The Good Detective 2: Episodes 9-10

by solstices

In the aftermath of a sudden death, our remaining players scramble to turn the situation in their favor. The truth has been obscured under layers of secrets and scheming, but nothing can be hidden forever.

 

EPISODES 9-10 WEECAP

Some time after the accident, Do-chang and Ji-hyuk review Tae-ho’s black box footage. There’s the distinct sound of a seat belt unbuckling before the car swerves, allowing them to surmise that Na-na intentionally unbuckled Tae-ho’s seatbelt to engineer the car crash.

Since the media reports it as a tragic accident, Do-chang and Ji-hyuk meet with Na-na to clarify the events of that night. She claims that Tae-ho wanted to expose Sang-woo’s assault case from two years ago, even if it meant he would also be indicted for fabricating evidence. In his ideal scenario, he would be released on probation, Sang-woo would go to prison, and Na-na would inherit TJ Group.

Ji-hyuk asks her why she apologized to Tae-ho then, and Na-na holds up a photo of Tae-ho and Hee-joo hugging in his car. We see an alternate version of events play out, in which Na-na confronts Tae-ho with the photos and he chooses to crash the car himself.

Na-na acts guilt-ridden over pushing Tae-ho to his death, but Ji-hyuk’s suspicions still haven’t abated. As he and Do-chang drive away, he points out that Na-na took control of their conversation — she volunteered information and answered her own questions, as if spinning her own tale.

Interestingly, once she’s left alone, Na-na’s mask drops. Unused to her crutches, she ends up falling over, and she struggles to pull herself back to her feet. With no one around to help her up, she can’t help but remember how Tae-ho comforted her during her breakdown, and anguished tears fill her eyes.

She may seem genuinely distressed over his absence, but I have a feeling it’s less about mourning his death per se, and more about grieving the loss of someone who used to be there for her — a loss that was cemented once she saw him turn to Hee-joo instead of her. Perhaps it may have been a loss she hadn’t let herself properly acknowledge until now, out of a refusal to admit that she’s been left behind yet again.

We see that on the night of the accident, Yong-geun followed Tae-ho and overheard his end of the phone call with Ji-hyuk. Afraid to have his own involvement exposed, he tells Bo-kyung to tie up any loose ends and clear out any information regarding Tae-ho that could potentially complicate matters.

Bo-kyung does as told, but as she organizes her desk, she notices a string of numbers written in her work planner. Tae-ho wrote the passcode to his safe before he left the office that night, but Bo-kyung resolves not to get caught up in anything more than her basic work duties.

A gossip outlet spreads the illicit photos of Tae-ho and Hee-joo, speculating that Tae-ho killed himself due to the shame and the police pressure. Guilt-ridden that his decision to reveal the photos may have pushed Tae-ho to his death, Hee-joo’s grandpa asks Eun-hye to visit the TJ company building with him, so that he can sincerely apologize to Tae-ho’s bereaved family.

As they arrive at the TJ lobby, Sang-woo coincidentally walks in, and Grandpa starts to humbly apologize. However, he soon notices Sang-woo’s rare, unique shoes, and they ring a bell. Sang-woo once visited his shoe shop and made snide comments about Hee-joo — namely, that she looked good at seducing men.

Grandpa realizes that Sang-woo knew about the clandestine relationship, and it escalates into a confrontation that has Sang-woo shoving Grandpa to the floor. Since they’re in public, Sang-woo makes a big show of going to help Grandpa up, but then he leans in and sneers that Hee-joo was a gold digger who deserved to die. Ugh, he’s the worst.

Sang-woo walks away all haughty and smug, leaving a heartbroken Grandpa on the floor. Eun-hye screams after him in indignation, but the callous Sang-woo remains entirely unruffled.

Bo-kyung witnesses this awful scene, and her compassionate heart can’t hold back any longer. She retrieves Tae-ho’s USB from his safe, but she’s caught on the way out by Yong-geun. He chases after her, and as she takes a long elevator ride up to escape his pursuit, she quickly thinks up a plan.

Yong-geun catches up with her by the time she arrives on her destination floor, but Na-na comes out of her office in the nick of time, having been called out by Bo-kyung. Claiming that Tae-ho asked her to retrieve his USB from the safe and pass it to Na-na in the case of an emergency, Bo-kyung gives the USB to Na-na, and that gets Yong-geun off her back.

It turns out that Bo-kyung copied the USB’s contents onto a colleague’s tablet for safekeeping, and she retrieves it afterwards, going straight to the police station. The USB contained a recording of the conversation between Tae-ho and Min-ji, and Bo-kyung plays it for our team to hear.

Since Hee-joo instructed Min-ji to use the CCTV video as leverage in pressuring Sang-woo to return her child to her, Min-ji thinks Sang-woo murdered Hee-joo for it. Hee-joo kept the original copy as insurance, which gives Sang-woo a very likely motive.

Now fully recovered, Man-gu and Ji-woong return to work. LOL, somehow the head injury made Ji-woong better at his multiplication tables, and the stab in Man-gu’s abdomen cured his irritable bowel syndrome. Their fellow detectives jokingly wonder if they ought to be grateful to Dong-jae, but the pair’s faces fall at the mention of the gangster.

Dong-jae may be released from prison soon, courtesy of Ki-jin, who forced Man-gu and Ji-woong to sign affidavits by threatening to jeopardize Do-chang’s career. Ki-jin has clearly joined hands with Yong-geun; it looks like the promise of money and power were too tempting to resist after all.

Incensed, Do-chang immediately storms out to confront Ki-jin, and it escalates into a full-blown physical fight. Then Ki-jin hits where it hurts most — he accuses Do-chang of killing people with his incompetent investigating. First it was Lee Dae-chul (Eun-hye’s father from Season 1), then it was Kim Hyung-bok, and now it’s Woo Tae-ho.

Ki-jin’s words cut deep, leaving Do-chang reeling in shock and guilt. We know how much of himself Do-chang pours into his work, and how deeply his empathy runs, which makes this scene even more devastating to watch. Do-chang carries these deaths like weights on his shoulders, and it’s the regret of not being able to save them that drives his urgency to apprehend the real culprits.

Yong-geun enacts his plan to get rid of the thorns in his side, one by one. He gets an internal audit opened against Ji-hyuk for alleged bribery, and he assigns Bo-kyung a confidential document to send to an important client, then hires someone to steal her laptop so he can presumably have an excuse to fire her.

However, that someone turns out to be detective Dong-wook’s brother, oops. When Bo-kyung runs to the station in a panic, hoping they can find her laptop, Dong-wook immediately recognizes his brother on the CCTV recording.

This plot point gets resolved a little too conveniently, but it does raise an interesting question — as a law enforcement officer, what happens when your relative becomes a criminal? In the aftermath of the incident, Dong-wook feels guilty and responsible for his brother’s misbehavior; he’s supposed to uphold the law, yet his very own family member chose to stand opposite it.

In any case, Bo-kyung’s laptop is returned safe and sound. The next day, she pointedly mentions to Yong-geun that someone attempted to steal her laptop. Putting on an innocent act, Bo-kyung pretends to be concerned about the company, saying that it seems like there are many people who have it out for TJ. The moment she turns around to leave the office, though, her polite smile drops and she starts grumbling under her breath, HAHA.

Dong-jae is released from prison, but he gets beaten up by his gangster boss that very night. He orders his underlings to toss Dong-jae into the sea, though we don’t actually see it happen. All this is conducted under Yong-geun’s orders, of course.

Police Chief Moon finds out that TJ, by way of Yong-geun, tried to mess with his precious daughter Bo-kyung, and he’s absolutely furious. That gets him onboard the team’s anti-TJ schemes, and they launch a counterattack through the media, using Ji-hyuk’s bribery accusations to their advantage.

As part of the plan, some members of the team give anonymous testimonies about Ji-hyuk, and they’re technically not falsehoods — Bo-kyung did arrange a secret meeting between Ji-hyuk and a top TJ executive, for instance. Of course, everything is spun to paint TJ in a bad light, and it successfully redirects the public’s attention to TJ’s machinations.

Man-gu and Ji-woong set out to retrieve Dong-jae’s phone, which he passed to his underling before getting arrested. After intimidating the minion into revealing the phone’s location, they obtain the phone, which contains a recording of Yong-geun instructing Dong-jae to clean up the crime scene and destroy evidence.

Right then, though, Na-na fakes a diabetic episode to manipulate Ji-hyuk into rushing over to her mother’s house. There, he finds her perfectly fine, and she plays a video recording from her hidden camera in Sang-woo’s office.

In it, Hee-joo says that she’ll show the CCTV video of Sang-woo’s assault to Chairman Cheon and Na-na, if Sang-woo doesn’t return Min-ji’s child to her. She walks out of the office without a second glance back, leaving Sang-woo yelling ineffectively after her. Infuriated at being on the losing end for once, Sang-woo impulsively calls Dong-jae and screams for him to kill Hee-joo.

Oof, that’s certainly an incriminating video. We end here this week, but that brief glimpse we got of Ji-hyuk’s reaction gives me faith that he’s not going to simply take this clip at face value. For one, if Na-na had this recording all along, why is she only revealing it now? Clearly it’s to deflect suspicion away from herself and give the police a convenient suspect, and I highly doubt she’s presenting the full truth without manipulation.

This week, the show shifted some of the focus away from the high-tension sleuthing, instead highlighting some struggles that detectives face in the process of chasing down a criminal. For example, Min-ji points out that Ji-hyuk is so focused on catching the killer that he doesn’t care what happens to other people in the process.

She’s not entirely right, of course; Ji-hyuk’s tenacity is driven by his desire to bring the truth to light and deliver justice to the victims, rather than simply putting criminals behind bars. However, she does make a valid point — as someone who’s also a victim, this case is retraumatizing her all over again. If Do-chang wasn’t there to act as a check-and-balance, Ji-hyuk’s forthrightness may very well have reopened Min-ji’s old wounds.

We see this side of Ji-hyuk in the scene with Na-na; we know that his incisive questions about the car accident are justified, since we’ve seen the truth of that night. However, Ji-hyuk is going off his detective’s hunch — what if he was wrong, and he was falsely accusing a grieving widow of killing her own husband, with such aggression and certainty?

I think that goes to show how good of a team our detective pair is, while also shining a spotlight on the intricacies of detective work. The balance between compassion and rationality isn’t an easy one to strike, and it’s a constant struggle. Similarly, the pursuit of justice often comes at a price, especially when going against the rich and powerful.

In this week’s episodes, we see our team’s livelihoods being threatened by TJ, such as family members being transferred away to different departments or a big fried chicken franchise opening right opposite the humble shop of Do-chang’s sister. It’s played off as a humorous scene, but these implicit threats could have very real consequences for our team and their loved ones.

Of course, that doesn’t mean our team should just play it safe and wash their hands of the situation. If no one, not even them, stands up against TJ’s tyranny, then these chaebols’ power and oppression will just continue going unchecked.

That’s what makes our protagonists even more admirable — from Ji-hyuk’s unrelenting investigation of the potential suspects, to Do-chang’s heartfelt compassion towards the victims, and even Bo-kyung’s unwillingness to keep mum and let her superiors walk all over her. They won’t take injustice lying down, not by a long shot.

 
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