As our con team hits closer to the heart of Jeokmok Foundation, their enemies hit back — from all sides. Our heroes aren’t giving up, but it’s no small feat to go up against a nameless, faceless enemy while having to rely on people whose reliability is never quite guaranteed.
EPISODES 13-14
The good news is that Mr. Ma’s fall from the rooftop proved fatal. The bad news is that the hacking tool our team used to hijack his presentation did a bit of reverse hacking on Da-jung’s system. This allows an ominous message from the chairman (one of many) to come through, erases some files, and exposes the location of the manhwa shop headquarters. There’s not much the team can do about it, other than pack up and move into Ringo’s hideout for the time being.
As Mu-young prepares to launch a class action lawsuit against Navis Well-Being, Reporter Woo goes on national news to publicize the story and issue a call for tips about Navis’s crimes. He does it without permission, though, and is promptly pressured to quit.
All the external pressure makes progress difficult, especially since Navis executives are threatening employees to keep them from whistleblowing. So the con team tosses out bait in the form of a fake financial services company. They’re not offering loans, just financial and legal advice in exchange for information about ways Navis employees have been exploited and lied to. And one of those employees is none other than Mu-young’s long-lost mother.
Ro-woom recognizes her name immediately, and her eyes actually fill with tears as she gently explains that Navis Well-Being is a pyramid scheme. Mu-young arrives in the middle of the conversation, so Ro-woom leaves them to catch up in private. Rather than pile more guilt on his mother, Mu-young lies that his father is doing well. Ro-woom checks on him later, only to find him sick with a fever on the couch (we’ll assume it’s a relapse of the empathy sickness?), and nurses him all night long.
Even after Mu-young and his law firm get enough evidence to raid Navis headquarters, though, it’s not easy going. Kyung-ja goes into hiding to avoid arrest. Prosecutor Ryu is called back to lead the investigation, but he rebuffs the con team’s efforts to share information. He says he’s just trying to do things by the books, but it feels more like he’s decided joining hands with Ro-woom and co. is riskier to his career than it’s worth.
Meanwhile, Ringo has been working on a risky project of his own. Inspired by Nasa’s report of a chip hidden in Kyung-ja’s lighter — likely a copy of the burned ledger — Ringo foolishly takes it upon himself to retrieve it. Since Kyung-ja keeps the lighter on her at all times, the only way to get it is to create an exact copy and ask Jay to swap them.
Considering the horrible beating Jay gave him before, you’d think Ringo would be a bit more cautious. But his desperation to help Ro-woom seems to blind him to the danger until he’s reading the words Jay is the chairman and staring down the barrel of Jay’s gun.
Jay shoots, but doesn’t aim to kill. Instead, he keeps Ringo (barely) alive, both as leverage and because he has a twisted sort of attachment to the Jeokmok Kids. He calls them his playthings, and Ro-woom is clearly his favorite of the bunch. As such, he sends her a gift: the final living accomplice to her parents’ murder. And because fate just couldn’t resist adding a little extra drama to the mix, the accomplice is Mu-young’s father — who used the money Jeokmok gave him to put Mu-young through law school.
Jay wants Ro-woom to kill Mu-young’s father, and he even rigs up a death trap so all she has to do is watch it happen. But Ro-woom saves him instead and goes to meet Jay, who’s ever so disappointed that she’s gotten so soft. Turns out, he scouted her way back at that game show when she was a child, impressed by her grit even more than her intelligence. They’re the same, he insists: born in the gutter, abandoned by the world, but capable of crushing the world under their feet in return. That’s why he had her parents killed — because he didn’t want her turning back. Having said his piece, he leaves her with Ringo (unconscious and bleeding out), the revolver, and an order: kill Kyung-ja.
When the rest of the team tracks them down, Ro-woom sends Da-jung ahead in the ambulance with Ringo and Nasa, the latter of whom is an absolute wreck, blaming himself for helping Ringo make the lighter exchange.
Mu-young has been occupied all this time with the news about his father (who turns himself in after apologizing to both Ro-woom and Mu-young). But as soon as Mu-young gets caught up, he races to find Ro-woom. She’s at the train station by now, following Jay’s instructions on where to find Kyung-ja. Mu-young begs her not to go alone, to no avail. She’s determined to cut off her weaknesses — her friends — so she can take Jay down once and for all.
When Ro-woom confronts Kyung-ja, she gives her one last chance to accept that Jay betrayed her. But Kyung-ja, having known all along that Jay was the chairman and being either too scared or too in love (or both) to defy him, accuses Ro-woom of using Jay as an excuse to kill her. But the point isn’t the person she’s aiming at, Ro-woom says, echoing a conversation she and Jay had years ago at Jeokmok Academy. The point is the people she’s protecting.
We don’t explicitly see how their encounter plays out just yet. But when Ro-woom returns to Mu-young, she confirms twice that he’s willing to defend her no matter what crimes she may be accused of. Then she kisses him (!). Before Mu-young can process what’s even happening, they’re surrounded by cops, here to arrest Ro-woom for murder. Kyung-ja is dead.
I’m not sure exactly when the individual members of our con team worked their ways into my heart, but I adored their little “just like old times” sleepover in Nasa’s basement, and Da-jung crying over Ringo in the ambulance nearly broke me. No matter how smart and skilled they are, and no matter what hi-tech tools they have at their disposal, they’re not genius superheroes. They’re traumatized kids fighting against a master manipulator that they believed was, in a sense, one of them.
Though, on that note, I’m starting to wonder if Jay being the first Jeokmok Kid was always a lie to convince them (especially Ro-woom) that he’s part of the “family.” We’ve seen that as a young orphan he was taken in by Jeokmok’s oldest patron, but it’s also clear that Jay took over calling the shots early on — and I highly doubt he had to undergo the same abuse and “training” as the others.
As for Ro-woom herself, the way she smirked at the camera at the end there suggests there’s more to Kyung-ja’s murder than it appears. But we wouldn’t really expect any differently, would we?