Our tale has ended, but that doesn’t mean it was satisfactorily resolved. If you like loose threads, disposable characters, and wild rides that lead nowhere, man are you gonna love this one.
EPISODES 15-16 WEECAP
Well, I survived, which is more than I can say for half the characters in this show. While there is something to be said for subverting expectations, it doesn’t really work when you throw your whole setup out the window. If you all recall, we were fed a line about ordinary citizens taking down big bad elites. We get a lawyer who can’t fight crime within the law, so he goes outside the law to do it. Fair enough. But then he becomes the rich and powerful leader of a criminal gang to take down rich and powerful leaders who commit crimes. Irony aside, what happened to our underdog story?
I’m not even sure how to write this weecap because it turns out that most of the information we were given had nothing to do with how things wrapped up. Rather than go through all the details just to shove them to the side at the end, I’d prefer to focus on Mi-ho. This character finally got the epic moment she deserved — the one I was waiting for — where her intelligence shined through and she was set up to save the day as both a teammate and a heroine in her own right. And then, they killed her off so that Chang-ho could be the hero. The only thing I can say is ick.
We ended last week with Chang-ho deciding to run in the next mayoral race and, separately, preparing for a stand-off with the mayor. These two things come together when Mayor Choi decides to run for re-election. Chang-ho states that the point of running for mayor is to destroy Mayor Choi with law and justice, rather than do anything shady. Just keep this information in mind as we parse the rest of this.
The team, which now even includes Ji-hoon, throws all kinds of things at the mayor to try to take him down legally. They tell the rest of NR Forum about his identity switch as a kid, but the members now side with the mayor since he took over all the chairman’s shares and is the most powerful man in town (Joo-hee owns the other half of everything). They expose that the mayor gave special treatment to NR Forum members while in office, but he denies it and it gains no traction. They even try to find the chairman’s only kin — a “serial killer” son in the U.S. — to dispute the will, but this comes to nothing.
The only point of Chairman Kang having a long lost serial killer son is so that we can learn that the death row inmate that’s been helping Mi-ho is not at all a serial killer. He’s just a kid who took the rap in exchange for getting his mother a needed surgery. His mother didn’t survive, and now, sick with cancer, he dies as well. He and the other model inmates became sick when they were sent on work release and repeatedly exposed to radiation — which is how Mi-ho also gets late-stage lymphoma.
When there was a collapse at the worksite one day, Mi-ho ran in to rescue her framed serial killer friend, and wound up with cancer too far advanced to treat. She decides to tell no one. Chang-ho is busy preparing to become mayor and riding around in SUVs with an entourage, while Mi-ho takes the bus home alone after her doctor’s appointment. For me, this sums up their relationship.
The team’s last hope to take down Mayor Choi legally comes with the televised mayoral debate, where Chang-ho and the current mayor will try to expose each other’s misdeeds. Leading up to this, Mi-ho goes to see Joo-hee and says that everything about the hospital, the secret lab, and the sick prisoners will be revealed and the corrupt individuals are about to get their just desserts. Joo-hee asks if Mi-ho can handle the despair that comes with exposing the truth and having nothing change. Mi-ho is an optimist, but Joo-hee is correct — this is how things will end up. Sort of.
Before we arrive at this disappointing ending, there is an amazing sequence of events involving Mi-ho leading the Big Mouse gang like a boss (and me thinking for a few minutes that the show was about to come through in the final hour). As Chang-ho prepares for the on-air debate, Mi-ho has her moment, going behind Chang-ho’s back for once, gathering the guys and taking a caravan to a fish farm related to NK Chemicals. She does this purposefully during the live debate so that the mayor can’t be notified of what’s happening because he’ll be on-air.
After a battle at the fish farm, Mi-ho gets a video of the owner admitting that the farm is a front to get rid of waste water produced by NK Chemicals. The water has toxic chemicals and radiation in it, which runs through drain pipes (like the ones that exploded over Mi-ho at the worksite) and is dumped into the ocean. With the evidence, Mi-ho and Jerry leave and head toward the TV station to break up the debate, but the VIPs show up and try to stop them.
Mi-ho alerts Soon-tae of what she and the gang have been up to this afternoon and sends him the video. At the same time, the VIPs call the police, where they have friends on the force, and tell them to put up a road block to stop Mi-ho and Jerry. Understanding the situation, Soon-tae tells Warden Park to call on the Big Mouse army who have infiltrated the police. As the VIPs pass by thinking that Mi-ho and Jerry are being arrested, we learn they are getting a police escort straight to the debate broadcast.
When they reach the debate, Mi-ho is allowed to enter during the portion where citizens ask questions to the candidates. She says she is there as a victim of the NK Chemicals radiation leak and tells everyone on live TV that she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. It’s the first time Chang-ho, her father, or anyone else hears about this. She then plays the video she recorded at the fish farm, hoping to incriminate the mayor.
This is by far the most satisfying series of events in the entire run because it uses the ingenuity of the team and what we know about each of these parts to bring about the outcomes. It’s the first time I felt myself rooting for anybody in this drama and it’s because it’s the first time it actually followed through with its setups. It’s fun to watch this criminal organization, with their hands in everything, outwit the even bigger criminals. And it’s even more fun to watch Mi-ho, Soon-tae, and Jerry pull it off.
And then, the show takes all this awesomeness and throws it off a balcony to its screaming death. First, nothing comes of any of this. Joo-hee was right. The mayor blames everything on the chairman, gets out of an investigation, and wins re-election. But second, by having the story go this way, it stops Mi-ho from being the one who takes down the mayor (and leaves it to Chang-ho).
An alternate awesome possibility gets waved (one I had pleaded for last week) to have Joo-hee direct the final blow at her husband. This almost happens when Joo-hee sends Mi-ho evidence of the mayor’s crimes and says she’ll testify against him in court. Joo-hee then goes missing and all charges against the mayor are dropped. We see that Joo-hee has been detained in the same mental institution that Chang-ho was in.
The story ends with Chang-ho as the single-handed hero. Mi-ho dies quietly at the hospital and gives Chang-ho permission to be Big Mouse forever — so long as he’s a “good Big Mouse.” Essentially, he becomes a vigilante, out to punish people who hurt others. So, since the legal way didn’t work — and all the team’s research and digging into the mayor’s backstory was entirely meaningless — Chang-ho decides to just kill him.
The mayor swims every day and Chang-ho fills the pool with the same waste water from NK Chemicals that killed Mi-ho. The mayor starts vomiting blood and we are left to assume he will now die of cancer. On one hand, you could call it poetic justice. If it weren’t for Mi-ho, Chang-ho wouldn’t even have known about the waste water in order to kill the mayor this way. On the other hand, you could call it the definition of “fridging” — the show only allowed Mi-ho’s actions to go far enough to help Chang-ho’s story progress, and then got rid of her.
In these final two episodes, both Mi-ho and Joo-hee do very cool things that are exciting and surprising for the story in the right way (rather than the “WTH I don’t get it” way that the show prefers). But instead of letting their actions play out to their conclusions, the writers decided to boot both of them out of the way and say, “let the men handle it.”
I had a hard time watching this drama. Partially because it was a mess story-wise, partially due to the violence, but mostly because of its treatment of female characters. The women were disposable from start to finish. Remember Hye-jin? The abused wife who escaped only to be murdered by her husband later? Not only was the thread never picked up again, it did nothing to advance the plot. We watched a women get beaten and killed while her husband gets away with it, just… for fun. I got into this for Lee Jong-seok but realized early on that even he couldn’t save it for me. Next time, I’ll be more cautious before I commit (something Joo-hee might be thinking right now too).