Angry Mom: Episode 2

by javabeans

Kim Hee-sun is such a badass, I don’t even know how she’s kept it under control all these years playing nice girly heroine types. She’s not the type of badass who begs you to admire her badassery from every angle; she’s the kind who just is, and you admire from afar while she just couldn’t care less ’cause she’s got more important things to do than worry about looking cool. A show like this is so utterly dependent on the title role that it’s a risky proposition in casting, but now that Kim Hee-sun is here owning this character, I don’t know how anybody else would’ve done it better.

SONG OF THE DAY

Bily Acoustie – “더는 참을 수 없어요” (Can’t take it anymore) [ Download ]

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EPISODE 2 RECAP

Kang-ja mulls over recent events—her daughter’s victimization, the broken system that won’t help—before coming to a decision. She makes a call, asking her contact whether they know where to find “Princess Han” these days.

That’s what takes her to the nightclub, where Princess Han is waited on hand and (literally) foot by a team of minions. (I love the detail where the men wear tiny crowns in their hair, to match the boss’s big one.) Princess Han orders her gangster army to tighten entry checks, to prevent underage girls getting pushed into drinking with adults. (Her bloodthirsty threat makes the men simultaneously shield their crotches, ha.)

So Kang-ja fights her way through the gangsters, then orders Crowny to tell his boss that “Beolgupo Sashimi” has arrived. Princess Han, a tattooed ajumma with a saturi accent, recognizes the name and description (“She looks like a high schooler, all skinny with huge eyes”) and asks, “Could it be Bang-wool?” (A nickname referring to large eyes.)

Thus Princess Han comes out to meet her visitor, decked out in an elaborate royal getup with ornate gown and glittery scepter. Somehow the absurd costume looks menacing rather than ironic.

The two ladies come face to face, and then we flashback to their high school days, when Kang-ja was known as Beolgupo Sashimi (her mother ran a fish restaurant), better known as Bang-wool to her circle of friends. Ah, and the boss’s real name is actually Han Gong-joo (which means Princess Han—she’s since adopted the literal meaning as her persona).

Gong-joo narrates as we see Teenage Kang-ja sneaking out of school. Gong-joo tags along as Kang-ja finds a pervy teacher outside a restaurant, after he’s just bragged about all the girl students he leers at freely.

Kang-ja slams him against the wall he just peed on, warning him to stop groping his students. Gong-joo explains that she could never stand to see injustice, and always delivered payback in double measure.

With a father in prison and a mother who works every single day, fearless Kang-ja rules the school. She helps at her mother’s fish restaurant, and one night while prepping sashimi, Kang-ja casually mentions that the school wants Mom to come in. We can see that this matters to her, but she acts blasé and says that she knows Mom doesn’t care and wouldn’t come anyway.

This is the scene we saw previously, when Mom says her life could have been better and Kang-ja retorts, masking her hurt, “Did I ask to be born?”

Then Kang-ja hears that Gong-joo’s in trouble at a huge showdown between the various high school gangs, and hurries to help her friend. Gong-joo is a pretty mean fighter but ends up bested by a mean-looking guy, who’s about to wail on her.

Kang-ja’s appearance comes in the nick of time and she flies at the guy, thereby securing her reputation as a legendary badass. (She was in the air so long that in Gong-joo’s exaggerated memory, the bully has time to rest, while Kang-ja cracks open a book and takes a nap midair.)

So now we return to the nightclub. The former friends stare each other down, eyes narrowed to slits…

And then Gong-joo grabs Kang-ja in a bear hug, saying that she thought Kang-ja had died after she left without a word—she’d worried that that bastard Ahn Dong-chil (now the school foundation’s Chief Secretary Ahn) had gotten to her. Kang-ja explains that she needs a favor, and asks for Gong-joo’s help in going to school (which Gong-joo first misinterprets to mean prison, heh).

At home, Ah-ran wakes up in the middle of the night and trembles at the memory of the alpha bully, Bok-dong, threatening her at knifepoint. She huddles into herself as she recalls Bok-dong’s warning to forget “all about that business” if she doesn’t want to die.

Kang-ja explains the situation, and her plan to pose as a student. Gong-joo’s first reaction is to scoff, but she concedes that Kang-ja always did look young (and her minions pipe up that they thought she was a high schooler). Once she sees that she’s serious about there being no other way to protect her daughter, Gong-joo readily agrees to help.

There’s one complication: One person from school knows Kang-ja’s face. There’s the homeroom teacher she’d tried to appeal to, but Gong-joo says she’ll handle things.

Gong-joo sees her friend off and marvels at Kang-ja being a mother. Then she does the math, and the timing strikes her—this means Kang-ja got pregnant her second year of high school. A flashback fills in the blanks to the attack Kang-ja suffered at Ahn Dong-chil’s hands… and now we see that after he kicked her brutally, he started fumbling with her clothing. Ackkk.

Looks like Ahn Dong-chil never changed his ways, because in a dark room somewhere, he confronts a scared Yi-kyung, who doesn’t know who he is or why he had her brought here. He comments, “You’re pretty. But why don’t you obey?” He reminds her that she was told to transfer schools, which she ignored. He pulls out a switchblade and says that because of her loose lips, she’s made trouble for him and put her friend in danger.

He tells Yi-kyung to transfer, and lets her go. Worried about Ah-ran, she calls her right away. The phone rings unanswered while Ah-ran huddles to herself, and then Kang-ja returns home and checks on her. She promises, “Don’t worry. Mom’s here. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

In the morning, the judge Kang-ja had sought out gives her a call, wondering why she disappeared on him. He leaves a message urging her to let him help using the law (rather than brute force)—and then we see that he is Teacher Noah’s father. Well.

They have a warm father-son relationship, and Noah has taken all of his father’s teachings over the years to heart, reciting them back to him. But then a phone call casts a pall over the mood—Noah’s just been fired from his academy teaching job. Judge Dad says the principal is blind, but Noah sighs that seven principals can’t all be blind, and that he must not be a good teacher.

Then Dad says that he just wasn’t suited to teach at academies, and Noah points out that schools don’t like him either—he’s failed every interview. Dad counters that in a country of one-eyed people, the one with two eyes is the oddity, and all those one-eyes don’t know how to pick good people. Aw, this is a sweet pair.

We get a bit more insight on bully Bok-dong, who reports to Ahn Dong-chil and calls him hyungnim—he’s a gangster minion in training. Ahn gives him money for his recent terrorizing job and a letter from his brother in prison, whose release he has promised to look into.

Ah-ran isn’t better by morning, and her family is upset to find her on the bathroom floor, having hacked her hair off with a utility knife.

On a more lighthearted note, Gong-joo makes good on her word to take care of the homeroom teacher problem: She has her minions stuff the teacher into a refrigerated snack box and tells him to admit his wrongs. Is it her fault he’s committed so many that he honestly doesn’t know which one she means? She leaves him there and says he’ll have to stick it out until he can figure out what he’s done.

Gong-joo sends his resignation letter to the school via courier, leaving them in the lurch. Two of the administrators (who, just as a reminder, are closely affiliated with the shady school foundation’s shady chairman), Vice Principal Oh and Teacher Do Jung-woo, wonder what to do. Rather than bothering with a lengthyl hiring process, the VP fishes through a stack of resumes and picks one at random. Teacher Noah!

We still don’t know exactly what kind of nefarious deeds our education officials are up to, but everything we’ve seen points to some kind of corruption. Myeongseong Foundation’s Chairman Hong blatantly sucks up to the minister of education before asking his favor: He wants to make Teacher Do Jung-woo the foundation director. The minister rejects this idea.

Kang-ja takes Ah-ran to the hospital and trims her hair while Ah-ran just stares blankly. The doctor had explained that this kind of behavior can arise in witnesses of school violence and had advised keeping her for observation, and allowing Ah-ran some alone time without Mom around.

Kang-ja swallows back her tears and tells Ah-ran that she doesn’t want her to just be nice and still like a doll. She wants her to be like before, and get angry and yell. “The feeling of being wronged and enraged—pour it out to me,” she asks. “You can tell me anything. I can hear it all.”

But Ah-ran is frozen in fear of Bok-dong’s warning: Telling Mom would make her a target.

Kang-ja steps aside to listen to her voicemail from Judge Park, which only makes her look grimmer. The mood lightens when Gong-joo takes her to a salon for a makeover and briefs her on the cover story she’s put together. Oh, this is awesome—Gong-joo’s set up a whole elaborate operation here, so it’s not just a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants scheme.

Some pertinent details: Gong-joo is listed as Kang-ja’s mother, and their address is Gong-joo’s office. Kang-ja supposedly left school in her second year because of heart surgery, and they can say the illness aged her. Last but not least, her fake name is now Jo Bang-wool. Hee.

The makeover complete, Gong-joo asks what Kang-ja means to do when she identifies the culprit. Kang-ja replies that she’ll make them pay double, and kneel in apology before Ah-ran. Gong-joo wisely says that while dishing out a beating is easy, changing someone’s heart is not. Then she adds that although Kang-ja’s real mother never came to school for her, she’ll go right away: “So if you need a mother, call me anytime.” Aw, tears. These ladies are awesome.

And like a true mother, Gong-joo says that she’s holding back from asking all the questions she wants to, because she’ll wait until Kang-ja is ready to tell her. The sweet scene even has Gong-joo’s goons fighting back tears, though I can’t blame ’em because so am I.

Kang-ja comes home to (what else?) a grumpy mother-in-law and weak husband, who are surprised at her new look. She just says that she’ll be coming home late for a while, and her mother-in-law huffs that Kang-ja’s totally overreacting about Ah-ran being ill. She grumbles, “You’d think it were her kid, not her dead unni’s!”

But that’s just another cover story, as we find when Kang-ja flips through Ah-ran’s journal looking for clues. Pages and pages have been torn out, but one that’s left intact grabs Kang-ja’s attention.

Ah-ran has written that the world is full of liars, and the worst is her mother, because there is no dead sister. “If she couldn’t tell people openly I was her daughter, why did she have me?” Ah-ran writes. “Mom has turned me into a liar too. I hate her. Mom has no right to be a mother.” Hard words to hear.

Although Teacher Jung-woo has been denied the foundation director post, Chairman Hong is fond of his protégé and suggests an alternative: corporate planning chief, which is the foundation’s most important position. He calls it the “washing machine” that needs to run in order for the foundation and the school to work properly. Jung-woo thinks it’s too early to make such a bold move, but Chairman Hong says that the education minister is gearing up to make a bid for presidential election, and that means he’s wanting money. He needs Jung-woo to run the washing machine.

The chairman makes it sound like good news, but Jung-woo knows better and leaves the meeting sneering, “You’ll use me as your bulletproof vest?”

Sharp-eyed Secretary Ae-yeon watches the whole exchange, and afterward the chairman asks what she thinks of Jung-woo. Ae-yeon gives a noncommittal answer about trusting the chairman’s opinion, but he flies into a temper and starts to beat her around. He accuses her of trading looks with Jung-woo and having a secret relationship with him, and backstabbing him.

The chairman’s son, Sang-tae, overhears the sounds of violence and hardly reacts, though he does rev his motorcycle (parked in his bedroom) loudly enough to cover the noise.

Yi-kyung crumbles more when she receives a torrent of abuse via text messages from her classmates. She tries calling Ah-ran again, begging her friend to pick up, but only gets the dial tone. Ah-ran lies in bed crying, not hearing her phone.

Kang-ja thinks to herself that her daughter was right; she doesn’t have a right to be a mother, but she became one anyway. Perhaps her decision is wrong, and perhaps her daughter will hate her for it: “But even so, I only have one choice. As I did seventeen years ago, this time also, I’ll protect my daughter.”

Noah greets his father with good news that night: He got a job with Myeongseong High School. Judge Dad just says he’s not at all surprised, because his son is exactly the type of person who should be an educator. Curiously, Judge Park seems to know more about this than he lets on, though all he says is for Noah to continue walking steadfastly on the right path.

“Like you?” Noah asks proudly. “You can’t be like me,” Judge Park says. It’s a strange way to react, but Noah doesn’t pick up on it. Judge Park says that judges shouldn’t judge children lightly, whereas teachers have to kneel down to see them eye to eye. He encourages Noah to try to win as the two-eyed oddity in the land of one-eyes.

In the morning, Kang-ja hurries through her housewife tasks like making breakfast, then heads out to put her plan into motion. She puts up a “temporarily closed” sign on her restaurant, and dressed in a school uniform, she heads off to school.

Noah arrives on campus with bright eyes and full heart, making a painfully earnest introductory speech to the faculty, promising to do his best. He’s happy to hear he’ll be a homeroom teacher in addition to teaching literature.

Then Kang-ja arrives at the faculty room, and Noah ushers her to homeroom. He tries to place why she looks familiar and tries to chat with her, but she remains stony and silent.

Noah is introduced to their class first, and some of them already recognize him as the “sleeping pill” teacher from academy. The whole class cringes and gags when Noah starts to recite literature, though it doesn’t dampen his enthusiasm at all.

Next is Kang-ja’s turn, and the class bursts into laughter to hear her name, calling it dog-like. (Bang-wool is a little silly-sounding, but not completely ridiculous.) Kang-ja scans the room, already scoping out the scene here, and notes how Yi-kyung protests to have the new girl assigned to Ah-ran’s desk.

In a spare moment, Jung-woo asks Noah how he got this job, surprised that he didn’t have connections through the administration. Vice Principal Oh ruffled Jung-woo’s feathers by selecting the new teacher without his input, and now Jung-woo thinks Noah bought his way in. But Noah is so innocent he doesn’t get the subtext, and answers in his guileless way.

Kang-ja takes a seat and is shocked to see all the graffiti written on Ah-ran’s desk—hateful comments calling her all sorts of epithets. She wells up in rage, and that’s when the trio of mean girls descends on her desk, led by Jung-hee, who says Bang-wool was her dog’s name. Jung-hee laughs at her tears, thinking it’s from her teasing, but Kang-ja asks if Jung-woo wrote all the stuff on the desk.

Jung-hee readily admits to it but assures her that Bang-wool is safe, since she reminds her of her dog. Quick as a flash, Kang-ja grabs Jung-hee’s head and slams it into the desk. Damn, that was satisfying. I know, I know, violence doesn’t solve violence, but still: satisfying.

Kang-ja grabs Mean Girl 2 and snaps at 3 to lock the doors. Jung-hee whimpers in pain and switches to jondaemal, asking to be let go. Now she’s polite.

In the faculty room, Noah takes a look at Bang-wool’s file, trying to place how he knows her. Only now does he remember the foul-mouthed girl from the pojangmacha and the academy, and he makes the connection.

By the time he makes it to the classroom, a crowd has already gathered outside the windows, watching Kang-ja wield a mop inside. The three mean girls kneel penitently, as she snaps off the mop’s head and demands answers. Did Jung-hee do that to Ah-ran’s desk?

Jung-hee mumbles feebly, “It’s not like that… just once… as a joke…”

Kang-ja slams the stick into the desk and screams, “A joke?! The stone you throw as a joke could kill a frog!” She raises the staff to use it again, but this time a hand stops it.

It’s Bok-dong, and he tells the new girl to give it a rest: “If you keep it up, you could die at my hands.”

That rings a bell. It’s exactly what the mysterious voice said in her ear the night Ah-ran was cornered and collapsed.

So rather than being intimidated by Bok-dong’s languid menace, she whirls around, whipping the stick out of his grasp, and grabs him by the throat. She pulls her other fist back for a punch—but this time, it’s Noah who grabs that arm to stop her.

She glares at Noah for a second, then reverses his grab easily, yanking him near and grabbing him in a headlock. Jaws drop—even Bok-dong’s—and the class stares in amazement. Bully in one hand, wimp in the other. Badass in the middle.

 
COMMENTS

Awesome. As I said up top, what I love about Kim Hee-sun in this role is that she doesn’t care about being a badass, and therefore she totally schools all the resident wannabes who try to posture and intimidate. She couldn’t care less about winning some invisible battle to be most feared, and because she comes to school with a singular mission, all that other stuff is a waste of time. And nothing could be more fearsome.

True, we’ve been told that Kang-ja’s rashness has been her fatal flaw, propelling her into situations that are difficult to fix once she’s set off the chaos. But that’s the grown-up world, which operates much differently than the adolescent one, which operates in the shadowy in-between spaces where adults are absent or uncaring. It makes it much wilder and unpredictable—but that’s Kang-ja’s forte, and I can’t wait to see how she sets the whole school on its ear.

Even so, I like that the show isn’t going full comedy on this setup, which based on description alone could have gone in a totally different direction—less realistic, more slapstick, going for the easy joke. I’m pretty sure I’d have been up for the joke version, but since that isn’t where Angry Mom is heading, I like that Kang-ja remains dead-serious in the wake of all the confusion and potential humor around her. It’s that weightiness that gives the show its anchor, so that even if it were to go broad at times, it’s grounded in this very heartfelt and honest mother-daughter love.

It’s similar with Noah’s character, whose simple nature could be such a punchline (as it is for the kids), but we can see how he’s driven by a genuine earnestness and idealism. A cynical way to look at him could say he’s so out of touch as to be useless, and it’s true that if you can’t connect with the ones you’re meant to teach, there’s only so much a good heart can take you.

But I liked the one-eye-versus-two metaphor he shared with his father, and how Noah briefly wished he could be one-eyed to fit in before opting for two eyes after all, fighting the uphill battle. It’s telling that his father, who seems to have compromised some part of his integrity along the way, is still rooting for Noah to stick to his guns. I’m curious to see what exactly the judge’s deal is, because he seems like a caring father who values honesty and ethics, but has dealt with enough that he can’t quite look his son in the eye. And I wonder how Noah will react once he finds out his father may not be the paragon he thinks him to be.

Most interesting is that Noah and Kang-ja seem quite similar to each other despite the obvious outward differences. They’re both driven by a sense of justice, corrupt world be damned, and I sense that neither is the kind to compromise on that code of honor to take the easy way out. They’ve expressed those values in completely different ways, but I can’t wait to see them realizing their commonalities eventually. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

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