A genius ex-convict with zero empathy meets a lawyer who’s way too empathetic for his own good — this could be a recipe for either the perfect partnership or a perfect storm of manipulation and moral grayness. Either way, we’re in for some interesting character studies and a ten-year-old mystery that’s far more complex than it first appears.
EPISODES 1-2
For a show with “comedy” as one of its descriptors, Delightfully Deceitful starts off quite chilling and bleak. The creepy opening sequence shows us glimpses of the terrible arson/murder that landed our heroine, LEE RO-WOOM (Chun Woo-hee), in prison for fifteen years. The victims were her parents, and she (only nineteen at the time) confessed to the crime upon being found at the scene.
Since then, she’s been making a name for herself as a psychopath by stabbing correction officers in the neck (to be fair, he was horrible) and threatening her fellow inmates to the point of panic attacks. But suddenly, ten years into her sentence, a new culprit is arrested, having been found in possession of the missing murder weapon. For the first time, people start to question whether Ro-woom might have been innocent all along.
Enter lawyer HAN MU-YOUNG (Kim Dong-wook). His powers of empathy make him an expert at getting sentences reduced or suspended, but they’re also a fatal flaw that his psychiatrist, MO JAE-IN (Sojin), is helping him learn to control. His unique brand of empathy is so strong that he tends to get overly, even dangerously, immersed in others’ emotions — so much so that it makes him physically unwell.
To counter the empathy sickness, Mu-young sticks to clients he doesn’t have to care too much about and turns his back on people who genuinely need his help. This earns him his own nickname — “Vampire” — and leaves him feeling unfulfilled and fraudulent.
When Ro-woom’s case comes back up, Mu-young volunteers to defend the newly accused YE CHOONG-SHIK (Park Wan-kyu). But when Choong-shik gleefully describes forcing teenage Ro-woom to murder her parents, Mu-young snaps. Against Jae-in’s advice, he leaks a recording of the conversation to the media, ensuring Choong-shik’s life sentence and Ro-woom’s release.
It’s basically career suicide, but his boss gives him one last chance: Ro-woom is suing the government for damages due to wrongful imprisonment, and she wants Mu-young to defend her. Mu-young agrees, and at their first official meeting, Ro-woom cries because he’s the first person to believe her. They’re crocodile tears, though, meant to wrap him around her finger. But while Mu-young knows exactly what she’s doing, he also catches bits of truth strewn in, like her comment about actions speaking louder than words.
Then Ro-woom sets out on her own, and we’re hit with a bit of tonal whiplash as she breaks the fourth wall to take us along for an elaborate con. It starts with her posing as a police officer to confiscate “stolen” merchandise from clothing and jewelry shops, and escalates to cheating at a casino to get herself a hefty cash settlement in exchange for leaving the premises without a fuss.
Even after catching her with a bag full of money, and even as it becomes increasingly apparent that Choong-shik wasn’t the true culprit after all, Mu-young refuses to give up on Ro-woom. He remembers meeting her on the set of a game show as kids, where she wowed the audience with her incredible memory.
But in the middle of filming, little Ro-woom had frozen up and run off to hide — not because she couldn’t remember the answer to the question, but because she was overwhelmed by the pressure. For better or for worse, Mu-young senses that Ro-woom is still just as lonely and frightened now as she was back then.
Ro-woom, however, brushes off Mu-young’s questions and carries on with her schemes. The one thorn in her side is her incessant probation officer, GO YO-HAN (Yoon Park). He seems to spend at least 90% of his time following his probationers around trying to catch them slipping up and then magnanimously “letting them off the hook.”
After much nagging on Yo-han’s part, Ro-woom gives him her new phone number… so she can call in her friends — hacker JUNG DA-JUNG (Lee Yeon) and polyglot errand boy RINGO (Hong Seung-beom) — to track his phone and photograph him overlooking probation violations. Then she blackmails him with the photos so he’ll leave her alone.
Ro-woom breaks the fourth wall again to lead us on a second con, which she prefaces with the story of a man who started with a paper clip and kept trading for bigger items until he got a house. Similarly, she enters a hospice as a visitor, transforms herself into a nurse, gets the password to the medicine safe, steals vials of morphine, enters a patient’s room… wait, this isn’t just a con. This is a murder.
The man in the hospital bed was a professor involved with the mysterious Jeokmok Foundation where she spent part of her youth, and he was also complicit in her parents’ deaths. Now Ro-woom is here to take revenge.
Fortunately, Mu-young has been digging into Ro-woom’s past, and he arrives just in time to stop her. He wonders aloud what Jeokmok Foundation must have done to turn her into a cold-blooded killer, but she spits back that she was born this way, thank you very much — and she’s only employing to him to win the lawsuit, not to “fix” her.
Ro-woom is exactly the kind of person Jae-in has warned Mu-young about all this time: someone who will take every opportunity to prey on his empathy to get what she wants. But while he’s determined to help her, he also has a plan to keep her from walking all over him. At the damages trial, instead of making his opening argument, he asks that the lawsuit be suspended until Choong-shik’s retrial (which he pushed Choong-shik to initiate) concludes.
Now Ro-woom can’t just kick Mu-young to the curb, because no other lawyer will willingly take up her lawsuit. And he’ll only continue to help her if she at least tries to learn how to care about other people’s feelings. Ro-woom’s response? “You’re fired.”
Two episodes in, I’m still kind of on the fence about these characters, but I think that’s the point. Ro-woom, with her complete lack of empathy, is naturally difficult to relate to, especially when pulling off a murder is just as much a game to her as rustling up some quick cash. But her fourth-wall-breaking, while jarring, is also charming, and she has moments of vulnerability that seem to confirm Mu-young’s suspicions that she’s scared and lonely and just trying to survive in the only way she knows how.
On the other hand, Mu-young, being hardwired to see the humanity in literally everyone, should theoretically be easy to root for. And in some ways he is, like how he doesn’t just accept the assumptions that everyone else uses to write Ro-woom off as a lost cause. But he also weaponizes his own empathy to manipulate people and engineer the outcomes he thinks are best.
I was struck by Jae-in’s caution that him learning to set other people’s feelings aside for his own mental and physical wellbeing is the treatment process, not the goal. I can see how he might run the risk of overcorrecting so much that he starts ignoring others’ emotions altogether except to use them to his own — and, probably, Ro-woom’s — advantage. Who knows? Maybe he’ll learn to maintain a healthy amount of emotional investment, or maybe that “Vampire” nickname isn’t so far off, after all.