One fateful night, a meteor shower and a special cow changed the lives of our heroes — for better or worse — and turned their quiet little town upside down. Now that chapter in their stories comes to an end as they chase after a serial killer, make amends, and march towards a brighter future. While I won’t say Behind Your Touch had a satisfying conclusion, at least the overall journey was entertaining.
EPISODES 15-16
Picking up from last week, Ye-boon returns to the scene of the crime and finds Sun-woo bleeding on the ground. The poncho killer waits nearby in the shadows, but before they attack, the police arrive. By the time Jang-yeol joins them, the shock of Sun-woo’s death leaves him numb, but his worries turn to Ye-boon who becomes a key witness as well as a prime suspect.
Though he tries to intervene for her sake, Ye-boon thrusts aside his concern, and glaring at him, she asks if he is finally satisfied now that Sun-woo is dead. Her unwarranted lambasting clearly hurts him, but Jang-yeol continues to fight for Ye-boon’s innocence to the point of disciplinary action.
Despite receiving a one-month suspension, Jang-yeol resumes his investigation thanks to the support from his detective team. He even borrows a car from them, and this small happenstance gives him the answer to Gwang-shik’s dying message: the blackouts can be faked using sunglasses in the dark.
Jang-yeol notifies Ye-boon of his discovery, but she remains hostile towards him and yells at him to leave her alone. With a heavy heart, she drops by Shaman Park’s place to bring a gift for Sun-woo’s funeral, but right before her eyes, she sees Jang-yeol’s warning. Without thinking things through, Ye-boon touches the shaman’s butt and learns that he was the poncho killer all along. (You know what happened to Gwang-shik, so why would you make the same mistake!?)
Luckily— or more like conveniently — Shaman Park decides to spare her life as penance for killing her grandpa, but his crocodile tears suggest that he is merely toying with her. Like Ye-boon, Shaman Park has psychometric powers, and can read people’s memories through eye contact. He knows that she has no concrete evidence to tie him to the murders, so for now, he lets her go under the condition that she stay out of his way.
Despite Shaman Park keeping a watchful eye on her, Ye-boon manages to trick him and pass along a message to Jang-yeol. From the shaman’s memories, she saw Sun-woo’s dying message — the passcode to his phone — and the detectives get hold of an incriminating recording where Shaman Park admits to being the poncho killer.
With Shaman Park in custody, all seems well as Ye-boon and Jang-yeol send Sun-woo off, and they share a moment together, just the two of them — no more deaths or a serial killer looming over their heads. She apologizes for her earlier behavior, acknowledging the fact that she blamed him even though the person she hated was herself, but Jang-yeol says that he holds some responsibility for these deaths since he was too slow to stop them.
Alas, things never go smoothly for our heroes, and Shaman Park requests Jang-yeol to interrogate him. Fully embracing the role of psychotic killer, Shaman Park tells Jang-yeol that he has no motive — his dad wasn’t even a part of the real estate scam — and merely killed for fun. The first victim was his cheating wife, and watching people’s memories fade away gave him a thrill.
However, Shaman Park did not ask for Jang-yeol specifically to simply share his story, and finally reveals his hand: let him go or else another person will die. Right on cue, Ye-boon barges into the interrogation room, and Shaman Park lets her read his memories since he left her a message. She watches in horror as he kidnaps Ok-hee and taunts Ye-boon to come find her.
Unwilling to risk her friend’s life, Ye-boon agrees to Shaman Park’s deal and gets him out of the station by threatening to kill him. The other detectives watch helplessly as Ye-boon orders Jang-yeol to drive, and as they get away, all three of them drop the ruse since this was the plan from the start. (Is this show supposed to reveal how incompetent the police force is? Because if that’s the goal, they’re smashing it out of the park.)
Now that they fulfilled their end of the bargain, Ye-boon demands to know Ok-hee’s location, but Shaman Park refuses to say more unless they take him to his destination. Of course, even when they arrive, Shaman Park stays quiet, and our heroes realize too late that they fell into a trap.
Having anticipated his capture, Shaman Park took out a bit of insurance in the form of Chairman Baek (the bad guy from Jang-yeol’s past who ordered Seung-gil to kill him). Thanks to their mini-collaboration, Baek and his goons capture Jang-yeol, and Shaman Park buys himself a ticket out of the country.
Fortunately for our heroes, these thugs are as proficient at their jobs as the police are at theirs, and Ye-boon frees herself from her bindings and saves Jang-yeol from losing his organs. Even with his injuries, Jang-yeol takes down the bad guys without much trouble, and Chairman Baek surrenders — though it does not save him from being tossed to the ground.
Out of danger, our heroes return to their original task, and the only one who can figure out Ok-hee’s location is Ye-boon. With Yong-myeong’s guidance, Ye-boon recalls the sounds from the shaman’s memory, and as they follow the clues, they arrive at a forested area. At first glance, it seems that they hit a dead end, but Yong-myeong discovers a hidden hole in the ground and rescues Ok-hee.
Now that her friend is safe, Ye-boon and Jang-yeol turn their attention back to Shaman Park, and with Chairman Baek’s assistance, they wait at the rendezvous point, hoping to capture their killer before he escapes. However, Shaman Park sees through their plans (quite literally), and slips from their grasp at the last minute.
The chase becomes a game of hide-and-seek as Shaman Park uses his eyes to run away and Ye-boon uses her touch to find him. As our heroes close in on their target, Shaman Park tricks them again and takes Ye-boon as his hostage. Holding a knife to her neck, he keeps Jang-yeol at bay, so our detective takes a gamble, hoping that Ye-boon will understand his signal.
As Jang-yeol bluffs about having superpowers, he counts down from three, and while Shaman Park is distracted, Ye-boon elbows him on one just like last time. With that, our heroes arrest the poncho killer who shows no remorse for his actions, and Ye-boon vows to visit him every week to poke his eyes. She then bites his head for good measure, and Jang-yeol orders her to stop eating him. Pfft.
Following the successful capture of a serial killer, Jang-yeol is reinstated to his old position back in Seoul, but before he leaves, he asks Ye-boon to come visit him once she fulfills all her other goals. Eight months pass by since then, and Ye-boon becomes a successful veterinarian who appears on TV shows to demonstrate her powers. As promised, she drops by to see Jang-yeol, but their reunion gets interrupted by his ceaselessly ringing phone.
Ye-boon asks if she can help him in any way, but Jang-yeol declines since he does not want to use her or put her in danger. She blurts out that it isn’t a big deal given their relationship, and Jang-yeol smiles at her inadvertent confession. He accepts her offer since the case would be over with a simple touch, but Ye-boon quickly regrets her hasty decision as she sits in jail across from her scary target (special appearance by Lee Jung-eun).
After spending most of her time catching flies and trying to stay alive, Ye-boon finally gets a chance to touch the inmate’s butt during a soccer game and successfully learns where her syndicate is. Before the inmate can hurt her, Jang-yeol comes to the rescue, and the two of them get lost in their own world as they make plans for a date. Of course, they have to get away from the angry inmates first, and holding hands, they run.
No matter how cute Han Ji-min and Lee Min-ki are (and they are very adorable together), that final scene was so lackluster. The creators ended the show with a last-minute, farcical case instead of giving characters the audience actually care about proper send-offs, and while I get their intention of bringing back the humor, the joke didn’t land well for me. It was a bit too ridiculous, and I wished that the show focused on their relationship more rather than follow Ye-boon around in the jail for the last eight minutes. However, the ending is the least of my problems with these final episodes which I thought were uninspired and poorly executed.
The reveal of the poncho killer wasn’t bad in of itself. The show actually sprinkled a lot of clues about Shaman Park’s identity from the beginning, and in hindsight, the dramatic pauses and music were all clues pointing at the shaman’s double-nature. I also thought some of the tricks he used were clever, like how he purposefully let himself get caught the first time outside of Assemblyman Cha’s office so he could hide his second visit from Ye-boon. However, as soon as Ye-boon figured out his lie, the show made him so cartoonishly evil, which wasn’t helped at all by the other characters’ complete incompetence. The whole case turned into a joke, and all the tension and mystery the show built up to this point became meaningless.
In order to raise the stakes in these final hours, the show made the characters act impulsively, but in the end, everything they did had no real consequence to the story which made the last chase boring. For example, Ye-boon and Jang-yeol helped Shaman Park escape so they could find Ok-hee, but ultimately, they found her without his help. There was no point in letting him go other than to set up the chase. In a similar fashion, Chairman Baek and his lackeys barely constituted as a threat and were essentially a plot device to allow Shaman Park to get away from our heroes. Also, the moment of Shaman Park’s capture was so absurd starting from the fact that he made it to the boat at all while holding a knife to Ye-boon’s neck, and then he fell for Jang-yeol’s “trick” and got knocked aside by Ye-boon with one hit. Is this really the same man who killed tons of people including Sun-woo?
One of the other effects of the show’s poor execution is that the final week inadvertently undermined the deaths of the victims and the poncho killer case as a whole. The show wanted to depict peace returning to this quiet town, but I actually found the neighbors’ lax attitudes jarring. They recently experienced a heinous crime committed by someone they all knew, but the show has them move on so quickly without delving into it. It felt as if nothing happened, but then again, these are the same people who had their livelihoods destroyed by a real estate scam and they still voted for the man who tricked them. Maybe the town’s motto is to forget the past and move on.
While my overall impression with the last episodes is poor, I will say that my general opinion of the show is still positive. I thought Behind Your Touch was a fun show with interesting characters and wacky jokes that had more hits than misses, especially as the story progressed and found its stride. Unfortunately, the show stumbled at the end, and though it did sour my watching experience, I’ll try to follow in the characters’ footsteps and forget this ending ever happened.