Haunted by the (figurative) ghosts of his dead friends, our protagonist takes up the daunting task of proving his own innocence eleven years after the fact — while shouldering the hatred of nearly everyone around him. The problem is, of course, he doesn’t even know for sure if he is innocent. And even if he is, the potential suspect list in this little town is alarmingly long.
EPISODES 3-4
Maybe it’s just because I want to believe Jung-woo is innocent, but it’s frustrating to see the turn Sang-cheol has taken. Instead of maintaining an outside perspective, Sang-cheol fully sides with the other townsfolk who take every opportunity to spew vitriol in Jung-woo’s face. He doesn’t believe for a moment that Jung-woo doesn’t remember what happened that night, and he shares the general opinion that ten years was far too short a sentence.
Sang-cheol does, however, continue investigating Geum-hee’s fall. By following a trail of CCTVs, he finally determines what happened. Bo-young’s mother, LEE JAE-HEE (Park Mi-hyun), saw Geum-hee buying a new shirt for Jung-woo and called her husband, Dong-min, to rage about it. Dong-min confronted Geum-hee on the overpass and ultimately shoved her off.
Jung-woo comes to the same conclusion by different means and catches Dong-min in the act of burying the coat he wore that day. After reporting their location to Sang-cheol, Jung-woo confronts Dong-min for taking revenge on his mother instead of him directly. There’s a moment or two where it looks like Dong-min might have finally pushed Jung-woo to retaliate, but then Jung-woo sighs and invites Dong-min to just kill him already. Dong-min may be terrified of his daughter’s presumed killer, but he steels himself to do it.
Sang-cheol arrives just in time to stop him, but makes sure to remind Jung-woo that all of this is his fault. In custody, Dong-min proves a tough nut to crack, clearly expecting Chief Hyun to get him off the hook. But either Chief Hyun has no intention of doing so or the other officers’ pressure works — regardless, Chief Hyun stays out of the interrogation, and Sang-cheol finally coaxes a remorseless confession out of Dong-min.
It feels like a breakthrough, but it’s far from the main event that night. Earlier that day, Seol was exploring a nearby village when she happened upon a man whose dog had pulled a bone from a storm drain. Sharp-eyed med student that she is, Seol immediately recognized it as a human bone and took it to Byung-mu for testing.
Thanks to the Dong-min situation, Jung-woo is at the police station when Byung-mu confirms that Seol identified the bone correctly. Jung-woo follows her outside to ask where it was found, and though she admits she’s scared of him, she shows him the spot and even gives him an extra flashlight. Jung-woo searches every drainpipe and manhole in the area, and in the very last one — beneath an abandoned school — he finds a skeleton with Bo-young’s school uniform nametag.
Up top, Seol somehow snaps a photo of the nametag and reports it to the police. When Sang-cheol descends into the manhole and finds Jung-woo sobbing and reaching toward the skeleton, he interprets it as Jung-woo trying to destroy evidence. And proceeds to punch the daylights out of him. And pull a gun on him. It’s all very dramatic, and Sang-cheol doesn’t seem to notice or care that Jung-woo can barely process anything through his grief.
Once the rest of the police force arrive, Sang-cheol hauls Jung-woo away for questioning… at the warehouse, not the police station. There, they go through the same cycle again of Sang-cheol screaming at Jung-woo and Jung-woo insisting he’s innocent. In desperation, Jung-woo promises Sang-cheol can go ahead and kill him — as long as he helps Jung-woo find the real murderer first. Sang-cheol still refuses to listen, so Jung-woo decides his only hope is to hunt for evidence himself.
He starts with his own patchy memories. Before they’d fought — the last time he remembers seeing her — Bo-young had been sitting in his car crying, something she never did even after suffering physical abuse at her father’s hands. What’s more, his car had been almost out of gas at the time. Her blood was found in the car after the fact, so whomever committed the murders would have had to fill it up before transporting her body. But since Jung-woo kept the key in an unlocked drawer in the warehouse, anyone could have swiped it. He tries talking to his friend SHIN MIN-SOO (Lee Woo-je) about it, but Min-soo gets weirdly dodgy about whether any of their friend group might have gone to the warehouse without Jung-woo that night, and leaves in a huff.
Meanwhile, now that he’s had time to cool off, Sang-cheol starts thinking a bit more rationally about Jung-woo’s case. Say what you will about how he treats criminals (and alleged criminals), but he knows how to get people to talk when he’s not beating them to a pulp. With seemingly casual questions and a pinch of flattery, he gets the other officers to elaborate on the (very rushed) investigation process, including the clue that put the target on Jung-woo’s back. Da-eun had called her mother from the warehouse, and Jung-woo had been heard in the background of the call, arguing with Da-eun and then full-on attacking her and making her scream. Which, yikes, that is rather damning. And yet, something about the investigation just doesn’t quite add up for Sang-cheol, not even with the extra tidbit that Chief Hyun pressured Jung-woo to confess so his sentence would be reduced from twenty years to ten.
In fact, there are lots of things surrounding Chief Hyun that almost add up but don’t quite. His son Su-oh has a creepy secret room under his greenhouse and has painted an even creepier picture depicting a bloody corpse, a tractor, and four faceless onlookers. Chief Hyun finds the painting after Su-oh suffers an epileptic seizure (triggered by Seol telling him Bo-young’s skeleton had been found) and burns it immediately.
And then there are two of his close acquaintances: ASSEMBLYWOMAN YE YOUNG-SIL (Bae Jong-ok), who presents herself as the most perfectly caring and down-to-earth politician you could ever ask for, and her husband, psychiatrist PARK HYUNG-SHIK (Gong Jung-hwan). Hyung-shik has just opened a center for victims of sexual violence (though he gives verrrry creepy vibes in private), and he’s also Su-oh’s primary psychiatrist.
Most interestingly, though, Hyung-shik receives an ominous text message out of the blue that says, “You killed me 11 years ago.” Whether he’s truly guilty or not (he’s certainly unsettled, to say the least), the episode leaves us with a second accusation to ponder alongside it. A despondent Jae-hee shows up at Chief Hyun’s house and reminds him that he last saw Bo-young here — “Because we killed her.”
If you’ve noticed that I’ve left someone out, it’s because Na-kyeom occupies an odd place in Jung-woo’s story: both central to it and on the fringes. Turns out, she’s been in love with Jung-woo basically forever. She pulls strings to get his mom in a VIP ward, blatantly says she doesn’t care if he killed someone or if being with him torpedoes her career, and repeatedly begs him to leave the past behind. But now that he’s made it clear he wants nothing beyond friendship from her, she seems poised to go off the deep end. Assuming, of course, she hasn’t already.