Tunnel: Episode 2

by Saya

With its moody atmosphere and keen emotions, Tunnel’s opening week is as compelling as it gets. Leaping forward thirty years into the present this hour, we watch our brash detective struggle with life in the modern world. But while fish-out-of-water antics are always entertaining, it’s the lonely stranger-in-a-strange-land-vibes that have curled their tentacles into my heart. I’m glad you’re back, Choi Jin-hyuk.

 
EPISODE 2 RECAP

In the dark tunnel, Kwang-ho struggles to come back to consciousness after his knock on the head. Picking himself up, he looks for the culprit as the air ripples around him.

Elsewhere, a desperate-looking young man in a white car careens through traffic, chased by another car. Meanwhile, Kwang-ho emerges from the tunnel, and behind him, the once-young vines grow and wither in the space of a moment over the tunnel’s mouth. Creepy.

The hunted young man (Vixx’s N) loses his pursuer at a busy intersection. He rummages through his glovebox for something, and his license identifies him as… Park Kwang-ho? He’s so busy that he nearly doesn’t see our Kwang-ho crossing the road and slams on the brakes just in time.

Our Kwang-ho leaps out of the way and orders the young man out of the car. But the young man is terrified to see the other car has caught up to him and speeds away. The other car hotly pursues him.

A confused Kwang-ho returns to his police station. His head is pulsing, and he calls out for maknae Sung-shik, but the station seems empty. He looks up at the sound of tapping, and is dismayed to see some other man at his desk.

Kwang-ho confronts him, and the man introduces himself as Lieutenant KIM SUN-JAE (Yoon Hyun-min). Ohhh…! Kwang-ho mutters that he must be a lunatic from the local prayer house and throws him out, locking the door behind him.

He returns to (what he thinks is) his desk, and wonders idly what the smartphone lying on it is. Noticing that the phone is different, he dials his chief, but a woman answers and tells him he’s got the wrong number. Only then does he notice his changed surroundings, from the computers in place of typewriters, to… well, everything.

He clutches his head as the old overlaps on the new. He takes a look at a printout, which turns out to be a transfer order for someone with the same name as his, although he’s confused by the 1988 birthdate (“It’s 1986, though”) and the even more ridiculous 2016 transfer date.

By then, Sun-jae returns with a key and furiously confronts Kwang-ho. Irritated, Kwang-ho squirrels away the transfer order, and then, quick as a flash, he cuffs Sun-jae to the bars of the holding cell. Sun-jae demands to be released, wanting to know his identity.

Kwang-ho doesn’t have time for him, since he has a criminal to catch. But finding no one else there, he heads out with a big flashlight, ignoring Sun-jae’s shouts. Once outside, however, he looks around in bewilderment at the bright lights and high-rises, his thoughts following in voiceover: “That night, all of a sudden, the world that I knew changed entirely.”

The officers arriving in the morning are shocked to find Sun-jae cuffed to the railing, though he’s now asleep. The older one, Detective KWAK TAE-HEE (Kim Byung-chul) gleefully takes pictures as his chief arrives. The noise wakes up both Sun-jae and Kwang-ho, who was asleep at his desk.

Kwang-ho uncuffs Sun-jae, explaining to the others that the guy kept saying he was a cop. As soon as Sun-jae is free, he shoves Kwang-ho, demanding to know his credentials. With a sigh, Kwang-ho tells him, “I’m Hwayang Precinct’s Park Kwang-ho,” which makes the chief (Jo Hee-bong) peer at him. Ohhh, I wonder…

Current maknae SONG MIN-HA (Kang Ki-young) also recognizes the name and perks up. Styling himself as a sunbae now, he introduces the newbie, saying he has no prior experience in violent crime. (Kwang-ho scoffs to himself that he’s been in violent crime for ten years and is a sergeant, not a corporal, thankyouverymuch.) The chief continues to stare at him.

Aloud, Kwang-ho agrees that that’s his name but he’s not that guy before walking out. The chief examines the transfer order, while detective Tae-hee laughs at Sun-jae being mistaken for a lunatic, adding that it’s true, since he tears out anytime he hears that a young woman has been murdered.

Maknae Min-ha hands over Kwang-ho’s heavy, old-fashioned handcuffs to the chief. A flashback shows Kwang-ho training maknae Sung-shik in using such cuffs. (I knew it, Sung-shik is the chief, isn’t he?) Meanwhile, Kwang-ho wanders the streets trying to get his head around modern Seoul, frantically wondering what’s happening to him.

The chief’s nameplate finally reveals that he is indeed Sung-shik. He roots through his desk until he finds an old photo of Kwang-ho and the ’86 team. Talking to himself, he says the newbie can’t be Kwang-ho’s son, and orders his personnel files.

Back in 1986, Kwang-ho’s entire team, including his wife, is in the tunnel looking for him. Sung-shik finds his torch, but they fear the worst when they find the bloodstained rock that the culprit used to strike Kwang-ho. Yeon-sook faints dead away at the sight.

Kwang-ho returns to his old residential area and retraces the route to his old home. But when he reaches the site, he’s stricken to find that it’s… gone, replaced by a busy road.

Yeon-sook comes to in a hospital and hurries to leave, but the doctor (who is also our medical examiner, Dr. Kim) gently tells her that she’s expecting. She’s stunned by the news.

In the present, Kwang-ho slumps at the roadside where his house used to be and finally accepts that this really must be 2016. “Yeon-sook-ah, where are you?” he asks, “Why is this happening to me?” He suddenly remembers collapsing in the tunnel. “If I can go through the tunnel again, I can go back,” he reasons.

Energized, he hops into a taxi, but is taken aback by the driver, who is none other than 1986’s Reporter Oh—or his doppelgänger, anyway. Kwang-ho asks Driver Oh if he knows of any tunnels in the area, and ever the opportunist, Oh takes him all around the houses to rack up the mileage.

But Kwang-ho catches on and refuses to pay after being dumped in some random place. While they argue, a woman boards the taxi. Driver Oh tells her he can’t take her because Kwang-ho has yet to pay, and she coolly says she’ll pay his fare along with hers. Driver Oh leaps on the offer and drives off with his new passenger, leaving Kwang-ho fuming.

Kwang-ho looks at the area he’s been stranded in. Recognition fills him as he takes in the building in front of him: it’s the old prayer house, which has now become a psychiatric hospital. That sparks a memory of a road sign he saw for the asylum the night before at the tunnel, and he realizes he’s close. Just then, an alarm sounds from the hospital, and a nurse runs out screaming. Torn for a moment, he runs into the building.

Lying in the dirt, a phone vibrates. Back at the station, Min-ha reports that he can’t reach Kwang-ho, which dismays Sung-shik even more. Oh no, it’s not looking good for the younger Kwang-ho, is it? He dispatches his team to the incident scene, but he keeps Sun-jae back to tell him that he’ll be paired up with Kwang-ho from now on.

Kwang-ho passes through a cordon of medical staff and arrives at the grisly scene of a woman with a pencil embedded in her neck, dead. He sees a distinctive tattoo and recognizes her as a once-cocky woman called Lee Seon-ok, whom he once questioned over the death of her fiancé.

It seems that the fiancé used to beat her and her younger sister, and Kwang-ho gently appealed to her to think of what might become of her sister. Just as she was about to open up, Kwang-ho was called away, and by the time he came back, she was back to denying everything. In the present, Kwang-ho sighs that she was caught after all.

Detectives Tae-hee and Min-ha arrive at the scene and are surprised to find Kwang-ho leaving it, considering his earlier outburst. He repeats that he’s not that Park Kwang-ho and pushes past them. He passes Sun-jae, too, who digs at him not to come back.

Kwang-ho finally locates the tunnel. “Yeon-sook-ah, wait just a little longer, I’m coming,” he says, grinning. He sprints in, calling her name, and emerges triumphant at the other side… except nothing’s changed. Confused, he goes back in, still to no avail. Each time he fails, he becomes a little more desperate.

In 1986, Yeon-sook returns to the tunnel to search for him. Catching a glint of light in the gravel, she finds the whistle she had given him and starts sobbing uncontrollably. In 2016, Kwang-ho doggedly keeps running, roaring her name.

And somehow, his cries reach her across space and time. Her head whips up as she hears him call her name, his voice echoing through the tunnel. Full of desperate hope, she heads to the tunnel mouth, and he runs towards her… and past her, a specter still trapped in the future. As his cries fade, so does her hope, and she collapses into sobbing again, as if she senses just how far away he is.

Kwang-ho, too, crumples up with a strangled cry. Tears pouring down his face, he wonders why he this is happening to him, “What did I do so wrong?”

Morning finds Kwang-ho back at the Hwayang police station. Looking over the transfer order he pocketed the day before, he figures that he’ll have to live as the other Kwang-ho until he can go back. He enters the station on Sun-jae’s heels and quickly scans to see if the younger Kwang-ho showed up. He hasn’t.

They have a team briefing on Lee Seon-ok’s case, and Kwang-ho is shocked to learn that she killed three people. Arrested in 1990, she was admitted to the hospital after serving her sentence. Just as Sung-shik forms the words, Kwang-ho asks if anyone had a grudge against her and says they should investigate the families of her victims.

He’s grudgingly impressed that Sun-jae has already collected that information. They report that there was no CCTV, and Kwang-ho inwardly wonders what this “CCTV” is, but on hearing that Seon-ok had a female visitor right before she died, he immediately guesses it must have been the woman who took his taxi.

Chief Sung-shik sends Sun-jae and Kwang-ho to track down the taxi. On the way, Kwang-ho awkwardly apologizes to Sun-jae about the handcuffing incident. “Don’t apologize,” Sun-jae replies brusquely, “Just have a wretched time of it from now on.” Haha. He takes a further dig at Kwang-ho for remembering the taxi by its look rather than its name: “Didn’t you learn Hangul?”

Meanwhile, Sung-shik calls an old hyungnim to ask him about the Park Kwang-ho who transferred from there.

The detectives successfully track down Driver Oh, and he tells them he dropped that woman off at the university. Using his cell phone, Sun-jae calls in a report to the chief that the daughter of Seon-ok’s last victim is a student there, and they’re heading over. Kwang-ho looks on, wondering whether Sun-jae’s device is a telephone or a radio. It’s a confusing world, isn’t it?

Sun-jae tracks down the daughter’s current class—which is being taught by the taxi-lady, whom we should now introduce as SHIN JAE-YI (Lee Yoo-young). She notices him. “Every crime leaves a trace,” she tells the class, throwing him a glance.

The PA system crackles with Kwang-ho’s voice, and he announces that he’s looking for the woman who paid his taxi fare the day before so he can pay her back.

After class, the daughter tells Sun-jae that she was with her mom in Busan the day before. Her alibi is confirmed a moment later by Min-ha, so he lets her go. He pauses as he encounters the professor leaving the class, and across the hall, Kwang-ho catches sight of her and calls out.

In the now-empty classroom, Kwang-ho plays around with the touch-screen operated lighting, fascinated. Sun-jae tells Jae-yi that the patient she visited the day before died. But when the news doesn’t move her, he asks the reason for her visit.

She tells them she’s a psychologist who studies female serial killers, and she was there to interview Lee Seon-ok. Kwang-ho scoffs and asks why she would study lunatics. She, in turn, asks him why he catches murderers when the victims are already dead, and he has no answer.

Sun-jae checks Jae-yi’s alibi with the dean. The dean confirms it, explaining that facilitating her research was a condition of Jae-yi’s recruitment from England, and that she had even written a thesis on the topic. She assures him that Jae-yi’s interest is purely academic. But this lady is kinda creepy all the same, you know?

Sun-jae asks her what her professional opinion is on Jae-yi as a fellow psychologist, observing that spending all your time studying the psyches of murderers might affect one’s own moral compass. With a smirk, the dean asks if he’s thinking that Jae-yi could have killed someone. “I didn’t say that,” Sun-jae replies.

Jae-yi watches the detectives leave before the dean finds her to ask for a word.

Sung-shik meets the hyungnim he called earlier, and they reminisce a bit about the past. Hyungnim tells him that he looked for photos of (the younger) Kwang-ho after Sung-shik’s call, but they had all disappeared. Sung-shik tells him that back in 1986, his team was broken up after a detective disappeared. Hyungnim recalls that that detective was Sung-shik’s sunbae, whom he had missed desperately, and he realizes that he was also called Park Kwang-ho.

A body was never found, Sung-shik says, “But… a person who vanished has reappeared before me, looking exactly as he did thirty years ago.” Hyungnim laughs that he must have had too much to drink, but Sung-shik remains deeply uneasy.

The medical examiner rules Lee Seon-ok’s death a suicide, explaining how the wound was self-inflicted. This guy is creepy. Noticing the new face, he eyes Kwang-ho with interest and asks his name, introducing himself as MOK JIN-WOO.

Sun-jae isn’t convinced by the verdict, and the medical examiner suggests he discuss it with the owner of the pencil. As the detectives head out, Sun-jae complains about Kwang-ho speaking banmal to him (since he outranks him), and Kwang-ho reminds himself that he’s meant to be an ’88-er. He gets huffy, and Sun-jae stalks off without him.

Seeking out Jae-yi (a.k.a. the owner of the pencil), Sun-jae asks her again why she visited Lee Seon-ok. She places a recorder on the table and we flash back to the interview. Lee Seon-ok was clearly suffering from psychosis, first acting distressed, then cackling. She confided in Jae-yi that everyone thought she only killed three people. “But actually, I killed my father, too,” she hissed.

Jae-yi showed no reaction and left her with one final question: “You can’t kill people anymore. But if a murderer can’t murder, is life still worth living… or not?” Jae-yi tells Sun-jae that Lee Seon-ok had smiled then, and we see that Jae-yi’s pencil had fallen at her feet.

Back at the police station, Kwang-ho tries to figure out how to go back and asks Min-ha if they at least caught the 1986 murderer. Min-ha doesn’t know and tells him to ask the chief, who was here then. Astounded, Kwang-ho asks the chief’s name, but before he can find out, a woman interrupts, looking for (the real) Kwang-ho.

He tries to hide, but she only turns out to be his new landlady, and she takes him to his new place. He lets himself in, dumbfounded that even a house has materialized. He throws himself down on the bed and shouts, “Hey! Stop giving me this stuff and just let me go home!” to the universe at large.

Yeon-sook gently shakes him and he wakes up to the sight of her face. Bolting up in delight, he engulfs her in a hug. “This is 1986, right? Not 2016?” he asks. She laughs that he must have been dreaming, and he agrees he was. He hugs her again, confessing that he thought he wasn’t going to see her again. This has got to be a dream.

Someone bangs at the door, and he opens it in his pajamas, thinking that it’s Sung-shik, but it’s 2016’s Sun-jae. Eyes widening, he cries out for Yeon-sook… and wakes up, still in 2016. Sigh. Of course it could never be that easy. Clutching his head in his hands, he howls Yeon-sook’s name.

Elsewhere, a woman kicks on the ground, struggling against an attacker. But then she falls limp, and we see five dots marked on her ankle. How…?!

The next morning, Kwang-ho tries to figure out how to get to the police station by bus. He observes other passengers touching the card-reader and attempts it himself… with his bare hand, which of course gets him thrown off. But then he spots a patrol car and snags himself a ride. Lol, an ’80s man is nothing if not resourceful, even when he finds modern jeans way too tight. Hahaha.

When he arrives at the office, chief Sung-shik introduces Jae-yi as their new consultant psychologist — not a profiler, as she corrects Tae-hee. Kwang-ho scoffs. “Hey, foolish agasshi. You don’t study criminals, you catch them,” he tells her, adding a comment about her being a woman.

Appalled by his rudeness, Sung-shik points out that she’s come to help them, and this time, it’s Sun-jae who retorts that he never asked for it. Done with the introductions, Jae-yi leaves, saying that she’ll be back when they have a case.

The phone rings, and Min-ha finally answers it after a pitched argument with Kwang-ho about who’s the maknae. Immediately grave, he reports that a dismembered body was just found on a nearby mountain.

The entire team are at the scene. Kwang-ho shouts for them to stop as he spots something: five black dots on the heel. “How on earth can this be here…?” he asks, remembering how the last victim in 1986 had six dots. “Six, not five?” the medical examiner had asked then. “One is missing.”

Well, it looks like they just found it.

 
COMMENTS

I’m afraid of jinxing it by saying it, but Tunnel is giving me some strong Signal vibes, along with a big dash of God’s Gift—14 Days—and only one of them ended well. But life is short, so I’m prepared to be an incautious optimist!

I’m so glad Choi Jin-hyuk is back in dramaland, after how good he was in 2014’s Pride and Prejudice. I feel like he’s gone even deeper into this role within just two episodes. While the fish-out-of-water setup is full of obvious conflicts and comedic potential, what really stands out is the emotionally rich undertone, which Choi Jin-hyuk brings to painful life. This is not a comedy, and you don’t forget that; even its funny moments have an undercurrent of gravity and unease. But while Kwang-ho’s predicament is a tragedy in every meaningful way, it’s offset by an equal current of human warmth, which is a quality Tunnel’s predecessor (Voice) sorely lacked.

Kwang-ho’s desperation to return “home” evokes the sharpest pathos this episode. He isn’t taking it stoically—he’s desperate and disorientated, and although he’s proven both adaptable and resourceful, being cut off from Yeon-sook is killing him. I love what this says about him, that his attachment isn’t to the world he knows, but to the person he loves in it. His situation reminds me of those fairy tales about people being taken under the sea only to come back a hundred years later, no older than the day they were taken, but everyone they knew and loved is dead.

But luckily for Kwang-ho, it’s only thirty years, and I’m dying for him to realize who Sung-shik is. Watching Sung-shik watch Kwang-ho was another highlight of the episode. It’s such an odd and fascinating contrast to have the one-time maknae now become Kwang-ho’s senior, but it’s enriched by the fact that Sung-shik’s lived those thirty years that Kwang-ho skipped. His seniority isn’t a mere technicality, but actually a product of experience. More than the clash between Kwang-ho and Sun-jae, I’m looking forward to seeing how Kwang-ho and Sung-shik will match up now.

This hour also brings into relief just how different the culture of the present time is. For example, where few people would have blinked at casual sexism in the ’80s, I winced right along with Sung-shik at Kwang-ho’s rude comments. But the past portions also offer us a window into an era swept away by an increasingly digitized world, not just in its visuals, but in that unhasty quality that marks a willingness to take time over living.

For now, we’re left with a fistful of mysteries, most of which I suspect will take all show to unravel. Apart from the time slip itself, there are so many questions. Who is the younger Park Kwang-ho? Why have his photos disappeared? How is he connected to our Park Kwang-ho? Who’s chasing him and where has he disappeared to? Was that dog-murdering kid the real culprit back then, and if so, where is he now—or more importantly, who is he now? (That creepy medical examiner is my candidate—the best place to hide is at the base of the lamp, right?) Can he time-travel? No no, can I time-travel? To Saturday?

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