Mrs. Cop: Episode 6

by LollyPip

As Young-jin’s team works on its first big case together, we finally see her incredible intuition and intelligence at work, and I’ve gotta say, it’s mighty impressive. Do-young struggles with her admiration even as she realizes that her mentor is human and imperfect, while she deals with disillusionment in herself – she’s still got a lot to learn.

EPISODE 6 RECAP

Young-jin sees a strange woman enter the murdered woman’s apartment complex on the CCTV footage, then leave in a hurry and jump in a taxi. She gets a clear shot of the woman’s face from the taxi’s black box, and after a moment, she realizes that she knows exactly who this is. It’s the missing employee from the victim’s flower shop, Kang Ji-yeon.

Do-young has discovered that Professor Jung’s wife found out that he was having an affair with Eun-jung, and Eun-jung was planning to break things off with him. This gives him a motive, plus she has a witness who saw them fighting recently. Jae-duk is skeptical, since a professor would be smart enough to know he’d be the prime suspect — but then he’d also be smart enough to know to clean up the evidence.

Young-jin lets them speculate, then simply says, “It’s not Professor Jung.” Do-young gets upset because she’s worked so hard to get her evidence, so Young-jin shows the the CCTV tapes she found. Paired with phone records, we see that Eun-jung sent a text to her coworker… after Professor Jung left her place that night. She was still alive when he left.

Jae-duk sees a Teaching Moment and fusses at Do-young for assuming the professor was guilty before she had evidence, but Young-jin gives her a break for being new. She sends the team to dig up more information on Kang Ji-yeon.

Jin-woo tells Do-young not to go off on her own anymore, and to talk to him first. He gives her credit for trying to do well, knowing that she’s beating herself up over it, and tells her to learn slowly by watching her sunbaes. Do-young thanks him for being kind, but admits that she feels like he’s being nice just because she’s a woman.

They go to Ji-yeon’s home, but nobody answers the door when they knock. On their way out, Do-young’s sharp eyes notice something — the curtains were open when they arrived, and now they’re closed. Jin-woo is impressed, and she impresses him even more when she thinks to have building security call the apartment and Ji-yeon answers the phone.

The security guard tells her to move her car, so when she comes down, Do-young and Jin-woo are waiting in the parking garage. Ji-yeon jumps in her car to drive away, but Jin-woo stands right in her path, forcing her to swerve into a pile of boxes. That was scary — but I kind of love that Do-young stops to yell at Jin-woo before checking on the girl.

They take Ji-yeon to the hospital, where Do-young continues to give Jin-woo the stink-eye until he defends that he’s not really crazy, he just looks that way. Ha. She wonders if he’s that brave or that reckless, standing in front of the car that way, and he says it was more like abject fear.

They get the okay from the doctor to arrest Ji-yeon, and take her in (awww, Jin-woo lets Do-young cuff her. That’s so oddly sweet). Ji-yeon admits she went to Eun-jung’s home that night, but says the door was locked and nobody answered, so she went home.

Jin-woo asks why she didn’t go to work the next day then, and she says she was just sick, but she’s starting to get agitated. Do-young suddenly turns hard, and says that there’s one thing she forgot in her explanations — the phone.

If her boss called her over and didn’t answer the door, why didn’t she try to call her? If she was simply sick the next day, why didn’t she call in to work? Isn’t it true that she didn’t need to call, because she’s the one who killed Eun-jung?

Crying now, Ji-yeon sobs that she knew Eun-jung didn’t sleep well, so when she rang the doorbell and she didn’t answer, she assumed she was sleeping and didn’t want to disturb her. In the morning she was ill, so she overslept and that’s why she didn’t call. And she ran from them in the parking garage because they didn’t identify themselves, and she thought they were there to rob her.

Do-young doesn’t believe her, but Ji-yeon insists that she had no reason to kill Eun-jung. Something in Jin-woo’s face says he’s starting to think she’s telling the truth.

Young-jin still has the two pimps locked up, and she brings them snacks and sits to talk. She shows them photos of several missing girls, but they refuse to say if they know them. They do tell her that they give girls to their boss and they then disappear — they assume to Japan. One of the girls, Jang Eun-young, had a warrant out for her arrest and was stopped when they tried to smuggle her out.

Young-jin takes Jong-ho out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, and he’s his usual flirty self though he knows she’s up to something. Ha, she says he might be married by now if he weren’t so suspicious of everything. But he’s right, and she gives him the files on the missing girls and asks him to check with his Japanese Interpol contacts.

It’s a good thing Jong-ho is basically harmless, because he’s such a sexist jerk — he tells Young-jin to at least fix up pretty if she’s going to ask for favors, and when she asks if he’s attracted to her, he offers to take her to a hotel and confirm it. Blech. But she knows how to handle him, hitting him with the file and telling him to grow up.

Do-young and Jin-woo examine the victim’s body, where the coroner tells them he found a piece of a blade lodged in the wound in her throat. The team examines the physical evidence — the stab wound was clean, but the person had difficulty removing the weapon and that’s when the piece of the blade broke off. Do-young thinks the murderer was either in a hurry, or panicked.

The team looks at all of the tools used in Eun-jung’s floral shop for damage, and Do-young borrows a knife from a neighboring store, whose owner tells her that the floral shop had one that broke all the time to they sold it to a female employee.

They search Ji-yeon’s apartment where Young-jin finds some candies in a drawer that catch her attention, but then Do-young calls out — she found the broken, bloody knife in Ji-yeon’s laundry hamper. They show Ji-yeon the knife along with the broken piece from Eun-jung’s body, and Ji-yeon starts to scream.

Do-young tells Ji-yeon to tell the truth, and she breathes, “She was already dead.” She admits she lied that Eun-jung never answered the door — we’re shown that the door was unlocked so she went in, and found her boss dead on the floor with the knife still in the wound.

In her cell later, Ji-yeon tells Young-jin that she’s sorry — not for killing Eun-jung, but for leaving her there. She’d felt bad that Eun-jung died alone and scared, but she’d left the scene and not reported it out of fear for herself.

Jong-ho whines at Young-jin for believing that Ji-yeon is innocent, even though they’ve also discovered that Eun-jung recently lent a lot of money to Ji-yeon, which would give her motive to kill her so as to avoid paying it back. Young-jin argues that it’s too obvious, everything fits too well, and she doesn’t believe that Ji-yeon would kill over money. She asks Jong-ho to postpone the case report presentation to buy her more time to investigate, and he just can’t say no to her.

Young-jin’s team also complain — they already found the culprit, why should they let her go and start all over? Jae-duk stays behind to ask what’s going on, but Young-jin doesn’t know either, she just knows Ji-yeon didn’t do it. Ji-yeon is set free, but Do-young makes it clear that Young-jin is the only one who thinks she’s innocent.

Do-young and Jin-woo have coffee in the shop where Nam-jin works, where one of her coworkers squeals to her over Jin-woo’s looks. Do-young gripes about Young-jin’s decision to let Ji-yeon go, but he has no response, and only asks what he’s drinking because he likes it.

He wants it sweeter and asks Do-young to have whipped cream added, since sweets are good for when you’re angry and upset. Realizing he just admitted he’s as upset as she is, she softens and gets his whipped cream. Hee, the girl who thinks Jin-woo is cute tries to charge Do-young for the cream, but then adds it a mountain of it for free when Jin-woo comes to the counter.

Young-jin brings home a cake for dinner, and her little family sits down for a humble dinner of jjajangmyun. They get Ha-eun ready for bed, fussing at each other like they do, with Ha-eun and Nam-jin telling Young-jin to go wash up because she’s stinky from always working.

Young-jin finds Se-won asleep over his computer keyboard when she gets back to work, and they sit to review the CCTV outside Eun-jung’s home again. They notice the lights in the building’s stairwells flipping off and on, seemingly at random.

Young-jin goes back to the apartment to look around, and something in the library reminds her of her daughter’s preference to shelve her books in the order she reads them. Young-jin spends some times scanning through Eun-jung’s books, seemingly looking for something specific.

At the case report presentation, Young-jin presents the final forensic report which shows the stab wound was done by someone left-handed and taller than the victim. Jang Ji-yeon is right-handed, and shorter than Eun-jung. The clean stab wound and messy weapon extraction seem to indicate that the person who did the stabbing, and the one who took the knife from the wound, were two different people. Further, the weapon was removed from the wound after rigor mortis had set in.

When asked how she plans to find the killer now, Young-jin says they won’t have to look much further than the third floor apartments. If nobody went in or out of the building at that time, then it must be someone who lives there.

They view the street CCTV which shows the lights coming on in the third floor stairs, then the second floor stairs, then Eun-jung’s automatic front door light, right around the time Eun-jung was killed. Half an hour later, it happens again in reverse order. During that night, other than Professor Jung and Ji-yeon, nobody but residents were caught on the CCTV.

Young-jin drops a book in front of Jae-duk, saying that it’s what the killer was looking for — a copy of “A Hundred Years of Solitude.” They stake out the apartment and see a man with golf clubs, and Young-jin remembers seeing him leaving the apartment building with a wife and small child when they went to examine the scene.

They follow him to the driving range, then later to a club, which offers up a clue that sends Young-jin back to speak with Ji-yeon again — the candy she noticed in Ji-yeon’s drawer. Whatever Ji-yeon reveals sends the team to a remote greenhouse filled with flowers, where Jin-woo muses that if all the greenhouses are this full, that adds up to a lot of illegal goods. Ooooh, it’s poppies. Opium.

Eun-jung’s flower shop was a front — her real income came from drug running. They grow the poppies, take the orders in the club, and deliver the goods to Eun-jung’s shop disguised as flowers. Which is a fantastic drug bust, but still doesn’t help them solve the murder.

They all head out together, and Do-young asks how Young-jin knew Ji-yeon was innocent. Jae-duk says she just has great intuition, which is why her nickname is Extrasensory Choi. Do-young wants details on how she really solved the murder, but Se-won jokes that you have to work with her for three years before she’ll tell you those kinds of secrets, ha.

Ji-yeon waits in the subway station until she’s joined by the man from Eun-jung’s building, Oh Young-nam. Young-jin watches their interaction from a remote location while her team hang around the area. Young-nam wants an account book, but Ji-yeon says that he didn’t have to kill Eun-jung.

She demands more money in return for the account book, but he threatens her with a knife instead. He says Eun-jung tried this too, and that’s what got her killed. The team gets this on record, and Young-jin orders them to move in and arrest him.

They can’t do anything until Ji-yeon moves away from Young-nam, but she just sits there, long enough for him to notice she’s nervous and realize he’s surrounded. He grabs her and jumps onto the train with his knife to her throat, but Jin-woo and Do-young manage to board the train before it pulls away from the station.

Young-jin orders them to stay back and just observe, but they don’t answer and she assumes she’s lost connection in the tunnel. They can see Young-nam in the next car, still clutching Ji-yeon and threatening the other passengers with the knife. Do-young wants to hold back, having heard Young-jin after all, but Jin-woo impulsively barges into the fray as usual.

Do-young directs the passengers to another car while Jin-woo confronts Young-nam, but everything slows down as Jin-woo sees Ji-yeon pull the original murder weapon out of her pocket. Just before she can recklessly stab Young-nam herself, Jin-woo pulls his medallion out of his own pocket and flicks it at Young-nam’s face.

Young-nam staggers back, letting go of Ji-yeon and giving Jin-woo a chance to jump him and throw him away from the girl (also? That was hot). Youn-nam escapes the train when it stops with Jin-woo hot on his heels, while Do-young calls Young-jin — Ji-yeon was stabbed in the neck in the confusion.

Jin-woo catches up with Young-nam and fights him bare-handed (still hot), finally getting his knife away from him and clenching him in a chokehold until the man passes out. The rest of the team find them and cuff Young-nam, and thank goodness, Jin-woo wasn’t hurt.

After further investigation, Young-jin reports that Oh Young-nam was embezzling some of the drug sales and Eun-jung found out, since she was in charge of the account book. She threatened to tell their boss, so he killed her. He texted Ji-yeon from her phone to come over, in order to frame her for the murder.

He’d searched the bookshelves for the account book and didn’t find it, but even though he was careful, he left clues. Eun-jung had a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder and kept her books in alphabetical order, but Young-name left her books disorganized.

Do-young watches over Ji-yeon in the hospital, and looks at Jin-woo’s medallion which she’d picked up from the train floor. When he arrives to check on the girl, Do-young says that her condition is his fault for barging in like he did, against Young-jin’s orders. Jin-woo just asks for his medallion and, disgusted, Do-young leaves after calling him a bastard.

Later, President Kang arrives for work, and nobody notices that he’s being watched — it’s the same man who was just let out of prison, who evidently killed Young-jin’s father. In his office, Secretary Yoon reports that Oh Young-nam has been arrested for murder, and his lawyer recommends that President Kang let that business go before he’s connected to it by the police.

Kang declines, since it’s a very lucrative branch of his business and many people are involved. Even if the police dig into things, they won’t be able to figure out much, or connect him to it. He’ll make sure of it.

Young-jin isn’t happy that her father’s killer’s release date was changed and she wasn’t notified, and finds the halfway house where he’s living. It’s the same place Bae Dal-hwan lives (the guy she sent Do-young and Jin-woo to capture), so she finds him and tasks him with keeping an eye on the man.

But the man walks in just then, so she asks him about his plans. He’s not sure, because the world has changed a lot, but they both agree they haven’t changed at all. Young-jin says he’s just as shameless, and lets him know that she plans to keep an eye on him. If he steps one toe out of line, she’ll destroy him. Just who is this guy??

Do-young drinks alone at Jae-soo’s restaurant, but Jin-woo comes to join her (ha, Jae-soo calls them husband and wife). She’s not interested in drinking together, saying he’s not even human, and drops to banmal.

He takes offense and she throws her drink in his face, screaming that he has no right to be a cop. Just thinking of all the people he’s gotten hurt with the reckless way he operates makes her furious, and Jin-woo glares at her wordlessly. They stand like that, both angry and disappointed in the other, at an impasse.

COMMENTS

Who exactly is this man that apparently killed Young-jin’s father? He and Young-jin obviously have some sort of personal history together, based on the way they interact. The man seems to know Young-jin well, and the way he looks at her shows that he cares deeply for her. And Young-jin doesn’t treat him like a random person who caused her father’s death — she seems to take whatever happened between her father and this man to heart, on a deeply personal level. Her need to forgive him but refusal to do it until he asks, speaks to me of a complex relationship between the two. I’m really anxious to learn who he is and what exactly happened.

But this episode really focused most heavily on Do-young and her struggle to become a valued member of the team. Do-young has a lot to learn, especially in how to be a team player. Enthusiasm and being a self-starter are good, and she’s a very intelligent and capable policewoman, but without more experience she could do more harm than good going off on her own like she does. She’s obviously driven, and wants to show her new team she’s a good detective, but she doesn’t have the experience to know how to go about it yet. Lucky for her she has a team leader who knows what it’s like to be a rookie (and a female rookie at that) and sees her drive for what it is.

But she’s been told now several times by her teammates to slow down, watch and learn, don’t go off on her own and not to assume she knows the endgame before she even starts. I want her to start to ask for help and learn from her sunbaes. One of the most dangerous things a detective can do is decide they know who the criminal is, then go looking for evidence to back up their assumption. She needs to learn to do it the right way around — get your evidence, look at everything, then make your conclusion. This is the most valuable thing Young-jin can teach Do-young, if only Do-young can humble herself enough to accept it.

I do like that Jin-woo seems to be softening up, especially towards Do-young. I think he gives her a lot of slack for being inexperienced and emotional, and he makes an effort to give her advice in a non-aggressive way (though I’m with Do-young — if he’s doing it just because she’s a woman, then that’s not okay). He seems to be opening up to her emotionally as well, like when he asked for lots of whipped cream in his coffee because sweets are good for when you’re upset. Since she’d just chastized him for being unemotional, it was a cute and face-saving way for him to admit he was also upset, without actually having to say it. I can definitely see these two developing a love line, though I’d be satisfied with just a strong friendship of mutual trust. They could both use a friend pretty badly, I think. Just the fact that they get so upset with each other is a sign that they already care. But Jin-woo has a long way to go too, especially in his tendency to use aggression to solve problems, which is rather frightening considering that he’s so gentle at all other times. He’s in danger of getting himself or someone else killed if he doesn’t learn to get that under control.

From the previews, it looks like President Kang and his plotline will be making their way back into our main story soon, which will be good for the show in general. As much as I’m enjoying the case-of-the-week format, I do think the show needs that looming Big Baddie to give our team something more to fight against than random criminals. It’s true that he seems to be behind everything they’re investigating, but the team doesn’t know that. They’re on the verge of fracturing due to unfulfilled expectations of the job and each other, and I’m ready for them to have a single purpose to link them together and drive them forward. There’s nothing like a crime boss to bring folks together.

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