Our final hour sets out to prove one thing: some people will never change, whether it’s our Solution team making one questionable move after another, or the bad guys relying on stale tricks to outwit the heroes, or me returning each week despite knowing I won’t get anything different. It’s one packed finale of kidnapping, spy activities, broken alliances, the final face-off between good and evil, and other tropes fitting for the closing week of what has been a pretty average show.
EPISODES 11-12
The week kicks off with the reveal of how Sara’s mom died. Apparently, Mom tried to make a deal with Yool-seong: she won’t tell the prosecution about his (alleged) role in his mistress’s death if he helps Sara get out of prison. Yool-seong took Mom to the rooftop to scare her, but she lost her footing and fell down. It wasn’t intentional, but Mom did die at Yool-seong’s hands. (And I did not need that long closeup shot of her bleeding out head.)
In the present, the show surprises us with a ta-da: Driver did not die from last week’s car crash! Yool-seong starts to suspect that Sara is aware of his connection with Driver, but she deflects his suspicion — and intentionally accuses Chairwoman Cha of masterminding her mom’s death. Yool-seong goes along with Sara’s accusation, and this is enough to piss the chairwoman off to the point where she begins to look into the case herself.
Sara also spreads rumors that Yool-seong is trying to take over Chayul behind his mom’s back, and when Cha learns that Yool-seong was behind Driver’s near-death, she confronts her son with the assumption that he’s about to frame her for Sara’s mom’s death. Chairwoman Cha uses her police connections to hurl Yool-seong’s ass to the station for questioning. And while this doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s a warning for him not to mess with her. “Always bear in mind that there are parents who can eat their own children,” Cha says, and she will not be getting that World’s Best Mom mug.
To get even with mommy dearest, Yool-seong has Driver kidnapped from the hospital. Bom and Dae-ki chase after the kidnappers, but Bom ends up getting injured — and once again, the show uses kidnapping as an effective tool for romance. Cue: Dae-ki and Bom in a slo-mo princess carry scene. Not to be left out of the romance, Driver ends up getting showered with Yool-seong’s love languages: acts of violence, words of affirming threats, quality time in confinement, and the likes.
Driver is so touched by Yool-seong’s sentiments that he goes after Chairwoman Cha. He makes her admit that she ordered the hit on Yool-seong’s mistress — and with a recording of the conversation, Yool-seong now has leverage on his mom. Proving that he learned nothing from his ordeal, Driver blackmails Cha again for 2 million dollars, and I think he died of a lack of that specific amount in his former life. Driver gets his money and flees abroad as promised, but as a parting gift, he tells Yool-seong that Sara is digging into him.
A paranoid Yool-seong bugs Sara’s room and his mom’s office, but thanks to Ki-joon’s timely bug sweeper gift, Sara is able to detect the bugs before she slips up. Sara informs Chairwoman Cha about the bug, and next thing you know, Cha is confronting her son and dishing out slaps. Earlier on, Sara bugged Yool-seong’s office for the inevitable showdown between mother and son. But since we’re in an episode of botched Spy Kids, the bug is discovered before Yool-seong can implicate himself as the mastermind behind Sara’s mom’s death. K-drama lesson 101: never plant a bug under a flowerpot when you have a violent mother-in-law who can use anything as a weapon.
Now that Yool-seong and Chairwoman Cha know that Sara tried to come in between them, they plan to beat her at her own game. But speaking of beating at a game, Driver loses a whooping 1.3 million dollars at a casino, and continues his unbeaten streak of being the most stupid character in this show. Thanks to Korea’s strict anti-gambling laws, the prosecution is hot on Driver’s trail, and they link the 2 million dollar transfer in his account to Chayul.
Knowing that Yool-seong and Chairwoman Cha are on to her, Sara puts an end to the show by calling the cops on them. Yool-seong is arrested for instigating his mistress’s murder, but he calmly throws his mom under the bus for being the mastermind. LMAO! I swear, classy Chairwoman Cha sitting in a cell is a sight for sore eyes. Yool-seong further pins Sara’s mom’s death on Cha because someone has to be on the outside to help mommy dearest with her trial and work on the Chayul law school project. It’s all for the good of the family, right? Looool.
Yool-seong sounds so convincing, and Chairwoman Cha reels from the emotional shock of going down for her son’s crime to actualize her lifelong dream of building Chayul town via the law school project. But Yool-seong has no plans of helping his mom with her trial, so he announces that Chayul will cut all ties with the chairwoman. Same script he played with his assemblyman father-in-law! Never change, Yool-seong, never change.
Hee-jin aligns with Sara and calls for a press conference where she exposes Yool-seong’s affair with the mistress — and drags him for leading her on with the promise of marriage. Someone is still butthurt about not becoming wife #3. Hehehe. Thanks to the press conference, Yool-seong’s image takes a hit, but it’s not serious enough to put him behind bars. It’s not until Professor Seo wakes up from his coma — and testifies that Yool-seong blackmailed him — that Yool-seong begins to feel the heat.
Sara goes after Yool-seong’s five-membered committee — or should I say four-membered since Professor Seo is out — and the search is on for the ledger containing evidence of their bribery for the Chayul law school project. Solution capitalizes on the greed of the weakest member in the committee, and he leads them straight to the farmhouse where the ledger is. They excavate the surrounding farmland, they check for secret safes and hidden panels in the wall, and Sara even looks under a chest of drawers. “Only a fool would hide [the ledger] there,” Ki-joon says to her. But what do you know? That’s exactly where they find the ledger!
With Professor Seo’s testimony and the discovery of their ledger, the committee members turn on Yool-seong. As always, Yool-seong resorts to threatening Sara with their son if she doesn’t hand over the ledger. And one clandestine meeting on a bridge later, Yool-seong and Sara make the exchange. She gets her son and he gets… a fake ledger. Pfft.
Thanks to the ledger, Solution exposes the committee for bribery and lobbying, and the Chayul law school bid is rejected. The prosecution storms Chayul for a search and seizure, and Yool-seong tells his loyal secretary to take the fall for Sara’s mom’s death in case his bribery investigation leads to the reopening of Mom’s case. Only a fool would trust a boss who’s famous for throwing people under the bus, so the secretary decides to side with Solution.
Cornered, Yool-seong reaches out to Sara and she agrees to meet up with him. Sara knows he’s going to kidnap her, so she wears a wire in a bid to extract a confession out of him. Unfortunately, Yool-seong finds the bug and destroys it, then he takes her to the seaport since he’s gone full-on gangster mode. Luckily, Sara is smart enough to leave a trail behind, and Team Solution storms the port to rescue their team leader before she’s shipped abroad in a freezer container. Cue: Ki-joon saving Sara’s life for the 100th time.
In the five harrowing minutes Sara spent with Yool-seong in the container, she managed to get him to admit that he killed her mom, and everything was recorded on his phone. That’s what happens when you try to force a “I faked the ledger” confession out of your ex-wife. Or wife. Wait, they’re still married, right? Anyway, to wrap up with the Yool-seong arc, Sara puts her kickboxing skills to use, and delivers a satisfying high kick on Yool-seong’s face before he’s dragged away by the prosecution.
The rest of the drama plays out as expected with Sara getting custody of her son after her second divorce. Dae-ki and Bom get married a few months later, and I’m surprised they filmed a whole ass wedding scene for these two — but it’s not that I didn’t like it. Ki-joon proposes to Sara, but after two marriages and two divorces, the institution no longer appeals to her. Sara says the only way she’ll consider marriage is if there’s an expiration date attached to it. She proposes a five-year period after which they’ll reexamine their relationship and extend the contract or terminate it depending on the outcome of the re-examination. Spoken like the queen of divorce that she is. Ki-joon agrees to this arrangement, and they stare at the sunset in contentment as the drama comes to an end. This is not the perfect happy ending I had in mind for them, but it’s a realistic one, so I’ll take it. I mean, do I even have a choice?
As a whole, what I got from this drama is not what I had in mind when I pressed play on Episode 1. As the show progressed, I was disappointed by a number of things, but when I turned off my brain and stopped looking for logic, the show became a fun way for me to pass time. It was just one long ping-pong match between Sara and Chayul — with the ball slipping out a few times to fatally hit some unsuspecting side characters. But our heroine emerged victorious in the end, and that’s all that matters. I guess.
Oh Min-seok as Yool-seong was definitely a highlight for me throughout the show. That man knows how to play bad in a so good, so ridiculous, and so fun manner. Hopefully, he gets his lead role soon — and hopefully, it is better than what Kang Ki-young got. I still can’t believe that Kang Ki-young was poached from Hanbada to Solution for his much-awaited lead role, only for him to end up being a supporting character and a white knight in Sara’s story. The dramaverse owes us a better drama with him as the lead, and I will not stop manifesting until he gets the befitting lead role that he deserves.