As our wildcard sinks further into the dark abyss, our counters are faced with a crisis of faith, and they struggle to keep their emotions in check. Betrayal also rocks some boats, and our counters come to learn that they’re not as invincible as they thought.
EPISODES 7-8
We resume the week with Joo-seok’s first kill, and the evil duo watch on the sidelines as Joo-seok and Moon battle it out. Both guys are on almost equal wavelengths, but Moon comes out tops. Unfortunately, he hesitates when it’s time to throw the final punch, and Pil-gwang shows up before he can summon the evil spirit in Joo-seok. Pil-gwang flings Moon aside and whisks Joo-seok away — obviously to continue planting rage-filled ideas into his head — and that’s how the counters lose both Pil-gwang and Joo-seok.
Unfortunately, again, the counters learn that separating Joo-seok and Pil-gwang is out of the question for now. Because, according to Yung, if Joo-seok goes up against Pil-gwang, the evil spirit that comes out tops (and swallows the other) will become a complete evil spirit. What’s the worst that can happen if a complete evil spirit emerges? For starters, the spirit will not just be able to see the territory, it will also be able to absorb the territory’s powers like the counters. How fun! Now I need to see Pil-gwang versus Joo-seok in the ring. Someone, get me a bookie.
While I’m arranging the battle of the year in my head, Joo-seok and Pil-gwang have a conversation. Pil-gwang affirms that he didn’t kill Min-ji (like the counters told Joo-seok), and he claims to be a victim of the real estate fraud as well. But I’m not sure victimhood is the right word to describe his saltiness about Chung-jae running off with the entire 120 billion won they made from the scam. Anyway, as to the “truth” Pil-gwang has been withholding from Joo-seok, he tells him now that Chung-jae is alive.
Apart from being a victim of his scam, Joo-seok has a personal vendetta against Chung-jae (Chung-jae ridiculed Min-ji in public and caused her to enter a dark place for a while), so it’s easy to convince Joo-seok that they need to get revenge on him. “They,” of course, refers to Joo-seok alone. Since Pil-gwang plans on killing two birds with one Joo-seok stone: using Joo-seok to get rid of Chung-jae (and taking the money for himself), and to also get rid of Moon (leaving Moon’s powers up for grabs).
Pil-gwang is many things, but a team player is not one of them. He only partners up with people who are useful to him and abandons them after they have maxed out their usefulness — just like he did when Wong was arrested. And after he took Joo-seok away from the fight with Moon and left Kelly alone to face Hana and the rest of the counters, it dawns on her that she has been replaced. Go rogue, sis. I believe in you.
To clear all doubts about Moon’s fight with Joo-seok, Mo-tak asks if Moon is sure he wasn’t able to summon the spirit in Joo-seok just because Pil-gwang interfered. In other words, are Moon’s emotions clouding his judgement? Moon is silent. “Don’t hesitate going forward. He is an evil spirit that must be summoned at all cost,” Mo-tak reminds their ace counter. But to Moon, Joo-seok was a good man. “I’ve always believed my job was to save good people from evil spirits. However if even good people can also become evil spirits then who are we actually saving?” Moon wonders, and it’s clear that the whole evil spirit business with Joo-seok has triggered a crisis of faith in him.
Moon’s beloved ahjussi might be an akwi (evil spirit) to the counters, but to the rest of the world, he is a prison escapee with a murder charge. Joo-seok plans to haunt every last one of the people involved in the real estate scam, and detective Mo-tak insists that the only way to stop him is to solve the real estate scam case. That is, locate Chung-jae, find the 120 billion, and compensate the victims.
An investigation leads them to Chung-jae’s newest scam — his men are coercing locals to sign away their houses in order to build an apartment complex on the land. The counters round up the thugs but one of them escapes. Ms. Chu goes after the escapee and he turns out to be her first heal from last week, IM JAE-YEOL (Jung Taek-hyun). Startled, she lets him go, leaving us with the second case of emotions clouding a counter’s judgement. Unfortunately, by letting him go, she has placed a target on his back because Chung-jae now believes that Jae-yeol has joined hands with the police.
Before Hana gets into a similar predicament as her colleagues, she decides to end things with her crush. But Kelly shows up to interrupt their date, and she’s about to stab Hana when Mr. Crush jumps in and fulfills his destiny as a kryptonite. Oof! Hana goes ballistic on Kelly and she comes this close to finishing her off when Pil-gwang shows up. Aish! But he’s not here out of loyalty to Kelly. He’d rather kill her and absorb her evil spirit than allow the spirit to be summoned to Yung. “Think of it as you’ll be living inside of me,” he says to her. Tsk.
Before having the main course, Pil-gwang decides to go for the appetizer: Hana’s crush. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and with her last bit of strength, Hana musters her psychokinetic powers to fling Pil-gwang away before he can kill off her crush. Phew! This is the first time in a while that I’ve been 100% satisfied with the use of this power. Kelly uses the opportunity to escape — but not before reading Hana’s memories to see how she acquired her counter powers. Hmmm.
In the meantime, Hana begs Ms. Chu to save her crush. And between healing Hana’s injury from being impaled by Joo-seok and healing the crush now, poor Ms. Chu is going through a lot. Hana better buy that woman a dozen multivitamins and supplements and ginseng extracts — after recovering from heartbreak, of course. Because as painful as it is, Hana had to erase herself completely from her crush’s memories in order to protect him. *Sniff*
Ms. Chu on the other hand, has gone all motherly on Jae-yeol — visiting his place to clean and preparing a memorial service for his grandmother. Sigh. Jae-yeol ends up drugging her to prove his loyalty to Chung-jae, and Chung-jae’s thugs kidnap her in order to lure Mo-tak and kill him. Terrible plan, guys. The Mo-tak and Ms. Chu tag team pull a reverse Uno card on the thugs, and all roads lead to Chung-jae.
Our resident scam artist is out playing golf (and bullying a caddie) when his nemesis arrives. And no, it’s not the tag team, it’s Joo-seok! Chung-jae runs away like the lizard he is, but he can’t escape the wrath of Joo-seok’s fists. The tag team walks in on the scene and they barely manage to stop Joo-seok from killing Chung-jae. Unfortunately, Chung-jae escapes, and Joo-seok does, too — but not before almost killing Mo-tak. It took all of Joo-seok’s willpower not to strike the killing blow, but that’s that. He plans to kill the counters on their next encounter.
The next encounter comes sooner than they expect, thanks to Jeok-bong and his sniff-a-ton around town. He picks up Joo-seok’s scent entering a hotel, but the scent disappears in the lobby. As they ride up the elevator, he picks up the scent again in addition to Pil-gwang’s, and Moon deduces that Jeok-bong can only smell within a limited distance and height — which is why they hadn’t been able to locate Pil-gwang’s hideout all the while because Jeok-bong had been sniffing around from ground level while Pil-gwang was resident at a high up hotel suite.
Unfortunately, this is the least of the counters’ problems at the moment because as it turns out, their territory is also height dependent and Moon cannot summon the territory this high up. Wait, what?? Now it looks like the counters have been using a trial version of the territory all along. Tsk. This height nonsense is a huge design flaw that the developers at Yung need to look into ASAP! And while they’re at it, maybe they can unlock new features like an invisibility cloak to prevent evil spirits from seeing and using the territory. Just saying.
“Welcome to my web,” the spider says to the fly, as Pil-gwang and Joo-seok welcome the counters into their trap. There’s no time to waste, and Moon faces Joo-seok alone, leaving the others to battle Pil-gwang. But without the territory on their side, the evil spirits give the counters a thorough whooping. Moon is the last one standing, and even then, he can barely even stand. Watching Moon come crashing down motivates the others to step up, and Hana and Jeok-bong switch over to Joo-seok, leaving the tag team with Pil-gwang.
For a minute, it seems like the fight is won. But the elevator dings open and Kelly strides in to take on Moon. She admits that she can’t kill him, but hey, she can do him one better. “What if I erase the moment of your rebirth?” She asks, slyly. *Gasp!* Hello, Yung, is this even possible? If Moon loses the memory of when he became a counter, he’s going to lose his powers as well!
But that’s exactly what Kelly was counting on, and before anyone gets a chance to react, she goes ahead to format his memory. To our collective shock, Counter_Moon.exe stops functioning, and his curly hair gets a silk press. No way! There has to be a cache memory stored somewhere in his brain, right? Right???
Kelly, when I said to go rogue, this isn’t what I meant! I didn’t bat an eye when she visited Wong in prison to kill him and put him out of his misery. But this? This is just evil! I’m not surprised, though, since stripping Moon of his powers is in line with Kelly’s deviousness. And more than getting back at the counters, this was a calculated move to spite Pil-gwang. She knows he’s after Moon’s powers, and she’d rather send the power back to Yung than let him have it. Payback is really a blonde-haired pirate.
It sucks as a Moon fan, but I’ve got to admit that this is such a delightful place to be in right now. Moon losing his powers is an interesting direction story-wise, and perhaps this is the angle the show was driving at all along with the Moon-centric approach. Removing Moon from the equation will shake things up and spotlight the other counters as they show the rest of us why they are his sunbaes in the business. And just in case any of them is in doubt about their ability to take on evil spirits without Moon, this will be the perfect opportunity to clear those doubts.
It’s not the first time Moon will lose his powers (Yung once stripped him of his counter rights in Season 1), so I’m not that worried about him — or the rest of the counters by extension. Sure, a powerless Moon is a setback to them. But unlike the crisis in the evil spirit camp where Kelly and Pil-gwang have it out for each other, at least, our counters are a solid unit. (Like me! Hahaha).