Possessed: Episode 6

by LollyPip

Things get pretty dark in this episode for our cranky cop – well, darker than usual, I should say. His nemesis is getting supernaturally stronger, while Pil-sung still hasn’t figured out exactly what he’s dealing with. Not only is a supernatural serial killer on the loose, but he’s putting together a plan to bring about complete social chaos, and time is running out to stop him.

 
EPISODE 6

While still at the site of Tae-shik’s murder, Chief Yoo notices that something is wrong with Pil-sung and says he’s worried for him. Pil-sung mentions the mirror and fingernails, saying that it’s like the killer is leaving him a message.

Chief Yoo says that Yang-woo’s case was all over the television, so everyone knows about those details, and this isn’t the first time someone copied a crime just to mess with the police. Pil-sung is sure that that’s not what’s happening this time, but Chief Yoo says that Hwang Dae-doo died twenty years ago, and he himself shot Yang-woo and watched him die.

They’re interrupted by Detective Kim from the Seoul Police Department. Detective Kim says that he’s taking over this case, explaining that it’s because of the new, dangerous “zombie” drug found on the scene and asking Chief Yoo not to take it personally.

Pil-sung pipes up, telling Detective Kim that the case is related to Hwang Dae-doo, but Chief Yoo stops him and leads him away, embarrassed. Back at the station, he tells Pil-sung to get himself together, because even if Dae-doo comes back from the dead, the case is out of their hands.

Chief Yoo heads home, and Yeon-hee follows him to ask if he intends to scold his daughter, Seung-hee, for breaking the bully’s wrist today. She says that as the youngest in her family with four older brothers, she thinks of Seung-hee like the little sister she never had, and asks Chief Yoo not to be too hard on her.

He says that regardless of circumstances, Seung-hee broke a girl’s wrist. But Yeon-hee promises to spend some time with Seung-hee this weekend and talk to her, and Chief Yoo is so moved that he agrees to let it go for now.

Pil-sung stays at the station long after everyone else has gone home, sighing over his nightmare featuring Dae-doo. A call sends him hurrying outside to find Seo-jung, who asks him to help her find her mother. He leaves Seo-jung to wait for him, but she gets curious and wanders over to his desk.

She snaps one of his handcuffs on her wrist, then realizes it’s locked. While she’s looking for the key, she sees a photo on his laptop from the murder scene and recognizes the symbol she saw in her vision.

Pil-sung returns and fusses at her for being nosy, but Seo-jung asks him dazedly where the picture was taken. She says she’s seen it before, and that she thinks something bad happened to her mother. Pil-sung drives Seo-jung to the address he found, both of them sitting in nervous silence until they pull up to the isolated shrine.

Pil-sung tells Seo-jung to stay in the car and approaches the shrine. He finds the ceremonial fan and knife still lying on the mat outside, and inside, he screams when he nearly steps on the bodies of Geum-joo and her assistant. Seo-jung is much calmer, but Pil-sung shoves her outside, away from the corpses.

She looks over the yard and, still eerily calm, tells Pil-sung, “They used the health of the psychic.” He orders her back to the car, but she says that she’s really okay.

In the morning, the police are there investigating the crime scene. Seo-jung still shows no emotion as the bodies are taken away, and Pil-sung pockets a photo found in the shrine. One of the detectives tells him that cars rarely come up here, but that CCTV cameras caught Yang-woo’s car in this area recently, and that he stayed for most of a night.

Seo-jung is still very quiet on the drive back, but she does show some interest when they near the sea, so they stop to sit on the beach. She tells Pil-sung that she’s been wanting to see the ocean, and now she can, thanks to her mother. She says that she’s never seen or spoken to her mother, so sitting in a funeral home mourning her will feel strange.

She muses that she’s never even dreamed about her mother, because only people you know appear in your dreams, but they were strangers. Pil-sung gruffly shoves the photo he saved at her, which is a picture of Seo-jung as a baby. He says that her mother may have been a stranger to her, but to her mother, she was that precious baby girl.

At work, Detective Choi asks Pil-sung how he knew to go to that shrine and find Yang-woo’s victims. Pil-sung wants to go back and look around some more, but Chief Yoo says that if Yang-woo was the killer, then the case is already closed.

He asks why Pil-sung is so obsessed with Yang-woo, and tells him to get counseling if he needs it. Pil-sung just huffs and stomps out, and Joon-hyung suggests that maybe Pil-sung has post-traumatic stress disorder from Yang-woo nearly killing him.

When Seo-jung returns to the store, her friend Ji-hang asks if she was out all night with a man. Seo-jung says it was something like that, but she declines to answer any of Ji-hang’s probing questions. She just crumples the baby picture of herself and throws it in the garbage.

She meets Pil-sung for dinner, where she tells Pil-sung that her mother isn’t quite dead — her body died, but her soul is still in this world. At Seo-jung’s apartment, Pil-sung shows her a photo of Yang-woo and tells her that he’s the man who killed her mother, and that he’s dead.

He can’t figure out why Yang-woo would go so far out of his way to kill an old woman, but Seo-jung knows: “It was to summon someone’s soul.” Pil-sung immediately guesses that he summoned Dae-doo, and Seo-jung explains that Dae-doo’s soul would have entered Yang-woo’s body, which explains Yang-woo’s strange behavior before he died.

Seo-jung says that Dae-doo was strong enough to completely overpower Yang-woo’s soul, which means he would have done the same to her mother’s. She agrees with Pil-sung that he probably possessed someone else after Yang-woo died, since her mother’s soul was very powerful.

She says that her mother has been sending her messages ever since Dae-doo’s soul absorbed her, but that Dae-doo is so strong, she’s probably not getting all of the messages. She says that Dae-doo’s new host body would have had to be near the place where Yang-woo died, because souls can’t stay too long outside of a body.

Meanwhile, Dae-doo brings the drug dealer, whose name is Chun-seob, back to Seung-hee’s home to offer him a deal. He makes Chun-seob a business partner in Great TF Group, and Chun-seob has no choice but to accept, seeming unsure but lured by the astronomical payoff Dae-doo offers.

Dae-doo asks him about the zombie drug, which Chun-seob was shipped in from abroad. Dae-doo tells him to get as much as he can, but Chun-seob says that it will be difficult because the police are watching for it since Tae-shik’s murder.

Dae-doo asks if they can make it, and Chun-seob says it’s easy to make, but the process creates a terrible odor. Dae-doo tells Chun-seob not to worry about finding a factory — unsurprisingly, there is already a drug lab in his basement.

Pil-sung goes looking for information on Dae-doo’s remains, and is told that his ashes would have been buried a year ago. But when the employee looks, he finds no record of Dae-doo’s ashes being buried, which means that someone took them.

It’s obvious to Pil-sung that Yang-woo stole Dae-doo’s ashes, took them to the shrine, and used them to summon Dae-doo’s soul. Seo-jung says softly that that’s why he went to her mother, because only special psychics can do it.

Pil-sung wonders whose body Dae-doo is in now, but Seo-jung says that the real problem is that the order between the mortal world and the underworld has been destroyed.

Pil-sung says that even if they catch Dae-doo’s current host body, if they kill him, he’ll just possess someone else. Seo-jung says she has to go somewhere, so Pil-sung drives her to a place out in the country where she asks to see “the godmother.”

The godmother is a very sickly older woman, who asks Seo-jung if Geum-joo told her where to find her. Seo-jung says that she’s never met her mother, but her aunt told her about this place. She tells the godmother that Geum-joo is dead, and the old woman sits up, gasping for air.

Outside, Pil-sung finds a small fluffy puppy and goes a little gaga over it. He takes it to its mother and watches them interact, getting a little emotional at the sight.

The godmother warns Seo-jung that if the gates of Hell open to the mortal world, something horrible will happen, and that Seo-jung is the only one who can fix it. When Seo-jung says she doesn’t choose that path, the godmother says that her mother didn’t choose it because she liked it, but because it was her unavoidable fate.

Seo-jung cries that she wants to live a normal life, but the godmother asks if she means to just let her mother’s soul suffer at the whim of an evil soul. She tells Seo-jung that if Dae-doo collects enough souls, he’ll gain unimaginable power, and that if Seo-jung doesn’t stop him, the world will fall into chaos.

Scared and lost, Seo-jung asks why it has to be her. The godmother says that it’s just her God-given destiny, and Seo-jung dissolves into tears.

When Pil-sung drops her off at home, he tells Seo-jung awkwardly that they’ll figure something out. Seo-jung talks about her dream of a cottage where she can see the ocean, and how at sunset she would walk on the beach holding the hand of the man she loves.

She says sadly, “But I can’t enjoy that extravagant fate.” She steps out of the car and goes inside, and Pil-sung just watches her go.

At the gym, Joon-hyung cringes as he watches two women spar in the boxing ring. They’re going hard, slamming each other around and literally pulling no punches. It’s Yeon-hee and Chief Yoo’s daughter Seung-hee, and Joon-hyung looks stunned when they finish their bout and hug it out.

He tells Yeon-hee hesitantly that this wasn’t what he’d pictured when she said she was into sports, and flinches when she goes to hug him. He accompanies them to lunch, where Seung-hee says that she wants to be a cop despite the fact that her father is against it.

Joon-hyung tries to talk her out of it, saying that it’s not like in dramas where all the cops are handsome, and Seung-hee asks Yeon-hee if he always talks this much, hee. Seung-hee’s plan is to take the police civil service exam, but Yeon-hee advises her to go to police college and become an elite cop, saying that once she’s accepted her dad will be happy about it.

Late that night, Chief Yoo is mystified by the fact that he can hear Seung-hee talking instead of sleeping. He peeks into her room and finds her studying, and he wonders if her sudden studiousness has anything to do with spending time with Yeon-hee.

The following day, Chief Yoo leaves work a bit early and tells the others to go enjoy life a little. Joon-hyung takes him up on it, and Detective Choi starts to feel like something is up. He’s right — Chief Yoo takes Joon-hyung and Yeon-hee to dinner, and he asks Yeon-hee what she and Seung-hee talked about yesterday. Yeon-hee says vaguely that Seung-hee will concentrate on her schoolwork from now on, and Chief Yoo happily tells Joon-hyung that he’s lucky to have her.

Chun-seob has some of the zombie drug manufactured, but he had it made in liquid form. He says that it’s taken orally, and needs thirty minutes to kick in. Dae-doo tells him to do a clinical trial — all they need is some “mice.”

Chun-seob sends a couple of his men out to a restaurant, where one of them pretends to be drunk and stumbles into another diner. He pours the man a shot of soju as an apology, but the drink is laced with the zombie drug.

The man is fine as he and his friends split up, then he starts to feel hot and headachey. By the time he gets home to his family, he’s dazed and covered in scratches. He glares at his wife and daughter with red-rimmed eyes, then lunges at them.

Dae-doo gets a visit at work from Soo-hyuk’s former assistant and her lawyer, and Dae-doo just asks how much they want. He says that the amount they’re asking (roughly nine million U.S. currency) is a high price for having a little fun, and the lawyer says that his client doesn’t actually want to settle.

Chuckling, Dae-doo tells them to to ahead and expose him if that’s what they want. They back down and agree to settle, and Dae-doo wishes the assistant, “Live a happy life!” ~shudder~

At school, a note is passed to Seung-hee from Jae-in, the bully whose wrist she broke, saying to come see her after school. Seung-hee remembers Yeon-hee’s advice to call her the next time Jae-in messed with her, so she does. Yeon-hee grabs Joon-hyung, Detective Choi, and Pil-sung and asks what she should do, and Pil-sung gets an idea.

Dae-doo follows Soo-hyuk’s former assistant that night, grinning that evil grin. At the same time, Seo-jung sees a vision of the training center the assistant just entered, then a second vision of Dae-doo watching her. The godmother had told her that her mother was trying to send her messages, so to keep her mind clear and open.

Yeon-hee and the team drive to the spot where Seung-hee’s bullies are known to hang out. Leaving Yeon-hee in the car, Pil-sung tells Detective Choi and Joon-hyung not to touch the girls, just scare them. They do the Badass Strut into the abandoned building and face off with the utterly unimpressed teens, saying that they’re Seung-hee’s oppas.

The girls just call for their oppas, who are actual thugs, so Pil-sung bluffs hard. He tells the girls not to mess with Seung-hee and they’ll leave without a fight, but it doesn’t work and their oppas just puff up at them. Detective Choi waves his arms at them in a martial-arts-ish gesture, but one kick to the face knocks him out cold.

Angry at being left behind, Yeon-hee storms in and offers to fight the oppas. She gives Pil-sung a condescending, Awww, you tried, smile, then goes in kicking. She takes down all the oppas in a matter of seconds.

The image of tiny little Yeon-hee lecturing the kneeling girls and their oppas is hilarious. She threatens to eat them if they cause any more trouble, while the guys watch with expressions varying from pride (Joon-hyung) to dismay (Pil-sung).

Seo-jung looks up the building she saw in her vision and, when she can’t reach Pil-sung, goes there alone. When he returns to the car Pil-sung finally gets her message, and he tells the others to take a taxi and leaves without them, ha. He calls Seo-jung and tells her he’s on his way and not to do anything.

But she sees Dae-doo crossing the street and recognizes him from her vision, so she grows alarmed and decides to follow him. Dae-doo sees her reflection in the glass, but he doesn’t let on that he knows she’s there. Pil-sung arrives in time to see Seo-jung entering the building behind Dae-doo, and he hurries to catch up.

Seo-jung is confused when Dae-doo walks through the building and out the back to an alley, but she keeps trailing him. He steps into another building, but Seo-jung loses sight of him. As she’s trying to find him again, he somehow circles around and grabs her, putting his knife to her throat.

At the contact, Seo-jung experiences a flood of visions — Dae-doo stabbing Tae-shik and the man in the alley, his spirit absorbing her mother’s soul, and even his hanging death in prison. Dae-doo whispers that he can sense everything about her, too, calling her Pil-sung’s girlfriend and Geum-joo’s daughter.

Growing more frantic with every moment, Pil-sung calls Seo-jung’s phone and follows the ringtone. He comes up the stairs and finds himself behind Dae-doo and Seo-jung, but Dae-doo senses that he’s there, and all the lights on the floor explode. He turns and gives the devastated Pil-sung a cheerful smile.

Pil-sung struggles to control his emotions as he tells Dae-doo to let Seo-jung go. Dae-doo says he’s curious to see the boyfriend’s reaction as his beloved gets her throat cut right in front of him. He starts to do it, but Pil-sung screams, “ME!! I’ll die! I’ll die.”

He sinks to his knees and in a shaking voice, tells Dae-doo to play a game with him. He says that Seo-jung means nothing to him, and that he’s Dae-doo’s target anyway, and Dae-doo laughs that that was so moving he almost cried. He says the same words that Yang-woo said, that it’s a pity if his toy is thrown away immediately.

He tells Pil-sung that he’s his last proof so to wait until it’s time. He turns back to Seo-jung and the knife digs into her throat as he purrs that it’s time for her to join her mother. He raises the knife, then brings it down as Pil-sung screams.

Epilogue.

Earlier, Seo-jung had seen someone dressed in a bear costume giving out free hugs on the street. She’d stepped in for a hug, and as the bear patted her back, she’d begun to cry. Pil-sung had seen her crying on the bear’s shoulder and had sighed heavily, unsure what to do for her.

 
COMMENTS

Wow. I mean, wow. Pil-sung just ripped my heart out in those last few minutes. I know he’s an admittedly emotional guy, and he’s not denying that he has feelings for Seo-jung (to himself anyway), but to offer to trade his life for hers… if that’s not love, then I don’t know what is. He looked like Dae-doo was stabbing him in the heart by holding that knife to Seo-jung’s throat, and I genuinely fear that he cares for Seo-jung so much already that it’s putting him in greater danger. Dae-doo knows his weak point now, and he’ll have no compunctions in exploiting it as far as he can. I wasn’t expecting Seo-jung and Pil-sung to cross paths with Dae-doo quite yet, but maybe now that they have, some questions will get answered and they’ll have some more information to work with (I’m assuming they’ll escape this first encounter).

I’m so curious about Dae-doo, and I hope the show goes deeper into what made him a serial killer. He’s dropped hints, particularly when he said to Pil-sung in his dream that he was abandoned by society and that he wants to repay the pain the world caused him. Obviously, something happened to make him this twisted and sick. He revels in killing those with loved ones and enjoys watching them mourn his victims, and I feel that there’s something extremely significant in that. Despite gaining so much supernatural power, Dae-doo has to have a weak point, and I feel like it’s somewhere in his past. If Pil-sung and Seo-jung can discover what caused Dae-doo to wish for mass misery, between that and their uncanny abilities they should be able to find a way to bring him down.

It’s unnerving the way Dae-doo is able to pick up the skills and knowledge of his host body, and it terrifies me, thinking of who he might possess if Soo-hyuk’s body dies. When he entered Yang-woo, he knew how to do surgery and impersonate the doctor, and now that he’s in Soo-hyuk, he’s suddenly capable of wheeling and dealing and has knowledge of high-level business politics. Dae-doo himself never struck me as very school-smart (though I know that serial killers are generally extremely intelligent), in the sense that he didn’t seem to have much education to speak of. But now he’s amassed the knowledge of three people, which is only making him scarier and more menacing.

I want to go on and on and on about how good this show is, how it brings out emotions that I haven’t felt while watching a drama in a long time, but honestly, I feel like my words aren’t good enough. Every single bit of Possessed is nearly perfect, and there’s just nothing I can say to express how it makes me feel. Just… if you aren’t watching it yet, do. You won’t be sorry.

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