You’re All Surrounded: Episode 10

by girlfriday

It’s not the most cohesive episode, but given that they had to finish filming without their lead actor this week, the result could be a lot worse. Now that secret identities have been uncovered, it’s time to get some answers about what happened that fateful night eleven years ago, and start piecing together how the players are connected.

The good news is that Lee Seung-gi is reportedly returning to the set on June 13, which I hope means that he’s fully recovered from his eye injury. Time to write in some bed rest for Dae-gu. Hey, what good is a fictional coma if you can’t use it in times of need?

 
SONG OF THE DAY

Lee Seung-chul – “사랑하나 봐” (It Must Be Love) for the You’re All Surrounded OST [ Download ]

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EPISODE 10: “What happened that night!”

Soo-sun can’t contain her giddiness as she takes the bus home that night, after finding out that Dae-gu is really Ji-yong. She thinks about the backhug and takes out her phone to text Dae-gu one last question about his “friend” Ji-yong, but decides he’d probably get mad at her for asking too many questions.

She remembers the day after Ji-yong disappeared, when her friends told her that he went missing and that his mother was killed. She heads straight to the police station to report that she saw Ji-yong just last night, and because Pan-seok isn’t there, another officer takes her statement.

She realizes now that what she saw at the school was probably far more serious than she imagined. Ji-yong seemed like he was being chased, and when she tried to catch up to him in the chemistry lab, he was already gone.

All she saw was a man dressed in black, with a scar behind his ear. As she’s saying this last tidbit, a younger Chief Kang (perhaps a detective then) enters the station and overhears.

She waits until Soo-sun leaves and tells the other officer that Pan-seok is in no frame of mind to handle these details right now, and takes the witness statement to deliver to the chief herself. But once he hands it over, she crumples up the paper in her hand. Gah, another point for Team Evil. Now I hope it’s just a running gag where she’s good in every odd episode and evil in all the even ones.

Soo-sun returns to school and trips on an untied shoelace, which makes her think of Ji-yong. She vows to switch to Velcro shoes from now on. Back in the present, she wonders who that man in black was.

Pan-seok shares a drink with Eung-do after telling him who Dae-gu really is. He sighs that Dae-gu hates him and rightfully so, and Eung-do argues that it’s because Dae-gu doesn’t know the whole story of what happened that night.

Pan-seok warns him to let Sa-kyung figure it out for herself; the last thing they need is for her to know who Dae-gu is. That makes me think that the worst-case scenario we feared is actually what happened. Pan-seok insists that he’s okay, but he says it unconvincingly as he pours drink after drink.

We go back to Masan eleven years ago, to the night of Mom’s murder. Pan-seok gets a call to go pick up his son at school and rushes out. But on the way there, he gets the call from Ji-yong about the pendant in his uniform pocket.

Pan-seok hears the school bell ring in the background and tells Ji-yong to stay put so he can pick him up. He calls the chief at the station about the pendant, and it’s there in the jacket pocket at the time of the call. (But then how does it end up in Soo-sun’s hands later?)

Pan-seok calls his son’s teacher to say that he’ll be an hour late, and then turns around to go pick up Ji-yong at school. He searches everywhere but Ji-yong isn’t there, and then he gets a call that sends him stumbling out of there in a daze. As he leaves, Combat Boots watches from the shadows.

He arrives at the hospital to find Sa-kyung on the floor cradling their son in her arms, and we hear the teacher’s frantic call to him earlier: that the boy was eager to see Dad and ran out into the street to be on the lookout for his arrival. He crumbles to the ground in shock.

In the ensuing days after losing their son, Sa-kyung is numb with grief, and Pan-seok’s efforts to get her to eat or see daylight are met with icy silence and broken glassware. One day she just packs up and leaves divorce papers on the kitchen table, and walks out without a word.

And as we’ve seen, Pan-seok still cries himself to sleep to that old video of his little boy, to this day.

Morning at the boys’ place is adorably domestic and petty, as Dae-gu glares at Gook for drinking the last banana milk, and Tae-il makes omelettes. Dae-gu picks the veggies out of his like the child that he is, and Tae-il grumps at his wasted handiwork.

Tae-il asks if Soo-sun came by yesterday because he found her police badge, and Gook scoops it up first to return to her. She catches up to the boys just outside the station, and throws an arm around Gook and Tae-il. Dae-gu stands off to the side and just steals tiny glances at her.

She asks Tae-il if he was really a doctor, and he says he quit in his first year as a resident. When she asks why, he says it wasn’t fun anymore.

She and Gook exchange bewildered looks, and Gook grumbles at his poor-me-the-genius attitude; Soo-sun assures him that Dae-gu is worse.

Pan-seok meets with Chief Kang first thing in the morning, and asks if she knew that Dae-gu was Ji-yong. She doesn’t play coy, and says that she sponsored him at the orphanage and when he said he wanted to become a cop, she thought that placing him on Pan-seok’s team would be good for both of them.

Pan-seok asks angrily why he was kept in the dark about it then, and guesses that she sought Ji-yong out at the orphanage on purpose. She insists that it was a coincidence, and thankfully Pan-seok doesn’t look like he’s buying that lame excuse.

Back to that night eleven years ago: the squad chief gets the call from Pan-seok and finds the pendant in Ji-yong’s jacket pocket. He bags it and puts it back in the evidence cabinet. While no one is looking, Detective Kang sneaks the pendant out, and then hands it off to Combat Boots in the hallway. Yup. Definitely evil.

Tae-il’s face hardens when he walks into the precinct and finds his mother standing there silently judging. He drags her out, and she tells him to quit rebelling and return to the hospital where he belongs, adding that Dad has filed his absence as a temporary leave.

She acts as if being in the building is beneath her, and doesn’t understand why Tae-il would choose such a lowly existence, thinking it a phase or a childish tantrum. He finally agrees to start answering her phone calls and ushers her out.

Sa-kyung overhears the conversation and stops to ask Tae-il if he still hasn’t gone home. He whirls around and notes sardonically that she’s acting like they know each other now, and she drops it before he can say anything else.

Sa-kyung is practically accosted at her desk by a mother who’s desperate to find her missing son, and she brings the case to Pan-seok’s team because it could likely be a murder.

The case involves an engaged couple, and from the mother’s perspective, the fiancée is hiding something because excessive loans were taken out just before the groom’s disappearance, and shortly following the missing persons report, she put their apartment up for sale.

When Soo-sun and Dae-gu go to interview the bride, she doesn’t seem very distraught, but she’s under the impression that the groom ran off to avoid marrying her, and left her high and dry. She’s simply trying to recoup her losses, and admits that he was always scared of committing and she was the one to make all the wedding plans and get the apartment. When they ask about the loans, she says he was gambling a lot lately, and that’s probably what it was for.

But when Gook and Tae-il interview his coworkers at the body shop where he worked, they say he was a diligent worker and that he’d never gamble. What’s more is that they find multiple life insurance policies taken out in recent months, all with the fiancée listed as the beneficiary.

The groom has been missing for a whole month now, and the team comes to the conclusion that the likeliest scenario is that they’re dealing with a murder case and just haven’t found the body yet.

The rookies discuss the case on their own, and Soo-sun wonders what love is if two people who were in love could betray each other like this. Dae-gu says that it’s not love that changes, but people, and they all ooooh at his pithy statement.

Gook wonders why Dae-gu doesn’t have a girlfriend, though the way he asks is hilariously backhanded: “We know about your personality, but outwardly you’re perfectly fine.” Ha. Dae-gu says he doesn’t like women, which Gook takes literally to mean that he likes guys.

Dae-gu calls him an idiot who doesn’t even know what a metaphor is, and then Soo-sun and Gook huddle over their smartphones to look it up.

Chief Toad finally makes headway on his one-man quest to find the vandal who messed with his precious car, but then he blows his top when the CCTV footage yields an unexpected culprit: a stray cat.

Despite being convinced that someone must’ve dropped the cat on purpose, he’s forced to pay for the repairs himself. Eung-do finds Chief Toad sighing over the bill and totally goads him about it, and makes a telling catlike gesture behind his back. Lol, is he the cat-thrower?

Soo-sun goes with Sa-kyung to scour all the abandoned warehouses in the area where the victim’s last phone call was made. Soo-sun notes that the officers accompanying them aren’t being very helpful, but Sa-kyung tells her that no one is obligated to help you in life—that’s something you have to make happen.

She watches as Sa-kyung puts on rain boots and gloves and gets down in the muck to search with more zeal than anyone, and then sure enough, the officers watch her example and follow suit.

Sa-kyung finds the phone, and back in the city, Gook and Tae-il find the victim on camera at the bar where he was last seen with his friends. The boys return to the precinct with a mountain of flash drives with neighborhood CCTV footage, and they begin the grueling process of going through them one by one.

Just when they think it’s over, Eung-do drops another basketful of USB drives on the desk and reminds them that this is a detective’s work. After hours of mind-numbing searches, Dae-gu finally spots their missing groom. He’s headed into a subway bathroom with a duffel bag on the morning after he disappeared.

The thing they can’t figure out is where he went after that, because they watch the rest of the footage, and he never comes back out of the bathroom. Gook and Dae-gu are sent to the scene to try and find another exit, but there is none.

Pan-seok and Eung-do join them to look over the footage again, not understanding how a guy could just up and vanish. That’s when Soo-sun spots something: a woman exiting the bathroom who’s the same height and build as the victim.

She pauses as she takes a drink of water, and compares it to a photo of the victim drinking a coffee, and his hand is positioned in exactly the same way.

Well that’s a twist. I wonder if the entire case of the week was crafted around wanting to make a meta reference to Cha Seung-won’s movie. Two seconds later, Sa-kyung comes in with a picture she got off the victim’s cell phone, and it’s him in drag.

The next morning, Soo-sun wakes up in her tent and goes for a run, during which she collides with a pedestrian, scrapes her hand, and breaks her phone. Then during her shower, the water cuts out while she’s still covered in soap.

She sits in front of her instant ramyun breakfast and narrates that some days, you just get this sinking feeling like it’s just going to be one of those days. She hopes that it won’t be, and then her chopsticks don’t split down the middle, which pretty much seals her bad omen morning.

Assemblyman Yoo visits the precinct without warning, and Chief Kang is on edge as he arrives. He tells her that Hyung-chul is back (Combat Boots finally gets a name!), and she pretends to be surprised by the news. He says that Hyung-chul told him something curious—that the child from eleven years ago is still alive.

He asks if she thinks it could be true, and says that the child can’t remain alive: “This is the road we have to take, and that child is an unavoidable sacrifice.” He says that the boy’s mother was about to testify and was killed in retaliation for that, and that’s the way the story has to stay. Innnnteresting. So then why’d she really die?

Chief Kang agrees that it must remain that way, and Assemblyman Yoo is convinced that she’s on his side. I’m not, but right now it seems to be a battle between Big Evil and Little Evil, and the important thing is that the case is more complicated than a second murder to cover up a first murder.

As he’s headed out of the precinct, Dae-gu happens to walk right past them, and Chief Kang holds her breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. Assemblyman Yoo stops and turns to look at Dae-gu, but then just remarks that the rookies are good-looking, and continues on his way. In the car, he calls Combat Boots to take care of “it” and not to disappoint him this time.

Chief Kang calls Dae-gu and warns him to be especially careful and to stay close to his teammates for the time being. He turns around to find Soo-sun breathing down his neck, and she follows him back to his desk to read him his horoscope.

He sticks his ruler out at her to remind her of their safe distance rule, and belittles her for believing in such stupid illogical nonsense. He lectures her on the mathematical improbability that every single person in the world with a certain blood type or astrological sign has the same character traits or the same exact fate on the same exact day.

But she just waits until he’s done ranting and reads his horoscope anyway, ha. It warns him to be careful, and she says that you can’t ignore bad omens. She has a bad feeling about today, and cautions him again and again. He kicks her chair away in response, but she just rolls right back. Gook watches the whole time, wondering what’s up with them.

Combat Boots packs a knife and calls someone for one last meeting. Pan-seok meets him in a warehouse that’s clearly familiar to them, and he calls him Hyung-chul like they’re old friends.

Hyung-chul says he’s about to finish a job and needs to be smuggled out to China. And Pan-seok is going to be the one to get him passage? What the heck is your relationship?

The way that Hyung-chul speaks to him, it’s clear that Pan-seok owes him for something, and Hyung-chul very pointedly mentions the scar behind his ear, calling it something he still thinks of proudly. He tells Pan-seok to get him out of the country soon, and promises that it’ll be the last he sees of him.

Pan-seok lingers in the warehouse, and thinks back to twelve years ago. In the flashback, when he arrives at the warehouse, Hyung-chul is beside him as his partner. Well now his connection to everyone makes sense—he started out as a cop.

They split up to search the place for their suspect, but the guy gets the jump on Pan-seok and swings a flaming two-by-four at his head. Hyung-chul is the first to see it, and goes diving in between them to save his partner, taking a burning thwack to the back of his head. So that’s how he gets the scar behind his ear.

Before Pan-seok can react, Hyung-chul takes out his gun and shoots, and the suspect dies at the scene. Hyung-chul ultimately loses his job over the shooting, and Pan-seok has felt guilty ever since.

Pan-seok trudges home that night and grouses when his kitchen lights flicker and two of the bulbs go out. Oh crap. He sighs and gets up there to change out the bulbs, and then of course he spots the spy camera that Dae-gu mounted into the light fixture.

He yanks it out and takes it down to the station, but the tech specialist says that the feed is untraceable. Pan-seok already has a good guess who’s been spying on him, says that tracing the feed was a long shot.

Combat Boots arrives outside Dae-gu’s apartment that night, and upstairs, Tae-il and Gook get ready to go out for groceries. Dae-gu declines to go with them (but asks for banana milk, ha) and so the boys head out and leave him all alone.

Combat Boots waits until the lights go out upstairs, and creeps inside. He checks all the rooms to make sure they’re empty before drawing his knife and opening Dae-gu’s bedroom door. Ack, that’s the knife that stabbed Puppy in the eye, isn’t it? I can’t watch!

The door opens slowly, and the room is eerily quiet.

It’s because Dae-gu is lying in wait, hiding just on the other side of the door. He grips the baseball bat in his hand tightly.

Combat Boots must sense him behind that door, because he clenches his knife and then launches himself against the door.

Dae-gu is faster and comes out swinging, and they hurl their weapons at each other in the dark.

And downstairs, Pan-seok arrives to give Fishy the Spy a piece of his mind. Yes, do hurry! Ruuuun!

 
COMMENTS

I sincerely hope that Pan-seok has no idea that his old partner became a rogue assassin. I feel like he has to know to some degree, because regular friends don’t usually ask for safe passage on smuggling ships for their birthdays. But I have to believe that if he makes it up to that apartment in time to come to Dae-gu’s rescue and catch Combat Boots with a knife in his hand, he’ll be genuinely surprised. The problem is that I have the feeling that Dae-gu was prepared for an attack because he saw Pan-seok stare into the spy camera before he cut the feed. Won’t his assumption be that Pan-seok sent Combat Boots to kill him? What’s it going to take to get you guys in a room and spilling your guts before you end up spilling blood?

As Eung-do noted, perhaps learning the truth about Pan-seok’s son and what it cost him to show up for Ji-yong that night will be the thing to make Dae-gu consider a different point of view. Now Pan-seok’s obsession with that case makes perfect sense—he’s been searching for Ji-yong all these years because that choice to go back for him can’t have been for nothing, and his son can’t have died in vain. It’s grasping at straws for meaning, but you get the sense that Pan-seok turned Ji-yong into a mission because he needed it to survive. He’s always been saying from Day 1 that you can’t do anything for the dead, but you can save the living—he couldn’t save his son, but Ji-yong was out there somewhere and could still be saved.

It’s entirely possible that Chief Kang and Combat Boots are in on it together to take Assemblyman Yoo down, but right now it seems like there are six different agendas going on, and the possible allegiances pretty much go in all directions. Interestingly, Soo-sun could be the linchpin, if Dae-gu ever lets her talk about that night. He has no idea that she gave a witness statement and that she can identify Combat Boots, and nobody knows that she has the pendant. Was the whole murder about that pendant after all, and nothing to do with Mom witnessing the schoolgirl’s murder? If that’s the case, it’s possible that it wasn’t Pan-seok’s fault for not protecting his witness, if Mom was a mark for a wholly different reason to begin with. Bromance, I will not give up on thee!

Dae-gu’s icy exterior seems to be melting little by little, and even his roommates seem to find his brusque demeanor endearing at this point. Though how can you not, when he’s pouting about banana milk and not wanting to eat his veggies? Even better than that is Soo-sun’s determination to protect Ji-yong and stick to his side like glue, safe distance ruler be damned. If anyone’s got a plan for how to sneak into the precinct and snap that ruler in half, I’m all ears.

 
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