Mrs. Cop: Episode 2

by Saya

Things get dark this hour and Young-jin has to grapple with the consequences of her decision last episode. To answer whether she can serve Lady Justice and the law at the same time, she has to look at why she catches baddies in the first place.

Her personal answer to that question is vital, because today, the stakes are frighteningly high. And with crushing consequences come difficult decisions — or is it the other way around?

EPISODE 2 RECAP

Young-jin hands in her badge and gun, and adds an official letter of resignation, which has Chief Yeom speechless. She passes Jong-ho on her way out, but doesn’t stop for him. However, the news of a new rape-murder bearing all the hallmarks of serial killer Nam Sang-hyuk stops her in her tracks.

Both of them rush to the scene, where forensics confirm Nam’s fingerprints are everywhere — he’s baiting them, Jong-ho says. Young-jin runs outside to scan the well-to-do neighborhood and realizes that he’s after money. She takes charge and immediately puts the team on finding out if any of the jewellery the victim is wearing in her photos is missing, and if it’s gone on the black market yet.

Jong-ho is impressed by how fast she zeroes in on the relevant facts, and praises her for a great job — for someone who’s just handed in their resignation. But when she heads out after telling him to catch the guy, he objects, and she reminds him — she just resigned.

In her car, she contemplates her police siren. Getting out again with siren in hand, she surveys the hubbub of the crime scene. Jong-ho notices her, and interprets her expression as regret — she must feel like she’s leaving her kids at the edge of the ocean. He takes the siren from her and tells her to take a few days off. But she takes the siren back and smashes it to the ground — now she feels free, she tells him, exhilarated.

Jae-deok calls her while she’s driving, ripping into her for leaving him high and dry. She ends up at the hospital, where wife JAE-SOO (Jung Soo-young) glares at Young-jin. “Traitor,” she says darkly, and departs. Jae-deok is a mixture of fury and helplessness — he realizes that Young-jin isn’t necessarily wrong, but what about him?

His temper flares again at how he’s being investigated like a criminal even though he barely escaped death himself, and wonders if they should just quit together. Young-jin disagrees — not after how hard his wife works, and when that would end their modest ambitions. He knows she’s right, but he’s still mad, and rattles off a string of complaints, finishing by calling her the shame of police everywhere. “But I’m good at catching criminals,” she offers, with a rueful smile.

Elsewhere, reporters swarm a young man. Ah, this is the son’s assault case that K1 Group’s President Kang bribed Chief Yeom to divert attention from. Unrepentant and aggressive, the son, KANG JAE-WON, is bodily held back by his father’s secretary, who warns him dangerously not to lose it in front of the cameras.

A cowed Jae-won is delivered to his father, President Kang. Holding the boy’s face in his hands, he says, “If you live like a dog, I, too, become a dog.” He tells him that a man shouldn’t hit a woman, and then his tone changes abruptly: “If you’re going to hit her, you should throw her away, or better, kill her.” Chaebol Survival 101, kids.

Dad proposes to send his errant boy off to an outpost in the Philippines to learn his lesson properly, but his secretary reports that it could be too dangerous for him out there. Jae-won pleads, “Dad…I’m your only son.” Whoops, wrong answer. Dad turns on him and delivers a savage beating. Panting, he hisses that he’s only letting him live because he’s his son.

Morning finds Young-jin burning breakfast. Nam-jin is confused by all this weird behavior, and asks unni what’s up. She also informs her that Ha-eun doesn’t eat carrots and doesn’t ever have rice for breakfast, which of course she wouldn’t know, she digs. But Ha-eun herself arrives and declares she wants rice and carrots, which tickles Young-jin pink. It’s adorable how both sisters light up at the sight of her, and they keep up their cheerful bickering all through breakfast.

While the sisters are out shopping for their Jeju holiday, Young-jin can’t help hearing the news report that their burglar Heo Jung-nam is being charged with the serial rape-murders and is about to be handed over to the prosecution. Once they’re home, she runs off, telling Nam-jin she’ll be back in time for dinner.

She’s come to visit Heo Jung-nam, and he’s hospitalized from being roughed up in prison — nobody likes a rapist-murderer, he explains. She tells him she knows he’s not the killer, and apologizes as she explains that he’s the scapegoat that stops the police from looking incompetent to the media for losing the real culprit, except not in those words. I don’t know why he’s not spitting furious but he takes it on the chin, only telling her that he has a seven-year-old son who’s now been alone for days. Young-jin loses it for a moment — why does a person with a son to worry about go stealing?

Jung-ho pays Chief Yeom a visit, and the chief throws a petulant fit asking if Jung-ho’s going to quit, too. Jung-ho points out that the loss of Young-jin will only make the chief look bad, and he asks him not to process her resignation — he’ll bring her back. But this is the best part: Yeom wants to know why the hell he’s going after Young-jin when he should be focusing on catching the killer. He’s so concerned about public safety. Not. Allow me to remind you why we’re in this situation to begin with, yes?

Young-jin is in Heo Jung-nam’s humble neighborhood, looking for his son, YOON-SOO. The small house is in poor repair, and she has to coax the child out from hiding. It’s achingly sweet how she showers him and cleans him up like he’s her own kid, and when the local kids call him “murderer’s son,” he enlists Police Ajumma to back him up. She confirms that Yoon-soo’s dad certainly isn’t a murderer, and tells the kids that they’re in trouble if they pick on him again.

Young-jin treats him to a meal and Yoon-su starts to cry, and so she learns how his mom walked out on him after buying him pizza. She hugs him and promises to find her for him, though I’m not sure it’s quite…ethical…to tell him his ding-dong’ll fall off if he cries too much. (Also it’s not true, otherwise imagine just how many a drama hero would be…unmanned.) She teases him back to cheerfulness.

Just then, a photo of killer Nam Sang-hyuk is sent to her, nearly forgetting about Yoon-soo. She sits back down to finish their meal.

She pulls up to a hotel with Yoon-soo. Leaving him in the car, she gives him a toy to play with and tells him to stay right there.

Inside, her informant, BAE DAL-HWAN (Shin Seung-hwan) shows her CCTV of their quarry, who paid his board with a stolen necklace. But before he reveals the room, he bargains with her to cancel his priors, and she agrees because she just wants the info. But she doesn’t take the key he hands over, instead calling in the location to Jong-ho, telling him to be quick, since Nam is set to check out soon.

We quickly cut to little Yoon-su in the car, happily playing, until he accidentally drops the toy figure out the window. He gets out to retrieve it, but is distracted by a kitty cat. Oh no, this music is bad.

Both Dal-hwan and Young-jin freeze when Nam unexpectedly appears. She has her back to him as he walks by, cocking a long look at them from under his cap.

Inside, Young-jin corners Nam, who immediately draws a knife. She orders him to drop it but he swipes at her and runs out instead. She gives chase, and outside, little Yoon-soo sees her and calls out excitedly. Nam picks up the child. Noooo!

Young-jin halts immediately and pleads with him to let him go…reaching for the gun that isn’t there. Nam tells her the kid might live if she hurries to the hospital. He ruffles the boy’s hair affectionately — then he stabs him in the stomach and drops him. He doesn’t even run away — he walks. She screams. WHY ARE YOU HOWLING, WOMAN, TAKE HIM TO THE HOSPITAL lsdfjkal sgjal

She gets there eventually, and Yoon-soo is wheeled into surgery. Young-jin falls into a melancholy and ignores her sister’s calls. Even when he comes out of theater, the doctors can’t give her any good news and she has to tell herself it’ll be okay, although that doesn’t stop her tears from rolling.

Jong-ho is busy tracking Nam’s movements, and they discover him at a train station, but the bureaucratic feet-dragging frays his temper. His arrival at the hospital sparks Young-jin’s breakdown into frenzied sobbing. Catching her breath, she lifts her head and vows to kill that bastard no matter what.

She storms into the police station, where the prosecution officials wait to take her away on account of her supposed bribery. This is what my dad calls, “trying to bake potatoes while your house is on fire.” They threaten to take her by force, which angers her team, but she agrees to go quietly.

They want to know who bought her and where and how she’s squirrelled away all that dirty money, since there’s no evidence of her receiving it. Let’s see, if an obviously upstanding policewoman takes a bribe, but nobody paid her any money and she didn’t receive it, did she really take a bribe? I’ll leave the smart cookies of the prosecution to figure that philosophical problem out. She yells at them to go look for it themselves.

Their impasse is interrupted by Jung-ho, calling from the hospital. He reports that Yoon-soo died. Stricken, she staggers out, assailed by her memories of the little boy. She tries to take maknae Se-won’s gun, and they have to tell her that since she resigned, she can’t take it. She rails that she has to catch killer Nam before she can face Yoon-soo. She wrestles the gun from Se-won and screams at them to step aside.

Jong-ho, too, pleads over the phone for her not to do anything on her own, but she just orders him to keep her updated. She begins a search on foot, going to every likely place — PC rooms, motels, seedy massage bars — where Nam might have holed up, showing his picture. She crosses them off, one by one.

She goes back to the hotel Nam was at, to search his room again for clues. She’s let into the taped-off area by her grumbling informant, Dal-hwan. When he asks for a light, it sparks a memory of Nam throwing away a lighter, and she runs back to the foyer, where she finds it under the vending machine. It bears a crown logo that she recognizes from her trek — it belongs to an arcade she already crossed off her list.

Too bad that that’s when the police guarding the scene show up. She haltingly introduces herself with her ex-title, and they ask for her ID. Oopsie.

Next thing you know, she’s tossed into a holding cell at the police station for escaping with a firearm. She’s frantic that they’re going to lose their killer, and when Jong-ho comes by, he congratulates her for getting what she wanted — she’s no longer a cop. She screams at him in frustration, and he shows her her police badge. “Without this, you’re just a troublemaking ajumma,” he tells her.

He goes on to say that other people know how to turn a blind eye to injustice — but not her, she always has to join the fray. And that means she’ll just keep coming back here, like this. His point is that if she’s quit, why is she still running around after Nam Sang-hyuk? Since he shamelessly sucked up to get her badge back, is she going to take her job back or not?

Teeth clenched, she swears to catch him no matter what, but Jong-ho cuts her off. Without her badge, all she can do is kill him, but she can never catch him, ever. He turns to leave.

She calls him back and gives him the lighter and the tip about Nam, as well as an instruction to stake out the place. He just tells her he’ll let her out when she makes a decision on which it’s going to be.

He goes on to follow up her lead with the lighter, and gets a team on the place. A little later, Young-jin asks the holding officers if she can make a call.

Chief Yeom sighs at Young-jin as he returns her badge and gun. She pauses to apologize, “For not catching the culprit.” He heaves a sigh and sends her on her way. But once out of his office, she can’t help grinning back at her smiling ID photo.

Jae-deok’s wife sets a hearty meal in front of Young-jin, who is now at her restaurant. She glowers that it’s only because she needs her to catch the beast who stabbed her husband. Young-jin assures her that she’ll kill him on Jae-deok’s behalf.

Nam-jin drops by with a change of clothes for unni, resigned to the fact that yet again, their plans are laid to waste because of Young-jin’s devotion to her job. But she still offers solemn parting advice to her to keep her daughter in mind, and not overreach herself. Young-jin has a hard time meeting her eyes.

Days of staking out the arcade follow. A rumpled Jung-ho gripes about their ripening smells and suggests they take turns to pop home and wash up. Young-jin doesn’t plan to go anywhere until she finds her prey, but tells him to go ahead — he’s welcome to go to her house. He scoffs at that — it’s not like he’s her husband. He sure doesn’t mind hitting on her after a few drinks, she retorts.

She suddenly pulls his head down — not with amorous intention: She’s just spotted Nam Sang-hyuk (codename: “Mad Dog”). Both detectives go to high alert and mobilize their crew. Jung-ho has to prevent Young-jin from going in herself, and while she struggles against his grip, he growls at her to just wait and let the team do their job.

Nam walks into the PC room and clocks the atmosphere. Without breaking stride he heads right back out, but police pour in and he fights his way to the door. He comes face to face with Young-jin, and swipes at her with his knife before she can bring up her gun.

He hurls himself through a second-storey window, and crashes outside. Jung-ho and his team give chase, but they lose him. LOL, the sight of thirty or more police failing to catch a single guy who was cornered is — unintentionally, I’m sure — hilarious.

Young-jin brings up the tail, and spots bloodstains marking a certain alley. Gun out, she follows the trail to the rooftop of an abandoned building, where he turns around with an unsettling grin. He complains about his rotten luck and proceeds to turn himself in. This way, he smirks, he can plead mitigating circumstances (and therefore receive leniency).

She can hardly believe his flippant attitude. She reproaches him with each of his victims — the woman about to be married, the promising university student, the pregnant mother. She asks why he killed the child, and it takes him a second to realize who she means, and then whines that he told her to hurry to the hospital. She cocks her gun.

“Don’t surrender. And don’t turn yourself in,” she tells him. He goads her into firing, and he screams — in surprise, since she shot wide. But the next time she cocks her gun, Jong-ho, having raced all the way up, shouts out, “No!”

He urges her to lower her gun, and she tells him to pretend he didn’t see anything and go. Throughout their frantic negotiation, Nam just whines at her. Jung-ho yells at him to shut up, but he continues his leering. All of a sudden, a shot fires, and the smirking killer goes down.

Chief Yeom throws his latest fit at Young-jin: Why the hell did she shoot him in the leg? Now, the murderer is going to sue them. Oh, I see — he’s angry because the blame for it will fall on him. He whines that she should have just shot him dead, and she accedes that she wanted to, but didn’t: “Because I’m a police officer.”

On her way out, she apologizes to Jung-ho, too, for bringing disciplinary action on him as well. He asks her one favor, if she’s really sorry — to tell the inquiry that it was an accident and she had no intent to kill. They don’t want to fire her, he argues, she just needs to say the right thing so that they’re allowed to officially let her off the hook.

The day of the hearing, Young-jin suits up in her full uniform. Ha-eun comes in crying because she thinks her mom is getting fired because of her. Nam-jin says that she heard from Jung-ho how she can save her job, and says that she didn’t do anything wrong.

She shows her Ha-eun’s drawings of her in uniform, and Ha-eun says she thinks Mom is coolest when she’s wearing it. If she’s fired, Nam-jin says, with what money is she going to take care of Ha-eun in the future, when she won’t even get a retirement fund?

At the station, Jung-ho reminds her again that with one word, she can keep it all. She thanks him and goes in.

She faces a panel of adjudicators, and she confirms that Nam Sang-hyuk voluntarily surrendered. They then ask the vital question: Did she deliberately shoot him? She looks up, ready to answer.

COMMENTS

I think it’s pretty clear that she can’t say “yes” and keep her job, which means she’ll have to say no. But what I really want to know is, when does the real show start? When do we get Sohn Ho-joon and Lee Da-hee and the ensemble we were promised?

I’m stumped by this tacit acceptance of Chief Yeom’s corruption — no, scratch that, I’m stumped that Young-jin and Jung-ho seem in some way accept the consequences of his corruption, not just without questioning it, but without needing to question it. It would be awfully self-defeating to set up this angle and then not address the evils that stem from it, but while I hope it happens, I also hope minimal time is spent on it.

All this matters because the consequences are so serious — a man was framed, and his innocent son was coldly murdered. Who’s going to break that to him? And if Nam Sang-hyuk can sue the police for being shot, Heo Jung-nam needs to sue them, too, because they’re directly responsible for the death of his child. Yeom’s breach of principle set this whole tragedy in motion, not just once, but at multiple junctures, starting with declaring the thief the killer when he knew he was innocent, and tying Young-jin’s hands when she tried to correct it.

Even if seniority rules, that doesn’t mean there aren’t lines that can’t be crossed. That’s why every time Yeom acts like he’s got the moral high ground, I want to punch his face in. I’m not so naive as to not understand that the higher the position, the greater the politics, but here, it’s clumsy and lacking complexity.

I’m not sure what to make yet of Young-jin’s mixed characterization. There’s this substantive conflict between duties — the working mom’s unwinnable situation (can’t win at work, can’t win at home), and the way the urgency of her job ends up taking her attention away from the everyday needs of her family. It’s a difficult choice when you hear how good at her job she is…except…is she really? Nearly everything she did this episode was dangerously inept, and Jung-ho was right to question her: civilian or police officer? She has to pick one. Because of her running to catch a criminal that it was no longer her job to catch, a kid died.

Her actions may have been driven by rage, panic and grief, but she’s an elite police officer, she should know better than to go off alone without backup. Her whole job is about keeping a cool head under unusual circumstances. Yes, I want Cha Ji-an. Perhaps it’s not fair to hold it up against a different show, but the reason why we love I Remember You is because the characters make sense, and we can see ourselves making their choices.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of things. Despite the spurts of illogic, there was as much good, and plenty of potential, I’d have to give it another week at least to get a real idea. Both episodes had some really promisingly dark moments, with a deft interweaving of mystery and suspense, which I hope we get more of. Kim Hee-ae shows a wonderful motherly side which makes her turmoil feel immediate and real. If there are problems in Young-jin’s character, it’s certainly not in the acting. I love how natural she is as the roughshod detective who gets her hands dirty and is respected by her all-male team, and I love that they call her “noonim” (it’s like, extra cute). If there’s one thing I haven’t seen a cop show get wrong, it’s camaraderie.

With about half the ensemble established, Jung-ho is currently the most interesting. He’s a loyal friend to Young-jin and his ongoing war of values versus pragmatism makes him sympathetic and easy to root for. Although he’s done a fair amount of pandering, it’s openly undercut by his driving agenda, which is to get the job done. He’s clearly the type to favor expediency: With his eyes on his endgame, compromised means will have to suffice in place of better alternatives.

It’s enjoyably greyer than the usual ends-don’t-justify-means dichotomy, and makes Jung-ho less easy to predict (and fun to watch!). His current place in the rigid hierarchy (he outranks Young-jin although they are peers) is evidently the result of careful politicking and active prudence, which means he’s ostensibly more “successful” at work than Young-jin, even though he doesn’t have anywhere near her case-by-case success. It’ll be fun to see whether his arc involves a return to idealism, or whether there’s a way to have your jaded maneuvering and eat it too.

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