Goodbye Mr. Black: Episode 16

by girlfriday

Well I’m glad someone in this relationship is tired of playing the avoidance game. It’s pretty fun to see Black on this side for once, trying to woo Swan back and convince her that they belong together. After what he put her through, I think a little wooing isn’t too much to ask for. Besides, they’ll need all the happiness they can get, because the baddies are teaming up and out in full force today.

 
EPISODE 16 RECAP

All it takes is one text message to scare the pants off of Teacher Baek and Sun-jae, but that’s because it’s a photo of Chairman Cha’s corpse, which they thought they’d cremated five years ago to destroy all evidence of their crime. Acting under VP Seo’s orders, Director Nam threatens each of them to cough up 10 billion won or this picture gets sent to Black.

Sun-jae walks in on Mari telling her lawyer that she moved back into the house as the lawyer advised, and he sees divorce papers beside her. She merely warns him not to drive drunk as he steps out.

Black and Swan are on a cute date after his sudden love confession on the bus. He keeps following her and playing reporter, much to her embarrassment, though eventually she can’t hide her smile.

He keeps shoving an imaginary microphone in her face and asking very loudly, “Your boyfriend is about to become the president of Sunwoo Construction. Can you give a statement?”

After playing the mock reporter, Black looks down at his hand and asks what else he should do with it, then grabs Swan’s hand and takes off running.

They go to dinner and she asks if he’s that happy because he might maybe get Sunwoo Construction back, and he offers to make a bet with her over it, where the loser has to give the winner a kiss. She laughs, and he says again out of the blue, “I love you.”

She smiles back, and he changes the subject to ask how his voice is, because his little sister Ji-soo thinks that Ji-ryun has the nicest voice. Black guesses that maybe Ji-soo likes him, and Swan says that’s a good thing since Ji-ryun is the best person she knows.

Black gets a little jealous at that, pouting that according to her, Woo-jin is the coolest person ever and Ji-ryun is the nicest, and demands to know, “What about me? What am I?” She just smiles shyly, and that seems to make him happy enough.

VP Seo calls his right-hand man Director Nam over and over, when suddenly he gets knocked off his barstool and surrounded by henchmen. He’s confused and scared until Sun-jae walks out from behind them.

Sun-jae takes Seo’s phone to track down Director Nam and then shows him the picture of the chairman’s corpse, demanding to know where it is. VP Seo plays dumb and acts shocked, stammering that they cremated him. Sun-jae just yanks him by the tie and barks at him to bring the body to him immediately.

Black pulls up outside Teacher Baek’s house, and as they chitchat about their dinner, Black’s hand starts to shake again. He lowers it from the steering wheel, careful to hide the tremors, and goes around to her side of the car and suddenly picks her up off the ground. It seems like he does it partly to distract her and partly to do it while he still can.

She wants to be put back down so he complies, but he turns their backs to the house as soon as he sees Sun-jae and his army of henchmen pull up out front. Black wants Swan to stay out here with him until the coast is clear, but Swan says confidently that Min Sun-jae can’t touch her now. Having a killer daddy has its advantages?

Swan creeps into the house and overhears Sun-jae asking about a text message. That’s all she gets though, before her father’s watchdog secretary shows up and blocks the door. Teacher Baek isn’t the least bit concerned that the chairman’s corpse has resurfaced, insisting that you can’t find out who killed him just from a body. Clearly you’ve never seen an episode of Bones.

Sun-jae is more appropriately alarmed, knowing that it would cause a new investigation. Teacher Baek just sits back and says it’s Sun-jae’s problem, until Sun-jae takes out the pen recorder and replays the evidence that Teacher Baek was behind the murder. Baek agrees to help him one last time, insisting that this means he’s owed a favor. He orders Sun-jae to keep Black distracted while he recovers the corpse.

Sung-min mocks the pen recording and sidles up to Black, offering to make him the new owner of Sunwoo Group. Sung-min says that Teacher Baek was the mastermind behind the chairman’s murder, but Black knows that Sun-jae was there too, making them co-conspirators.

Black points out that there’s a second culprit in Ji-soo’s case too, since we know Sun-jae went looking for her while someone else had already kidnapped her. Gye-dong joins them and reports that his search into VP Seo’s finances brought up regular payments into Thailand, including Director Nam’s recent trip there.

Swan sits up in bed staring at the sketch Black drew of her as a duckling, while Black sits at his kitchen table and braces his shaking hand to write a letter to Swan. He writes in his casual tone that he’s “a little sick,” but that it’s a good thing: “If I weren’t sick, I would’ve spared the words ‘I love you,’ but now I can say it as much as I want.” He smiles to himself, remembering his confession to her on the bus.

VP Seo is still frantically looking for Director Nam the next day, and Black comes by to ask why he’s been making payments into the same Thailand bank account for five years. But they’re interrupted by a prosecutor who’s here to arrest VP Seo for Chairman Cha’s murder. What?

It becomes clear when the witness is brought into the interrogation room: It’s Killer, and he points to VP Seo as the man who ordered the hit. Teacher Baek strikes again.

Woo-jin goes running to the prosecutor’s office as soon as he hears the news about his dad, and Black finds him looking glum in the hallway.

He hands Woo-jin an envelope with his research into VP Seo, and says that he was the perfect patsy to pin the murder on because he was in charge of the gas company merger five years ago. Black knows he’s innocent, and Woo-jin says he’ll thank him later after clearing his father’s name. Go, Panda, go!

When Gye-dong says Director Nam has already left Thailand with whatever he came for, it doesn’t take Black very long to follow the trail to the airport. But he’s literally the last one at the party, because he finds Sun-jae’s army of henchmen having a powwow with Teacher Baek’s army of henchmen, and Swan spying on all of them from a distance in her super-secret spy hat.

Black sidles up next to her and calls her hat cute, and they couldn’t look more conspicuous just standing there eavesdropping. Swan is the first to discover Director Nam among a group of Chinese tourists, just as Sung-min calls to tell them that Director Nam purchased two plane tickets to throw the other guys off.

The baddies discover this pretty quickly though (you couldn’t have bought your decoy ticket for later in the day?) and Director Nam scurries away as soon as he spots them. Black and Swan rush out when he disappears, and when Black’s hand starts to shake again, he asks Swan to drive.

Director Nam manages to give everyone the slip, and Sung-min and May wait outside his home in Paju just in case he goes there. Sung-min tells Black that in the movies, you always catch the bad guy with his mistress, insisting that it’s always how he found people back in Thailand because it’s foolproof. Meanwhile, Director Nam calls Sun-jae to warn him that he has until tomorrow night to transfer the money.

Swan is upset to hear about Woo-jin’s father being framed, knowing that her father must’ve been behind it. She hangs her head wondering how she’ll face Woo-jin now, but Black says that no one blames her for any of this, and reminds her that Woo-jin is the coolest person ever, according to her. It doesn’t seem to lessen her guilt complex though, and she heads home in a subdued mood.

Black heads out to meet Mari when she calls, and she passes over an envelope of her shares in Sunwoo Capital (which outnumber Sun-jae’s). She says they belonged to Black anyway, so she’s returning them.

He says that he’s wanted to tell her for some time—that the reason he came back for her was to try and erase the bad memories with Sun-jae and give her happy memories to replace them. He apologizes for not being able to do that, and acknowledges the pain she endured for all of it. He passes the company shares back to her and tells her to use it to give herself a fresh start.

Mari asks sadly if they can’t even be friends now, and Black assures her that they were always friends. It sounds a lot like goodbye when he says, “I sincerely hope for your happiness.” And from a distance, someone snaps photos of them together.

Mari comes home to discover her housekeeper about to leave with a suitcase, and Mari pleads with her to stay. She says she can’t bear to be in this house alone, but the housekeeper says regretfully that she’s too afraid now, and scurries away as soon as Sun-jae arrives.

Sun-jae stops Mari from going after the housekeeper, and violently yanks her into the bedroom and throws her onto the bed. He flings a stack of photos at her, of her meeting with Black today and their kiss the other night when Sun-jae was there—all evidence that he’ll use against her if she tries to divorce him.

Mari counters that he did much worse to her, but he says that her doctor already lost her license and he helped her leave the country, so there’s no one to testify about the false pregnancy.

He slams her down and gets on top of her, and Mari’s eyes widen in terror.

He grips her shoulders violently and growls, “Don’t think of running away. Do you know how much I love you?! Even if I lose everything I have, I will never give you up. If you’re going to go, kill me first. Or better yet, let’s die together.” Whoa that went to a dark place.

Mari calls him crazy, and Sun-jae just yells back that you can’t love if you’re not crazy (uh, said the crazy guy), and says that it’s HER fault that she made him this way. Oh no you di’n’t! Did you just blame her for your loose marbles?

He gets downright terrifying as he screams that he’s innocent, and then in the same breath threatens to kill Black for real this time if Mari leaves him. She trembles, finally realizing just how frightening her husband really is.

And then it’s tonal whiplash as we cut to Sung-min’s comically shocked face as the housekeeper says she’s moving in with Team Black. May asks if this is her new stepmother, and they all laugh as Sung-min swears it’s not what it looks like and flails all over the place.

But the housekeeper only furthers the misunderstanding, calling him Brad Pitt to her Angelina Jolie, and pouting that she left home because of him. Well now I hope they get married. (Though what would Black do without his wifey?)

Black and Sung-min continue to follow the money trail, and discover that Director Nam is moving something to Korea via shipping container. They don’t know what it is, but they know they can’t check every single container just to find it.

At the same time, Swan eavesdrops on Teacher Baek, who talks to his minion about the corpse being moved in a shipping container. They stop talking when they hear a noise outside, but Swan manages to stay out of sight.

Sun-jae drinks alone at home, and gasps when he finds a coffin in the middle of his foyer. He kneels down beside it and pushes the lid open to check the body, when suddenly a hand darts out latches onto him. Aaaaah! Jeepers.

He wakes up from the nightmare clutching his throat, and he’s so shaken up that he huddles in front of Mari’s bedroom door, shaking as he calls out her name over and over.

Swan seizes the opportunity when her father steps out of his study, and sneaks inside to get a look at that text message she heard him talking about. She manages to unlock his phone using the fingerprints he left on the screen, but that’s when Teacher Baek returns, looking for his phone.

Swan holds her breath as she hides just a few feet away, barely covered by a potted plant. Thankfully his secretary runs in to say that they’ve discovered which boat Director Nam sent the package on, and Baek tells him to call Sun-jae as they walk out.

Now alone, Swan is able to find the text message she was looking for of Chairman Cha’s corpse, and she breaks down in tears to face the truth so plainly. She forwards the message to herself, and goes back to her room.

Teacher Baek finds her in bed and wonders if she’s sick, but Swan shrinks back from his touch and asks if he had anything to do with Woo-jin’s father being arrested. Teacher Baek just says that she should believe now that he wasn’t the culprit.

Breakfast is a happy affair for Team Black now that they have a housekeeper-chef living there. Sung-min is the only one who complains, this time sounding like a husband whining over how his wife spent his paycheck on groceries.

Black runs out cheerily when he gets a text from Swan, but she won’t even look him in the eye as she says over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The she shows him the picture of his father’s corpse, and Black stumbles back as he stares at the screen in shock.

Woo-jin goes to visit his father and asks where Director Nam is, but VP Seo doesn’t know anymore. Woo-jin asks haltingly how his father could do something like this, and asks where Chairman Cha’s corpse is.

VP Seo just cries defensively that he doesn’t know because that bastard Director Nam took it, and a tear rolls down Woo-jin’s face like he just got slapped. Ugh, poor Panda. You were hoping he’d deny it, weren’t you?

All sides spring into action to search the shipping containers that have arrived from Thailand, including Black and Swan, who hang back and watch the henchmen.

Woo-jin and Ji-ryun go to the police with the text message and the detective questions Teacher Baek and Sun-jae about it, though both are completely unruffled and say they thought little of the text message and erased it. Woo-jin yells at his detective friend to hurry because they don’t have time for warrants and reports, and finally convinces him to search the port first.

Sun-jae tells his men to look for Black first, which Black and Swan overhear. Black hurries her away to safety before they’re found, and again his hand fails him, which he keeps hidden.

Woo-jin and his detective friend meet them at the port, though Swan is disappointed that they’re the entire cavalry. Black pulls the detective aside, and Swan guiltily avoids Woo-jin’s gaze.

Woo-jin asks why she’s not greeting him, and calls her Kim Gil-dong again—a reference to his positive spin on Hong Gil-dong’s illegitimacy—and insists that she has nothing to do with her father. She gives him a weak smile at that, and finally glances up to meet his eyes.

Sun-jae goes to meet Director Nam in person, and Black tells Sung-min to stay on his tail so he’ll lead them to Nam. Unfortunately Sung-min is the worst tracker ever, and loses Sun-jae within minutes.

Black clutches the compass Dad gave him and comes to a decision, and the next thing we know, Ji-ryun is at a TV station and producers are scrambling to get a video on his phone ready for broadcast.

Director Nam waits for Sun-jae at a bus terminal, where they both see the breaking news story on TV that Chairman Cha’s corpse was taken and is being held ransom by Director Nam. Black says in a video clip that Nam can continue to hide and not turn himself in, because he’ll chase him to the ends of the earth. He adds a warning that everyone responsible for his father’s death will have nowhere to run and hide now.

It’s enough to scare Director Nam away from meeting with Sun-jae and he sneaks away, only not fast enough. Teacher Baek’s secretary finds him, and a few minutes later, he texts the container number to Sun-jae while looming over Director Nam’s body. Drat, is he dead?

Black is listening in as the henchmen get the call and rush over to the container, but as he follows, his leg gives out. Ack, this is terrible timing! Also, shouldn’t you have backup?

Suddenly someone pulls Black up by the shoulders. Oh phew, it’s Woo-jin. Black plays it off like he got a leg cramp and tells Woo-jin to stay behind, facing off with all the henchmen alone.

At the same time, someone finds Swan waiting in the car and her eyes widen in surprise. Well that can’t be good.

Sun-jae arrives at the port, but the cops are ahead of him, which makes him pause.

Black fights off all the henchmen, though I don’t know how long he can keep that up all on his own…

Swan is escorted to the pier where Teacher Baek is waiting, and he snarls before slapping her across the cheek, so hard that she falls to the ground.

Black’s condition worsens as he fights, and at one point he just loses grip on the man he’s got in a chokehold, and then his leg gives out again.

Swan looks up at her father in terror, and the image of him fuming in anger suddenly brings back a memory: She was a little girl, and she’d opened the door to a bedroom and found her father standing over someone with a gun…

With his last remaining strength, Black throws himself against the container where his father’s body is and clings for dear life as one of the henchmen picks up the sledgehammer.

He’s saved by the bell when the cops arrive, and the sound of the sirens sends all the men running, leaving Black alone in front of the container. Sun-jae lowers his car window and looks out in anticipation, as Black raises the sledgehammer above his head to break open the container.

 
COMMENTS

Part of me is upset that Black still hasn’t solved his dad’s murder after five whole years, but the other part of me is just relieved that VP Seo had the good sense to steal the corpse and hide it away all this time. I know Woo-jin is gravely disappointed in his father’s involvement, but I’m just grateful that there’s actual evidence that exists. Is it all too convenient? Well yeah, but that’s pretty much how this show goes. Chasing after corpses is far more exciting than hostile takeovers, so really, I can’t complain about the renewed action and sleuthing (in matching hats!) and mayhem around here.

Here I was thinking that Sun-jae had already snapped before, but then this episode happened and… yikes. It made me wonder if Sun-jae ever had a sense of right and wrong, but I’m remembering that he always altered the truth ever so slightly to paint himself the victim—it’s how he turned the blame onto Chairman Cha for his own death, how Black’s family was to blame for his own inferiority complex, and now how Mari leaving him and breaking his heart would justify just about anything in his mind, from inventing phantom babies, to threatening her physically, to killing Black. Again.

What terrifies me isn’t just what he’s capable of doing, since we already know he’s chosen the dark side; it’s the way he justifies everything in his mind, to make it not his fault. It’s never his fault, never his choice, never his responsibility. I don’t know how he does the mental backflips to get there, because it’s clear that the guilt haunts him. At this point, I take back any mean thing I’ve ever said about Mari; just get her the heck out of that house!

At least things are on an upswing for the main couple, even though Swan is still a little reluctant to let go of her guilt-by-association martyr thing. But now that Black is being so forward and open about his love for her, it seems pointless to deny her feelings anymore. I just like that she’s in the thick of the action again, spying on bad guys and stealing text messages. It’s the stuff I’ve been wanting ever since she moved into that house (I mean, why else go there?) and it really paid off in this episode. It’s sad to see that Black’s condition is deteriorating faster and faster, but I kind of love the way it’s spurring him on to be more proactive about making happy memories with her while he still has time. The recurring thing where he searches for all the things he can do with his hand before he loses all feeling in it, like writing her a letter or holding her hand in his—it actually gave me little heart pangs, which I didn’t think I’d ever get from this drama.

 
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