I Hear Your Voice: Episode 3

by girlfriday

Yup, I’m back for more. Like I could stay away, right? This show is really rockin’ my socks off, so I’m in it for the long haul, sleep and sanity be damned. Each episode continues to be a pleasant surprise—fantastic characters mixed with a swiftly moving story, and I just love the heroine more and more with each episode. She’s so endearingly flawed and winsome, and easy to root for.

Ratings continue to shoot skyward: I Hear Your Voice rose to 15.0% today, with Mandate of Heaven in at 8.0%, and Go Hyun-jung’s new drama Queen’s Classroom premiering to 6.6%.

 
EPISODE 3: “I’ll be there”

Kwan-woo comes out of his first case disheveled and totally spun around. Hye-sung’s smug reaction grates on his nerves until he finally snaps and declares (out loud to no one, looking like a crazy person) that he’ll go see her case and give her a piece of his mind when she fails to trust her client and loses spectacularly.

He sneaks into the back of the courtroom… just in time for Hye-sung to stand up and plead not guilty. I love the is-it-opposite-day look on his face.

Hye-sung over at Su-ha, really really hoping she just made the right move, and he smiles back at her.

The prosecution begins by reading text messages that Sung-bin sent to the victim, and it’s another chain of bleeped-out curses that makes everyone cringe. Hye-sung timidly tries argue that those phrases could be a sign of camaraderie among kids.

She looks over at Su-ha, and he crosses his arms into an X. Ha. No go on that argument. She moves on.

As the case progresses, she uses Su-ha as a barometer for what to argue, and it works like a charm. I’m less convinced she’s a good lawyer if she needs that much help, but who’s to turn down X’s and O’s from a mind-reader? He watches her in court and all he can see is that girl who ran in to testify against his father’s killer. Aw, is the puppy love back?

Things aren’t really going Do-yeon’s way, so she asks the judge to call the victim in to testify, since she recently woke up from her coma. Sung-bin lights up at that news, and she and Hye-sung happily agree to let her testify.

They break while she’s brought in from the hospital, and Hye-sung literally skips down the hall. It’s so cute. She gets a text from a number she doesn’t recognize, and just thinks it’s spam: “I’ll be there.”

She skips over to Su-ha (still calling him Chewing Gum) and says his signals are handy, and asks him to keep doing it. He jokes, “For free?” and then notices the highlighter mark she’s been sporting on her face for the last ten minutes.

He points at his own cheek to let her know—hahahaha—which totally looks like he’s asking her for a kiss.

The even funnier part is that she laughs like it’s completely obvious that he’d want a kiss from her, and she’s doing him a favor: “Oh, okay.” She kisses her hand and presses it against his cheek. Eeee.

He’s like, “What’re you doing?” and points out the ink on her face. He walks away scowling and clutching his cheek, shouting that he has to wash it now… and then when he’s far enough away from her he totally swoons. Ohmygah.

He’s standing on the staircase above the lobby of the courthouse, and the crowd’s inner thoughts come and go. Suddenly a familiar voice stands out above the rest, and it stops him cold.

It’s that killer’s voice—the same one he heard in that courtroom, and as he watched his father die. Even creepier are the words he hears: “That kid became a public defender? This’ll be fun.”

He races down the stairs and grabs the nearest man who fits the killer’s build, but it isn’t him. He thinks that it can’t be, but we watch as the killer walks right past him.

Kwan-woo is back in the office, and he retells jjang-byun’s case like an adorable fanboy, painting her as a superhero. They’re in the middle of discussing her rude personality versus her courtroom tactics, when Mom pops in for a surprise visit.

Sung-bin’s case resumes, and the victim, Dong-hee, gets sworn in as a witness. I don’t like the nervous look in her eye. Sung-bin waves at her, and it’s not like they’re friends, but she gets squarely ignored.

And then the girl testifies that someone pushed her out of that window, and points at Sung-bin as the culprit. What. Sung-bin flares up, and it all happens so fast that it can’t be stopped—Sung-bin yanks off her wig and starts cursing up a storm that Dong-hee is lying, and has to be held back from attacking her.

Su-ha gets up from his seat to look Dong-hee in the eye before she gets wheeled away, and hears her terrified thoughts—that she can never tell the truth about why she fell, because it’ll all be over for her.

Do-yeon doesn’t waste the opportunity to gloat, and tells Hye-sung not to be too hard on herself. “It was a good effort… for a public defender.” Hye-sung sits alone in the empty courtroom, completely deflated.

Su-ha waits for her outside and goes running up to her, but the first thing he hears is her thinking, “Get lost. I don’t ever want to see you again.” He just lets her pass without a word.

Mom has brought chicken for Hye-sung’s new coworkers, and she asks if her daughter has been difficult to work with. They start to hedge, but Kwan-woo pipes up that they know she’s really a good person on the inside, and Mom clasps his hand, grateful that he could see past her prickly exterior.

But just as Mom is swearing up and down that Hye-sung is a good egg, her voice echoes down the corridor: “Shut up! I told you to get lost!” Su-ha has followed her all the way back to the office, and she tells him this is all his fault because he didn’t let her go for the guilty plea.

He doesn’t see why Sung-bin should admit to doing something she didn’t, and tells her that Dong-hee is lying. But Hye-sung says it’s over and she’s done being humiliated. “Do you have to climb the Himalayas to know it’s cold? Do you have to jump into the fire to know it’s hot?” She says there’s no use fighting it anymore because the end result will be the same, and it’s game over.

By now Mom and the other lawyers are standing in the hall watching, and Mom finally bursts into a fuming rage. (She’s hilariously colorful with language, which just doesn’t translate well, but suffice it to say, Mom’s a spitfire.)

The disappointment just comes off of her in waves, and she asks how she could’ve raised a daughter who treats another person’s life like it’s a game.

Hye-sung turns into a bratty teenager all over again, and whines that Mom doesn’t even know—she got humiliated by Seo Do-yeon, the girl who threw them out into the street. But Mom doesn’t give a rat’s ass about that: “YOU’RE humiliating ME right now!”

She sighs that she’s embarrassed for running around town putting up banners and flyers, and walks away. And poor Su-ha gets a “What are you looking at?” just for standing there, heh.

Their boss Lawyer Shin tells the story to a prisoner (perhaps a client?)—they talk like old friends while playing celebrity bingo, and it’s clear this is a normal routine for them. The prisoner asks how old jjang-byun is, and seems doubly interested when Lawyer Shin says she’s about 27 or 28. He notes that the man’s daughter ought to be about that age. Hm.

The man asks if someone named Min Joon-gook (our killer) came by the office recently. Lawyer Shin says no, and his friend says the guy was just released, and seemed to have a friend at the public defender’s office.

Hye-sung walks home that night, lost in thought over Sung-bin’s case and Mom’s biting words. She doesn’t notice a basketball rolling by, and the boys who come after it remember her as the ajumma who threw away their last ball and got it flattened.

They stand in her way threateningly, so she acts like she doesn’t remember and speed-walks away. But they’re a couple of punks and they follow her, all the way into a dead end. She’s scared, but she threatens them with all the laws they’d be breaking if they laid a finger on her, which only makes them laugh.

Thankfully Su-ha has been behind her all this time, so he saunters up behind the boys, and she yells at him to call the police. Instead, Su-ha just parks his ass down leisurely and says that if she doesn’t give up on Sung-bin, he’ll take care of the punks.

She balks at him trying to use this to wheel and deal her, but he seems completely willing to let her sweat it out. She looks back and forth between the punks and Su-ha and quickly changes her mind, but insists for her pride’s sake: “I wasn’t going to give up on her anyway!”

So Su-ha starts stretching exercises to prepare for a fight, when one of the boys whispers, “That’s Park Su-ha!” and tells the other boys about the time he kicked the school jjang around.

Suddenly the boys aren’t so keen to fight, and make up excuses about having somewhere to be. Su-ha doesn’t let them go so easily, and throws up a leg to block them.

Their leader swallows his pride and speaks to Su-ha in jondae, so he lets them pass… under his leg. HA. Hye-sung watches in wide-eyed wonder, and he tells her she has to take responsibility for Sung-bin until the end.

She asks how this was taking care of her problem, and he just shrugs with a grin. He walks her home and tells her that Dong-hee was hanging off the ledge and fell, and then listens as she works out her next move in the case.

He smiles and admits that he really thought she had given up on Sung-bin, and she just tells him not to get all cocky thinking it was because of him. He turns to go and she calls out, “Hey Chewing Gum, you didn’t exactly rescue me back there or anything, but I was sorta thankful.” Heh.

On her rooftop, she wonders how he knew where she lived, and then gets another “I’ll be there” text. She suddenly realizes it might be Su-ha, and when she looks down, he’s looking back up at her with a smile.

The next day, Hye-sung sits by quietly as Lawyer Shin heaps advice and tips on Kwan-woo, and then decides to make her move. She throws her case file down on top of his and asks for Lawyer Shin’s help.

He refuses like a petulant child, and even takes out his hearing aid when she won’t stop bugging him. So she starts writing down apologies on post-its and chasing him down, to no avail.

Kwan-woo cautiously offers his help, which she turns down flat. But it only takes a few seconds for her roll over to his cubicle to ask how exactly he could help…

Cut to: the pair of them dressed in high school uniforms. LOL. He says he was actually very good at his job when he was a cop, and the best way to gather evidence is to return to the scene of the crime.

So off they go to high school. Hye-sung sidles up to a pair of gossipy girls and gets them to talk about Sung-bin and Dong-hee, while Kwan-woo looks over the music room and the spot where Dong-hee was found.

The girls admit to joining in when everyone teased Dong-hee, and they say that it was mostly jealousy because Dong-hee was pretty and about to get a contract as an actress, and smart to boot—they say she skipped grades to be in their class. They admit that they caved to peer pressure, not wanting to be an outcast like her.

Su-ha discovers Hye-sung poking around his school dressed like a student, and follows her into the computer lab. He just greets her with this silent look, and she hangs her head, “Look I know. I’m embarrassed too.” Ha.

He points out the computer Dong-hee used the day she fell, and she insists she’ll do the rest herself. But then he hears her wondering what to do next, as if searching internet history is a newfangled trick.

He sighs and goes over to show her. Omo, so handsy. He leans in until he’s literally cheek-to-cheek, with both hands over hers. They check the sign-in log and match the browser history for that time and day, and find that she was searching for how to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke.

At the same time, Kwan-woo runs up with a cigarette butt and a lighter he found at the scene, and says that he knows what happened.

Hye-sung goes to see Dong-hee in the hospital and confronts her with the truth—she was smoking at school and when Sung-bin came into the room, she thought she could hang off the ledge for a minute to keep from being discovered, and accidentally fell.

Hye-sung says she understands that she’s about to sign a big contract to be an actress and can’t have something like this getting out, but it’s not a reason to ruin someone’s life. But the girl surprises her and refuses to testify.

Sung-bin is hiding around the corner listening and at first Su-ha holds her back, but when Dong-hee digs her heels in about not telling the truth, Sung-bin comes darting out. She demands to know what she ever did to deserve this, and Dong-hee looks up at her in tears, asking the same thing of her—what did she ever do to deserve being made into an outcast?

She says that Sung-bin can go ahead and go to jail, because that’s the way she’s lived all this time, locked away with no friends, no one to understand her. It’s only then that Sung-bin realizes how Dong-hee must feel, remembering what it felt like when she wanted to jump in front of that train, thinking she had nobody in the world on her side.

She stops Hye-sung’s pleading and says she’ll face her judgment without Dong-hee’s testimony. She apologizes sincerely for making fun of her, for not realizing how hurtful her words could be.

Hye-sung turns to Dong-hee with one last word of warning, that she’s the one with the rock in her hands now—will she throw?

She makes her exit with impact… and then walks over to Su-ha and grips his arm in a panic: “Will she come? Do you think she’ll come? What if she doesn’t come?” Haha, I love her. He assures her that Dong-hee said what she wanted to say and heard what she wanted to hear, so she’ll show.

Day 2 of the trial comes around, and this time Hye-sung’s coworkers cheer her on (minus grumpypants boss, of course). Kwan-woo offers her a present in a little jewelry box, and she takes one look and turns him down cold, “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Kwan-woo: “Huh?” He opens up the ring box, and inside is a rubber thimble for page-turning. Pffft. I just want to bury my head under a blanket.

She runs into Do-yeon again in the elevator, and remembers what Su-ha told her that she was thinking the other day—how alike Hye-sung and Sung-bin were. She asks now why Do-yeon lied all those years ago about the fireworks, and says she always thought Do-yeon was the horrible bitch, and never once thought about why. Do-yeon thinks she’s just trying to ruffle feathers before the case, and says it won’t matter what she does because the truth won’t change.

Dong-hee gets put back on the stand, but before Hye-sung can question her, Do-yeon stands up to remind her that if she changes her testimony, she’ll be admitting to perjury. Dude, are you seriously threatening her to keep lying?

Dong-hee is clearly terrified, and Hye-sung freezes, not knowing what to do. Su-ha isn’t there either, not that he’d have the answer in this case. But thankfully Lawyer Shin is there, and he sends Hye-sung a text pointing to a law.

She hurriedly demands the judge’s copy of a law book and looks it up—it says that a minor can’t perjure herself, and she remembers that Dong-hee skipped a few grades. She asks how old she is, and when she says fifteen, Do-yeon’s face hardens. Hye-sung knows her case is won.

Lawyer Shin gives a tiny smile. Aw, you gruff teddy bear. The boys in the office cheer at the news that Hye-sung won her case, and then start to turn on Lawyer Shin for being so mean to her, not knowing that he helped her win it. Hee.

Hye-sung catches up to Do-yeon after winning the case, and calls her out for knowing that Dong-hee was lying in the first place and not caring. She scoffs that she hasn’t changed one bit since high school, and that she’ll continue being the same way, never acknowledging her faults and putting blame where it doesn’t belong, only now as a prosecutor.

Do-yeon takes another condescending jab that she did well for a public defender. Hye-sung says she wondered when she first ran into her here, why Fate had such a sick sense of humor and had them meet as prosecutor and public defender.

Hye-sung: “But I know the answer now. A big-time prosecutor being defeated by a big-time lawyer doesn’t have any impact. It’s to have you beaten by nothing but a mere public defender, like today.”

Do-yeon says today was the last, and Hye-sung just tells her that the next time, she’ll have to acknowledge it, and then apologize to her. “And my mom!” She spins on her heels and struts away like a badass. Aaaand then she totally ruins the moment by muttering to herself that she’s AWESOME. Hee.

She gets another “I’ll be there” text on her way out, and wonders why Chewing Gum missed such an important day and only sent a text.

She calls Mom and asks if she took down all the banners, and Mom grumps, “Of course I did.” But when Hye-sung rounds the corner to Mom’s chicken shop, all the banners are still up and displayed proudly. Aw, the mother-daughter moments on this show are so great. It feels just like the moment when Mom came back to burn the money.

Hye-sung says she won her case, and Mom nearly bursts into tears. She covers it up with a “Whatever, why should I be proud when you’re just doing your job?”

But Hye-sung can see her welling up with pride, and she hangs back and watches as Mom busts out a dance in the middle of the street. Too. Cute. She smiles and takes one of Mom’s flyers and sticks it in her briefcase.

It turns out Su-ha didn’t show up because he went to the prison. He asks to visit Min Joon-gook, but is horrified to find out he’s been released.

He heads back lost in thought, and races to get off the bus when he sees Hye-sung at the bus stop across the street. He hears her think wearily that there’s never a seat on this damned bus when she gets on, and quickly scans the bus and finds a lady who’s getting off at the next stop.

He grabs Hye-sung and tips her off to the seat, and makes her day. He asks about the trial and she brags that it went swimmingly: “I don’t want to say this about myself, but I was kind of awesome today.”

He rolls his eyes as she blathers on, and just walks away in the middle of her self-congratulatory speech. She gets another “I’ll be there” text right when Su-ha happens to be on his phone, and smiles thinking it’s his way of saying thanks.

He walks her home again and asks if she always comes home at this hour, wondering if she can’t come and go earlier when it’s not so dark out. She asks if he followed her because he’s worried, and he says no and just tells her to go inside.

He turns to go, and she stops him with something to say, but tells him not to turn around. She says she wondered whether or not she should say something, but being the adult here, she figured it’s the right thing to do.

She says that he’s in high school and she’s a lawyer, and she doesn’t have time to accept his childish innocence, so he should fold his feelings now. “I know, it might sound cruel. But just think of it like medicine and listen.”

Su-ha: “Who likes whom?” Hye-sung: “You. Me.”

She says her phone told her so, and shows him the texts that began the day the trial started. “Did you see me in court and fall for me?” He laughs (I’m so embarrassed for her) and says it wasn’t him—he doesn’t even have her number.

She doesn’t believe him, so he proves it by calling his number. She wonders who sent the texts then, and he says it must be spam. Hye-sung thinks: “Mortified, mortified, mortified!” And of course he catches it, which is doubly mortifying.

She realizes her mistake and covers her eyes, “Don’t look! If you look in my head, you’re dead!” She runs up the stairs, and he repeats her mortified confession out loud to tease her.

She dies of embarrassment all over again, cursing herself for saying something, but then wonders why he keeps walking her home if he doesn’t like her. She realizes now that she doesn’t even know Chewing Gum’s name.

Then her thoughts drift to the text messages, and it occurs to her that they might be from Kwan-woo.

Lawyer Shin stops to ask Kwan-woo if he knows someone named Min Joon-gook, and says that a friend of his shared a cell with him, and he said he owed something to a public defender. Kwan-woo wonders if maybe it’s Hye-sung he meant, and asks what the man was in prison for. “Murder.”

Su-ha saves Hye-sung’s number and names her Jjang d’Arc (as in Joan of Arc), and wonders who sent her those texts. It’s only then that he starts piecing together the clues—the killer’s release, the voice he heard, the message.

“It can’t be…” He takes off running.

Hye-sung sits up in bed and goes back and forth on Kwan-woo vs. Spam vs. Mortified, and decides that she’ll just call the number back and find out once and for all. Egads, don’t do that. But she pushes the button…

The ringtone is “I’ll Be There,” but then she realizes that she can hear the phone she’s calling… FROM INSIDE HER OWN APARTMENT. So. Creepy.

She hangs up and tries again, and it rings from somewhere in her house. Ohgodohgod.

Su-ha races back to her place, screaming into his phone for her to pick up. But when he reaches her neighborhood, those punks he dealt with the other night are back, and they’ve brought their jjang Choong-ki with them. Dude, take a number! There’s a killer we have to deal with!

But there’s no getting out of this, and despite Su-ha’s best efforts to get past them, they start a fight. He fights back, looking for a chance to break free.

Meanwhile, Hye-sung gets up out of bed and calls the number again. She creeps over to her kitchen to pick up a frying pan and inches toward her door. “Who’s there?”

Su-ha finally beats all the boys and limps away, bleeding, to get to Hye-sung.

 
COMMENTS

Aaaaack. Okay, the killer-turned-stalker thing is effectively creeping me out. I didn’t think they’d bring that conflict out so soon in the series, but this show has consistently been a step ahead of expectation, so I really like how quickly we’re getting to the meat of the story with the killer’s release.

So far I like the balance between the case of the week and the personal character journeys, because everyone is so closely tied into the heroine’s life in some way that there’s a lot of double duty in those storylines. Like her rivalry with Do-yeon that gets played out in the courtroom, or her work conflicts directly reflecting her character (or lack thereof) to Mom. They’re woven nicely with a lot of attention to the build-up within each episode, which is really this writer’s strength. No one episode feels like it’s slapdashed together or part of some other episode that has yet to air—each has its own narrative point and build, and that’s not always the case in dramaland.

What really makes the setup work is that Hye-sung is a great heroine. There’s clearly going to be more to her backstory, including who her father was, but that feels secondary to her growth as a lawyer and well, a human being. She’s so flawed, and jaded, and really embarrassingly prideful, and yet she’s still lovable. I root for her and cringe with her, and I want her to stomp all over that bitchy prosecutor and do a little dance. What’s nice about her character is that she’s not unaware of her mistakes—she says dumb things and then regrets them, and will still well up with tears when Mom believes in her. She’s not above gloating or thinking she’s hot stuff, only to be utterly humiliated when other people don’t agree with her, which is almost all the time. I can see the sixteen-year-old girl she used to be more and more as we get to know her, and not just in the heroic way that Su-ha sees her, but in her attitude and her spunk. And it would tickle me silly if she were to fall for Su-ha first, while he’s still had his first love mirage dashed to pieces. The thing is, I love the idea of both boys with her, which is a happy dilemma to have.

 
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