Our upright investigator and persistent officer join hands to expose the reprehensible criminals, setting the stage for their future collaboration. One case wraps up, while another begins, bringing with it some spooky intrigue to keep us hooked till next week.
Editor’s note: Weekly drama coverage will continue.
EPISODE 2
Apparently a car doesn’t quite have the same efficacy as our trusty Truck of Doom, because Yeon-ho gets off mostly unscathed. So-hee arrives in the nick of time to judo flip Ho-kyu to the ground, and the TCI team swiftly apprehends him in an emergency arrest.
To their dismay, Ho-kyu sticks to his tall tales and refuses to confess. So-hee and Hyun-kyung investigate the man Ho-kyu sold the wiretapped car to, and he tells them Ho-kyu borrowed his phone on the pretext that his battery had died. Afterwards, Ho-kyu erased the call log.
Retracing Ho-kyu’s tracks from the previous day, the team discovers that he’d pulled the same phone call tactic on a gas station employee. There’s someone behind Ho-kyu who’s coaching him how to act, and this accomplice is much more meticulous.
Yeon-ho has come to a similar conclusion, and his investigation leads him to a victim’s son. SONG JI-MAN is the only one who received a hefty payout from his mother’s life insurance policy — and before the accident that killed his mother, he’d met Ho-kyu in yet another traffic accident. They’d schemed together to profit off the death of Ji-man’s mother. (So utterly despicable!)
Ji-man has covered his bases with other insurance policies, and he sets fire to his shop in an attempt to murder Yeon-ho. Needless to say, it doesn’t go quite as he planned. He goes up in flames instead, the TCI team arrives to extinguish the blaze, and Ji-man winds up surviving with severe burns all over.
To add fuel to the fire (heh), Yeon-ho recorded their conversation, which means Ji-man has effectively incriminated both himself and Ho-kyu. At long last, everything is brought to light. Yeon-ho’s boss is arrested as well, having closed her eyes to the crime in exchange for a cut of the payout.
This case ends up having a profound impact on Yeon-ho; not only does he end up resigning after being branded a whistleblower, but the close shave of being knocked down by Ho-kyu also spurred a traumatic flashback. Ten years ago, LEE HYUN-SOO had lost her life in a traffic accident, and Yeon-ho still carries that grief on his guilt-ridden shoulders. Her father holds no resentment, but Yeon-ho can’t forgive himself. Instead, he resolves to make a career change and follow in the footsteps of Hyun-soo’s father.
Fast forward to one year later, and our squad runs into Yeon-ho again at their usual joint. It’s not mere coincidence, because it turns out he’s there for their first team meal together — starting today, Yeon-ho will be joining the TCI team as their newest recruit.
Yeon-ho’s by-the-book approach may be a boon for investigations, but not so much for social situations. In a hilariously campy mockumentary sequence, Yeon-ho gets on the station chief’s blacklist — CHIEF GU (Baek Hyun-jin) collided with Yeon-ho’s bicycle while backing out of a parking lot, and he’s 70% to blame. Or rather, as Yeon-ho corrects, it’s more like 85%. LOL.
Chief Gu fumes, but he can’t do much else since they’re, y’know, the traffic police. The bootlicker Chief changes tack fairly quickly, though, when he hears rumors that Yeon-ho is the son of the prime candidate for the next police commissioner. In an attempt to smooth things over, Chief Gu treats the TCI team to dinner at a fancy restaurant, where he butters up the cluelessly oblivious Yeon-ho.
Our next case is one that imbues some creepy suspense into the show. There’s been an accident in a tunnel; a car has crashed into the curb. The driver claims to have seen a ghost, whom he swerved to avoid, but his delirious confusion leads to the assumption that he’s simply drunk.
Except it turns out there’s a kernel of truth to his tale. When Dong-ki drives So-hee and Yeon-ho home from Chief Gu’s team dinner, they pass through the same tunnel — only to witness a woman in white run into the road. It’s just as the man had said, and likewise, our trio veers off course and into the curb.
As if this new case wasn’t intriguing enough already, the post-credits epilogue gives us yet another nugget to chew on. It turns out Hyun-soo’s father is acquainted with Chae-man, though we aren’t privy to the details just yet. This gives us an exciting bit of additional dimension to Chae-man’s character, which I’m already thoroughly enjoying thus far. His gruff papa bear love for the team! His eloquent Hanja proverbs that leave Chief Gu confused!
Of course, our protagonists make for an absolutely delightful pair; Yeon-ho’s composure balances out So-hee’s headstrong determination, and her burning desire for justice matches his unwavering moral compass. I may be reading too much into this, but I think Yeon-ho might be autistic-coded — given his keen attention to detail, his straightforward communication, his occasional tendency to avoid eye contact, and the way he doesn’t quite register social niceties — and I really like how simply and gently the show is treating his character thus far. Already, you see So-hee accepting Yeon-ho’s little idiosyncrasies — like not eating pork rind because of the texture, or his avoidance of alcohol due to his “lack of alcohol-metabolizing enzymes” — with barely any reluctance or fanfare. They make a good duo, and I can’t wait for the rest of the TCI team to welcome Yeon-ho into the fold, too.