Woman With a Suitcase: Episode 15

by Paroma

The last battle begins as Geum-joo throws her all into a case that could potentially kill her career as a lawyer. Mysteries are unravelled and hidden crimes brought to light, even as those with the blackest of consciences work to undermine the system. With Bok-geo’s advice and Suk-woo’s help, our heroine must figure out a way to lead the villains to their own downfall, or risk losing everything.

 
EPISODE 15: “God’s Eyes”

Geum-joo tells Hye-joo that her appeal for a retrial has been accepted and asks her to watch how she wins it for Min-ah and Gyeong-hwan. Hye-joo counters by asking how Geum-joo plans to get Bok-geo acquitted even if she manages to win.

Prosecutor Choi discusses Yoo Tae-ho’s disappearance with his colleagues, and one of them brings up the missing page from Ji-ah’s autopsy report. Just then, Suk-woo walks in and accuses Prosecutor Choi of tampering with the report and hiding the page. He promises to unveil the truth.

The prosecutor is flustered enough to barge into Hye-joo’s office in a panic, telling her that Suk-woo and Geum-joo intend to prove Bok-geo’s innocence during the retrial. Hye-joo assures him that it won’t happen, but something about her demeanor makes Prosecutor Choi ask if she was the one who took the page from the report.

Hye-joo easily admits it, adding that he should be grateful for it. Prosecutor Choi asks to have the page back, since Hye-joo might suddenly decide to cooperate with Geum-joo. To prove him wrong, Hye-joo asks for a lighter and suddenly sets the page on fire.

Realizing that it was the only proof pointing to the real murderer, “Alan Baston,” Prosecutor Choi tries to stamp out the flames, but it’s too late. He looks at Hye-joo and observes that she’s no longer the Hye-joo he knew.

CEO Lee visits the offices of another law and is asked to join their company after he leaves Oh Sung. CEO Lee asks whose idea that was and is mildly surprised to hear that Han Ji-eun is behind it. She walks into the room and explains that since she didn’t want Hye-joo handling her cases, she decided to hire this firm on the condition that he would be recruited.

CEO Lee tells Han Ji-eun that he’ll think about the offer, and she asks how he intends to teach Hye-joo a lesson. At that moment, he gets a call from someone informing him that his vacation home is being raided by the police. He arrives to find diggers gathered around a spot where a body has been found. Fortunately for CEO Lee, it seems to only be the body of a dead badger.

Fixer Kang cleans his car and thinks back on the night when he got rid of Yoo Tae-ho. In flashback, we see Yoo Tae-ho gagged and kneeling on the ground. Fixer Kang told him to swallow something before he killed him, explaining that Ji-ah cleverly left evidence pointing to her murderer in this same manner.

In the present, Geum-joo and Suk-woo go over their list of witnesses and evidence. Suk-woo asks if she intends to use Hye-ryung’s clip at the retrial even though it may allow the opposition to accuse them of a conflict of interest because they represented Hye-ryung in the past. Geum-joo already thought of this, but she’s ready for it.

CEO Lee meets Hye-joo and tells her to lose the retrial and focus on leaving Bok-geo a criminal. Hye-joo asks if he’s telling her to separate the two cases, looking thoughtful.

Editor Go keeps watch outside CEO Lee’s vacation home, while Bok-geo’s driver and Reporter Baek take pictures of everything inside. The driver finds a peculiar set of items framed like trophies on a wall, one of which lies empty on the floor. The label identifies it as “Sam Han Technology Patent Lawsuit,” which, unknown to them, is the case Fixer Kang’s father lost to CEO Lee.

Bok-geo finds the information interesting and tells his driver to look into the patent. Geum-joo and An-na enter an old, rundown factory and come across an old newspaper with an article on the patent lawsuit that ended with CEO Lee having Fixer Kang’s father arrested.

Geum-joo visits Bok-geo at the prison and tells him that he’ll be asked to stand witness. Bok-geo warns her against “double-timing” and tells her to either save the kids or save him. He explains that trying to prove his innocence through the retrial might tangle the case up, so she should focus on the kids while he works on freeing himself.

She asks what his strategy is, and Bok-geo suggests that she call CEO Lee to the witness stand and use his past as a prosecutor and an attorney to set a trap for him. They exchange a look of understanding.

Hye-ryung receives a subpoena, and Hye-joo persuades her to attend court. She also sends Hye-ryung’s assistant out of the country, since he was the one to hand over the payment to Lee Byung-dae for killing Min-ah.

The date of the retrial arrives, and reporters surround Geum-joo as she enters the court. She only tells them that the truth can’t be locked away before making her way inside.

Bok-geo is escorted in before the session begins and finds Geum-joo bent over paperwork. He walks up to her and tells her that she’s prettiest when he sees her in court. Suk-woo interrupts his flirting by pointing out Bok-geo’s seat to him before grinning and ducking away.

Judge Seo begins the session by having all witnesses pledge to tell the truth. Suk-woo calls his first witness, Min-ah, and guides her through her side of the story, establishing that she was attacked because she took the video of clip of Hye-ryung with Yoo Tae-ho.

Prosecutor Choi gets up to cross-examine her, and narrows in on her testimony that she was being paid by Ji-ah to go to CEO Lee’s vacation home to meet men. He makes a point of saying that she was selling sex, which makes Suk-woo protest that she was a minor at the time and unaware of the consequences of going with Ji-ah. Min-ah returns to her seat, humiliated.

Suk-woo calls his next witness, Lee Byung-dae, and the young man recounts how he was paid to get Min-ah’s phone, and how he had panicked when Min-ah told him that she hadn’t brought her phone with her.

He had dragged her to a nearby park and threatened to kill her. She had handed him the money Ji-ah gave her and tried to run away, but in the ensuing tussle, they fell, and she was accidentally stabbed.

In the present, Lee Byung-dae confesses that he thought she was dead, which is why he ran away. He further tells the court that the knife he used had been found under his mattress by the Busan police, and so he had confessed his crime to them.

When Suk-woo asks how he was released, Lee Byung-dae looks toward Prosecutor Jung and admits that despite his confession, he was told that the case was closed. That’s why he was allowed to walk free.

When it’s his turn, Prosecutor Choi asks Lee Byung-dae where he spent the money he was given to attack Min-ah, and smiles to hear about his drug habits. He casts doubt on the testimony of a drug user and looks at Bok-geo as he speculates whether Lee Byung-dae has been hired by someone to give false testimony.

Geum-joo calls Hye-ryung up to the stand next. She begins by asking if Hye-ryung knows Yoo Tae-ho well, to which Hye-ryung says that she only knows him as a model for Oh Sung Fashion. Geum-joo runs the video Min-ah took, and when Hye-ryung denies that the woman in the video is her, Geum-joo adds a letter from an expert which states that the recording has not been altered.

As Hye-ryung gets angry, Geum-joo asks if she hired Lee Byung-dae to get the phone from Min-ah. Hye-ryung refuses to answer any further questions, which doesn’t seem to be what Hye-joo coached her to do.

Geum-joo then calls Byung-dae back to the stand and asks him to identify the man who paid him. After sifting through a pile of photos, he stops her at the image of Hye-ryung’s assistant. Geum-joo asks Hye-ryung if she’ll still insist that the video has been manipulated.

Suk-woo calls for Hye-joo next, and An-na murmurs under her breath that this is her last chance to come back to them.

Bok-geo’s driver/agent meets with his NIS superiors, who tell him that British Intelligence wants their help in arresting a certain “Alan Baston.”

Geum-joo reminds Hye-joo that when she defended Gyeong-hwan, she had believed in his innocence. Hye-joo tells the judge that she will not testify against her present client to defend a former one, and the judge agrees. Geum-joo asks if the woman in the clip is Hye-ryung, and whether she knows the whereabouts of Hye-ryung’s assistant. Hye-joo, in turn, asks her for the source of the clip.

Pleasantly, she points out that if Geum-joo herself was the source, then she’s breaching client confidentiality (as she had previously defended Hye-ryung), and is in violation of the Attorney-at-law Act.

Geum-joo looks at Hye-joo with a rueful smile, and tells Hye-joo that despite a conflict of interest, a truth that affects the good of all needs to be revealed. She then asks Hye-joo not to use fallacious arguments to hide that truth.

Prosecutor Choi calls Gyeong-hwan next. He asks why he wrote letters of confession to the police after his release if he’s so innocent. Gyeong-hwan tries to explain that he did it out of fear, since a scary man had threatened to kill him. Prosecutor Choi mocks his changing testimonies.

Geum-joo asks Gyeong-hwan if Prosecutor Jung beat him during the interrogation that led to his false confession. Gyeong-hwan says no, but he did do something else.

In CCTV footage that Geum-joo shows the court, we see that Prosecutor Jung fed Gyeong-hwan information about where Min-ah was taken and where her body was found, and then asked him to point it out on a map. Geum-joo ends her argument by underlining how the prosecutor manipulated Gyeong-hwan into a confession.

Suk-woo asks Prosecutor Jung on the witness stand if he admits to coercing a confession out of Gyeong-hwan. He denies it, but Suk-woo shows him his written order to his subordinates, telling them to let Lee Byung-dae go, since the case was already closed. Prosecutor Jung still denies it, earning a look of contempt from Suk-woo.

Geum-joo calls Bok-geo to the stand and asks about his involvement in Min-ah’s case. He explains that he became interested when he saw that someone named Tomy Kim was involved in the case, and that he was based out of an Oh Sung vacation home. Geum-joo then asks whether he really killed Ji-ah, and he says yes, shocking everyone on his team.

Geum-joo asks again, and he says that it was his fault. He says that quitting as a prosecutor during the sex hostess case, living a life of compromise as a paparazzi CEO, and then sitting by while a woman (Geum-joo) got tangled up in this case and had to go to jail was all because of him.

The audience lets up admiring cries of, “What a man!” (snort), while Geum-joo summarizes his confession as a symbolic acceptance of guilt, not a literal one.

When Prosecutor Choi gets up to ask why Bok-geo remained silent about Min-ah’s case if he knew the truth, he answers that he lacked crucial evidence. Bok-geo further needles Prosecutor Choi by saying that the common factor between the paparazzi and prosecutors is that sometimes they both remain silent despite knowing the truth.

Prosecutor Choi calls CEO Lee to the stand, who defends his “Food Talk” as an elite, civilized gathering, and even claims Bok-geo as a member. He offers to submit a photograph that proves his membership, and we know he has that picture from the one time Bok-geo attended a meeting at CEO Lee’s invitation.

Geum-joo gets up to cross-examine him next. She compliments him on his illustrious career as a trial attorney, which seems to throw him. Then she shows him some newspaper clips, and he quickly identifies his old cases, one of them being the patent lawsuit with Fixer Kang’s father.

Geum-joo says that she heard he saved souvenirs from all his old cases, including one from that case. He admits so, but when he asks why that is relevant, Geum-joo asks the judges to remember what CEO Lee just testified to. Then she pointedly says that given what a remarkable man CEO Lee is, he could never be involved in anything unsavory.

For his closing statement, Prosecutor Choi argues that while Gyeong-hwan’s confession may have been coerced, Bok-geo’s case is unrelated to the this, and he is still guilty of murder.

Geum-joo pleads with the court to right the wrongs of the past and give a verdict of “Not Guilty” for Gyeong-hwan.

The judges sit in deliberation. One of the judges points out to Judge Seo that giving a not guilty verdict would mean admitting to a mistake on the court’s part, while the second judge brings up Geum-joo’s interrogation with CEO Lee.

He interprets her talk of CEO Lee’s amazing, spotless career as a subtle hint that she’ll let the matter of the “Food Talk” go, if the judges will give the “Not Guilty” verdict. The others seem to agree, and Judge Seo comes to a decision of “Not Guilty.”

As Geum-joo hugs Gyeong-hwan and Min-ah in congratulations, Hye-ryung is arrested on charges of hiring Lee Byung-dae to attack Min-ah. The press converges on the victors and asks Geum-joo how she feels.

Geum-joo tells them that she took the case because she wanted to be famous, but she’ll only be satisfied once Ji-ah and Yoo Tae-ho’s cases are resolved as well. She asks them to come and interview her then, and the reporters happily promise to do so.

Hye-joo walks out to her car, but is kidnapped by a masked figure. CEO Lee enters his home with the issue of the patent case still ringing in his ears. He finds his framed trophy of that case on the floor with the trophy missing, and wonders if Geum-joo set a trap for him in court somehow.

Fixer Kang sends him a picture of him holding CEO Lee’s souvenir from his father’s case — a bolt — in front of Yoo Tae-ho’s face. He tells CEO Lee over the phone that he’s leaving the country, but that he wanted to give him a present first. Then Fixer Kang sends him an image of the location where he’ll find his gift.

Fixer Kang arrives at the airport and gets through security, but stops when someone texts him a picture of Hye-joo tied to a chair. Prosecutor Choi receives the text as well, thoroughly rattled.

CEO Lee finds the spot where Fixer Kang left his present and begins to dig. As soon as he uncovers Yoo Tae-ho’s body, Prosecutor Choi and his team arrive. The prosecutor arrests CEO Lee before demanding to know where Hye-joo is.

Geum-joo waits at the morgue while a bolt is extracted from Yoo Tae-ho’s body. She thinks back to her talk with Bok-geo about the killer, since Bok-geo had noticed a pattern in his killings which included shifting blame on someone else by planting evidence.

He had hypothesized that if the souvenir had disappeared, and if Fixer Kang really was working with Hye-joo, then his new target would be CEO Lee.

We find Fixer Kang and CEO Lee now under the custody of both the British Intelligence and the NIS. During the interrogation, Bok-geo’s driver/agent shows CEO Lee their own copy of the page missing from Ji-ah’s autopsy.

Prosecutor Choi is asked by his superior to cancel Bok-geo’s arrest in order to avoid a media storm, since there’s now evidence that CEO Lee ordered Ji-ah and Yoo Tae-ho’s murder to hide the reality behind “Food Talk.” When Prosecutor Choi asks for proof of Bok-geo’s innocence, his superior hands him a copy of the autopsy page, which quickly shuts him up.

Prosecutor Choi takes his time cancelling the arrest, keeping Suk-woo and Bok-geo waiting. Once the order comes, he asks Bok-geo where Hye-joo is, and promises to do well if he tells him.

Bok-geo doesn’t have any reason to do him favors, so he just leaves, while Suk-woo stays back to punch the prosecutor in the face. Then Suk-woo declares that he’ll be cleaning up the prosecutor’s office by joining it.

Bok-geo dresses in his own clothes as the news announces his release. He walks out to find Geum-joo waiting as he hails her first as his attorney, and then as Geum-joo the person. They stand close, grinning at each other like teenagers, when Bok-geo’s gaze falls on something coming toward them.

He looks at her and says ruefully that it won’t be easy for them, since it seems that it’s her turn this time. Then cops run up to them with a warrant for Geum-joo’s arrest. She’s been reported for violating the Attorney-at-Law Act.

 
COMMENTS

The show’s habit of milking every moment for drama has become so predictable that at this point, I’m not even surprised that the reunion lasted all of two minutes before Geum-joo got dragged off to prison. Here’s hoping the final episode gives us a generous amount of Bok-geo and Geum-joo time to make up for all the years they spent apart.

This episode was particularly dense, with the story outpacing logic. The attempt to resolve all the plot lines through one trial ended up creating a messy, somewhat confusing hour, where people seemed to jump to a whole lot of right conclusions for plot convenient reasons. With very little evidence to tie Fixer Kang to CEO Lee’s old case or knowledge of his new alliance with Hye-joo, Bok-geo still managed to guess that Fixer Kang would want to implicate CEO Lee in Yoo Tae-ho’s murder. Prosecutor Choi’s superior showed him the image of Ji-ah’s sketch of a parrot on a wrapper to prove that Bok-geo was innocent, when at no point had anyone even looked into what that image could mean. How would they even know about Fixer Kang’s parrot fixation? When did that investigation happen, and why did we see none of it?

There were plenty of inconsistencies to go on about, and more than a few unexplained shifts in the narrative (like why Hye-joo’s kidnapping would cause Fixer Kang to turn himself in), but overall I was glad to finally see most of our baddies being served their just desserts. I’m optimistic that the show will try to clear up how things fell into place as perfectly as they did in the final episode.

For the most part, I had accepted that Hye-joo was evil, and was waiting for some final tremendous betrayal on her part. It turns out that the betrayal was that video clip she handed Geum-joo. It happened a little too early and with very little drama, so I think I kind of missed the impact. While I can see the trap and that Geum-joo decided to walk into it with her eyes open, after years of Hye-joo’s vitriol and Geum-joo’s anger at her, I can’t see why Geum-joo would protect her stepsister again. Habit? But no matter how much old loyalties tug at Geum-joo’s heart, I can’t see her enduring a second stint in jail for her ungrateful, selfish sister. Here’s hoping Geum-joo does more than upturning a basket of shredded paper on Hye-joo this time.

Hye-joo’s kidnapping kind of came out of nowhere, though. Just when I was settling in to view Hye-joo as the ultimate threat, the show takes her out and makes her a pawn again. I almost like the arc of her character now that I can see what the story intended, but villain or not, after outmaneuvering all the people who ever used her, it’ll make for a pretty tragic story if she ends up with her agency stripped once again. Now the question is, which side is playing her this time? Something tells me that Bok-geo knows more than he’s telling.

Just like Hye-joo’s character arc, Suk-woo finally got where we had hoped he would arrive all along. He’s good friends with Geum-joo and Bok-geo, and his determination to clean up the system is as strong as ever, if a bit tempered by the underhanded skills he learned from his paralegal mentor. While this is the growth we wanted for his character, I still regret the many episodes we wasted on his obstinate pursuit of a one-sided crush. That time could have been spent on watching his idealism repeatedly clashing against Geum-joo’s wise practicality, with both characters actively learning from each other.

However, with this penultimate recap, I want to thank the show for giving us a great cast, an excellent mix of interesting characters with great potential, case-of-the-week stories that tied seamlessly into the main narrative, and an OTP that made us smile throughout.

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