Get ready to flip some tables and rage-crack some television screens, Beanies, because this drama finale is out to piss off everybody. Our beloved chaebol is on the hunt for his father and his mother’s killer, but the closer he gets to the truth, the more he’s going to wish he didn’t chase after it.
EPISODES 15-16
Our finale opens with a replay of Yi-soo’s final conversation with his father, but this time around the scenes are in black and white — an incongruous artistic choice that adds a superfluously somber tone to a flashback that holds no surprises. Well, no surprises other than the fact that we witness Chairman Jin’s previously unseen confession that, all those years ago, he’d planned to divorce his wife and live with Yi-soo and his mother. It’s a tough pill for Yi-soo to swallow, and so, like any angsty son confronted by his taciturn father’s uncharacteristic show of paternal love, he says a few harsh words and storms out of his father’s villa. For added emotional effect, his black and white departure is shrouded in a thick, horror movie-like fog.
The next day, the world is in color again, and Yi-soo returns to the police station to ask for Kang-hyun’s help reinvestigating his mother’s death. Just as he finishes telling her that it’s impossible for his mother to have died from an overdose of sleeping pills (because he’d hid them from her as a child), detectives from the Seoul station show up and tell him that his father was found dead from what appears to be a suicide — sleeping pills crushed into his drink. Now, we all know that Chairman Jin’s death is as suss as a white truck revving its engine outside a leading character’s house, but we’ve gotta give our characters some time to get there.
Yi-soo is in shock. He was the last known person to see his father alive, and as Yi-soo reflects on his parting words to dear ol’ dad, he simultaneously doubts his father would have killed himself over the pressures of a failed mayoral race, and wonders if maybe he’d pushed Chairman Jin over the emotional edge.
To make matters worse, the press begin hounding Yi-soo before he even gets the chance to fully process his father’s death. One unscrupulous reporter stoops so low as to ask Yi-soo how it feels to have both his parents die from suicide. This question is so uncalled for that even the other reporters collectively gasp — you just don’t ask someone that! — and we get one final reminder that Ki-suk is a reporter with (some) integrity when he tells the unscrupulous reporter that he’d crossed a line with his unnecessarily hurtful question.
As Yi-soo grieves and functions on autopilot, the rest of Team One offers their support. They arrive as a group to Chairman Jin’s funeral, and when Yi-soo sees them, it’s obvious that they are the first — out of the long parade of guests who have paid their respects — to be present for him. Kang-hyun and Jun-young are reserved, but Kyung-jin is overcome by sympathy and tearfully hugs Yi-soo and calls him hyung. The funeral is an absolute tear-jerker of a scene, but this moment was also symbolic of Yi-soo moving into the embrace of his found family after losing his last biological relative. And as Seung-joo leaves the room to give them their privacy, his absence feels like a subtle reminder of the growing rift that formed when Yi-soo discovered Seung-joo’s birth secret and realized that his step-mother put out a hit on Wall Climber.
Seung-joo, for his part, continues to play the role of a good brother. He has his mother carted away to the hospital when she causes a scene at the funeral, and as the company executives begin looking to Seung-joo as the future leader of Hansu Group, Seung-joo indicates that he wants Yi-soo at his side. Despite — or because of — Seung-joo’s overcompensation to make up for the fact that they aren’t blood related, the brothers feel out of sync. While Yi-soo struggles to accept that Chairman Jin killed himself, Seung-joo muses that their father must have been under a lot of pressure — more than they realized. After all, “there’s no one strong enough to beat everything.”
Even though there’s an undercurrent of tension, Yi-soo accepts Seung-joo’s offer to return to the family home, which is how Yi-soo finds a hidden picture of his mother and proof that his father was telling the truth in his final moments. Chairman Jin really was planning to divorce Hee-ja and give up everything to be with Yi-soo and his mom. Cue: flashback to all Yi-soo’s previous conversations with his father and, damn, do they all hit differently now that Yi-soo knows his father really did love him and his mother.
The truth, however, delivers more than just a punch to Yi-soo’s feels. Along with the angst comes an epiphany: Chairman Jin did not kill himself. There’s no way his father would have poured Yi-soo a drink from the same liquor bottle if it was laced with sleeping pills — which means the pills were added after Yi-soo left. And since there was no pill bottle or casings found at the scene, someone else must have supplied the sleeping pills and added them to Chairman Jin’s drink after he poured it.
The details of Chairman Jin’s case bear a striking resemblance to the murder of Yi-soo’s mom, and after Yi-soo pays the incarcerated Famous Psychiatrist a visit and unlocks more of his memories, he now recalls that Hee-ja was the person who assaulted his mom the night of her death. Team One agrees that Hee-ja had the most to gain from his mom’s death, but in the present, the one who would benefit the most from Chairman Jin’s murder is Seung-joo. Yi-soo refuses to believe his brother had anything to do with their father’s death, and I was in denial along with him — right up until the moment Seung-joo shows his true colors.
The night Chairman Jin died, Hee-ja saw Seung-joo leave the house with a handful of her sleeping pills, and when she confronts Seung-joo with her suspicions, a subtle switch flips. His tone becomes matter-of-fact as he explains that he just did what she would have wanted. She was the one who raised him to believe he must take over Hansu Group no matter what, and a series of flashbacks reveal that Hee-ja was an equally bad mother to Seung-joo.
While she reversed the classic bullying-style of abuse for Yi-soo, she unintentionally effed up Seung-joo, who knew all along he wasn’t Chairman Jin’s biological son. From an early age, he was subjected to Hee-ja’s drunken lamentations and led to believe their status and security hung on Seung-joo’s ability to be a good son and become the next chairman. (No pressure, right?)
So when Chairman Jin found out about Hee-ja and Seung-joo’s involvement with Wall Climber’s murder and decided to write Seung-joo out of his [holy cow that’s a lot of assets] will, Seung-joo killed him. It’s debatable how much of his motivation stemmed from his own greed versus a twisted belief that he was just doing what was best for him and his mother, but either way I’m seriously bummed. But that’s not even the worst of it! Because, even more shocking is the revelation that Seung-joo also killed Yi-soo’s mother. (Pausing here so we can all collectively flip tables and throw things in frustration.)
Like the rest of you, I hate, hate, hate that Yi-soo’s beloved brother turned out to be our ultimate villain, but I will give props to the writers for one thing: way to make the viewer feel exactly how Yi-soo feels. The evil brother vying for the seat on the company throne is such a cliche, but Flex x Cop did it in a novel way that made none of us want it to be true. We were just like Yi-soo, grasping for straws to prove it wasn’t true.
Unfortunately, the more Yi-soo investigates his mother’s murder, the more proof he finds that Seung-joo was involved — starting with the fact that Seung-joo was involved in an accident near Yi-soo’s house the night his mom was murdered. However, the key piece of evidence that knocks Yi-soo out of his denial bubble is the fact that Seung-joo’s fingerprints were found at his mother’s crime scene. At the time of her murder, they were never identified because Seung-joo was a minor and his prints weren’t on file, but for the present reinvestigation, Hyung-joon dug them out of the evidence archives.
When Yi-soo reads the fingerprint analysis results on Kang-hyun’s desk, he goes a little nuts and snatches the key to the gun locker. With Kang-hyun’s stolen gun in his possession, Yi-soo invites Seung-joo over to his house for an off-the-books interrogation. What follows is one of the most intense and heart-wrenching confrontations I’ve seen in dramaland. And, once again, even though I’m pissed at the writers for irrevocably ripping these two brothers apart, I begrudgingly have to give them — and our actors — props for the execution.
When confronted by Yi-soo, Seung-joo’s confession doesn’t come as freely as it did when he admitted the truth to his mother (who he knows will love him unconditionally) or and Jung-hoon (for whom he has no emotional attachment). Instead, with Yi-soo, he tries to maintain his innocence for as long as possible, and it isn’t until Yi-soo points a literal gun at him that he finally admits he murdered Yi-soo’s mother. This suggests to me that he didn’t want the truth to sever their relationship and that — despite his later assertion that he should have also killed Yi-soo that night — he genuinely grew to love Yi-soo.
Although Seung-joo’s motivations align with the greedy evil brother stereotype, the writers didn’t make him evil for the sake of being evil. Instead, when we flash back to the night he killed Yi-soo’s mother, we see a vulnerable, conflicted kid — not a sociopath. He hesitates to kill Yi-soo’s mom, and it’s only when he feels his and Hee-ja’s livelihood is threatened that he puts the sleeping pills in her drink.
It’s a decision that’s made all the more tragic in hindsight when Yi-soo tells Seung-joo that Chairman Jin knew all along that Seung-joo wasn’t his biological son. Even if Chairman Jin had successfully divorced Hee-ja, he would not have tossed her and Seung-joo to the curb, like trash, in favor of his true love and the biological son. When Seung-joo learns the truth, he’s shattered. He takes the gun, which Yi-soo dropped in their earlier scuffle, and puts it to his head — but there are no bullets. As distraught as Yi-soo was by Seung-joo’s betrayal, he could never kill his brother.
After Seung-joo’s arrest and subsequent trial, Mi-sook gets to cook Yi-soo one last comforting homecooked meal before he steps up to run Hansu Group. Meanwhile, Team One adjusts to life without Yi-soo. Kyung-jin is learning to interrogate suspects, and Jun-young — in a roundabout way — confesses to Ji-won after accepting her dinner invitation on a full stomach. As the day of Yi-soo’s official inauguration as Hansu Group’s next chairman arrives, Kang-hyun gives one last mournful look at his empty desk and tells the rest of Team One that it’s time to remove his desk.
Almost as soon as the words are out of her mouth, Yi-soo comes busting through the door. He decided to leave the company in Jung-hoon’s very capable hands and return to his true calling: detective work. While Team One gives him a hard time in order to hide their gleefulness, Team Two looks on amused at the obvious display of camaraderie. Although this happy ending feels a bit rushed after the prolonged heaviness of our story’s final two hours, it does set up the recently announced second season to begin on a clean slate.
Overall, Flex x Cop was an unexpected gem that evolved from an eyeroll-inducing premise into a surprisingly thoughtful and well-crafted story about a found family that solves murders and arrests bad guys. Even when the story disappointed me by going in a direction that I absolutely hated, I couldn’t stay mad at it because the execution was too good to complain about. Flex x Cop was a drama with a lot of heart that was, at times, heartbreaking, and I can’t wait to see these characters again. Here’s hoping there’s plenty of happiness, ridiculous undercover hijinks, and romance in Season 2.