Our photographer and his team are slowly but steadily unraveling the truth about their respective and shared pasts, but an ancient evil is just as steadily catching up to them. Can he find a way to save himself and his loved ones before time runs out, or is it time for yet another painful goodbye?
EPISODE 12-13
Picking back up with Bom’s resurfaced memories of the tunnel crash that killed her parents, we now know that Ki-won happened on the scene while searching for something he called “Death’s Pass.” He told her about it as a distraction, and gave her the Midnight Studio camera to hold, hoping it would keep her alive while he went to call for help. Unfortunately, the perpetrators of the original crash — who would later become the murdered vacation home thieves — returned to retrieve a dropped cell phone, and deliberately mowed Ki-won down to eliminate him as a witness to their hit-and-run.
These details help fill in the gaps of what happened, but they don’t move our team much closer to proving it happened or that Prosecutor Lee covered it up. So while Bom tries to remember the two months she spent as a ghost living with teenage Ki-joo, we spend the better part of an episode with the ghost assistants and their respective relationships.
Sung-ho agonizes over what to text Ji-won for so long that she gets impatient and goes on a blind date with some other guy hoping it’ll provoke Sung-ho to intervene, which is exactly what happens. The two finally go on their first official (honestly adorable) date, wherein Sung-ho works around his ten-minute possession limit by changing hosts repeatedly without regard for gender or any particular age. Of course, the timer interrupts their attempt at a kiss, and then they run into Bom and Ki-joo and Ji-won learns all about the Midnight Studio at last.
As for Nam-gu, Na-rae feels so hounded by his lingering presence that she begs his soul to move on and leave her be. She pleads her case — she was so lonely that she even lied about liking flowers in hopes he’d see them everywhere, think of her, and pick up the phone — but promises she’ll live in guilt and misery if he’ll just leave. Through tears, knowing she can’t hear him, Nam-gu promises to do so.
Before he leaves, though, the team has a mystery to solve. Nam-gu tracks down the sole witness to the vacation home murders, who subsequently vanishes again, only to turn up dead in a bathtub. Which belongs to a third person involved in the tunnel crash: the driver, then a drunk teenager who knew his father, Prosecutor Lee, could get him out of any trouble his joyride might cause. Today, we and the Midnight Studio team know him as Detective Lee.
All that time he spent snooping around the studio? Far from coincidence. Not only did he kill Bom’s parents and Ki-won, but he set the whole vacation home murder scenario up to keep his ex-friends from spilling about the tunnel crash. To make matters worse, he now carries The Evil Spirit (you know the one) around on his back.
Ki-joo learns all this in the worst possible way: alone and unarmed in Detective Lee’s apartment, with Detective Lee and The Spirit blocking his exit. He puts up a desperate fight, and he does make it to his Ferris wheel date with Bom… but flows right through her when she goes to hug him. Oof, all he can do is apologize for breaking his promise not to make her cry, while she processes what this means.
There is one sliver of hope, however: Ki-joo isn’t dead yet. He’s hospitalized with a severe stab wound, but as long as his body remains alive, he’s only a temporary ghost (just like twelve-year-old Bom after the tunnel crash). With one week remaining to his 35th birthday, he and the (actual) ghosts head out to find a way to destroy The Spirit while Bom stays behind to protect his body with the Safe Zone.
But Detective Lee is not so easily deterred. He plants the murder witness’s corpse on Bom’s property and has her arrested. Several times, The Spirit spurs him on to attempt to kill her, but another detective unknowingly interrupts each time. Meanwhile, Ji-won and the ghosts take advantage of the opportunity to move Ki-joo’s body to the VIP ward. It’s only a matter of time before Detective Lee finds the new room, but the switch does keep him busy searching long enough for our team’s ghost network to dig up black box footage of Detective Lee moving the corpse, and for Bom to convince the other detective to reexamine additional evidence that points straight to Detective Lee.
So when Detective Lee forces his way into the VIP ward, the cops are ready to ambush and arrest him. But with an ancient evil spirit attached to him, it’s all too easy for Detective Lee to grab Bom as a hostage and take her up to the rooftop. The police manage to shoot him in the shoulder, forcing him away from Bom, but before anyone can stop him, he grabs her again and dives off the roof.
After days of trying and failing to touch Bom — and anything else in the living world — Ki-joo finally succeeds when it matters most. He catches her hand just in time and hauls her back up over the side of the building (much to the onlookers’ confusion, since they can’t see him). Once she’s safe, he holds her tightly. But then he fades away to nothing as midnight — his birthday — arrives. Either he’s woken back up in his body, or he’s failed to escape the curse.
I have to hand it to The Midnight Studio, I did not see this twist with Detective Lee coming. Given the ways he’s been involved with resolving many of the previous ghost stories, and the way he found out this week that Ki-joo can in fact see ghosts, I expected him to eventually, perhaps begrudgingly, be drawn into the team. But no, it turns out he’s even more cruel, calculating, and lacking in empathy than his father. And now that the truth is out, the connections tying everything together make a whole lot more sense.
What really struck me this week, though, is just how many of this show’s characters have suffered not because they were personally targeted, but simply as collateral damage in someone else’s scheme to get whatever it is they want. The most obvious of course are Bom’s family and Ki-won — all killed because they were literally in the way — and Yoon-chul, who was nothing more than a convenient scapegoat.
But there’s also Sung-ho and Ji-won, who lost each other (and Sung-ho’s life) because of their boss’s greed and disregard for his employees’ wellbeing. Even Nam-gu unintentionally hurt Na-rae because he was too focused on his job to see how his absence was affecting her. Not to mention all the people The Spirit has killed while hunting down the camera.
So while The Midnight Studio is certainly about making the most of whatever time we have and not leaving behind regrets, I think it’s also making the important point that it’s very easy to lose sight of how our actions and desires impact the people around us. And that’s true whether you’re well-meaning but short-sighted or literally possessed by an evil spirit. (But at least we don’t have to locate Death’s Path in order to be a little more mindful of how our choices affect other people!)