Mrs. Cop: Episode 3

by LollyPip

Young-jin makes a big decision, one that affects her entire life and career in some pretty drastic ways. But she still has her moral compass, and her fighting spirit is stirred again and as she goes to bat against a system that seems to work only for itself. Let’s hope that this time around, Young-jin makes smarter choices so that she can actually do some good.

EPISODE 3

Young-jin faces the panel, and they ask her the all-important question, the one that will determine if she keeps her job or not: Did she intentionally shoot Nam Sang-hyuk? Nam-jin’s worry about money and Jong-ho’s concern for her career flood her mind, and she thinks of her daughter’s adoration.

She seems ready to lie to save her job, but instead she says what’s got to be the hardest thing to say in that moment… “Yes, I did.”

Jong-ho waits in the hall until it’s all over, and Young-jin just apologizes for not being able to follow his advice. He yells at her for acting superior, as if she doesn’t need to think about others, then tells her to get out of his face.

Young-jin picks up Ha-eun at school, showing off a bit one final time in her dress uniform for her daughter’s behalf. She takes Ha-eun for ice cream and tells her that Mommy did something really good today – she told the truth because of her, demanding ten kisses as payment. Cute.

But then Young-jin starts to cry, overwhelmed by her emotional day, and tells Ha-eun that it’s just because she’s happy to be with her. Ha-eun sweetly offers her a hundred kisses, which cheers Young-jin right up.

Two years later.

President Kang (of KL Group) oversees construction of a new development, with his skeevy son Jae-won there learning the ropes. Secretary Yoon says that their informant in charge of construction bids has backed out, and when Jae-won spouts some aggressive threats, President Kang is impressed and puts him in charge.

Of course, his way of handling the situation is through threats and blackmail, and he refers to himself as “Mad Dog” to the informant. Gag, he’s disgusting ~shudder~

Little Ha-eun has grown, emotionally as well as physically, and now it’s her job to reassure Nam-jin that Young-jin will show up to her recital and to stop fussing about it. Nam-jin gripes that she’s just like her mother, and she’s not wrong, ha.

Young-jin is now a sub-station chief, but she’s just as dedicated as before at using her skills to solve mysteries, even if they involve more door-dings than murders these days. She also makes sure to leave in plenty of time to make it to Ha-eun’s show, though a motorcycle cop tries to pull her over on her way for scootching through a red light.

While still driving, she tries to beg off just this once, but he forces her off the road. HA, when he starts to write her a ticket she hands him her ID and zooms away, so he follows her all the way to the school.

Young-jin gets there just in time for Ha-eun’s dance, but right as the music starts, the cop grabs Young-jin by the wrist. Acting on muscle-memory, Young-jin swings him around and punches him before she even registers what’s happening.

Meet beat cop HAN JIN-WOO (Sohn Ho-joon), who sports a giant shiner and a glare that could peel paint by the time they end up at the station. Young-jin is contrite, though she’s not above playing the “I’m a cop, too” card, but Jin-woo isn’t interested in giving her any leeway.

Young-jin gets annoyed at his inflexibility, and they bark at each other until they’re shouting in each others’ faces right in front of the whole station. Luckily Jae-duk shows up to pull Young-jin away, giving her the heads-up that Jin-woo caused some problems with excessive force in the Violent Crimes Department, which is why he’s here now.

He tells Young-jin to let it go, because Jin-woo is a bulldog when he decides to go after someone. Sure enough, Jin-woo plans to turn her over to Internal Affairs, and Young-jin can’t keep in her laughter — he’s just feeling bitter because he got punched out by an ajumma. She appeals to Jae-duk, but one stink-eye from Jin-woo has Jae-duk crumbling, saying that she’s got to pay for her crimes. HAHA.

Amid creepshow-worthy music and atmosphere (complete with lightning and a smoky room), Jae-won gives a young woman a drugged drink. She’s terrified, but he says that someone is coming soon, and that if she does well tonight, she can pass her audition later. Ew ew EWWWW. She doesn’t want to do this, but Jae-won makes it clear that her wishes don’t enter into it.

He forces the tainted drink on her, but she shoves him off and tries to run. He grabs her and they both fall, and oh no, she’s not moving and there’s blood soaking the rug under her head. She’d hit her head on the table on her way down, killing her instantly, and Jae-won calls in a man he calls President Han to handle the problem.

Han isn’t keen to do this, but he agrees if Jae-won will make all of his investment problems go away by morning. Jae-won promises him whatever he wants, and they get rid of the girl’s body and erase the CCTV footage of the whole thing. But Secretary Yoon finds them and glares ominously.

Jae-won ends up in President Kang’s office again, and Dad tells him never to hang his head unless he’s dying. When Jae-won ekes out a tiny “sorry,” Kang tells him also never to say he’s sorry, except when he’s weak or wants to live. Wow, his life advice SUCKS.

Kang just says that accidents happen, and it’s all good as long as Jae-won got the bid. He tells Secretary Yoon to handle the girls death with President Han, and Jae-won simpers gratefully.

Young-jin pulls age rank on Nam-jin for a chicken leg, and they both wonder how that cop could have gone down with one punch, ha. Young-jin blusters that she could take him any time, anywhere, but Nam-jin mostly noticed his flower boy looks.

Young-jin gets a call about a woman who jumped off a building, that we recognize as the young woman Jae-won killed tonight. Young-jin knows her too, having been called to a salon room recently where the young woman, Mi-kyung, had drunkenly trashed the room and injured herself. She’d refused first aid, and Young-jin realizes now that something had been terribly wrong.

A woman who must be her mother is called in to identify Mi-kyung’s body, and she wails that if Mi-kyung had wanted to avoid her so badly that she left home, she should have stayed alive. She collapses in grief.

Young-jin goes to eat at Jae-duk’s wife Jae-soo’s little corner restaurant, and Jae-soo heads to bed with an admonishment not to drink too much. Several bottles of soju later, Young-jin and Jae-duk are both shnockered and slurring, and he’s adorably trying to convince her that Mi-kyung’s death isn’t her fault.

President Kang calls on Chief Yeom to give him a heads-up about the dead girl, telling him to gloss it over. Yeom asks for details, but Kang sidesteps all of his questions, and Yeom sighs that he’s got a bad feeling about this.

The cops look over the case, which seems like a clear suicide, as it looks like Mi-kyung jumped from the roof of the management company where she was a trainee. Chief Yeom asks why the CCTV cameras were turned off and there were no witnesses, but everything seems to have a plausible explanation.

When Chief Yeom runs into Young-jin in the hall, he can’t help but insult her, saying she looks like an ajumma housewife in her uniform. She just belatedly thanks him for not firing her, and he’s all, “Sure,” and walks away. So rude. Young-jin sees her old team approaching and hides in the ladies’ room, which is so sad because they would be thrilled to see her.

She goes to the hospital and finds Mi-kyung’s mother drinking soju in the hallway, and Mom tells her that Mi-kyung’s management company paid her off not to make a fuss. She asks why Young-jin keeps hanging around when even the detectives assigned to the case haven’t come, and Young-jin says that she met Mi-kyung once. Mom sighs that it feels like everyone knows why her daughter is dead, but nobody will tell her.

Young-jin tells Mom to stop drinking on an empty stomach, but she counters that she’s got no reason to stop. She asks Young-jin to find out what happened to her daughter, so that she can understand. Young-jin agrees to look into it, staying silent when the mother mutters that she’s not even a detective.

Jong-ho hasn’t lost his flirtatious mojo, quipping that Young-jin’s uniform is sexy on her, but she just ignores him which is hysterical. She borrows Mi-kyung’s file, ignoring his wheedling to go to dinner with him and telling him to find someone and get married already. HA.

Young-jin spends the night poring over the file, looking for any clues, but it’s not until morning that she notices a necklace with the word “niño” in one of the photos. A quick online search brings up a particular church, and a talk with a nun there proves that Mi-kyung was a frequent attendee.

Young-jin checks out Mi-kyung’s apartment, which is in such a state of disarray that even the pictures on the walls are crooked. Mi-kyung appears to have liked a kpop group called RIONFIVE, and even had tickets to an upcoming concert. Why would a ticketholding teenage fangirl kill herself right before a concert?

Next Young-jin takes a trip to the supposed site of Mi-kyung’s death, coincidentally walking right into the room where the girl died, where Jong-ho joins her, full of complaints as usual. His constant stream of grousing is pretty endearing, actually. Young-jin says that Mi-kyung didn’t commit suicide, which gets his attention.

At Jae-soo’s restaurant Young-jin shows him the file, saying that any girl who was such a devout Catholic that she’d even once considered becoming a nun, would never kill herself. Not to mention the tickets to the concert the day after her death. Jong-ho works himself into a lather, that none of his detectives discovered any of this.

He brings the evidence to Chief Yeom, looking quite sheepish to admit that Young-jin found everything. Yeom just flat-out tells him to cover it up, shocking Jong-ho so badly that he calls Yeom by his given name. Yeom gives him some BS about letting things go and not putting the family through hardship needlessly.

Jong-do obediently shreds Mi-kyung’s file, though he looks sick over it. The okay is given by the police department to hold the funeral, though Mi-kyung’s mother tries to fight it since there’s still been no investigation. Young-jin arrives in time to stop the doctors, and literally runs all the way to Jong-ho’s office.

She yanks him out of a meeting and demands to know what’s going on, and why he signed off to terminate the investigation. He says there wasn’t enough evidence it wasn’t a suicide, and that Mi-kyung was being treated for depression and even left a suicide note on her blog.

He tells Young-jin that her problem is that she’s convinced she’s always right, and never considers other viewpoints. Well, he’s not wrong. He says angrily that he’s getting tired of dealing with her, and his outburst brings tears to Young-jin’s eyes.

But she fires back that it’s a cop’s job to investigate a suspicious death, no matter who the person was, and wonders what’s wrong with him lately. When he walks away from her, Young-jin asks if he really thinks it was a suicide, but his lack of an answer is all the answer she needs.

Jong-ho reports back to Chief Yeom that he’s not taking down the crime scene quite yet, because the reporters would catch on that something was off. He declines Yeom’s friendly offer of a drink, looking uncomfortable.

Young-jin keeps Mi-kyung’s mother company at the funeral, and Mom talks mostly to herself about how she hadn’t seen her daughter in years and how hard it is to accept that she would commit suicide. Young-jin assures her that it wasn’t suicide, and asks her to delay the funeral and allow an autopsy.

Jong-ho is waiting for Young-jin when she gets home late that night, and says simply, “Bring me evidence.” He gives her the card of a forensic doctor who recently left the force, and says that the crime scene will be left up for two days — that’s her deadline.

Mom allows the autopsy, but Young-jin gets a call that the case will be officially closed a day early. She rushes to get there before the press conference can start, and she breathlessly asks Chief Yeom to delay the announcement. He blows her off until she says that Mi-kyung’s body is undergoing autopsy at this very moment, and they’ll have the results in two hours.

Yeom pretty much flips his lid, but Young-jin argues that they should do everything they can on behalf of the parent, who wants this investigated. She says she will take responsibility and quit if the autopsy shows it’s a suicide, and her declaration is caught on film by the reporters.

Chief Yeom does some damage control to his superiors, saying that he’ll say he requested the autopsy. The results are soon delivered to Young-jin, and everyone in the room holds their breath.

The press conference is held, where Chief Yeom announces that Mi-kyung’s death was NOT a suicide, but disguised to look as though it was. He takes credit for the tenacity of the detectives, and how they didn’t give up until they discovered the truth. He announces the creation of a special task team dedicated to solving this murder.

The detectives go all out, setting up an elaborate headquarters for the special team. Outside the station, Young-jin sees another mother with a sign asking the police to find her missing daughter, and witnesses a female cop telling the mother she can’t picket here.

The cop roughly grabs her sign when the mother doesn’t respond, and Young-jin confronts her. She tells the cop, whose name is MIN DO-YOUNG (Lee Da-hee) to give the mother back her sign. Young-jin tries to take it back by force, but Do-young doesn’t let go, and the two woman glare at each other in their power struggle.

COMMENTS

In a lot of ways, it feels like the show is hitting its stride with this episode. Now that the back story is complete, and we’re caught up to current events, I’m ready to get to the meat of the plot. I’m still a little confused by the lack of family focus when we’re supposed to be watching a show about a woman who struggles to balance her career and her family life, but I’m not ready to criticize the show for it, yet. I really am looking forward to that part of the drama though, so I hope the family stuff kicks in soon. Otherwise I’ll feel a little baited, being promised one thing and given another straightforward “rogue cop learns to be a better civil servant” story.

I completely agree with Saya about the villains in this drama, who are disappointingly one-note and boring. I hold out hope that we’ll be given a reason for their nefarious plots and deeds, though I’ve been quite recently burned by a similar hope (~cough~Mask~cough~) so I’ll admit that my hope is weak. I get it, sometimes a bad guy is just a bad guy because of greed or DNA or lack of hugs as a child or whatever, but in a drama where we’re expected to care about the heroine bringing those bad guys to justice, it’s just a lot more interesting if they have actual… you know. Motives and stuff.

Right now all I see is President Kang who is greedy and thinks his money gives him the right to do whatever he wants, his son Jae-won who is a sniveling little toad, and Chief Yeom who… I still don’t know. He obeys President Kang and gets paid for it, but we still don’t know why. And he does seem to know it’s wrong, and even questions and talks back when he’s told to do something he knows is unlawful and immoral. But WHY? I want to know why. And I’m still frustrated that he’s made it all the way to become the Chief of Police when he’s this crooked and never, ever seems to at least have a plausible reason for his actions. Any questioning of his decisions just results in his usual “just do it and shut up because I’m the boss” reaction, and that would never fly in the real world. Eventually someone would realize that he’s abusing his power without even the flimsiest of excuses.

But otherwise, I actually really like the antagonists, though they’re far from perfect. It’s no secret that Young-jin’s biggest flaw is her temper, and I think that two years out of the detective race has mellowed her out a bit. Not completely, because blatant injustice still causes her to lash out and fight back, but hopefully she’s learned some lessons and will go about this investigation with a cooler head. I know a lot of us complained about what a terrible detective she was, but possibly it’s just that she never had a reason to be otherwise, and she needed to hit rock bottom before she could start to change. Though I’m glad for her sake that she went out on her own terms, with dignity and honesty. It’s interesting that Chief Yeom seems to have saved her by not firing her, and even her demotion doesn’t seem that terrible, since she’s still in a position of authority, even if it is of a small station. But going from where she was then to where she is now — for a person with her pride in her work — had to be tremendously humbling. Let’s hope that her mistakes in the premiere week were meant to be horrendous and not just carelessness in the writing, and that now we’re going to see her lift her head and work her way up to becoming an even better detective than before.

Jong-ho is also an intriguing character, because he’s clearly spent many years going along to get along and rising in the ranks, but he still hasn’t lost his moral compass. Now that he’s dealing with Chief Yeom without Young-jin as a buffer, he’s seeing some of the corruption but unable, or unwilling, to fight against it quite yet. He says often to Young-jin to just say what Yeom wants to hear, just go along with him, don’t make waves. I have a feeling that’s why he’s Head of Violent Crimes — he doesn’t make waves. But he’s not completely lost, and when faced with a clear violation of policy, he’s questioning whether his decisions are the right thing to do. I’m looking forward to seeing more of that, and giving Young-jin the opportunity to prove that Mi-kyung’s death wasn’t a suicide is a beautiful first step.

Speaking of looking forward, I really like Sohn Ho-joon’s character even though we didn’t see much of him. He’s amusingly rigid and grouchy, and I really hope we get to see him and Young-jin team up to take down the tainted Chief. I don’t know if that’s where his character arc is going to go, but it sure would be fun to see the two of them fight their way to friendship. Please make it so!

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