kiss so soon, not that a don’t-spill-the-beans kiss is a real kiss, but still, there are about a million more efficient ways to shut someone up. That you chose smoochies over a hand to the mouth, well good luck trying to convince anyone that meant nothing. I’m excited that Soo-sun recognized him, because he looked completely unprepared for that outing, and if he can’t convince her that she’s mistaken, he’ll have to tell her something about his past to keep her quiet. I’m not sure if he can include her in his super secret spy club given her blind worship of Pan-seok, but I’d like it if he was forced to let her in, just so that someone could steer him down other avenues of logic.

I love the dynamic that’s forming around Soo-sun. Her wide-eyed hero worship of Pan-seok is growing by the day, while Dae-gu is becoming begrudgingly attached and he’s clearly annoyed that she thinks Pan-seok is so great when he’s convinced it’s all an act. I love this peevish jealousy stage in rom-coms where the hero doesn’t know why but he’s just angry all the time when the girl is near other men, and it’s all the funnier that Soo-sun just keeps launching herself at guys while he stands there. It’s far more complicated where Pan-seok is involved since her admiration of him is genuine, and I actually think her blind faith in their leader is what will become their biggest obstacle romantically, as a point of ideology rather than a traditional love triangle.

But the best part is that Dae-gu and Pan-seok are the main loveline in a narrative sense—they’re the two characters at the heart of the story and we want them to find their way back to each other. They’re the same—not just by circumstance—but cut from the same cloth and burdened with the same need to do the right thing. They just happen to also be equally bullheaded and convinced they can never be wrong, which spells many more dangerous misunderstandings to come. It’s a great setup for a pair mortal enemies as much as a pair of comrades, or what I’m really hoping for: master and young grasshopper.

Pan-seok’s admission about being a terrible father and getting it all wrong the first time is so moving because he never would’ve learned that lesson had he not lost his son, all because he thought devoting himself to his work was the right thing to do. But he learns the lesson all over again when he realizes that he left his new children floundering without their dad, and none of his so-called legendary lessons mean a thing if he isn’t there for them. I know that Dae-gu ultimately helped free Pan-seok because that’s his link to Combat Boots and he needs the team to stay together if he wants to keep spying on Pan-seok, but his argument with him at the end sounded like such a father-son moment. Why do your own rules not apply to you? You’re the one who said we’re a team, and then you left us! You guys are going to make such a cute surrogate daddy-son pair someday. Just as soon as we get that pesky murder, corruption, lying, stalking, and invasion of privacy stuff squared away. Easy as pie.

 
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