Hold on to your hats, people. Our penultimate week comes with a shocking reveal, proving that the coldest of hearts lie beneath the warmest of exteriors.
EPISODES 13-14 WEECAP
Now that Tae-hee is aware that the truck driver is Hae-an’s brother, Hae-an feigns ignorance about knowing that the accident victim was Tae-hee’s brother. He apologizes on his brother’s behalf, though, and narrates the incidents leading up to the accident. To celebrate Hae-an’s appointment as valedictorian of his class at the police university, his brother SEO YOUNG-CHEOL (Choi Jae-hwan) broke his eight-month-long sobriety period. Seven bottles of soju later, Young-cheol got into his truck and the rest of the accident plays out as we know it.
In Hae-an’s defense, he went to pay for the drinks and didn’t notice until he was done that Young-cheol had already left the bar. Now he apologizes to Tae-hee because it’s all his fault for not paying attention to his brother, and Tae-hee barely manages to suppress his anger. But more than at the Seo brothers, I think he’s more angry with himself, because hearing Hae-an faulting himself for his brother’s accident makes Tae-hee think about his “role” in Joon-ho’s death.
I found it out of character for Hae-an to lie to Tae-hee not just about not knowing Joon-ho was the victim, but about other details of the accident — like Joon-ho having no last words when the boy clearly asked him for help. And then about not receiving the victim’s information from the police — which, even if it were true, he almost didn’t need any information because he already saw the victim at the scene!
His silence is probably out of guilt, and he moves out of the Dime a Job building at least until Tae-hee tells him to move back in. It doesn’t mean Tae-hee and Vincent have completely forgiven him, but aside from the Dime a Job guys, Hae-an has no other family except for his comatose brother — who eventually dies. Tae-hee calls Dong-joo to help out with some ghostly interrogation, but as we saw from last week’s murder-suicide case, Dong-joo can’t see the ghosts of people who killed themselves or others.
To our collective surprise, Young-cheol actually transforms in front of Dong-joo — longing for a shot of soju among other cravings. *Facepalm* And that can only mean one thing: Joon-ho didn’t die by Young-cheol’s hands. So who killed Joon-ho? We get the answer soon enough, boldly written on Hae-an’s face which displays a sly and knowing smile. OMG! He was the one who drove that night and hit Joon-ho midway into an argument with Young-cheol.
That was an accident, but everything Hae-an did afterwards was international. He removed the memory card of the truck’s dash-cam, took advantage of his promotion at work to delete the CCTV footage of the accident (quite ironic, really, that he’s in the traffic division arresting similar offenders like himself), and the worst of all, switched an unconscious Young-cheol to the driver’s seat before steering the truck to crash into a pole — sending his brother into a coma. Oh boy, I’m going to need a moment or two to recover from this.
Dong-joo can’t tell Tae-hee yet about seeing Young-cheol (who insists that he was the driver), but her suspicion grows by the minute, and she begins some sleuthing of her own. She’s told by Young-cheol’s co-worker (and girlfriend) that Young-cheol sent her a picture of his registration papers an hour before the accident, and Dong-joo comes to a definite conclusion on seeing the picture which was definitely taken from the passenger’s seat.
Dong-joo finally opens up to Tae-hee about her suspicion that Young-cheol is innocent now that she has some concrete evidence. Tae-hee then approaches Hae-an with a proposal to work together to find the real culprit in order to clear Young-cheol’s name, and it’s a pity he’s still concerned about Hae-an till now. Of course Hae-an agrees to help, but he’s known about the picture all along and even lied to the girlfriend that the police couldn’t use it as evidence when he didn’t even submit it in the first place.
As it turns out, the detective in charge of Joon-ho’s case is Hae-an’s sunbae at work, and he’s suspicious about the sudden erasure of the CCTV footage shortly after Hae-an’s arrival at the station. Tae-hee’s suspicion begins to grow after the detective tells him that Hae-an didn’t turn in the picture as evidence, and confirmation arrives for both of them when the detective finally recovers the deleted footage.
Meanwhile, Hae-an has had a nagging feeling that Dong-joo knows more than she’s letting on, since she brought Young-cheol’s favorite cigarette brand to the funeral. And when he sees her in the church while working on a case, he follows her to the confession booth and overhears her talk about the case with Father Michael.
Hae-an proceeds to get drunk and violent like all the men in his family — his violent father who strangled his mom in a drunken fit, and Young-cheol who attempted to kill their father afterwards — as he lies in wait for Dong-joo at home. He asks how she knew his brother’s favorite cigarette brand, and attempts to strangle the living daylights out of Dong-joo when she tells him she saw Young-cheol. And that’s the cliffhanger on which we end this week’s shocking episodes.
I kinda need the drama to decide on the exact attitude Hae-an has towards the accident and his subsequent actions. Because he’ll smirk in one flashback scene giving remorseless vibes, and then he’ll look guilty in another scene, making me unable to reconcile the two. But then he went on to strangle Dong-joo now, so maybe remorseless it is.
In the end, how far is too far for victims to forgive the people who wrong them? For Il-seob and the father of his ex (yes, it’s basically confirmed now that the lady with the child is his ex, and the ahjussi is her father not his), it took the child’s death for the father to stop blaming Il-seob for bringing them bad luck. Though the father didn’t utter a word of apology (he just held Il-seob’s hand), it’s almost enough for Il-seob to forgive him.
But the Seo brothers are really something, as despite having many opportunities to come clean both as human and ghost, they refuse to even make an attempt to genuinely apologize. From the few scenes we saw him in, Young-cheol is particularly very annoying and I don’t care at all about him. But for the sake of all the love I had for Hae-an and his bromance with the Dime a Job guys, I hope he doesn’t stray too far off the road of redemption.