With his grim fate looming ever nearer, our photographer has to make a choice: accept what seems inevitable, or fight for the chance to live against all odds. And if that weren’t difficult enough to wrestle with, he and his loved ones also have to face painful truths about their pasts — many of which are far more intertwined than anyone might have guessed.
EPISODES 10-11
Now that Yoon-chul has found his way to The Midnight Studio, we get his full backstory — at least, what he knows of it. Desperate to help fund his sister’s upcoming wedding, he’d reluctantly agreed to act as lookout while two accomplices robbed a vacation home. When they didn’t reemerge, he ventured inside and found them dead on the floor. Despite having been at the crime scene for less than five minutes (not nearly enough time for him to have murdered both men), Yoon-chul was arrested and indicted in record time.
This was the case that rookie prosecutor Bom was pressured to close quickly and without question. That didn’t sit right with her, though, so she posted the whole story online in hopes that her fellow prosecutors would not unjustly punish someone who had yet to be proven guilty. As we’ve already seen, her higher-up, Prosecutor Lee, demanded she apologize and retract her post, and she walked out instead.
Given everything he’s been through, Yoon-chul carries a ton of pent-up resentment. Multiple times, the team has to work together to talk him down from killing someone and bring him back to his right mind — all while battling their own inner demons. For Bom, that means facing Prosecutor Lee again and reopening some of her past trauma (plus, she’s still angry and hurt that Ki-joo didn’t tell her about the curse).
For Ki-joo, it means confronting the truth that his uncle Ki-won is dead, since it was Ki-won who led Yoon-chul to the Midnight Studio from the netherworld. Ki-joo insists he’s fine and that he expected this, but when he’s alone, he breaks down. If Ki-won couldn’t escape the curse, what chance does he have?
See, for most of his life, Ki-joo has been resigned to his eventual fate. As he explains to Bom, he focused more on securing a less excruciating death than on finding a way to survive. But when the cat-killing spirit (which is actually many spirits in one entity) catches up to him and all seems lost, all he can think about is wanting to see Bom one last time. And when Bom shows up in the nick of time to rescue him with the power of the Safe Zone, Ki-joo promises that from now on, he’ll fight for his own life with everything he has.
With little time before Yoon-chul needs to pass through the Gate of the Dead, the team puts pressure on Prosecutor Lee and a detective who helped smooth over Yoon-chul’s murder. They trick the two into admitting their complicity while the ghosts record the conversation, and then Ki-joo swoops in to spook Prosecutor Lee with the evidence — and with some ghostly activity, courtesy of his assistants and Yoon-chul.
Then Ki-joo does what he does best: convinces Yoon-chul’s sister to meet Yoon-chul one last time at the Midnight Studio. She brings their mother, too, and the three resolve their respective feelings of guilt in a tearful send-off. Just before his final photo, Yoon-chul thanks Bom for everything she’s done for him, and she promises to make Prosecutor Lee apologize to him, one way or another.
Also seeking some semblance of closure this week is Nam-gu, who watches as his wife, JIN NA-RAE (Han Groo), packs up their home and moves back in with her mother. He’s saddened to see her handling everything on her own, only to realize she’d been doing just that during their entire marriage. He was so committed to his job that she rarely saw him — and when they did get time together, he was always falling asleep — and she didn’t dare call him when he was out for fear of endangering him. The florist, on the other hand, was attentive, reliable, and made her feel less alone. It may not excuse her affair, but Nam-gu certainly didn’t uphold his end of their wedding vows, either.
Na-rae is slowly picking up on the signs that Nam-gu’s ghost is lingering around her. And elsewhere, Ji-won also connects the dots between the random people helping her lately and the infamous office ghost, whom she has finally learned was the guy who (she thought) stood her up. The next time Sung-ho possesses someone to give her an extra hand, she uses a talisman to (temporarily) trap him in the person’s body so she can finally get some concrete answers — and ask him for that date they never got to go on.
Meanwhile, the investigation into Prosecutor Lee continues. Our team knows he orchestrated the vacation home murders, but not why. Eventually, Nam-gu finds a connection: one of the murdered thieves once caused a fatal car wreck, and Prosecutor Lee helped him avoid the full consequences. And wouldn’t you know it — the victims were a couple and their 12-year-old daughter, the latter of whom was in a coma for two months following the accident.
That’s right: Prosecutor Lee wrecked Bom’s life twice over (at least). Though stricken by the revelation, she insists on accompanying Ki-joo to scope out the tunnel where the accident occurred. She doesn’t trust his driving (honestly, same), he might need the Safe Zone, and anyway, she figures revisiting the scene might trigger some buried memories of what actually happened there. She’s right, but she’s not prepared for the intensity of the resulting flashbacks — or for what they reveal to her. The person who pulled her from the wreckage was Ki-won, and while he was trying to call for help, another car (or perhaps the same one?) mowed him down.
This week was heavy on the emotions, so I’m grateful for the few moments of levity it gave us. Like Bom asking for a more personal nickname than “Safe Zone” and Ki-joo oh-so-proudly amending it to “Safe Person!” Which I think is just the sweetest thing, even if she didn’t seem to appreciate it quite as much as I did. But that, I think, is one of the most beautiful things about their relationship: they really are each other’s safe place, no matter what. Regardless of how much they’re struggling individually or as a couple, they’re always there for each other to offer words of support and to help keep the literal and figurative demons at bay.
I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that the two souls Ki-won sent to find Ki-joo (Yoon-chul and coma ghost Bom) were both connected to Prosecutor Lee, though now I’m wondering if there’s an even bigger connection there that he’s trying to communicate. We still don’t know how he ended up at the tunnel that night, or the details of how and why he transferred the camera — and the scar — to Bom. But one thing is sure: he has unfinished business, and not being able to visit the Midnight Studio isn’t stopping him from reaching out.