Woman With a Suitcase: Episode 2

by festerfaster

Even after losing everything she valued, our heroine is much too enterprising to be kept down for long. The old adage about shut windows and open doors holds true, and Geum-joo begins to discover new possibilities in life. And while our resourceful paralegal tries to bring her life back on track, our hero finds himself in some serious trouble. Does he have the good sense to call on his “forever friend” for help?

 
EPISODE 2: “I got to play the bad guy”

At Cha Geum-joo’s hearing, the judge asks her to make a last statement before her sentencing. Geum-joo smiles at her sister and says that her lawyer worked very hard, but she’s guilty. Guessing that she would be given a year’s sentence, she lists the charges against herself. Geum-joo tells the court that she’s not guilty because any of these are true, she’s guilty because she was closing in on a man named Tomy Kim.

As everyone in court wonders what she’s talking about, Geum-joo asks if she might say one last thing. As Hye-joo looks at her apprehensively, Geum-joo smiles and makes her statement. “This court… is shitty.” The court erupts around her, and her paralegal colleague An-na jumps up to cheer her on. The judge gives her the year’s sentence Geum-joo predicted.

Twelve months later, Geum-joo emerges from prison. In another part of town, Ham Bok-geo sets up his camerawoman on a bridge to capture a particular shot he wants.

A quick montage of sepia colored scenes seems to show a glimpse into the future: A woman emerges from a swimming pool as Bok-geo looks on with interest. She flirtatiously takes off Bok-geo’s coat and drops her own robe. Bok-geo speeds away in a car with blood staining his sleeve. The woman’s body is found floating face down in water and someone dives in shouting her name, “Yoo-ri.”

Outside the penitentiary, Geum-joo is met by her husband and his young girlfriend, MI-SUN. They sit in a café, Geum-joo on one side and her husband on the other, while Mi-sun prettily explains how they fell in love while she was in prison. Without ever looking directly at her, the husband tells Geum-joo that she can sue him if she wants to but all her money was spent paying her court penalty, and he no longer wants to stay married to an “amazing woman” like her.

Bok-geo and his camerawoman are trying to get a clear picture of an actress named KIM YOO-RI through the tinted glass of a car. She was the one who visited his office trying to sell another actress’s scandal to cover her own. When the camerawoman says that the face might not be clear enough because of the picture quality, Bok-geo simply says their readers will identify the woman themselves.

Geum-joo moves into a cramped hostel room piled high with her books, and thinks back to the time when her husband greeted her at home after a bad work day and took umbrage at any lawyer making his “golden tree” feel small. His anger on her behalf had lifted her mood and made her laugh. She stands alone in the room now, her eyes shimmering with tears.

Deciding to sell the Queen of Monaco’s handbag, she takes it to an upscale shop. Unfortunately, it turns out that the bag is only a high end fake. Disappointed, Geum-joo drinks soju alone on a park bench, fake handbag sitting beside her. She thinks back to Bok-geo’s words and laughs: She wasn’t a lawyer, so wasn’t she a fake?

Bok-geo visits the comatose Min-ah at a hospital. The nurse gives him hope that she might still wake up. Elsewhere, Tomy Kim gets philosophical with his right-hand woman, who is almost trembling with nervousness. He asks her where she hid Min-ah, since the dead kid at the funeral was a fake. She denies knowing anything about it, but is visibly rattled when he says that she’ll die if she lies to him. Tomy Kim’s creepy parrot echoes his threat behind her.

Geum-joo meets up with her fellow paralegals, An-na and Manager HWANG, and they’re both very happy to see her. An-na is raring to go after Tomy Kim in order to exact revenge, but Geum-joo seems in no hurry. They eat together and Manager Hwang tells her what happened with Oh Geong-hwan’s case after her arrest.

Without Geum-joo, Geong-hwan froze at his first trial, but he settled in the second one by compromising on the length of his sentencing. Geum-joo asks about the victim, Min-ah, and is saddened to learn that the girl passed away while she was in prison. Manager Hwang tells her not to think about going after Tomy Kim, which frustrates the idealistic An-na.

Hye-joo is in the States now, attending school at Boston University. As she sits in one of her classes, discussing a tragic incident that brought about a new anti-paparazzi law, the scene shifts to K-Fact’s office, where Bok-geo’s team studies the shot of a couple inside a car. They discuss what might be going on between them when suddenly, Bok-geo gets a call from Yoo-ri.

The actress yells at him for taking that picture and asks him what he wants. Bok-geo gets a glint in his eyes as he tells her he wants a reasonable negotiation.

Geum-joo goes job hunting with her resume. She is humble about her worth now, but gets turned down anyway. She gets a call from another office and runs all the way to the interview, only to be greeted by a fancily dressed Attorney Goo, who seems to have climbed up in the world.

Assuming she called her there to hire her, Geum-joo tells Attorney Goo that she doesn’t need options, only a paralegal’s salary. Her old rival dismisses her, and says she only wanted confirmation. She had assumed Geum-joo might have one or two big clients to fall back on, but gleefully observes that Geum-joo is completely bare now.

With her shoes pinching her sore heels, Geum-joo walks into a convenience store and realizes she only has enough money for a medicine patch and not for the drink she wanted to buy. Outside the store, she sits at a table cradling her foot, when Attorney Ma Suk-woo takes the other seat, intent on his case files. She recognizes him from the elevator a year back, and asks him how that incident went. Suk-woo recognizes her as well, and when she offers help with his case he asks, perfectly innocently, if she has much experience with rape.

The store’s employee is startled to hear Geum-joo casually answer that she does, and has done rape a hundred times. Suk-woo is delighted to find an “expert in the field,” and asks her to look over his papers. The employee hurries back into the store, thoroughly creeped out.

The case deals with a woman accused of raping a man, and as Geum-joo looks over the evidence, she tells him he can win the case if he works with her. She hands him her card, but his face falls when he realizes that she’s a paralegal, since he can’t afford to hire one. Realizing she wouldn’t get a paid job with this lawyer, Geum-joo starts collecting her belongings to make a hasty exit. But when Suk-woo recites a list of meals he could treat her to if she would only help him, she pauses and says there is something she’s craving.

They end up at a burger joint, and Geum-joo coaches Suk-woo on finding the inconsistencies in the statements given by both sides. Suk-woo is pretty impressed with Geum-joo, who guesses that he barely passed his bar exam. But it turns out he ranked third in his exams, and is only woefully inexperienced.

Hye-joo arrives back in Korea, and remembers how the man who had wanted to meet her sister had given her a choice: become a pariah in the legal world, or work for his firm. She stands at the airport now, looking conflicted by the choice she made. Meanwhile, Geum-joo lands a job with a much smaller firm.

Yoo-ri, the aforementioned actress, swims the length of a pool and emerges dripping wet as Bok-geo watches from a balcony with her manager. Oooh, we saw this before! Once the two are alone, Yoo-ri offers him a choice of wine, but Bok-geo tells her to choose which picture should be published. She tells him that if this one goes out, she’ll die. He retorts that he came here for negotiations, not threats.

Yoo-ri pulls off his overcoat and drops her robe, flirtatiously telling him that she would go to any length to convince him. He pretends to consider the proposition, then rejects her and walks away. Yoo-ri picks up a knife and holds it to her neck. She tells him that if she were to die, things would become difficult for him. As Bok-geo turns around, she demands that he promise not to publish that article.

The next thing we know, Bok-geo is driving off in his car with blood stains on his sleeves, and Yoo-ri is found floating face down in her pool with bruises marring her wrist. A traffic police car stops Bok-geo for speeding and asks to see his license. As dispatch informs the cop that he’s wanted for attempted murder, but when Bok-geo hears it, he drives off before he can be apprehended.

Geum-joo is passing out flyers for her new employer when it starts to rain. Bok-geo has just learned that his attorney is in Hong Kong when he notices Geum-joo in a raincoat, trying to get people to take her flyers. His looks at her intently and tells his staff over the phone, “I think I found the right person.”

A speeding car splashes Geum-joo with water and makes her drop her flyers. She yells in frustration and is none too pleased to find Bok-geo standing on some of the papers. She tries to ignore him, but he snatches the flyers out of her hands and dumps them in a trash bin, offering her money as compensation for them.

Compounding her anger and confusion, he tells her she has to come to the police station with him. Offended, she asks what’s wrong with passing out flyers. With an ironic smile, Bok-geo finally says, “I think my life… just got twisted.” (Dude, you couldn’t have just said that to begin with?) At the reference to her earlier prophetic words about everyone facing twists in their lives, Geum-joo falls silent.

Geum-joo runs into the police station with health drinks, which she passes around to the cops at the station as she exuberantly greets everyone like old friends. The detective on the case initially seems a little reserved, but Geum-joo manages to coax a smile out of him too.

Bok-geo finds out that he wasn’t charged with attempted murder after all, and that Yoo-ri had attempted suicide. The detective tells him that he heard Bok-geo asked for sexual favors from the actress. The detective then tells him that he’s been charged with something better than attempted murder: attempted rape.

Hye-joo walks into a boardroom with her mysterious mentor, who introduces her as the newest member of their firm. It seems to be the same place where Attorney Goo now works. She scoffs at Hye-joo’s fresh new LLM from Boston University, and asks why a paralegal took the fall for a violation that Hye-joo should have taken responsibility for. Snap! The mentor tells Attorney Goo to be nice to her, since Hye-joo will be her new associate. Hahaha, I love the face she makes at this.

As photographers take shots of the bruises on Yoo-ri’s neck and arms, she thinks back to how she got them. Bok-geo had grabbed her hand to disarm her. As they struggled, Bok-geo had told her to die some other day, because he was done being cowardly because of her. The knife went flying, slashing Bok-geo’s arm in the process.

In the present, Geum-joo tells Bok-geo that he’ll most likely be arrested. Bok-geo asks what she found out and she tells him about the finger prints on Yoo-ri’s body, her torn swim suit, and also his prints on a knife that was suspected to be his weapon. Geum-joo quietly asks if the charge is real, but after seeing the look on his face, she tells him not to answer that.

He asks what she means, and Geum-joo says that the look of anger and injustice on his face is more persuasive than any verbal denial he can give. He asks if that doesn’t mean he looks guilty, and Geum-joo answers that she can tell whether her clients are being truthful right away. He may be a bad guy, she says, but he’s not a ruthless bastard.

Geum-joo tells him that though she would like to recommend that he settles, it would be better if he clears his name. Settling might save him, but it would be the end of K-Fact. As Bok-geo glowers at the idea of Yoo-ri shutting his company down, Geum-joo encourages him to go after a verdict of not guilty.

She readies her pad to take down his statement, but he tells her that her job is done. Just then Attorney Goo arrives to take over, and laughs at Geum-joo’s bedraggled clothes. With clearly hurt feelings, Geum-joo hands her research over to Attorney Goo and leaves. Bok-geo watches her walk away.

Attorney Goo tells Bok-geo to settle with Yoo-ri with a payoff and a promise not to publish the article. As she points out how easily he can be found guilty, Bok-geo realizes that she has already sentenced him in her mind, and she therefore cannot convince a court on his behalf.

Yoo-ri holds a press conference and convincingly tells her tale to her fans and the media. Bok-geo watches her on TV as she cries and mentions the pictures, which she claims are manipulated. Bok-geo’s staff suggests releasing the photos, but Bok-geo just says that the water is too muddied now, and the public is more interested in the story Yoo-ri is telling them.

Bok-geo gets to his office to find it crowded with both the media and Yoo-ri’s fans, all clamoring for his confession. Geum-joo is still watching Yoo-ri’s statement when Bok-geo calls her and asks if she can really get him a “not guilty” verdict.

Geum-joo goes to Suk-woo’s meager little office and asks for all the cases he’s working on. She goes through them and observes that they’re all public defender cases. “I can see why you like snack food so much,” she notes, meaning that his salary is so low that snack food is all he can afford. He mentions that he likes hamburgers too. Haha, cute. Geum-joo promises to feed him steak from now on.

She takes him to Bok-geo’s office, where he hands them a contract. Bok-geo isn’t too impressed with the young and inexperienced Suk-woo, but Geum-joo points out that he needs her, and she needs Suk-woo. Before Suk-woo signs the contract, Geum-joo reminds him the first rule of being an attorney: money first, work later. Bok-geo asks him how much, and Geum-joo covertly indicates “three” with her fingers.

“Three million won,” says Suk-woo, and Bok-geo dryly observes that at least he has a conscience. At Geum-joo’s frantic finger waving, Suk-woo belatedly realizes she meant thirty million won. Bok-geo agrees, and assures Geum-joo that she can swap out lawyers whenever she wants. She firmly says she has no intention of doing so.

Looking over the evidence, Geum-joo decides to test out the “public figure theory” and heads out of office. Using Suk-woo’s fan site knowledge, she looks up all the pictures uploaded by Yoo-ri’s fans. Finding something interesting, she confirms with Suk-woo that the CCTVs on the property faced away from the house.

As they track down an ardent Yoo-ri fan, Geum-joo teases Suk-woo for being a closet fan himself, which he denies. But once inside the house, when the young man calling himself “YooRiLove” on the net asks for proof that Suk-woo is a real fan, he easily blurts out Yoo-ri’s birthday, making Geum-joo suppress a smile. She asks the man how he got pictures of Yoo-ri inside her home, and guesses that he had illegally installed some cameras. The fan looks away guiltily.

On the day of the hearing, Prosecutor Choi, Hye-joo’s erstwhile lover, presents Yoo-ri’s case to the court. He interrogates Yoo-ri’s manager who found her body and lays out the evidence of her bruises. Next on the stand is Bok-geo. The prosecutor asks Bok-geo leading questions until Suk-woo objects, before the prosecutor presents pictures of the swim suit that was cut up by a knife.

Bok-geo answers all the questions with a simple “yes” or “no” until Prosecutor Choi tries to push him into admitting that he tore Yoo-ri’s bathing suit. Then, Bok-geo leans forward and tells the prosecutor that he doesn’t find Yoo-ri attractive enough to tear up her suit — her abs are too tight. You just couldn’t keep shut, could you?

Geum-joo tells Suk-woo to call the fifth witness. It turns out to be YooRiLove, who nervously takes the stand. Suk-woo gets him to admit that there are CCTVs installed by fans in her house that Yoo-ri didn’t know about. The young man has already deleted the footage, but at Suk-woo’s coaxing, he explains that he saw Yoo-ri come out to the poolside after Bok-geo left and cut up her own bathing suit.

At this, the courtroom erupts, and Yoo-ri gets up to claim that this particular fan is a mentally unstable stalker and has a history of spreading false rumors about her. YooRiLove looks stunned at her betrayal. Then as the commotion rises, another man gets up and asks Yoo-ri how she can do this to her longtime fan. He asks if she knows how many times they have covered for her.

Hurt by his idol’s perfidy, he tells the court that while YooRiLove may have deleted the video clip, he still has it. He takes out his phone and plays the recording, clearly showing Yoo-ri hacking at her own suit with the knife. Even Geum-joo looks startled at this.

The visual proof breaks down Yoo-ri’s case, and Geum-joo grins in victory. Bok-geo nods his thanks at Geum-joo, who breezily flips her hair over her shoulder.

Outside the courtroom, Bok-geo watches Suk-woo and Geum-joo praise each other and hands them a bonus for winning the case. He congratulates Suk-woo for doing a good job, and then ruins the mood by adding that he did a good job “as a paralegal’s puppet.” He then walks away smiling to himself.

Suk-woo tells Geum-joo to never take Bok-geo as a client again, but Geum-joo protests that he’s a great client, since he believed in them. He asks if Geum-joo believed in Bok-geo’s innocence, and she says that she just believed he had better taste in women.

As they walk companionably together, Geum-joo thinks to herself that when you lose something, you gain something else. After losing her career, she gained a rude client and a colleague with a bright future.

Geum-joo spots Hye-joo on the street, and it takes a moment for Hye-joo to control her panicked expression and greet her stepsister. They drink coffee together and Geum-joo apologizes for not being able to help with her tuition. Hye-joo asks if she’s really working for Bok-geo, and Geum-joo declares she’d rather become a garbage picker than work for him. Just then, “Hamburger” calls her, and she silences the phone by claiming that it’s just spam.

K-Fact’s editor, GO GOO-TAE, praises Geum-joo’s cleverness, and Bok-geo says it’s a shame she was sitting in the audience. Editor Go suggests they hire her for “that job,” but Bok-geo says they can’t, since she doesn’t have a lawyer’s badge.

But that night he waits in his car outside her hostel, and scolds her for not picking up her phone when she gets home. She gets in his car and comments on his rudeness, while he asks her if she was bad at school — how did she fail her bar exam five times? As she realizes he’s done a background check on her, he answers his own question. She had exam phobia, which he dismisses as nothing more than an excuse.

He parks the car in front of his own office and leads her inside. As they walk the corridors of an empty office floor, he asks her if she can overcome her fear of exams. Geum-joo looks at him in confusion, and he lays out his proposal: “Do you think you can become a lawyer? Then this law firm will be yours.” Geum-joo simply stares at him.

COMMENTS

Cha Geum-joo is one of the strongest fictional characters I’ve enjoyed watching in some time. She has her own code of ethics, a backbone that is flexible but unbreakable, and most importantly, she has the drive to survive and live life doing what she loves the most. When her own family turns their backs on her, and her hard-earned career lies in shambles, she chooses to pick herself up and build a new life. While the idealistic An-na wants to hunt down Tomy Kim immediately, the more realistic and mature Geum-joo knows that she has to survive and land on her feet before running off to avenge herself. Even superhuman paralegals have to eat.

I had my doubts about this show, but they are no more. The first two episodes are usually used to build the world and establish the characters, but I feel like the writer decided to dispense with slow introductions and just make things happen. So Geum-joo went from trial to prison to rejoining life after a year and winning her first case, all in one episode. I only hope their pace doesn’t slacken as they go into the second week, since it looks like they used up at least four episodes worth of materials in this one.

However, the speed of events unfolding doesn’t take away from the quality of the story told. We still got to watch Geum-joo struggle, her hurt at losing her family, and her fight to win even the humblest job so she could begin again. Without this sense of Geum-joo finding herself at the very bottom and pulling herself up by sheer force of will, her victory at the end of the episode wouldn’t be as sweet. Even the case of the week was far more intricately plotted and shot than I expected. And because the setup was so well done, the hilariously simple court proceedings didn’t feel remotely contrived.

The overarching mystery of Tomy Kim and the young comatose girl has taken an obvious backseat; however, we got just enough glimpses to know that unanswered questions are waiting in the background for Geum-joo to investigate when she’s ready. The apparent fake death of Min-ah was a little confusing. Was it Bok-geo who arranged it? And did Tomy Kim’s henchwoman really help Bok-geo hide her from him? Also, how does Tomy Kim train his parrots to be quite that creepy?

It is pretty clear that to Geum-joo, being unable to work on a trial is a much bigger loss than the lack of comfortable apartments and luxury handbags. Which makes her exam phobia that much sadder. It’s obvious to everyone how much she can achieve if she only gets past that one hurdle, but until she does, she’ll always need to use the badges of other, less capable lawyer who would appreciate her help and not get in her way. While Hye-joo was the perfect “puppet” in that way, something tells me Suk-woo wouldn’t be happy taking credit for Geum-joo’s work for long. His inevitable crush on Geum-joo almost makes me sad because I don’t want his puppy-like enthusiasm dampened by heartache, nor crushed by Bok-geo’s jealous meanness. But it’s an interesting arc in a second lead when his feelings are not just inspired by curiosity and novelty, but by deep admiration. I can see how it might help him on his own path to greatness.

Hye-joo is getting more interesting to me. I had initially pegged her as a jealous younger sibling, but after watching Geum-joo steer her sister’s choices in her professional life, it occurred to me that Geum-joo was using her just as much as Hye-joo was using her older sister to keep her flawless win record intact. Geum-joo had been treating Hye-joo’s lawyer’s badge like it was her own. In such an atmosphere, I can see how Hye-joo might be convinced to abandon her sister in an effort to break away from that life and stand on her own feet. Sadly, I think she may have exchanged a benevolent keeper for a far more calculating one. Now my question is, why does Hye-joo seem so worried that Geum-joo is working with Bok-geo? Also, who is this mentor and how is he connected with Tomy Kim or Bok-geo?

Finally, our mysterious hero: an ex-prosecutor and proud scandalmonger. I’ve started to really like him, but I don’t know if I can trust him. His actions don’t match his words. What information did he ask Editor Go to erase in the last episode? Why did he visit Yoo-ri in the name of negotiations when he seemed to be determined to publish her photos anyway? Why is he keeping the comatose Min-ah hidden? And what is this special job he needs Geum-joo for? So many questions to answer, and all we get from him are intense, toe-curling smolders. The most astonishing thing about the first two episodes was the very evident chemistry between the leads. I hadn’t really sensed that from their interactions in the trailers, so I wasn’t expecting the level of heat they gave off just standing next to each other: Geum-joo laughing at him while Bok-geo intently watches her every move. I dearly hope he succeeds in getting Geum-joo to take the bar exam. For her sake, of course, but also because I can’t wait for these two to be working under the same roof. I’ll just keep a fire extinguisher next to my laptop from here on out.

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