Mouse: Episode 6

by LollyPip

The closer our detectives seem to get to finding the killer, the less they seem to really know about him. And although our bereaved cop seems to think he knows who the killer is, what if he’s wrong? A little boy’s life is on the line and time is running out — can they solve the mystery in time?

 
EPISODE 3 RECAP

Moo-won lies on the floor of the church, his throat having been slit on live television. His last gasping words are for his killer, “May the Lord… save… your soul.”

The killer appears as his childhood self as he looks up at the statue of Jesus. Covered in blood, he throws out his arms in grotesque mockery as he asks, “How do I look? I asked not to be turned into a monster. I begged. But you ignored my prayer. And you call yourself a deity? From this moment on, that job will be mine. I will judge all the fools who believe in your nonsense.”

The killer hangs Moo-won’s body from the ceiling, and on the wall behind him, he writes in blood: I AM GOD.

Bong-yi arrives at the church first. The killer is still there and he grabs her by the hair, but she’s brought a knife, which she swings at him. After a short fight, the killer comes very close to stabbing Bong-yi, but he hears the cops arriving and runs away.

Ba-reum arrives on the scene after Bong-yi is taken away in an ambulance. He recognizes the same mint scent that lingered around Halmoni’s body, and sure enough, there’s Yo-han lurking in the crowd. Moo-won shows up moments later, and when he sees his brother’s body, he remembers Detective Park’s warning not to do the broadcast or he’d lose what he most loved.

As Moo-won screams and has to be dragged away from his brother’s body, Ba-reum finally steps inside the church. He sees the carnage and bursts into tears.

The SBC newscaster receives a video from the killer. First, Han-kook is watching a family have a picnic and talking about the fable of the donkey and the goat. The killer asks Han-kook if he’s jealous of the other boy for having a family, but Han-kook doesn’t answer.

Later, the killer kidnaps the other boy as well and offers to kill him if Han-kook wants. But Han-kook tells the killer to send the other boy home. The killer croons that those who don’t get jealous are sinners, but Han-kook only looks at the killer and says, “I pity you.”

Han-kook finishes the fable (the jealous goat talks the donkey into pretending to be sick, but the farmer sacrifices the goat and uses its lungs to make medicine for the donkey). The killer tells him to choose… should the donkey — the other boy — die, or will he?

Moo-chi had mistakenly thought that Han-kook’s fable was about wrath, but in reality, it was about jealousy. The other little boy was returned home safely, leading the police to believe that Han-kook has been murdered.

Moo-chi has to be sedated and is brought to the hospital, while Yo-han visits Moo-won’s body in the morgue. Everyone shows up for Moo-won’s funeral, and at the same time, a body believed to be Daniel Lee’s is found in the ocean, too decayed for them to identify it yet.

Bong-yi is given the all-clear by Yo-han to go home after her beating at the hands of the killer. He asks if she saw the killer’s face, and when she says she didn’t, he tells her darkly that he’d have killed her if she had. Bong-yi asks if they’ve met, but Ba-reum’s entrance gives Yo-han the chance to slip away.

Ba-reum yells at Bong-yi, and she argues that she couldn’t just sit at home and watch Moo-won get killed. She asks after Moo-chi, so Ba-reum wants to know how she knows the detective, but Detective Kang comes to ask Bong-yi some questions.

Detective Kang also fusses at Bong-yi for going to the church alone, so she explains that she called in which church the killer had Moo-won in, but she wasn’t believed. Unfortunately she didn’t see the killer well, but she recalls that he was very strong, and that he wasn’t left-handed. Confused, Ba-reum is sure that the person who attacked him was a lefty.

Ji-eun is at the hospital to see her son, but when she spots him, Yo-han is staring intently into Bong-yi’s room. Ji-eun looks in, sees Ba-reum fluttering around Bong-yi, and she gags. Hmmm…

Ba-reum tells Bong-yi that he promised Halmoni that he would look after her if she wasn’t around. As Ba-reum is leaving, she abruptly recalls that she cut the killer’s left arm. Ba-reum leaves, promising to tell Detective Kang everything she remembered.

Meanwhile, Ji-eun runs outside to throw up. She recalls how she once throttled Jae-hoon and mutters, “I should have killed him then!” Ba-reum spots her and asks if she’s okay, and she gasps that she’s fine as she hurries away, both of them unaware that Yo-han is watching them from a window.

As it turns out, the boy that was returned home safely is Han-kook’s half-brother from his estranged father (oh, ouch). He was unconscious the whole time, only remembering someone putting a cloth over his mouth while he played, then waking up in the same spot.

Hong-joo asks if the killer left anything with Moo-won’s body like he did with his other victims, and she’s shown a picture that makes her go quiet. She visits Ba-reum, and while they talk, Dong-goo poses a wild theory that the killer must have bugged their house, which is how he knew they were making a fake video.

Hong-joo reminds him that they filmed the fake video very soon after having the idea, so there wasn’t time for the killer to place a bug. Dong-goo hears a strange noise in a bedroom and briefly checks, but he doesn’t see Yo-han lurking in the closet.

Ba-reum takes the last of the japchae that Moo-won made to Moo-chi, calling an apology through the door for lying that the japchae they shared before was made by Moo-won. He says that Moo-won wouldn’t want to see Moo-chi like this, and Moo-chi briefly stirs from his drunken stupor.

Eleven days after Han-kook’s disappearance, the killer releases another video. It’s blurred for television, but it appears to be a dead goat with the killer holding its lungs (as per the fable he’s assigned to Han-kook). The killer’s distorted voice taunts Moo-chi, saying that this is how things end for the Goatman and asking if he’s just giving up on Han-kook.

He says that at midnight in three days, the country will see Han-kook’s body without its lungs unless Moo-chi saves him. Moo-chi finally wakes up and makes himself eat Moo-won’s japchae, imagining his hyung lovingly reminding him not to eat too fast.

Stricken, Moo-chi apologizes, sobbing that this is all his fault. He sees Moo-won as his young self, saying that it’s not his fault — not then, and not now. Moo-chi is nearly overcome by grief again, but he nods at Moo-won and keeps eating.

Shin Sang waits at Yo-han’s house to ask about the fact that he’s the last person Kim Joon-sung spoke to on the phone before he disappeared. He asks why Yo-han stopped calling Joon-sung when they usually talk daily, and Yo-han says that Joon-sung was going on vacation.

Moo-chi goes back to work and starts studying the killer’s clues with new determination. He feels like the picture that Halmoni was holding is important, but he has no idea where she got it. Moo-chi finds Halmoni’s backpack, the pilfered yogurts still inside, which remind him of the lady at the temp agency complaining about stolen yogurts.

He goes back there and the lady confesses that Halmoni was looking for work, but that she denied her due to her age. Through CCTV and phone records, Moo-chi deduces that Halmoni must have taken the job offered by Ji-eun, so he goes to question her.

He asks about her hiring a housekeeper, and as she’s explaining, she gets up to feed her whining dog. Her phone lights up with a message that some money was sent automatically to Go Moo-chi, and when he sees it, Moo-chi realizes that she’s Han Seo-joon’s ex-wife, who’s been sending him money monthly for years to pay for Moo-won’s extensive surgeries.

He leaves and is quickly able to confirm that Ji-eun changed her name, and the name of her son, years ago. What’s more, her son is now doctor Sung Yo-han. Moo-chi calls Shin Sang, who says that Yo-han’s friend Joon-sung has been murdered.

They meet at Joon-sung’s place, where it’s obvious that Joon-sung was severely tortured. They found a plane ticket to Switzerland, so Moo-chi assumes that Joon-sung knew Yo-han was the killer and that Yo-han killed him to stop him from fleeing the country.

Even more interestingly, Joon-sung’s time of death is during Moo-chi’s press conference, when he got a call from the killer. Moo-chi imagines Yo-han calling him to tell him to do a TV show to save Han-kook, while standing over his friend’s dead body.

Moo-chi sobs that it’s not enough that Han Seo-joon killed his parents, but now Seo-joon’s son has killed his brother. He leans into the face of the imagined Yo-han and growls, “You just wait. I will kill you first, go to prison, then kill your father.”

He bribes an electrician into disabling Yo-han’s security system and sneaks into Yo-han’s home. He heads downstairs and finds the locked basement door, but just as he’s about to break into the room, he hears Yo-han returning home and he sneaks out into the garage.

While in there, Moo-chi finds a pair of bloody shoes in a box, one of them missing a piece of decoration that was found at the location where Daniel Lee is believed to have been murdered. He places them near Yo-han’s trash and calls Shin Sang, who immediately figures out that Moo-chi got the shoes inside. Moving them would make them inadmissible as evidence, but Moo-chi forcefully convinces him that a small white lie could save lives.

Meanwhile, Ba-reum goes to the prison to get something for Chi-kook. While he’s there he runs into Hong-joo, who came to find out if anyone could have sneaked in on the day that Chi-kook was attacked. Security is pretty tight and all visitors are logged, unless they get a ride in from a prison employee.

The prison doctor is in the infirmary, where Han Seo-joon faked chest pain to ask if Yo-han was here the day Chi-kook was attacked. The doctor is called to talk to Hong-joo, and he admits that Yo-han was there to see him that day, and that he drove Yo-han past security, but he’s insistent that Yo-han didn’t harm Chi-kook.

This is the first that Hong-joo has heard Yo-han’s name associated with this case, and she’s stunned to realize that her boyfriend might be a murder suspect. Suddenly she recalls how Yo-han seemed terrified that night as he held her, and the cartoon Goatman bandage she’d found in his house.

She lets herself into Yo-han’s house and marches straight to Yo-han’s office to look for the bandage she threw away. Instead, she finds a bugging device in his trash can. It makes her wonder if Yo-han bugged Ba-reum and Dong-goo’s place, as Dong-goo suggested.

Flustered, she knocks some files onto the floor. As she’s picking them up, she finds the Goatman bandage under Yo-han’s desk… then looks up to see him in the doorway. Eep! She covers by throwing her arms around him, and behind his back she shoves the bandage into her sleeve.

When she leaves the room, Yo-han carefully hides one of the files she knocked over — a report from a genetic testing lab. He brings Hong-joo a drink and asks if she’s free tomorrow night, because he has something to tell her.

Moo-chi is outside the house, waiting for Shin Sang to get a search warrant with the bloody shoes. He wonders why Hong-joo is at Yo-han’s house, and he realizes that in a previous conversation, she’d known that Sung Yo-han is Han Seo-joon’s son without him telling her. He calls Hong-joo and tells her to join him if she wants an exclusive story.

A while later, Yo-han is driving when the car behind him speeds up and rear-ends him. The driver insists on getting the police even though Yo-han just wants to go. Ah, Moo-chi is watching from nearby — this was a set-up. The search warrant for Yo-han’s house is denied because the blood on the shoes wasn’t a match for any of the murder victims, so they had to think up another plan to catch Yo-han, as tonight is the third and final midnight before Han-kook is killed.

The other driver (Shin Sang’s girlfriend, hee) tells the cops that she heard a child’s voice coming from Yo-han’s bag, and since Han-kook is still missing, the police order him to open the bag. Moo-chi sits in his car, gun pointed at Yo-han, ready to shoot him dead the moment Han-kook is safe.

But the bag only holds clothes for a long shift at work, so Shin Sang texts his girlfriend to say that actually, the sound came from the trunk. Moo-chi braces himself again, but he’s disappointed when Yo-han’s trunk is empty aside from an emergency kit. Time is running out, so Shin Sang follows Yo-han while Moo-chi moves on to Plan C — breaking into Yo-han’s home and shooting the knob off the basement door.

Yo-han drives to a junkyard and hides, and when Shin Sang passes his car, he takes off in the opposite direction. Shin Sang calls Moo-chi, who has Yo-han’s vehicle tracked. Hong-joo has the bandage analyzed, and when the DNA on it doesn’t match Chi-kook, they move on to testing it against the killer’s other victims.

She runs into Moo-chi again at the station, where he snarls at her for hiding the fact that she knew Yo-han is Seo-joon’s son. He’s so angry that he’s nearly crying and has to walk away from her, and just then, she feels sick and runs off to vomit. Oh no… she’s pregnant, isn’t she?

Moo-chi heads to the control room where the team has all the photos and evidence of the killer’s victims on the walls. He sees something new — photos of Moo-won’s body. What Moo-chi wasn’t told is that the killer sliced open Moo-won’s abdomen and left stones inside, as in another fable.

Moo-chi sinks to his knees, overcome with grief and horror all over again. He ends up unconscious at a restaurant, surrounded by empty soju bottles.

The test comes back from the blood on Yo-han’s shoes, and it matches the blood of the body that was found in the ocean. Captain Baek also gets the results on the Goatman bandage, which also points towards Yo-han being the killer.

Meanwhile, Yo-han burns the folder from the genetic testing lab then goes to see his mother. “You knew, didn’t you?” he asks her. “That your son is a murderer.” At the same time, Hong-joo takes a pregnancy test, which comes up positive.

Home alone, Bong-yi slips and falls, but luckily Ba-reum is nearby. He piggybacks Bong-yi to his house so that he can watch over her. He settles her in his bed, adorably self-conscious that the blankets smell like him, though Bong-yi seems to secretly like it.

Ba-reum heads back to Bong-yi’s house for some of her things, promising to bring Eo Bong-yi, her bird, back with him. On the way, Ba-reum gets a call that Moo-chi is missing and that Halmoni’s DNA was found on a bandage at Yo-han’s house. He decides to go check it out himself and ends up in Yo-han’s basement, courtesy of the broken doorknob. He finds the wall of photos, but Yo-han is outside, seeming to know that someone is there. He steals a delivery scooter and takes off just as the cops arrive.

Bong-yi wakes up and hears Yo-han breaking into Ba-reum’s house. She calls Moo-chi, who drunkenly answers, and Bong-yi whispers, “Ajusshi… he’s here… right now!” Yo-han follows Bong-yi when she slips outside and tries to find Ba-reum. Thankfully, Ba-reum finds Bong-yi first and helps her get away, but he goes back to catch Yo-han and ends up cornered by Yo-han on the roof.

Bong-yi finds Moo-chi and wails that Ba-reum is in danger. They arrive at the building just in time to see Yo-han bashing Ba-reum in the head with a hammer over and over and over. Acting on impulse, Moo-chi shoots Yo-han, who falls next to Ba-reum and the two lie there, bleeding out.

They’re rushed to the hospital, and some time later, Ba-reum wakes up alone, his head heavily bandaged. Bong-yi has left her bird’s cage in the room with him, where Eo Bong-yi chirps happily in the morning sun. Ba-reum slowly gets out of bed, takes the bird from its cage, and snaps its neck… with his left hand.

He tosses the tiny body out his hospital window, goes back to bed, and sighs contentedly: “Finally it’s quiet.”

 
COMMENTS

Well okay, now we’re getting somewhere! You know, I adore Lee Seung-gi, and at first I really liked his characterization of Ba-reum. He’s just such a sweet, earnest guy. But I was starting to get frustrated because I felt like there’s got to be more to him, mostly because this is a long, twisty-turny drama. But also because Ba-reum is endearing, but he’s so straight as to be actually boring at times, and I just feel like Lee Seung-gi wouldn’t choose a role that doesn’t have something surprising up its sleeve. I still think that Ba-reum could be the real killer, Jae-hoon, but the question is, how is he also so convincingly caring and gentle?

Ba-reum just seems too genuine in the way he interacts with others like Halmoni, and in his reactions to horrible events like Moo-won’s murder to be faking it or playing a role. And I think he really is that sweet guy. So my theory would be that he doesn’t know he’s the killer, and likely suffers from dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities). It makes sense that a young boy who wanted so badly not to become a monster, yet found himself killing anyway, would experience the kind of trauma necessary to cause that split in his psyche. It would explain how Ba-reum could be so empathetic and kind, yet also kill in such heartless, dramatic ways — Ba-reum honestly wouldn’t recall doing those things, because Jae-hoon is a different personality altogether. It would also explain why Ba-reum seems baffled and shocked by the killer’s actions even when he’s alone and would have no reason to put on an act, and how the killer knew they were making a fake video, if Jae-hoon is another aspect of Ba-reum himself.

And the truly tragic thing is, it’s probably Ba-reum, the kind one, who is the “imposter” personality. Jae-hoon would have been there first, and his desire to be normal would have created a persona of the person he wishes he was. What if, now that he’s suffered a serious head trauma, we’re seeing the true, original personality back in control. What if now we’re looking at Jae-hoon, the real son of Han Seo-joon, who thinks nothing of crushing a bird in his hand just to get some peace and quiet.

For me, one big clue that this all may be the case was Ji-eun’s reaction to seeing Ba-reum in the hospital room with Bong-yi. At first, it looks like she’s upset because Yo-han was staring at them, but what if it’s because she was seeing Jae-hoon, her homicidal son, for the first time in years? Maybe she gave Jae-hoon away after he tried to kill his younger half-brother Jae-min and she failed to kill him. Which brings us to Yo-han… my theory is that he’s Jae-min, the little brother who almost died that day. Maybe that’s why he’s got those pictures in his basement and is following Ba-reum around everywhere — because he knows who Ba-reum really is, and is trying to stop his older half-brother from killing. It’s very possible that when he confronted his mother about knowing her son is a murderer, he didn’t mean himself, but Ba-reum. I know I’m throwing around a lot of speculation, but with the information we have now, it all fits.

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