Mrs. Cop: Episode 12

by LollyPip

Well, sad to say it’s another episode where not much happens. A lot of time is spent waiting for Boss Park to wake up so that Young-jin can get her answers, while unimportant details are investigated that add no valuable information to the case. But we do learn a bit more about Boss Park’s past, and why he wasn’t ready until now to ask Young-jin’s forgiveness.

EPISODE 12 RECAP

Do-young finds the car with the gold stashed in it heading out of the area, and she and Young-jin use CCTV footage to pinpoint the car’s exact location.

Jong-ho is still with Madam Park, and an offhand comment about her coffee has her complaining that she doesn’t like being around people who know of her past. He asks her for any information on President Kang, but she plays coy as usual, and Jong-ho gets called back to the office.

Secretary Yoon supervises the transfer of the gold ingots into old car batteries this time, and by the time Young-jin and her team arrive at their site, the gold and everyone working on it have cleared out. They do find the broken statue and the car that was left behind, but it’s been cleaned out.

Do-young’s sharp eyes noticed the car battery insides that were left behind, and remembers seeing a flatbed full of batteries driving past them on their way on. Young-jin gets all nearby police looking for the truck carrying the batteries, and it’s quickly found and surrounded.

Young-jin’s team, with Jin-woo driving, catches up to the truck and it becomes a car chase. The truck driver nearly hits a civilian car and overturns his truck, spilling the gold ingots all over the road. They secure the scene to prevent theft by onlookers, with Jae-duk laughing at how beautiful all that gold looks lying everywhere.

President Kang watches the news coverage of his gold having been stopped from being transferred for a second time, and throws his remote at the television in fury. He’s not mollified that the driver won’t divulge the owner of the gold, and he screams Young-jin’s name over and over — why does she always get in his way?

His lawyer advises him to call his Chinese investor to tell him the investment will be put on hold, and tells Kang that selling his stocks to fund the project would be a terrible idea. Losing stocks could lose him management rights in his company. She suggests he make cash available to her instead of gold and she’ll try to strike a new deal with the investor, and Kang agrees.

Once he’s alone with Secretary Yoon, Kang asks what will happen if the police find out that gold belongs to him. No matter what, it must not be tracked back to him. He makes it clear that this is Secretary Yoon’s last chance — no more mistakes will be tolerated.

Jong-ho brings his findings about Madam Park back to Young-jin — she wasn’t smuggling the gold, only procuring it for President Kang. He says that’s all she would say so Young-jin suggests he seduce more information out of her, but he refuses.

Young-jin teases that there must be women he can’t get after all, and Jong-ho just sighs that there’s one, but it’s not Madam Park. When he mutters that it’s the woman sitting in front of him right now, Young-jin jokes some more, but poor Jong-ho doesn’t look like he’s kidding.

The truck driver has some scrapes from the accident but he’s okay, and he refuses to say who hired him. The team are confused why the gold’s owner doen’t step forward — true, they’d do a few years for illegal smuggling, but the gold would still be their property. Young-jin figures there’s something more valuable than the gold being hidden, and sets the team to investigate Madam Park and Jangan-pyung Park.

Young-jin visits Boss Park in the hospital, where he still hasn’t woken from his altercation with President Kang. She re-reads his text that the day to beg her forgiveness had arrived and that he would tell her everything once she arrested him. She’s recognized by a reporter and tries to distract him, but he wonders why she would be hanging outside that particular patient’s room.

Young-jin goes to Boss Park’s room to look for clues, and visits the warden of the prison where he was incarcerated. Boss Park’s daughter had died a mere two weeks after he was imprisoned there, and at her funeral he’d screamed that he didn’t kill anyone and tried to escape.

Chief Yeom is furious when the story about President Kang’s kidnapping is leaked to the press, but Jong-ho defends Young-jin’s team when he yells at them, assuming one of them talked to a reporter. Of course he’s not really angry that incorrect information got out, just that now it will seem as though the police were hiding something. Finally Young-jin admits that it was her, though it was just an accident the way she ran into the reporter at the hospital.

Chief Yeom has to defend himself to President Kang, who’s angry that Boss Park is still alive. Yeom flat refuses to “take care of” him, saying that if Boss Park wakes and talks, all he loses is his job. If President Kang wants him dead, he can do it himself… Yeom has no intention of working with him.

Jin-woo and Do-young search Jangan-pyung Park’s phone records and find several calls to Secretary Yoon. Yoon denies knowing the man, explaining that he assumed those calls were spam and didn’t pick up. He refuses to show Jin-woo his phone without a warrant, and Jin-woo notes that only people with something to hide demand warrants. After Jin-woo leaves, Yoon calls his friend Prosecutor Go for a favor.

Jin-woo is pretty confident they have the right man, which means the gold belongs to President Kang. Do-young is suddenly more interested in the case now that it’s big-time, so Jin-woo warns her not to get sloppy just because she’s excited. He does grin at her enthusiasm, admitting he likes her more and more lately, and she beams under his approval.

Boss Park shows signs of waking soon and Chief Yeom is notified as he ordered. Young-jin is told at the hospital that the patient has a strong will to live which is why he’s hanging on, but he’s been so badly injured his chances of survival are pretty slim. He may wake up long enough to tell them what happened, though.

Do-young’s request for Secretary Yoon’s phone records was denied, and Jin-woo tries unsuccessfully to stop her from storming over to the prosecutor’s office to demand to know why. She goes to speak with Prosecutor Go, who mutters that the captain and her team are all idiots, and says that three phone calls to his secretary isn’t enough evidence to assume the gold belongs to President Kang.

He goes off on the stupidity of the police, seeming to expect Do-young to lose her cool, but she stays calm. She says that they need to see those records and if he continues to block them, they’ll investigate him, too. Prosecutor Go laughs in her face and tells her to go look for real evidence.

Jae-duk and Se-won observe from a distance as Madam Park transports some artwork, and they visit the artist to ask about some work of his. He looks uncomfortable when they show him the small piece of the sculpture that was used to transport the gold ingots.

Chief Yeom yanks Do-young and Young-jin into his office and demands to know if Young-jin ordered Do-young to confront Prosecutor Go. Do-young says it was all her idea but Yeom is still upset, saying that Young-jin sets a bad example of being impulsive. He threatens to demote Do-young if she pulls another stunt like that.

Afterward Young-jin says not to worry about getting her in trouble — she’s always in trouble, ha. She blinks in amazement when Do-young mutters that she threatened to investigate the prosecutor, impressed by her guts. Poor Do-young mostly feels bad that their team will have a hard time now because of her.

Young-jin gets the call that Boss Park is conscious and rushes over to the hospital, launching right into her questions as soon as the man opens his eyes. He can’t speak because he’s intubated, but we hear his thoughts apologizing for hiding the truth from her — because of his selfish wish to kill President Kang before confessing, everything was messed up.

Becoming more agitated, Young-jin tells him to blink once if it’s true that he didn’t kill her father. But the nurse pulls her away before she can see Boss Park blink, confirming her suspicions.

President Kang is told that Boss Park is awake, and he orders Secretary Yoon to take care of it while he goes to see Chief Yeom.

Young-jin sees a woman leaving Boss Park’s room and asks how she knows him, but the woman scurries away without a word. It’s the lady who runs the restaurant where President Kang always meets his subordinates, but she just says she’s nobody important when Young-jin corners her. Young-jin follows her back to her restaurant, but the woman locks her out.

Young-jin, Jong-ho, and her team discuss the information that the gold was delivered to President Kang from Madam Park in the statue, and the fact that Prosecutor Go won’t allow them to check Secretary Yoon’s phone records. At least now they know where the gold came from, but why would a construction company need to smuggle gold bars to China?

They assume it’s to set up a foreign slush fund, so Young-jin says to summon Yoon in for questioning. Prosecutor Go arrives to tell them to hand over the gold smuggling case to the prosecution department, but Jong-ho argues that they’re still investigating. Young-jin tells Go they’ve narrowed the case to KL Construction, asking him to let them finish the case.

Prosecutor Go is pretty snarky about the fact that none of them have studied tax law or money laundering (and even gets a dig in that they seem to hire based on looks, ha), but Do-young’s hackles are raised again and she says just because they never have, doesn’t mean they can’t. He patronizes her that it will involve a whole lot of reading, and reading is hard, so they should stick to things that involve running and catching criminals.

They have no choice but to hand over the case, especially since Chief Yeom has already given the order, but Young-jin confronts him anyway. He says it’s complicated now that a large corporation is involved, so the prosecutors need to investigate, but he doesn’t seem happy about it.

Young-jin gets home late that night and offers Nam-jin a sideways apology for always taking Ha-eun’s side. Nam-jin asks why she’s suddenly so hard on herself, saying she should be sorry for being incompetant, but Young-jin says that it’s not easy raising a child as well as she’s raised Ha-eun.

She tells her sister that as hard as she’s studied, if she still couldn’t pass the test, then the problem is with the world, not her. She assures Nam-jin that she’ll support her as long as she wants, and if she wants to keep trying to pass the test, then she should do that. That’s so sweet.

President Kang sits in his favorite restaurant in the dark, whispering something to Secretary Yoon that we don’t hear. Chief Yeom is in his office late, arguing with someone over the phone and insisting he doesn’t know anything.

Boss Park is improving so the doctors decide to remove his breathing tube. Yeom calls someone to tell them that he’s awake and talking, asking what they plan to do and growing agitated when he hears the answer.

Boss Park slides into a memory from twenty years ago, when he’d entered a salon room to find President Kang standing with a knife in his hand, and Young-jin’s father dead in a pool of blood. Kang had handed Park the knife and told him that he would become a murderer, and Park had asked him to keep his promise to save his daughter. Park had taken the knife and smeared blood all over himself.

In the present Boss Park gasps out a name: Choi Young-jin. He begs the nurse to call the police, and she notifies the guard outside Park’s door. Young-jin is called, but Secretary Yoon is already there at the hospital dressed as a doctor, sneaking into Boss Park’s room.

Yoon injects something into Boss Park’s IV line and tells him to go in peace. By the time Young-jin arrives, the doctors are trying to revive Park, who’s gone into cardiac arrest. They’re unable to save him, and Young-jin is left without the answers she was promised. Her only hope is the woman who visited him — possibly she knows something.

Young-jin finds her at her restaurant and tells her that Boss Park has died. She tells the woman that he’s the man who killed her father, but the woman says that in all her years of feeding gangsters, she can tell he wasn’t the kind to kill a man. She tells Young-jin that even if she knew anything she couldn’t tell, and sends her away.

Young-jin demands to know who did kill her father if Boss Park didn’t do it, and asks if the woman knows someone named Kang Tae-yoo. The woman says she doesn’t but her nervous expression gives her away — as does the fact that President Kang himself walks in at that exact moment.

Kang composes himself and the restaurant owner explains that she followed her here from the hospital after visiting Boss Park, and Young-jin knows he was lying when he said he didn’t know Park. Fed up, Young-jin demands the truth — why did Park kidnap and try to kill him?

President Kang breezes that it doesn’t matter now that the perpetrator is dead, so she has no pressing need to know the details. She says that Boss Park didn’t kill her father, asking if Kang knows who did. With Park’s promise to kill Kang then tell her the truth, it sure does look like he’s the true killer.

She really only wants to know the answer to one question: Did he know her father? Kang asks if that was the detective who was stubborn and difficult to communicate with, admitting that he did know him. “You killed him, didn’t you?” Young-jin asks.

Kang refuses to give a straight answer as usual, saying that even if he did, the statute of limitations has passed. Why bring it up now? Young-jin repeats that he killed her father, and points her taser at his face. Secretary Yoon tries to intervene, but President Kang stops him.

Kang actually has the nerve to warn Young-jin not to start something she can’t finish. He says she’s dumber than she looks but Young-jin only retorts that she’ll send him to the same room where his son now lives.

President Kang suggests she visit her father first, and Young-jin orders him onto his knees to be arrested. Yoon rushes her and she shoots him with the taser, then pulls her gun on Kang, yelling at him to get on his knees. He snarls that he’s never been on his knees in his entire life, screaming back at her, “Shoot me!”

COMMENTS

Well, I’d hoped we’d get some plot progression, or character progression, or some kind of progression in the second episode this week, but yet again we were given an episode where very little happened until nearly the end. Literally three quarters of this episode was spent waiting for something to happen, even by the characters themselves! I’m a bit worried that the writers are out of story and are hoping we haven’t noticed yet, but I’ve definitely noticed. It seems as though the plot has ground to a screeching halt, and has no ideas of where to go next.

One thing I liked about the show was the zippy transitioning from case to case, even introducing multiples cases at once, but now we’ve spend nearly two entire weeks on stolen cars. We hardly even saw the man in charge of that operation, and it was literally a case chosen at random from a stack on Jae-duk’s desk. which brings up another issue – does every case being handled in the Violent Crimes division trace directly back to President Kang? And why was a stolen car ring being handled by Violent Crimes at all? It’s just getting sloppy.

The writing has gotten into a worrying habit of repeating information, treating it as important, and hoping we don’t notice that it’s really not necessary to be going over this a second time. Especially since the information wasn’t critical the first time, such as the several scenes we’ve been treated to of President Kang telling Chief Yeom to kill Boss Park, when Yeom never even came close to agreeing to kill him. It’s just filler to watch the same basic scene multiple times, when those scenes ultimately have no impact on the plot itself.

I think the biggest problem though, is the confusing tendency of the show to deliver information to the viewers in a way that seems backwards. Lately the audience is shown how something goes down with the bad guys first, then spends an awful lot of time having the detectives catch up to what we already know. Was it truly necessary to spend a significant chunk of airtime watching the detectives confirm that Madam Park procured the gold for President Kang, or showing us the man who made the statue that the gold was transferred in two episodes ago? When we already know the details, watching the team gather up the same information we’ve knows for weeks just isn’t very interesting. I liked it a lot better when we were shown a crime scene, then followed along as Young-jin and her team pieced together random clues to form a really interesting explanation.

I guess the reason I’m so disillusioned by the show right now, after so many weeks of giving it the benefit of the doubt, is because I know it can do better. I’ve seen this drama be smart, and I’ve seen it give its characters interesting cases to solve. I was excited by a show that focused on the problem of teen runaways and featured a detective team that truly cared about the kids they were trying to save. When that was the underlying theme of all the cases, I was all in. Now it’s about stolen cars and gold bars, and I just don’t care all that much. I still hold out hope that we’ll get back to the really heart-wrenching cases that get our detectives emotionally involved, which was what made the show good.

RELATED POSTS

• Mrs. Cop: Episode 11
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 10
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 9
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 8
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 7
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 6
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 5
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 4
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 3
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 2
• Mrs. Cop: Episode 1