All the spreadsheets in the world can’t bring a man back from the dead. But maybe the data left behind can resolve his last regrets. Our heroes are blazing a trail through Sanga’s files, in the hopes that numbers can still save the day!
EPISODES 9-10
It takes a while for the flames to die down. Longer for the crisis team to find what’s left of Hyeong-woo. Our heroes attend his funeral with twin hollow-eyed stares, distraught in the face of this villainy. Hyun and Suk-min join, wracked by guilt that they hadn’t intervened sooner. But the belle of the ball is Vice President Han, who dabs his eyes dramatically at the photo of poor, dear… er, whatshisname. Lackey no. 4. Flanking him, in true bad taste, is his brand-new replacement minion.
Vice President Han isn’t one to let his no-doubt enormous grief slow him down — it’s back to business! This time, he’s dead set on selling a P2P online loan company to his good friend President Jin. Peering at the files, Ji-soo quickly spots the squiffy numbers; this loan company is riddled with more losses than your average accountant has business formal button-downs.
Meanwhile, Chan-joo of Sanga has handed over stocks to his feckless son, Bo-sung. Bo-sung is all indignation: how’s he meant to pay off the interest? Fortunately, he has a good friend from Taeil willing to cut him a squeaky-clean deal with low interest… provided Sanga’s stocks remain steady. Sanga’s too big to fail, right? Well, not so much. Thanks to a carefully-orchestrated — and deeply distasteful — scheme from his loving uncle, a drunken Bo-sung is manipulated into being caught canoodling with a minor. Stocks plummet.
Bo-sung is forced to admit to Chan-joo that his stocks have been seized. With a fatherly screech of rage, Chan-joo batters Bo-sung with his fists. It’s amid this touching family tableau that Lee Sung-joo enters, smug to the bone. Guess who’s now the majority shareholder for Sanga? I’ll give you a clue: he was last spotted shoving his brother’s head into a urinal, and now gives a scream of triumph that I can only transliterate as “AaAAaaaaaaauuAAARRRGHAA!” As Sung-joo gloats all over the room, Chan-joo and son are dragged away by a prosecutor. There’s a new chairman in town!
Later, Ho-woo receives some mysterious mail — supposedly from the long-dead Mr. Jang. With help from Yeo-jin, he nabs the security footage from the post office. Hyeong-woo appears on screen like a ghost. Prior to his death, he posted Ho-woo an innocuous-looking key card… to his old staff locker in the Taeil foyer. Inside are a series of pen drives: his way of being understood from beyond the grave.
The drives contain recordings of every single meeting Vice President Han conducted —with threats, fraud and everything in between — whilst Hyeong-woo stood by, every inch the loyal lackey. One stands out. It’s the voice of Mr. Jang. On that dark night after the destruction of Haebit, he stood at the top of a building site… and spoke with a masked figure. Hyeong-woo. There’s the flash of a knife, and a muffled cry of pain. I’ve stood before the gates of hell, Mr. Jang says. You think I didn’t plan for the worst?
As Ho-woo listens to his father figure die afresh, Ji-soo makes her own discovery. On the list of Taeil scholarship beneficiaries is a forensic scientist — easy enough to track down. She steps into the office of a broken man, swigging from a bottle of soju. Vice President Han bribed him into faking an autopsy report. Jang In-ho’s death wasn’t suicide. He was stabbed by Hyeong-woo. Ji-soo and Ho-woo are in agreement: they will make Vice President Han suffer.
This is a mission statement our heroes can all rally behind. Dream Team assemble! Seung-jo, Ho-woo and Yeon-ah are joined by Suk-min, Hyun, and even Vice President Ahn. Their mission? To figure out just why our resident villain is so keen on selling an online loan company to Jisan Bank. As our heroes run the numbers, their faces fall. The loan company is lousy with hidden debt. If Jisan swallowed this poison pill, it would be up to its elbows in loan failure. Here’s where Ho-woo’s murderboard comes into play: he’s got evidence of Vice President Han meeting with the Financial Services Commission.
Cue glorious, glorious ham. Vice President Ahn has to sit down. The banks…! she intones. Vice President Han wants to take over Jisan. With someone as unqualified as our villain at the helm — he’ll draw blood! Hyun delivers the most beautiful line of the series, with pitch-perfect sincerity. It’s only a matter of time before Vice President Han starts messing… with the national economy! Our heroes are horror-struck. Not the national economy! Yeon-ah makes a frantic call to alert her father. Alas — too late. The deal is struck. After all, Chairman Jin is laughably blackmailable: the last thing he wants is his daughter knowing about his less-than-legit ascent to power.
Seung-jo, meanwhile, is devastated to learn of Mr. Jang’s murder. Words, he confesses to Ji-soo, are worthless in the face of this. Still, all he can do is say that he’s sorry. It’s not your fault, insists Ji-soo. Please, don’t act rashly. Disregarding this warning, he cuts straight to the belly of the beast: his father’s office, in the dark of evening. It’s time for a family chat.
Let me ask you something, begins Seung-jo. Is all of this — becoming Chairman, owning Jisan — worth enough to justify murder? Vice President Han gives his signature, semi-ironic smirk. When I become chairman, he replies, you’ll be my successor. Seung-jo looks part stricken, part resigned. We could have been an ordinary family, he says. Asking after each other’s day. Consoling each other. Caring. But you’ve never done any of that. And I can no longer live as a murderer’s son. His father’s face curdles: that thin sneer of a man biting into a rotten lemon. Your greatest fortune in life, he says, is the fact that you’re my son. That same thing is my worst misfortune. Oof. I lived my whole life at its worst, Seung-jo bites back. Your son, Han Seung-jo, is no more.
Elsewhere, Ho-woo meets with the newly-minted chairman of Sanga, Sung-joo. He’s got a last-minute plot twist in store. What would you say, he smirks at a snarling Ho-woo, if I told you Vice President Han was to blame for the death of your birth parents too? It’s improbable, but he’s got papers to prove it. Ho-woo’s father worked on a Sanga construction project — one which would later become notorious for its fatal safety breaches. He and his wife died in the collapse that resulted. Sung-joo hands over two conflicting ledgers: evidence that Vice President Han was embezzling money from the project.
Rage eclipses rationality. Ho-woo confronts Vice President Han, papers clenched in his fist, railing at him for killing his parents. He is subsequently annihilated. Call yourself an accountant, scoffs Vice President Han, darkly. You come to me no plan, no proof — just hearsay. I hope you’re prepared to pay for your rudeness. Know your place. Ho-woo is utterly undone. He leaves work to wander the streets, numb with rage. Later, his friends drag him home from a cell after brawling on the streets. He refuses to speak a word.
Ho-woo’s not the only one mid-breakdown. Seung-jo has noped out of Taeil: he’s gone fishing, potentially forever, thank you so much. Of course, he lasts about thirty minutes before pulling out his laptop. Disaster has struck! Vice President Han has rallied his obedient ex-scholarship flunkies into launching a media campaign against Jisan. The press is rife with unfounded fears about its debt, wreaking consumer chaos. It’s not long before Seung-jo’s on the phone from his new office, the lake, coordinating a defense with the Dream Team — which now includes Jae-hwan and Hye-won, and is a veritable dream battalion.
Seung-jo is lucky he’s predictable. By evening, Ji-soo approaches, remembering his favorite haunt. It must have been tough, she says, living as that man’s son. So, stop saying sorry. Do you remember saying you’d defeat your father if I was patient? Seung-jo nods. Well, she says, I can’t wait forever. This is all the prompting Seung-jo needs. Soon, he’s back in a tie, striding into Taeil like he owns the place! To reward him for good behavior, Ji-soo organizes a gift: on TV, they announce that Jisan’s finances are solid as ever, quelling consumer fears. The crisis recedes. Meanwhile, for the low, low bribe of a cup of coffee, Hyun agrees to park the loan company’s debt with his new firm.
Ho-woo is still deep in his torpor when a very insistent Seung-jo begins asking irritating questions. Things like, are you ever going to come back to work? And, what happened to your insatiable yen for revenge? Ho-woo is adamant that he and his murderboards are closed for business. Tough-love mentor that he is, Seung-jo expertly nabs the last word. Forget about feelings — face reality. Stalking to his room with a face like thunder, Ho-woo returns to his post-its with a vengeance. He tallies up a litany of Vice President Han’s crimes. Arson! Murder! Violation of the Certified Accountant Act!
The next day, to Yeon-ah’s delight, she encounters Ho-woo in the archive room. With an air of awkward decisiveness, he pulls her into a hug. After much blushing and fidgeting, the two settle into research-mode. They hit the investigative jackpot: all Sanga subsidiaries donate to Nuri Children’s Foundation… a charity that owns 4.9% of Sanga itself. But there’s no evidence that its supposed projects ever existed. Looking at Nuri’s sponsor list, there are five companies that donate millions on the regular. When the two take a road trip to visit these firms, they discover… a series of abandoned portacabins. Paper company ahoy! This is a money-laundering scheme of mammoth proportions.
Sure enough, the press explodes with news of a search and seizure. Nuri is well and truly scuppered… but our villain seems positively chipper. The reason becomes clear when he calls a meeting with Sung-joo, casually declaring it’ll be their last. After all, he deserves to be punished for priming Ho-woo against him. Sung-joo is outraged; he was in on the Nuri scheme. This could destroy them both! Vice President Han gives his shark-like smile. Not so much. The case prosecutor is a scholarship fund minion. This won’t touch him. What’s more, he declares, recently, he investigated a fire the caused the death of a Taeil accountant. The real owner of the warehouse was, of course, Lee Sung-joo. It takes Sung-joo a moment to realize he’s been outmaneuvered — but, oh, that guy was dead before he even hit the ground.
Despite a tad too much messing around with literal murder, this drama is back to what it does best: hyping the heck out of finances. Hyeong-woo may have died by fire, but Sung-joo “died” by paperwork — and wow did the latter make for better TV. It’s the same kind of brilliance as Hyeong-woo leaving his posthumous mark via meticulously-organized pen drives. I love the sheer quantity of horror our characters put into the phrase “bank run,” and when our main action involves scrutinizing donor lists. Above all, I’m thrilled that the stakes are so high they encompass… the national economy!
My one bone to pick is that this drama struggles with priorities. Sometimes, it does too much at once, and skips over the fun parts. There’s been far too much focus on the slightly tepid romance between Yeon-ah and Ho-woo, and nowhere near enough on the much more compelling Ji-soo and Seung-jo — or the under-explored relationship between our two male leads.
Still, when it wants to, Numbers can bring it. I was enthralled by the scene between Seung-jo and his dad; the tension was sky-high, and the dialogue to die for. There’s also something utterly lovely about watching every single background accountant pitch in to take down the villain. Speaking of which — Vice President Han’s eleventh hour machinations were a delight. I can’t wait for where our last episodes lead us!