Mouse: Episodes 12-13 Open Thread

by selena

With one despicable psychopath gone, another appears… which might actually prove to be a good thing for our murder-hungry cop. Finally freed from the shackles of her past, our feisty and strong boxing enthusiast has the opportunity to search for her dreams and aspirations.

Please note: There will be no coverage on Mouse from episode 14 onwards. We’ll see you on our Drama Hangout post instead!

 
EPISODES 12-13 WEECAP

Taking Kang Deok-soo out really did wonders for Ba-reum, who looked absolutely radiant the morning after as if everything wrong with his life was magically fixed. Thankfully, Hoon-seok is still alive thanks to Butterfly the cat who scratched Ba-reum before he could strike his cousin with the wrench.

Butterfly didn’t make it through the night because of this, and Ba-reum really needs to find the remaining kitten a new home before he harms it, too. Curiously, Ba-reum’s aunt can’t even look him in the eye when she picks Hoon-seok up and seems absolutely terrified, although we don’t learn why yet.

In a disturbing reveal, we find out that twelve years ago, Jae-hoon came across Bong-yi after Deok-soo was finished with her. Annoyed that this discovery would cut into his gaming time, Jae-hoon ignored her desperate pleas to be saved. Deok-soo’s corpse was disposed of in a very similar fashion, under a bridge with a blanket covering his entire battered body.

Throughout the episode, we piece together the events of that night. Ba-reum went to look for Bong-yi and decided to protect Yoo-na by locking her in a cabinet under the bridge, not knowing that she saw the scratch on his hand (which she later identified him with).

He then set up a trap for Deok-soo, gave the sexual offender every wound that was inflicted onto Bong-yi back then (inspired by the “eye for an eye” passage from the bible found in Soo-ho’s evidence box), and castrated him as punishment. This makes Bong-yi a prime suspect in Detective Kang’s eyes, but Moo-chi points out that this has “psychopath” written all over it.

Bong-yi barely defends herself when put in the hot seat, and it’s because she thinks that Moo-chi killed Deok-soo for her (she found the 1,000 won bill at the crime scene). It’s kind of sweet that they’d both protect each other like this, because Moo-chi was prepared to hide any evidence that would incriminate Bong-yi if she really were responsible.

Moo-chi makes Ba-reum increasingly nervous with his scarily accurate explanations regarding the killer’s thought process. At one point, he has to throw suspicion back onto Bong-yi after she’d been deemed innocent just to prevent her from talking to Yoo-na, who recognized that Ba-reum was the killer. He was ready to silence the child, but she was grateful for what he did.

By the end of episode 12, it looked like Moo-chi figured out that Ba-reum was the killer and confronted him about it, but it was a fake out of course. Instead, the murder weapon (planted by Ba-reum) was found downstream near the crime scene and on it was the DNA of Lee Jae-shik, who’s been in jail for the past five years.

Two old cases are brought to light: an unsolved attack on Ji-eun in 1995, and the infamous Suseong Serial Murders which took the lives of ten women between 1997-1999. A man named Kim Bong-cheol was tortured by police and forced to give a false confession as the Suseong serial killer, and Bong-yi (who was hired by Hong-joo to become a writer on her team) has a strong feeling that he’s innocent.

Dong-goo and Ba-reum assist Bong-yi with her goal of convincing the Sherlock Hong-joo team to cover Bong-cheol’s story. She wanted his estranged daughter to know that her father’s not a killer. Bong-yi gathers a statement from Ji-eun because her case had similarities to the Suseong murders, like the fact that her kidnapper ate crescent-shaped apple slices.

To get people talking about the Suseong murders again, Ba-reum leaks to the press that presidential candidate Shin Sung-min’s future daughter-in-law (a.k.a. Shin Sang’s fiancée) is Kim Bong-cheol’s daughter. The buzz surrounding this case gets them the green light to air an episode focused on Bong-cheol’s innocence.

It turns out that Daniel found two toothbrushes with the psychopath gene from the batch that Ba-reum provided. One was Deok-soo’s, and the other was evidence that was accidentally picked up, belonging to Lee Jae-shik. Things happen fairly quickly from there, but Ba-reum realized that he was the Suseong serial killer and planted his DNA on Deok-soo’s murder weapon to guide Moo-chi towards looking into him.

The episode closes out with Moo-chi catching Ba-reum in the act of killing Lee Jae-shik the night that he’s released from prison. I hope that it’s not another fake out because I’m ready for Moo-chi to learn about Ba-reum’s darker side, especially now that Bong-yi also has evidence that Ba-reum was there when Deok-soo was killed.

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