If you think last week was intense, this week ups the scale. On one hand, we have our OTP’s dating era characterized by cuteness and growing curiosity. And on the other, we have unravelling of plot threads and the reveal of how our raincoat case and the missing women’s case are linked.
EPISODES 13-14
Last week’s kiss ushers us into Ji-woong and Mi-jin’s dating era, and boy are they so cute! Height difference between couples is one of my major catnips, and you bet I was squeeing all the way to Seoul and back whenever they hugged and her head fit snugly under his neck. Our OTP’s dating era involves texting at work, and while Ji-woong is blushing to himself at his desk, Soon is doing the same at hers. Heh.
Of course, Myung-duk is in the middle of this, and he thinks they have both cracked under the pressure of their workload. I about died when he asked if Ji-woong took any drugs by mistake while investigating. And I was on the floor in literal tears at the parallel of Ji-woong’s romantic texts and Myung-duk’s inbox of spam messages.
In the midst of this, Soon runs into Won, and he asks if she keeps avoiding him because of his confession. Soon tells him she likes someone else, but it doesn’t matter because he has no intention of moving on from her. While Won is entitled to his feelings, those feelings make our heroine uncomfortable — and Won is pleased with her discomfort. “You’d at least become attracted [to me],” he says. But men who can’t take no for an answer are one of the least attractive species out there. Won needs to give it a rest because not all of us are in the league of his fangirls who pledge their undying love to him.
At home, Mi-jin realizes that she left her phone at work so she rushes back to the office. She succeeds in retrieving the phone, but Ji-woong — who’s back at work for overtime — catches her in the lobby, and she claims she came to see him. He gives her a tour of an office she already knows, and she’s a bit emotional to be in the office for the first time as Mi-jin. Mr. Best in Comic Relief, Myung-duk, joins them… and reaches the very natural conclusion that Mi-jin stopped by for cake. Remind me again how this man managed to become an investigator? Lol.
Being in the office is second nature to our heroine, and she knows everything from where items are kept to personal information she picked up from being Myung-duk’s colleague. “What is this familiar but unfamiliar feeling?” Myung-duk asks, after noting that people might think Mi-jin works here. Lool. Mi-jin makes up excuses as to why she knows these things, and Myung-duk buys them. But Ji-woong says he will wait until she is ready to tell him the secrets she’s been keeping from him. Mi-jin worries that she might disappoint him, but he reiterates that she’s the only person he fully trusts, and he understands that she has reasons for not revealing her secrets. Aigoo! The weight of his trust is almost as crushing as it is relieving.
Cheol-gyu is brought in for another round of questioning, and he asks to see Soon again. He asks how she intends to catch the culprit, and she tells him she smelled a unique scent when she approached the raincoat killer’s car. To mark the start of their cooperation, Cheol-gyu gives Soon a list of all his fentanyl transactions for the past 24 years, and the prosecution uses this to formally charge him for drug distribution.
In the meantime, Detective Intern confirms that Ji-woong is the son of the witness in the missing women’s case — who also went missing 20 years ago. And he’s relieved to see that Ji-woong grew up well. He tells Ji-woong that Cheol-gyu has Parkinson’s, and further investigation reveals that Cheol-gyu was receiving treatment at the time AWOL intern was killed. Ain’t no alibi stronger than that.
Ji-woong is assigned to work the drug distribution case with a female prosecutor, TAK CHEON-HEE (Moon Ye-won), who’s been hanging around our plot since week one. Cheon-hee has a crush on Ji-woong, and our resident confusion specialist, Myung-duk, ropes Soon into his theory that Ji-woong and Cheon-hee are flirting. Now our heroine is jealous. Lol.
Back to our romance, Ji-woong begins to question why he only ever gets to see Mi-jin at night. Myung-duk and Soon separately come up with a “Mi-jin might be allergic to the sun theory,” but it doesn’t really matter to Ji-woong if his girlfriend is a vampire. The fact that he doesn’t know where Mi-jin works or what she does for a living unsettles Myung-duk. And of course, the best way to investigate Mi-jin is to bring food over to her best friend’s house. Heh.
Myung-duk is a surprisingly good cook, and coincidentally, he and Ga-yeong have the same taste in food. It’s boys over flowers and best friends, so Ga-yeong invites him in against Soon’s wishes. Poor Soon is trapped in the room with her bowels in a protest — and when she can’t take it any longer, she bursts out of the room and interrupts their date. But Myung-duk and Ga-yeong were just about to have their Lady and the Tramp spaghetti kiss!
Myung-duk reports back to Ji-woong that he saw Soon at Ga-yeong’s. Ji-woong recalls the first time a drunk Mi-jin passed the night at his place and then panicked to the point of climbing out the window of his house before sunrise. He also recalls seeing Soon when he came over to Ga-yeong’s place with hangover medicine for Mi-jin, and now he’s not sure of what to think.
Cheon-hee reports back to Ji-woong that one of the fentanyl customers on Cheol-gyu’s list made a deal with him 20 years ago, and fast forward to the present, the same woman made another deal but with a new name. It’s suspicious that the woman reappeared after 20 years under a new name, and it’s even more suspicious that the last time she bought fentanyl was right before AWOL intern’s murder. OMG! I think I know where this is going.
Soon catches Won in his investigation of the “an intern is lying about her identity” letters, and she’s upset that he didn’t tell her about the letters. The end of the investigation trail leads them to a shocking discovery: the other female intern (Bae Hae-sun) stole someone else’s identity to get the job. Whoa! Confronting the lady intern doesn’t seem like a good plan, so Soon asks Myung-duk to run a background check on her.
Following Myung-duk’s advice to create a situation where Mi-jin has to see him during the day, Ji-woong drops by Mi-jin’s house on a weekend. Unfortunately, Mi-jin overslept, and when her parents go to fetch her, they see Soon. We have a repeat of the “who are you and what are you doing in our house?” chase sequence, and Soon lands in the police station again. Ji-woong recognizes Soon as his office assistant — and while both parties find it very frustrating, our heroine cannot tell Ji-woong that Mi-jin and Soon are the same person.
Mi-jin decides to resign from work because she can’t keep lying to the people she cares about, but writing her resignation is one of the saddest things she has ever done. The silver lining to her transformation is that she was able to get a job and work, and she cries as she thinks about all the happy and productive memories that accompanied her stint at the prosecution office. I blinked back a few tears here. Soon drops her resignation the following morning and apologizes to Ji-woong. But he doesn’t want an apology, just an explanation. He mentions that Mi-jin’s mom now believes that our Soon is her sister, and he asks how she will take responsibility for her actions. But our heroine maintains her silence.
Myung-duk shows Soon the results of the background check on the intern, and it turns out that she’s GONG EUN-SHIM, the fentanyl customer who reappeared after 20 years! Wow! The big bad was hiding in plain sight the entire time! Eun-shim stopped coming to work after Cheol-gyu was arrested, and now we see her decked in fancy clothes and parading the streets in all her full villain glory — looking much younger than the intern we used to know, because she aged herself up to get the job.
A flashback reveals that Eun-shim drugged Cheol-gyu’s wife with fentanyl, before carting away all her valuables and shakily axing her. Eun-shim then posed as the victim to withdraw the money in her bank account. But because Cheol-gyu previously met with the real Soon to inform him about any activity on his wife’s account, she flagged the withdrawal. From Soon’s body language, Eun-shim suspected the jig was up, so she waylaid her at night and axed her to death. In contrast to her first kill, Eun-shim carries out this murder with nerves of steel, and Ji-woong’s mom witnesses the scene. Ji-woong’s mom drops her things and runs away in fright, but among the items she dropped was a branded lighter from the coffeehouse she worked at.
Eun-shim is subsequently confirmed as the raincoat killer, and we see that the woman she axed in our premiere week is the lady whose identity she stole to get the intern job. AWOL intern witnessed the murder, and that’s why she also killed him. Dear Lord, this woman is unhinged!
Myung-duk informs Ji-woong about Eun-shim, and his findings show that: 1) she took night classes at nursing school and administered beauty injections/sedatives to women during house calls — which is probably how she identified targets she could steal from; 2) she ran a teahouse but she recently closed it — probably to resume as an intern.
To raise the stakes and our blood pressure, Mi-jin’s dad drops by the teahouse to see Eun-shim. And via a flashback, we learn that Dad first met her at the coffeehouse in his search for Soon — because he heard one of the attendants at the shop (Ji-woong’s mom) also disappeared. Eun-shim had promised to help find Soon for a fee, and Dad is here to cash in on the promise. It probably took him this long to find Eun-shim again since she had a different identity back then. She’s had like four identities now, and I can’t keep up at this point.
In the present, Dad’s phone rings and Mi-jin is his wallpaper. Eun-shim recognizes her as the witness, and compliments her beauty. Dad is proud of the apple of his eyes, and says that she’s his daughter, Mi-jin. This is all Eun-shim needs to confirm that her target is Lee Mi-jin, not Im Mi-jin. Eun-shim asks Dad if anyone knows he came to see her, and he replies in the negative. “What a relief!” our villainess says, before locking the door and trapping Dad inside. Oh no!
Earlier that morning, Cheol-gyu sent his spy to give Soon a poppy flower, and she confirms that’s what she smelled in the raincoat killer’s car. Soon breaks into Eun-shim’s locker at work and sees a stash of poppy flowers, and this is her confirmation that Eun-shim is the raincoat killer. Our heroine calls Ji-woong and tells him she found the culprit, and at this point, she doesn’t care that he recognizes the voice as Soon’s. Ji-woong orders a tracking on Eun-shim’s location, and tells Soon to stay put in the office. But Soon gets a video of her dad tied up, and Eun-shim says to meet up. “Bring the cops, and your dad dies.”
By the time our heroine arrives at the location of the meet, it’s already sunset and she’s back to Mi-jin. Next thing you know, Eun-shim creeps up to her dressed in the Raincoat of Death, and the week ends with our heroine getting knocked out from behind.
What a week! I’m tempted to think that everything is finally in the open, but it won’t surprise me if there’s a secret this misdirection-filled drama is still holding on to. Heh. l do love a good mystery — especially if the reveal doesn’t come out of left field or make me feel stupid — and this show did exactly just that. I was actually kinda impressed.
Eun-shim was not on my radar as the ultimate villainess, and I just saw her as a condescending lady with a crush on Cheol-gyu. But thinking back to some of her words and actions, it does make sense that she’s not the typical ahjumma intern. Honestly, my first thought when it clicked that Eun-shim was the serial killer was: Wow! It’s nice to see women in male dominated fields. Lol. The humor is a little dark, but yeah, it is what it is.