The story continues with our prosecutor getting more entangled in the double lives of our heroine. In addition to the killer on the loose and the unsolved twenty-year-old case, we’ve also got a drug distribution ring and undercover assignments popping up this week. How exciting!
EPISODES 3-4
It turns out that last week’s car crash was a misdirection. Phew! The raincoat killer did not hit Mi-jin with his car — but he was this close to stepping out with his axe when Mi-jin approached the car to pick up the strewn pieces of investigation files that flew out of Ji-woong’s envelope. Raincoat Killer is forced to drive off when Ji-woong shows up, but Mi-jin is now on his hit list after he hears Ji-woong shout her name — although he’s not sure if the surname he heard was Lee or Im. But what does it matter? Our Lee Mi-jin is also Im Soon!
Speaking of Soon, our ahjumma goes viral after saving Won from the acid attack, and she receives a Brave Intern Award at work. She also receives a dozen thank you gifts from Won — including a car! But since Soon couldn’t possibly put down Mi-jin’s house address in her employee details, the gifts are delivered to the address she has on file: her best friend, DO GA-YEONG’s (Kim Ah-young) house. Not the delivery person mistaking Ga-yeong for Soon’s daughter. Loool.
By the way, Ga-yeong’s dad owns the building, and Ji-woong is the newest tenant — who moved into the “haunted” apartment upstairs. Cheers to an avenue for more run-ins between our leads. *Clinks glasses too hard and spills the champagne at the whole “haunted” stuff*
Soon rushes over to Ga-yeong’s house on hearing about the gifts, and we get another round of the “Ahjumma, who are you?” and “I’m your best friend, silly!” back and forth. Pfft. Soon literally has to transform in front of Ga-yeong at sundown for her best friend to believe that she’s really Mi-jin — but I worry about Ga-yeong’s recording of the transformation even though Mi-jin asked her to do it in order to clear her doubt. For one, Ga-yeong is a YouTuber, and these clips have a way of accidentally making it out of the phone and onto the internet. Anyway, I hope it’s just me overthinking things as usual.
Moving on, Soon returns all the gifts to Won because K-drama female leads are too modest to accept expensive gifts right off the bat. I’d have accepted a coffee shop in my name so I don’t have to worry about money and employment, but our heroine settles for daily coffee from Won. Then again, it’s in her nature to help others without expecting anything in return. Like her subsequent non-pity and Candy of Encouragement for Won after his trauma-induced panic attack on seeing a random man in a mask — which leads to an increase in our resident idol’s gratitude to the cleaner ahjumma. Hmmm.
As investigation into Raincoat Killer continues, Ji-woong learns that the victim was alive when her arm was severed. But that’s the only part of her body that has been found. The detective in charge of the raincoat case — who also put together the missing women’s investigation files — notes that there’s a similar case of dismemberment of a living person among the files he compiled for Ji-woong. But for some reason, the personal details section of the file was ripped out, and the detective in charge of the twenty-year-old case is retired. Yep. Not suspicious at all. (By the way, the dismemberment case in question is likely to be Ji-woong’s mom’s, based on his flashbacks.)
Back to the current case, Ji-woong needs Mi-jin’s help to identify Raincoat Killer’s car from CCTV footage, so he comes over to her house since his number is still blocked in her phone from when she mistook him as a voice phishing scammer. Heh. As the captain of the ship — or at least as a fan of kicking her daughter into the arms of an eligible bachelor — Mi-jin’s mom wastes no time inviting Ji-woong in. I mean, why take their business to a coffee shop when there’s tea and fruits at home? “You can make yourself comfortable [in Mi-jin’s room],” she says, and lol! Mom is so transparent, she might just as well have told them to make her some grandbabies.
Unfortunately, Mi-jin can’t identify the car; neither does she make grandbabies. What she does — or rather, what Soon does — is get assigned to be Ji-woong’s office aide after his previous assistant quits. For Soon, getting a desk job and somewhat achieving her dream of becoming a civil servant is the best thing to come out of her Intern of the Month reward package. And the deal is further sweetened by her Candies of Gratitude when she assumes Ji-woong requested her to be his aide. The man just wanted a new assistant, but the deputy chief prosecutor could not be bothered to hire someone else to deal with his prickly subordinate. Lol.
With our heroine’s blushing, twirling of hair and request for Ga-yeong to touch up her makeup on her first day as an aide, it’s safe to assume that someone has a crush. Ji-woong, on the other hand, is uncomfortable working with older people. But since our prosecutor is extremely talented at making all his assistants quit — lol — an ahjumma like Soon won’t last long according to his investigator, JOO BYUNG-DUK (Yoon Byung-hee). *Snorts*
What Mr. Prosecutor and Mr. Investigator don’t know is that Ms. Aide is not the average ahjumma who shies away from challenges. Typing 1000 WPM? No problem! Creating spreadsheets with advanced functions? Pfft. Easy peasy. Climbing a mountain to hand-deliver prosecution summons to a recluse? She doesn’t break a sweat. Miss ma’am even knows how to code! And best of all, Soon has no idea that these tasks are intentionally designed to make her quit. Lol. I want to be like her when I grow up.
But whatever our prosecutor’s reservations with Soon are, things are different with Mi-jin. To Ji-woong, Mi-jin is a very important woman witness in the raincoat murder case, and he buys her self defense weapons and saves his number in her shortcuts so she can call him right away if something dangerous happens. Awww. Ji-woong’s concern for Mi-jin’s safety sets her heart aflutter, and you know the girl is down bad when she accidentally dials his number while squeeing. Lool. But Ji-woong secretly installs a GPS tracker on Mi-jin’s phone, and even though his intentions are purely for her protection, I’m not so comfortable with this because it’s still an invasion of her privacy.
Back to the raincoat victim, the police find traces of fentanyl in the blood at the crime scene, and you know who else loves his fentanyl patches? It’s Acid Assailant. Not that he was directly involved in Raincoat Killer’s murder since he was already in custody at the time. According to Byung-duk’s investigation, the fentanyl business began to boom in Seohan about a year ago, but curiously enough, there was also fentanyl in Ji-woong’s mom’s corpse. And her murder happened years ago.
To prove her worth to the team, Soon goes undercover into the fentanyl distribution club — as Mi-jin, since club doors swing open at sundown — and she manages to get invited into the VIP rooms where the drug deals go down. Things go south when a sleazy guy finds the hidden camera in her bag, but since she couldn’t check back in with Ji-woong after their agreed ten-minute interval, he fights his way into the club to look for her. Ji-woong bursts into the room just as Mr. Sleaze is about to smash Mi-jin’s head with an ashtray, and the week comes to an end with another cliffhanger.
Tune in next week to find out how Mi-jin will explain her way out of getting caught up in a situation Soon is supposed to be in. Although I don’t expect Ji-woong to find out this early into the show that both women are the same person. It’ll be fun to watch him wallow in confusion for a bit as the similarities begin to hit him — like how he noticed that Mi-jin has an identical backpack to Soon. Won, on the other hand, has become a detective racking his brain and analyzing CCTV footage after spotting Soon riding her bicycle, and then seeing a similarly-dressed Mi-jin on the bicycle after turning around the corner. At this point, bets are officially open on which guy will find out Mi-jin’s secret first.
Bets are also open as to the identity of the new senior citizen intern at the prosecution office. All we know is that he’s a former hospital director — who coincidentally resumed work after the Raincoat Killer tried to piece Mi-jin’s surname together. Someone with his medical training would have knowledge of the human anatomy and amputation/dismemberment skills, but he could also be a red herring. In any case, it’s left for our prosecutor and his transforming heroine to find out the truth. If the former detective intern doesn’t beat them to the punch.