You’re All Surrounded: Episode 15

by girlfriday

Our not-a-couple spends the entire episode trying desperately to hide their embarrassment and not let their feelings show, which of course makes said fluttery feelings blatantly obvious to the rest of the universe (and to us, hee). It’s an amusing hour filled with denials, company-mandated skinship, and a surprise sleepover that makes my day.

 
SONG OF THE DAY

One More Chance – “뭐가 그리 좋은지 몰라” (I Don’t Know What I Like So Much)
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EPISODE 15: “Whether coincidence or fate”

Kiss! This time we stay with the team in the van as Dae-gu and Soo-sun lock lips, and Eung-do remarks that they sure are working hard for the case. Pan-seok closes his mouth long enough to chuckle, “And you said you weren’t supposed to eat the rabbit that lives in your house.” Hee. And in the back Tae-il comforts Gook, assuring him that it’s all business.

Dae-gu and Soo-sun pull away awkwardly, and he still keeps his gaze locked on her, but she can’t meet his eyes anymore.

The ride back is uncomfortably silent, to say the least, so then Pan-seok makes this hilariously obvious attempt to be cheery. He congratulates them on closing their own case and even helping Team 1 with this narcotics case, and laughs like a maniac to cover up everyone’s embarrassment.

Soo-sun says she wants to treat everyone out for helping with Mom’s case, so Pan-seok and Eung-do drop the kids off to start without them, promising to join after their department meeting.

The kids go out for beers, and Soo-sun sincerely thanks them for everything they did for Mom. She’s back in Masan now and feeling much better. Dae-gu says they don’t deserve the gratitude because they failed to make Birkin Bitch pay for her crime. He hangs his head and calls it a half-failure because of Assemblyman Yoo’s intervention.

Soo-sun says that’s not how she looks at it, and calls it a half-success. She muses that Mom’s always been the one to protect her; it never occurred to her that the day would come so soon when she’d be the one to protect Mom. She admits that it scares her and makes her a little sad, and Gook jumps in to say that they’re around to protect her.

Tae-il confesses that they were tempted to out Assemblyman Yoo’s connection to his daughter, since that seemed to be the thing he was most afraid of. Soo-sun says it did cross her mind too, but in the end she would rather lose righteously than win with foul play. Then she ruins her own moment by asking if that makes her sound cool, heh.

Gook is the one to bring up the kiss, and tries to play it cool by commending them for going so above and beyond the call of duty. Yeah, I’d say. He says it as if willing the words to be true—they had to act like a couple, and force themselves to kiss when they didn’t want to. Everyone else looks away.

Soo-sun and Dae-gu try so hard not to look at each other that I think their eyeballs might stick in opposite corners. She steals one little glance at Dae-gu while he isn’t looking, and starts feeling a little feverish.

She tosses and turns that night in her rooftop tent, and when she thinks about the kiss, her heart starts to race and she has to fan her face again. Dae-gu lies in bed with his hand over his heart, smiling to himself as he feels his heart race. He curls up with the most adorable grin on his face.

Pan-seok comes home to a nasty leak in his apartment, and the maintenance crew asks him to stay elsewhere for a few nights while they fix the pipes. He grabs a few boxes and goes straight to Eung-do’s apartment, where he’s greeted by four toddlers and Eung-do’s pregnant wife. He decides he can’t impose and heads off in search of Plan B.

I was totally expecting him to cave and go to Sa-kyung’s place, but the doorbell rings at the boys’ apartment, rousing them all out of bed. They open the door to find Pan-seok standing there with his stuff. This is going to be so great.

They’re all flustered when he asks to crash here for a few days, but it’s not like they can say no to their boss. Tae-il says it’s fine with them but they only have the couch to offer.

Gook corrects him—Dae-gu’s got a bunk free—only to realize after he says it how awkward that would be and how Dae-gu might rather die. Pan-seok is quick to assure them that he’s afraid of heights anyway and doesn’t like bunk beds.

It’s pretty funny how normally Tae-il would be the one to smooth over the rough edges, but right now he and Pan-seok are fighting over Sa-kyung too, so it’s just Awkward City any which way you look. They turn down his offer of a midnight snack and scurry to their rooms.

Pan-seok stays up late reading case files, and hears noises coming from Dae-gu’s room. He peeks in to see Dae-gu sleeping with cartoons on, and tucks him in under the covers. Awwwww.

In the morning, Dae-gu wakes up and sees Pan-seok’s case files sprawled out over the coffee table—it’s his mother’s case that he’s been working on. He rifles through them, and reads a report on Oh Joon-soo, the henchman who accompanied the man who threatened Mom against testifying in court. Dae-gu remembers seeing him that night, dressed in all black and wearing a black cap. Hm.

Dae-gu finds that Pan-seok’s boxes are filled with reports all on Mom’s case, from the time of the murder all the way to the present. He never stopped working on it all this time, and Dae-gu starts to look at him a little differently.

Dae-gu heads to the precinct early, and Soo-sun whirls around on her heels at the sight of him. Ha, that’s not obvious or anything. She’s so jumpy at every little thing he says or does that it’s a miracle she even makes it to her desk in one piece.

When she says she didn’t eat breakfast, he wheels over to her side of the desk with a sandwich, and she jumps out of her skin, sticking the ruler out in between them: “Maintain a safe distance! That’s your rule!”

He can’t exactly argue, and just makes her eat breakfast. She can barely handle standing there for thirty seconds and skitters away, and he just laughs because he finds everything about her cute for no reason.

Pan-seok goes to buy pig’s feet early in the morning, and the owner turns out to be Oh Joon-soo, the henchman involved in Mom’s case. Pan-seok’s been coming here off and on for years, judging by the wearied reception he gets.

Pig’s Feet sighs that he doesn’t have anything to say, but Pan-seok says he’s just here to get twenty-two orders of pig’s feet for the department picnic today. As Pig’s Feet puts the order together, Pan-seok wonders aloud why his boss hired Combat Boots and didn’t use the henchmen he already had, if he was truly the culprit behind Mom’s murder. Pig’s Feet swears he doesn’t know.

Pan-seok runs off when he gets a call from the Masan chief, who’s here with the detective who took Soo-sun’s witness statement eleven years ago. He’s about to call Dae-gu excitedly, but then remembers Boots’ warning about it being dangerous for the kid to dig further, and decides against it for now.

The old friends greet each other warmly, and the ex-cop says all he can remember is that he took the statement and then gave it to someone who promised to pass the message along to the chief.

The chief urges him to think harder, because he never received that message and it means that the person who intercepted it is likely responsible for the missing necklace too, which he nearly lost his job over. Try as he might he can’t remember, and Pan-seok deflates.

They turn to small talk, and the chief sighs over Boots and then asks how Chief Kang is doing. At the mention of her, a light bulb suddenly goes off in the ex-cop’s brain, and he remembers it: Chief Kang specifically insisting that Pan-seok was in no frame of mind to deal with it, and that she’d pass it along to the chief. Their jaws drop, and they don’t believe him at first. But now he’s sure that it was her. Pan-seok’s eyes widen in shock and disappointment.

That afternoon the violent crimes unit gathers for their department picnic. Pan-seok watches Chief Kang warily, wondering if he’s been fooled this entire time. They start off with the game where you have to gather in groups of whatever number gets called out, and three turns out to be the funniest, with Pan-seok trying to pry Tae-il and Sa-kyung apart, and Dae-gu trying to squeeze in between Soo-sun and Gook. In the end, Dae-gu and Pan-seok get tossed aside by their own teammates.

And then they play… suck and blow? At a company picnic? That is just a lawsuit waiting to happen. To everyone’s horror, Eung-do ends up in an open-mouthed kiss with Chief Toad. They all shudder, and then start chanting for them to date.

Dae-gu wins the big relay race for his team, and Chief Kang congratulates him happily. Everyone spends the day watching someone else—Dae-gu noticing every time Gook is nice to Soo-sun, Soo-sun trying not to be obvious about looking at Dae-gu, and Pan-seok clocking every move that Chief Kang makes.

Pan-seok takes his team out for dinner to celebrate, and Eung-do points out how far their babies have come since the first day, remembering all their terrible reasons for becoming detectives. And this time even Dae-gu answers and smiles when Eung-do calls him a numbskull.

Even Pan-seok agrees that their kids have grown, though he makes sure to add that they’ve still got miles to go. Soo-sun and Gook take turns mocking Pan-seok’s speeches about how they’ll never become detectives and how he’s never wrong, and he stares them down before letting them off the hook with a laugh.

Pan-seok gets called away by Chief Toad, Eung-do wipes his lips again at the mention of him. But the thought of the kiss turns his attention over to Dae-gu and Soo-sun, and he asks them point-blank: “You guys are dating, aren’t you? That kiss was real, wasn’t it?”

Dae-gu and Soo-sun fidget nervously, and Gook furrows his brow. Tae-il sighs and looks over at Gook, not at all surprised since he’s likely noticed all the signs before the kiss even happened.

Soo-sun nervously says no, and when Eung-do eggs her on to tell them the truth, she stammers that Dae-gu isn’t even her type. Gook jumps in to defend her, saying that it’s obviously all business between them.

But then suddenly Dae-gu says, “Not me. It wasn’t all business for me. It was real.” Eeeee! He looks right at her as he says it, and it renders her speechless. Gook downs a beer and Eung-do drunkenly slurs that Dae-gu is a man.

Soo-sun starts to hiccup in response, and runs off to the bathroom. At first she’s rambling to herself in shock and disbelief, but then as it dawns on her that this means he really likes her, she can’t help it—a smiles just creeps up on her face. How. Cute.

Gook and Tae-il find Dae-gu in the men’s room, and Gook slurs huffily at Dae-gu for the outburst, and not thinking about Soo-sun’s position in all this and how she might feel. Dae-gu remains stoic and says it wasn’t intentional—it just came out.

Tae-il assures Gook that Dae-gu was just drunk and pulls him away before things get tense. And then as soon as they leave, Dae-gu’s cool façade crumbles, and he buries his head in his hands in mortification. Hahahaha. Okay, I need to watch that again.

Pan-seok sits up that night going over all the things that Chief Kang said, which now seem suspicious in this new light. Dae-gu is up late too, and Pan-seok invites him to sit, which finally gives him the opportunity to ask about Mom’s case files.

Pan-seok says he’s been working on it over the years, but Combat Boots’ involvement eluded him all this time—he never imagined his ex-partner would be the killer. Pan-seok asks if he wants to go with him the next time he visits Boots in jail, and they agree to go together.

Dae-gu gets up to go to bed, and Pan-seok calls out after him, “Ji-yong-ah, I’m sorry that I couldn’t protect your mother. I’m really sorry.”

Assemblyman Yoo checks in with his son-in-law about the family company, wondering if he’s keeping an eye on the stock purchase maneuvers and if things are going according to plan. Madam Yoo accuses her husband with rumors that he’s actually backing the other side, but he dismisses them as false.

Their son Ki-jae shuts down the business talk at the breakfast table, which prompts Grandpa to nag him about what he’s going to do with his future. Ki-jae wonders if he should become a cop, like that cool hyung who came to the house to arrest Mom.

Chief Kang comes to see Assemblyman Yoo at the shooting range, and they speak in thinly veiled metaphors about how hitting nine out of ten targets is meaningless if that last one gets away from you.

She in turn asks what he’s got to show for the nine other targets, and changes her tone to point out that he’s already in his second term in office, and still has nothing to show for his end of the bargain. There’s been no public motion and no hearing on the matter, whatever it is, and she demands to know when she’ll see results. Innnteresting. So you did agree to sell your soul for something.

She says that she trusted him to keep his word, but wonders if power has corrupted him, or if maybe this was his true face from the start. He points out that she’s in too deep to be wondering that now, and she admits that he’s right about that, but tells him that she’s no longer the same person either: “I’ve grown a little too.”

It’s finally moving day for Soo-sun, and the boys arrive to help her haul stuff out of her rooftop tent. Gook hesitates before leaving Dae-gu alone with her, and they hem and haw for a while before Dae-gu joins her in the tent.

She fans her face nervously when he sits close enough to brush up against her, and he asks hesitantly if he’s really not her type. She sort of answers that he isn’t, which makes him mad, and he asks if the kiss was really all business for her.

But before she can answer, she drops her jewelry case, and he goes to pick it up. That’s when he finally discovers the pendant—the one he found at his house the day Mom was murdered, and went missing from police evidence that same night.

He recognizes it immediately, and demands to know where she got it. She says she found it at school in the science lab. A flashback confirms that she came to the classroom looking for Ji-yong, and hid from Boots on her way there. Ji-yong was long gone by then, but she found the necklace on the ground and picked it up, thinking it was pretty.

We catch up to the team as she’s telling them how she found it, and Dae-gu can’t believe she’s had it all this time and didn’t make the connection that it had something to do with Boots. She feels terrible and apologizes, swearing that it never occurred to her because she naturally assumed it was a woman’s necklace.

Pan-seok tells them they’re not going to hand the pendant over when they don’t know whom to trust, and decides that the only way they’ll get anywhere with the evidence is to investigate on the sly. Dae-gu agrees for once, though he questions Pan-seok’s order to keep it a secret even from Chief Kang.

Pan-seok doesn’t know what to say, and Eung-do comes up with the excuse that she’d have to follow the rules and hand it over to the prosecutor’s office, so they agree not to tell her. Their first task is to identify the necklace and where it might have been made and sold.

They ask Sa-kyung for her opinion, and she tells them to upload pictures online and ask jewelry fanatics and experts if anyone recognizes the design. Pan-seok uses the chance to sneak in a date request, and she points out that he’s going to be awfully busy now with this case.

She tells him he should stick to his strengths and just be happy working for the rest of his life, and he swears up and down that he’ll make time. Besides, he’s not about to let her off the hook on the divorce talk, and whines about Tae-il knowing the answer when he doesn’t.

He gripes about her hugging Tae-il just because he asked for a sympathy hug, and nags, “Hug ME like that!” He grumbles again about Tae-il’s non-apology about not being sorry, and she smiles, finding his jealousy cute.

The team gets to work trying to identify the pendant, but so far it isn’t a design that anyone recognizes. Pan-seok takes a moment to look at the photo of him with his old partner, and this time he finds a number written on the back: 0723. I knew there’d be a clue in that thing. He doesn’t think much of it for now, and watches Chief Kang intently.

He and Dae-gu head to the prison to visit Boots, but he declines to see them. They catch a break in the necklace hunt though, and Soo-sun calls with an update that they’ve found the Parisian jewelry designer who happens to be here for an exhibition.

Pan-seok and Dae-gu go to see the man who made the necklace, and he identifies it as his work from a collection where he designed limited-edition one-of-a-kind pieces. He has to dig through his records to find it, and shows him the sketch—with “Yoo Ae-yeon,” aka Madam Yoo, aka Birkin Bitch, written at the top of the page.

They’re stunned, and Dae-gu asks if it’s the same Yoo Ae-yeon of Chasung Group. The designer checks the purchase log, and there’s her card. It’s Madam Yoo all right. They walk out in a stupor, and Dae-gu says it doesn’t make sense—that woman came to his house eleven years ago and killed his mother?

Pan-seok asks if he knows of any connection between Madam Yoo and his mom, but naturally he has no idea. Dae-gu thinks back to his last puzzling conversation with Madam Yoo, and says he did think it was weird because she acted as if she knew who he was.

They go right over there to confront her head-on, and for once she lets them into the house. Pan-seok drops the pendant down right in front of her, and they clock her reaction. She’s shocked. Pan-seok lets her stew in her panic for a moment before asking, “You recognize this, don’t you?”

 
COMMENTS

The one-of-a-kind pendant is disappointingly convenient, especially when you consider the fact that it takes our characters this long to come to such an obvious conclusion. I honestly never expected this drama to go so far as to be twisty, but a little sleuthing would make the discovery more satisfying, rather than coincidentally finding the necklace that Soo-sun forgot about, and then coincidentally lucking out because it’s an original design, not to mention the fact that the designer happens to be in the country for just that one day.

Mystery is certainly not this writer’s strong suit, but I honestly wouldn’t quibble about that if our characters could just be a little smarter and have the satisfying aha-moments of discovery. I don’t want them to be told the answers—I want them to dig where they shouldn’t be digging and be smart enough to put the puzzle pieces together themselves. These are elements we see in them as they work their day-to-day cases, but when it comes to the overarching case, it feels like their intelligence is held back for the sake of delaying the reveal. It’s frustrating because you want them to be at their sharpest in the one case that’s most important. I want to be wowed by the legendary Seo Pan-seok and Dae-gu’s high IQ, but the result is the opposite because the writer feels the need to stretch this one mystery to the end, and we’re left waiting for our cast to catch up to us.

Plotwise, the one thing that keeps me caring is their personal stake in the case, because they feel so guilty and responsible for what happened to Mom, and the only way they’ll get past that is to find answers and seek justice. I really wish Assemblyman Yoo were a better villain, because fear would add a healthy dose of suspense, but that fizzled out once Boots went to jail and then we were left with a politician who threatens to kill, but no assassin to make that threat feel real anymore. Perhaps it’s time for him to hire more henchmen? We need something to light a fire under their asses, so if you’ve got an army of killers, now’s the time to use ’em.

Of course despite all that, the episode itself was enjoyable for entirely different reasons, since we got to spend the hour watching Dae-gu be a lovesick guppy and Soo-sun try her damnedest not to be a rabbit-eater. I like watching their very sweet uncomplicated romance that’s now all about the discovery of feelings, especially in this phase where denial is more telling than confessions. It’s great that he’s always one step ahead of her too, because now that she’s in denial, he’s finally being direct. It’s too bad that Soo-sun never moved in with the boys, but Pan-seok sleeping over was even better. Dae-gu gets to see firsthand how much time and energy he’s dedicated to Mom’s case, which speaks far more than any apology could. I hope his entire apartment gets flooded, because now I want every day to end with Pan-seok tucking Dae-gu into bed at night.

 
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