Our night and day show reaches its halfway mark this week, and locks in the results of our Week 2 bet. Depending on where you cast your lot, you might be right about the next character to figure out our heroine’s secret, and the category under which Mr. Red Herring/Red Flag falls.
EPISODES 7-8
The week resumes with Mi-jin, our commander in chief of the Beer-Chugging Prevention Squad, throwing a chicken thigh to stop Ji-woong from drinking the spiked beer on his undercover date. The distraction is semi-effective, but what really crashes the beer party — aside from Mi-jin spitting in the drink (eww!) — is her “girlfriend who caught her boyfriend on a date with another woman” act. Lol. Dragged back and forth like a rag doll, Ji-woong is torn between Mi-jin and the fentanyl supplier’s girlfriend, until Mr. Supplier bursts into the restaurant to add to the chaos. This scene is straight outta those fictional makjang shows we see drama characters watch on TV. Lol.
It turns out that Mr. Supplier is the club thug from the other night, and he and his girlfriend get arrested. Ji-woong is curious as to why Mi-jin is a common denominator at the club and the restaurant, but she can’t exactly explain why she was at both locations. “Sometimes, not saying things can lead to misunderstandings,” Ji-woong says, but since everyone has their own reasons, he promises to wait until she can tell him everything. “Could you tell me everything?” Mi-jin swings the ball back into his net, and she’s pleased when he replies that he has never been the type to open up, but he thinks he might be able to do that with her. Awww.
Naturally, Byung-duk assumes something is going on between Ji-woong and Mi-jin — after also running into Miss Night at the club and the restaurant — but Ji-woong refuses to give him the satisfaction of an answer. Soon is equally curious to know what Ji-woong thinks of Mi-jin — and she’s quite excited when Byung-duk mentions that Ji-woong has never been romantically involved with a woman. But her excitement turns damp when a visitor to the prosecution office recognizes her — as the real Im Soon! Mi-jin did say she resembles her aunt. Soon plays the “I’m sorry, you have the wrong person” card, and while this encounter with her aunt’s colleague served to reveal that the real Soon used to work at Seohan Bank, it also means our Soon’s cover identity is in crisis.
Sure enough, Won is still looking into Soon — and the news that there are no records of her aside from a cancelled missing person’s report from years ago makes him curious enough to trail her again. Soon stops by a PC room after work, and by the time Won arrives, it’s Mi-jin he sees — with Soon’s cardigan and bag strapped on her gaming chair. While a similar cardigan, bag, and keychain might not prove anything, Mi-jin and Soon having an identical scar on the leg is a different story. To confirm his suspicions, Chief Inspector Won checks the CCTV footage from the first time he trailed after our heroine, and yes, Mi-jin is the young lady he saw riding Soon’s bicycle. Welp! Looks like the cat is out of the bag — even though our Mysterious Cat of Transformation is still in the wind. Heh.
Everyone at work — minus Ji-woong who can’t be bothered — is invited to a “not-mandatory-but-totally-mandatory” company dinner, and the highlight of the evening is karaoke where Soon dazzles everyone with an Apink performance! Loool. She’s pretty disoriented afterwards which is odd because she didn’t drink as much, and Won whisks her away before she’s dragged off for another round of drinks. Soon ends up collapsing in his arms — but not before hearing him say that she has to leave because the sun will soon set.
At the same time, Ji-woong shows up — thanks to the secret tracker on Mi-jin’s phone — because an inebriated Soon called him with Mi-jin’s number, and he assumed Mi-jin was in danger. While Won’s embrace prevents Ji-woong from witnessing her transformation, Won still has to explain how he knows/what he’s doing with an unconscious Mi-jin when they rush her to the ER. It’s not a pleasant conversation because there’s no love lost between Mr. Prosecutor and the idol singer he prosecuted for drug use. And Ji-woong is even more pissed when Won inevitably reveals that Mi-jin’s drowsiness began when she accidentally drank his water which contained dissolved anxiety medication. Oops!
When Mi-jin wakes up later on, she questions Won about his “the sun will soon set” statement, and he admits that he knows her secret — even going as far as waiting outside her house the entire night to witness her transformation at sunrise after clocking the dual persona at the PC room. Wow! S for stalker.
Secret-wise, there might be nothing much to worry about since Won promises to keep his lips sealed. But health-wise, I’m not liking this sudden loss of energy and “strange feeling” that Mi-jin has started experiencing. I want to say it’s nothing serious and it’s just the day/night transformation taking a toll on her body. But then the doctor mentioned her unusually high white blood cell count, and now I’m worried. I do not trust K-dramas when it comes to things like this.
To compound Mi-jin’s woes, the drama does a villain reveal — yunno, Acid Assailant’s instigator/the man watching Soon in the bathroom at the company dinner/the owner of a car with the same four digits as the raincoat killer’s number plate — and he’s none other than the hospital director intern, BAEK CHEOL-GYU (Jung Jae-sung). And worse, it’s hinted that he might have a partner. Oh dear!
Ji-woong comes to learn that Cheol-gyu used to be director at Hwadong Medical Center, and this info seems to ring a bell to him. Flashing back to his unease the first time he saw Cheol-gyu on the stairs at the office, our prosecutor checks the employee records and sees that Cheol-gyu resumed a week after the acid attack as a convenient replacement for the AWOL intern — who has now been declared missing by his daughter. Ji-woong’s spidey senses tell him there’s something fishy about Mr. Hospital Director, and it’s investigation time.
Enter: Soon aka Ms. I’ve Lived in Seohan For a Long Time and I Can Easily Become Friends With Cheol-gyu to Fish Out Information. Smh. Soon gets a “No, thanks,” from Ji-woong, but our resident danger magnet goes on to share the “AWOL intern is actually missing” news to the other interns. Detective intern perks up on hearing this because the one case he was never able to solve during his time on the force is the missing women’s case — and Soon remembers seeing the investigation files in Ji-woong’s envelope back in our premiere week. Before Soon can fully dwell on this recollection, Cheol-gyu waters down the conversation. But her suspicion that he knows more than he’s letting on increases when she remembers that he asked her about AWOL intern last week — and that was before anyone at work even knew the man was missing.
Myung-duk’s investigation into Cheol-gyu reveals that Mr. Hospital Director is an upstanding pillar of the community — except for a little underground rumor that he killed his wife. Of course, he did! Apparently, she was found dead in a motel after she tried to run off with another man, but there was no evidence tying Cheol-gyu to the crime. The motel went out of business afterwards and was renovated into a residential building… where Ji-woong currently lives. Ohhhh. Now the “haunted” apartment makes sense.
Speaking of apartments, the detective supplying Ji-woong with investigation files drops off a list of missing persons in the 2000s — which Ji-woong plans to look over at home. The problem is, our heroine suspects there’s an Im Soon on the list, so she drops by his house for an “I’m sorry for destroying your door locks the other day” visit. Mi-jin is armed with food and alcohol — and a belly full of hangover drinks — in a bid to get Ji-woong drunk and get rid of the Im Soon page on the list. An excellent plan, really, if only our prosecutor did not have a high alcohol tolerance. Hehe.
In the battle to ruin both their livers, Ji-woong loosens up and admits he liked Mi-jin from the start — or so our delulu heroine assumes. Because going by his flashbacks during the conversation, the statement could also be translated as “I liked [it] from the start.” The “it” in question, being his interactions with her mom. Lol. According to Ji-woong, most people have a pitiful reaction when they hear that he’s an orphan, but not Mom. She didn’t see it as a big deal or a flaw, and he is really grateful for that — as evidenced by his little thank you gifts in the returned side dish containers.
Ji-woong is ready to call it a night, but Mi-jin still has to complete her mission — and she accidentally breaks a plate in the process of extending her stay in his house. Oops! Mi-jin cuts her finger on one of the broken pieces, and Ji-woong has to get the first aid kit from inside. Seizing the opportunity, she goes through the missing person’s list, and it turns out the name she saw was Im Sook, not Soon. Phew! As Ji-woong wraps her finger with a Band-Aid, Mi-jin asks for the consequence of an alcohol-influenced action, and Mr. Prosecutor replies that it’s a reduced sentence depending on whether the incident is an accident or not. “Then, this isn’t an accident,” Mi-jin declares before pressing her lips to his. And on this — dead fish — note, the first half of the drama comes to an end.
Miss Night and Day continues to move along with a nice pace, juggling the comedy and mystery with an enjoyable rhythm. The drama is clearly not in a hurry to solve any of its multiple cases, but it does reveal new information each week. This week we learn that Ji-woong’s mom was a witness in the missing women’s case, as she saw something in an alley behind Seohan Bank — where the real Soon used to work, hmmm — but she was too scared to give a statement. When she finally summoned the courage to speak with the detective in charge, he was strong-armed into fetching the precinct’s chief from a minor car crash instead. Unfortunately, by the time his partner — our detective intern — arrived at her location, the killer had gotten there first.
Deference to higher-ups against one’s wishes is clearly a thing among the workforce in K-drama societies, and I’m glad Soon called out the nonsense when the deputy chief informed the interns about the company dinner. If only someone had done something similar twenty-something years ago, maybe an innocent woman wouldn’t have lost her life.
Speaking of twenty-something years ago, it turns out that Mi-jin and Ji-woong first met when her mom was handing out missing person’s fliers for her aunt outside the police station, and he was on his usual pilgrimage to the station looking for answers to his mom’s case. Lol. Poor Won. It’s sad enough that he can only “protect” the female lead from afar — or from his vantage point at the window of his new “assistant secretary to the deputy chief” office — but to be KO’d by the famous childhood connection trope? How tragic! Oh well, such is the price to pay for being a K-drama second male lead.