I Remember You: Episode 4

by rejoycie

Another link to Hyun’s past appears and in a twist of fate, history is on the verge of repeating itself. Once again, it’s Hyun versus the rest of the world, although this time round, he has his trusty sasaeng-fan-stalker by his side. It’s ironic that we expect this hour to give us some answers, but all it really does is give us half an answer, that prompts a thousand more questions and reservations.

EPISODE 4: “The Suspect, Lee Hyun”

Following the arrest of murderer Seung-hoon in China, detectives Seung-joo and Eun-bok report to Team Leader Kang that the drugs found in Seung-hoon’s possession are the same drugs found in the two victims’ bodies. Since his father’s influence would be useless in China, it’s likely he would get slapped with at least a life sentence.

As Ji-an makes her way to Hyun’s old apartment, she attempts to convince herself that underhanded methods are acceptable as long as the criminal is put away. What ensues is a battle between her inner voice approving of Hyun’s questionable methods, and her actual voice insisting that the police should strictly abide by the law.

Hyun corners Ji-an with his deduction that she’s a frequent visitor to this house, and once again confronts her about her identity. She debates whether to out herself, as we flash back to her childhood days: Little Ji-an follows little Hyun home, but her nonexistent spy skills cause her tracks to be immediately discovered by Hyun. She declares herself as his “partner,” and then we get this whole montage of the umpteen times Hyun demanded Ji-an get lost. Lol, he’s harsh, but her persistence is something too.

Thinking back to Hyun’s childhood confession that he’s responsible for his father’s death, Ji-an decides to stick to her previous admission that she’s just a fan. At Hyun’s disbelief that a mere fan would know the address of his childhood home, Ji-an claims to be a sasaeng fan, which Hyun likens to a stalker.

He accepts her words for now, and gets dangerously close to her while asking, “How can I repay you? What do you want from me? This kind of thing?” Slightly flustered, Ji-an puts a stop to his teasing, and acknowledges her annoyance that he doesn’t recognize her despite her constant stalking (as a fan) whenever he came to Korea. She tries to worm her out of the situation, saying, “They say not to mess with a woman who’s been hurt.”

He threatens to report her for being a stalker, but she announces that as of today, she’s an ex-stalker; he’s in her past, and she’s now into the “lively and young oppas” of EXO. She encourages him to forget their history, and proposes getting along as partners from now on. Cut to: Ji-an being kicked out of the house.

Lawyer Jung receives a phone call informing him about the request for a drug investigation. He assumes it’s Hyun’s doing, and is thus a little surprised to find out that Ji-an’s name is behind it.

Deputy Chief Kang calls Chief Hyun and Team Leader Kang to his office to berate them for turning over their suspect to the Chinese police. Team Leader Kang defends their actions, but Deputy Chief is adamant that Ji-an be issued disciplinary action and transferred.

Team Leader Kang suddenly grows a backbone and insists that he will protect his team members. But Deputy Chief threatens to dismantle their special investigation team, and desperation drives Team Leader Kang to pound his fist on the table: “Father!” Then our resident heodang leader grimaces in pain, since he slammed his fist too hard.

Ji-an and the three musketeers overhear her transfer orders, and she mutters a swear directed at Hyun. But Myung-woo and Team Leader Kang think she’s directing it at them, and even Lawyer Jung arrives to join the little party.

Ji-an takes him aside, and gives him permission to complain about the drug investigation. His roundabout reply tricks her into revealing that she’s being held scapegoat for the instigator. She only belatedly realizes that she fell into his trap while he confirms his hunch that Hyun’s the real mastermind.

Back at Hyun’s childhood home, he spies a pair of handcuffs on the floor, dropped by Ji-an when she chucked her bag at him previously. He tut-tuts at her oversight.

As he heads out of the house, his neighbor, forensics specialist Joon-ho, is there to greet him with a rogue water hose that will not shut off. After a rather failed wrestling match with the hose, the two grown man are left drenched from head to toe. Okay, I kinda love that this is how they meet.

They both rummage in their pockets for a handkerchief, but only pull out job-related tools like a magnifying glass and handcuffs. Hyun guesses that Joon-ho is a doctor (Joon-ho: “Something like that”) and Joon-ho guesses Hyun is a police officer (Hyun: “Something like that”).

Hyun heads to Joon-ho’s house to borrow some dry clothing, and the two of them start undressing with their backs turned to each other.

As Hyun is putting his shirt on, a scalpel appears within a hair’s breadth of his neck. His senses are on high alert, but the camera pulls back to reveal that Joon-ho was simply trying to remove the clothing tag on Hyun’s shirt.

Hyun observes that Joon-ho’s expecting someone since he recently went shopping, and Joon-ho replies, “I’m always waiting because I’m lonely.” He explains that his wife and child live abroad.

Hyun sips the tea that Joon-ho prepared, then notices Joon-ho’s intent stare. Joon-ho awkwardly explains that he’s grateful to finally have a neighbor, since the house next door was left empty for so long. There’s nothing wrong with Joon-ho’s words, but this atmosphere couldn’t be any eerier.

In an abandoned building, a dark hooded figure walks by: “Please forgive me, God. I couldn’t help it.” And then, the camera pans to reveal a dead body left in his wake.

Back in China, Seung-hoon is raising a fuss that strings haven’t been pulled to release him from prison. He’s curious as to how “they” are doing, and Lawyer Jung answers that Hyun and Ji-an are probably fine. Seung-hoon slams his fist in anger: “Tell them to enjoy these times. People can live inside these walls too.”

Lawyer Jung says soothingly, “It must hurt. Isn’t it best to make the easiest choice at the latest time?”

It’s been two weeks since Ji-an has been stuck in her demoted position, and she plasters a forced smile on her face to deal with petty complaints. She drops by to see her team, but hurries to hide when Deputy Chief Kang appears, ducking behind the boys. Her team even adorably sways side-to-side to keep her out of sight.

With her mood down in the dumps, Ji-an realizes how much she’d loved her job — the stakeouts, the crime scenes, the handcuffs, and even the stalking.

Aunt brings up her obsession with Hyun, and Ji-an again classifies it as monitoring, not stalking. She recalls her promise to no longer watch Hyun, and sighs in frustration that she has no excuse to stalk anymore.

In a flashback to Hyun’s childhood, we see the moment when he discovers the hidden lever that opens the basement door. Min is there too, and both boys head down to the basement for their first time.

In the present, Hyun retraces his steps into the basement, just as he receives a text message from a detective, Officer Yang. He’d been on duty during young Hyun’s visit to Joon-young and got overly excited at Hyun’s ability to accurately guess the number of matchsticks.

Officer Yang rings up Hyun, who has no inclination to meet up until Officer Yang mentions information regarding Joon-young’s escape. That’s more than enough to get Hyun rushing over.

But just before their agreed-upon meeting time, Officer Yang gets a diffferent visitor. A hooded figure rushes into the house and Officer Yang’s eyes seem to widen in recognition, but the man swiftly sticks a knife into Officer Yang. Oh crap.

By the time Hyun arrives at the door, Office Yang is bleeding profusely, and the attacker turns out the lights to hide himself. Hyun calls Officer Yang’s cell phone, and hears it ringing from within the house. Suspicious, Hyun finds the door unlocked and cautiously heads in.

He finds Office Yang on the floor and immediately calls for an ambulance. Alas, it’s too late as Office Yang dies before he manages to utter a word.

Hyun’s spidey sense alerts him to the presence of the intruder in the house, and within moments, the attacker comes rushing at him with a knife. A violent fistfight ensues, and Hyun’s judo skills manage to hold back his opponent significantly. However, the attacker jumps out of the window before Hyun can unmask him, and he limps away just as the police sirens sound: “Please forgive me, even I can’t do anything about myself.”

Back in Officer Yang’s house, Hyun notices the boxes of information stored, but the arriving police, and the rather damning evidence of Office Yang’s blood on his shirt, forces him to make his escape.

Chief Hyun and the team inspect the site. They hear Hyun’s call to emergency services and think they recognize his voice, then review a car’s black box recording that shows Hyun leaving the area. He’s now the prime suspect.

Myung-woo informs Ji-an that Hyun is a murder suspect, but she doesn’t know of his whereabouts. She goes to Hyun’s childhood home to look for him, and the way she removes the key from its hiding place is rather telling of her familiarity with this house.

By the time she arrives home, Hyun is playing video games oh-so-comfortably in her living room, and scares the bejeezus out of her. He labels his visit as a “surprise event” for his stalker, while she’s flabbergasted at his audacity for trespassing into a police officer’s house. He correctly guesses that she just came from breaking into his childhood home as well, but she maintains that she was chasing a murder suspect.

Ji-an reaches for her handcuffs to apprehend him, but he dangles them in front of her. She snatches them and attempts to cuffs him, but he asks if she really thinks he’s a murderer. He says, “Believe me. I don’t kill people if I can help it.” He thinks back to his father calling him a monster, and finishes, “Because normal children rebel against their parents.” He means he’s rebelling against the monster label, but since Ji-an doesn’t know that, she’s just confused.

Hyun says she owes him a favor, and he’s here to stay since he has nowhere else to go. This seems to strike a chord with Ji-an, although it also leaves her stewing in anger. She ought to turn him in but she can’t bring herself to, and she calls herself crazy for it. Hyun shakes his head at her contradictory monologue.

The police team is hard at work with stakeouts and investigations, although Team Leader Kang is unconvinced about Hyun’s motive for murdering Officer Yang. Myung-woo suggests starting off first with Hyun’s interrogation, and then proceeds to surreptitiously remove a photograph of himself from the board.

Lawyer Jung is at a gathering with other lawyers, where the speaker is a rich old man talking about a crime novel: Two boys, A and B, were playing with bow and arrows, and A shot B dead by accident. The incident was believed to be accidental and A got acquitted, but someone saw A shooting perfectly in a vacant lot before the incident. At the end of the day, no one is sure if A killed his friend on purpose.

He links this to a similar real-life crime, where a child killed a friend in what seemed like an accident, but the old man believes it was a planned murder. What’s more interesting is that the child appeared in front of him as a grown young man, he says as he smiles at Lawyer Jung.

Old Man takes Lawyer Jung aside to ask a favor. He sighs that his old body has failed him, and Lawyer Jung replies that the body isn’t important when the brain is intact. Old Man asks Lawyer Jung to “be my body.”

Ji-an struggles with her loyalty to the police, and tries to persuade herself that she’s monitoring Hyun as a murder suspect (not abetting him). At least she has the guts to admit that she’s simply giving cowardly excuses.

She hustles around the house, hiding Dad’s case file and her childhood photo from Hyun. Eventually, she questions him about his relation to Officer Yang, and he explains that Officer Yang is just someone he knew from his childhood.

Ji-an encourages him to turn himself in, which Hyun rejects in a heartbeat. Changing topics, she’s curious about his clean set of clothing, and we see that he sneaked into someone’s yard earlier to pilfer some clothes, though he left money behind to cover them.

Putting her faith in Hyun, Ji-an heads to Officer Yang’s apartment. Under the cover of being a member of the investigation team, she gets the officer-on-duty to leave his post for thirty minutes, and sneaks Hyun and herself into the cordoned-off crime scene.

After poking around the apartment, Hyun pockets a pill found on the floor. Although Hyun didn’t get a look at the murderer’s face, he noticed that the murderer was of normal build, and had exceptional fighting skills.

Ji-an scoffs at his vague information, but Hyun has one final point to make. Officer Yang made no move to defend himself from the knife wound, which is odd, since basic survival instincts would have tried to block the knife.

Hyun’s senses pick up impending footsteps, and he quickly turns out the light and pulls Ji-an inside a closet with him. It’s Team Leader Kang and Myung-woo, who both have doubts about Hyun being the murderer, though Myung-woo still harbors distaste for Hyun: “His entire existence is rude.”

An inspection of Officer Yang’s computer revealed lots of porn videos, and Team Leader Kang swears that he has no appetite for such things. Myung-woo vows to never live like Officer Yang, old and single, but the problem is, there are no women around him.

Team Leader Kang suggests Ji-an, but Myung-woo rejects Ji-an as a woman, saying that she has no figure. Ji-an holds in her irritation at her colleagues’ comments, but accidentally lets slip a hiccup when she realizes her proximity to Hyun.

Both investigators hear it — and worse, Ji-an’s hiccups just won’t stop. Myung-woo cocks his gun and starts to approach the closet, while Ji-an and Hyun huddle together like sitting ducks.

COMMENTS

What, no smooches? I half-expected Hyun to kiss her to muffle her hiccups, but oh well, maybe it’s too out-of-character for now.

I really love this setup with Hyun being the wrongly accused lone wolf, and the only person he has a semblance of trust in being Ji-an. To a certain extent, his knowledge of her is limited and shallow, although it’s still up in the air if he really doesn’t recognize her, or if he’s just toying with her. Still, there’s something he finds trustworthy about her and when push comes to shove, he finds an inexplicable pull to seek refuge with Ji-an. It’s actually pretty likely that he’s already somewhat aware of Ji-an being the little girl who followed him around, since what are the chances his genius self didn’t already do a little snooping around Ji-an’s apartment?

It killed me a little inside when Ji-an encouraged Hyun to turn himself in, and his reaction was an earnest question if Ji-an really thinks he’s a murderer. While he’s used to messing around and being a jerk as a defense mechanism to protect himself from getting hurt, it’s almost palpable how much he really cared for Ji-an’s answer, as if it was the one opinion that mattered to him. It’s one of the few times we see him being completely serious, and it’s an almost identical occurrence from when Dad accused little Hyun of being a monster, and Hyun’s plea was for Dad to have at least listened to him. Dad and Ji-an might have been the only two people who were ever on Hyun’s side, so in a sense, their betrayal would have hurt all the more. And thank goodness, Ji-an eventually pulled through his smarminess to believe in him.

I appreciate that the show isn’t overly pushing romantic vibes between the two leads, because I much rather enjoy this dependent and semi-cohabitation relationship they have with each other. It’s impossible to deny their chemistry and charged moments, but I’m in no rush for him to be a Prince Charming to her Damsel In Distress. Hyun is slowly polishing Ji-an up to be a better investigator, and Hyun is showing small signs of letting down his icy demeanor in her presence. They mutually complement and complete each other in a rather unpredictable fashion, and I hope the show only does great things with this development.

Joon-ho and Hyun finally meet, albeit in a rather unexpected silly way. It’s striking how such a comedic situation can be so thick with suspense, what with all the subtext and reading between the lines. Joon-ho’s disturbing smiles are eerily similar to that of Joon-young’s, and his preoccupation and bump-in with Hyun seem too coincidental to be pure chance. If he indeed bought the house next to Hyun’s childhood home deliberately, Joon-young’s words that he’s already next to Hyun fit the puzzle perfectly, but then again, I can’t trust the show not to pull a fast one on us. While Joon-ho’s intentions remain murky for now, it’s hard to ignore the almost fatherly smile he occasionally directs towards Hyun.

There are many arrows pointing to Lawyer Jung being Little Bro Min, noting the comparable wide-eyed, innocent yet emotionless expressions, although I’m not betting my cards on anything. The scene of the two little boys looking for the basement door reminded me that only Dad and the two kids knew about the lever to open the door from outside the basement. So when the door opened for little Hyun to find Dad dead, either Min opened it, or one of the brothers told Joon-young about the hidden lever. With little Hyun’s confession, he’s looking guiltier and guiltier by the minute, although we still can’t rule out Min’s participation in Dad’s death. So, what’s the deal here – is Lawyer Jung Little Bro, is Lawyer Jung the puppet master pulling the strings behind Seung-hoon, or is Old Man the big brain behind it all? Where are the answers!

There’s definitely more that meets the eye regarding the members of Ji-an’s team. Myung-woo seems overly and unreasonably set against Hyun, and I’m wondering where he falls in this tangled web. Team Leader Kang seems to be nursing a cute crush on Ji-an, but is that really all there is to him? Of course, with another uncontrollable rogue killer, we’ve got our hands pretty full with loose criminals, hidden identities, and sexy smiles. All in a day’s work, really.

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