Revenge of Others: Episodes 11-12 (Final)

by missvictrix

The end is here, and with it several reveals that we kinda expected, but also were still somehow shocking. After so many twists and turns, our drama goes all in to pack a wallop for its ending. The stakes are high, and our heroine’s target pistol is out again.

 
EPISODES 11-12 WEECAP

It was with much sadness — but also a tiny bit of relief — that I tuned into our final two episodes of this show. How will it end? Will it be satisfying? Will they land their final reveals? And most importantly, will my Jae-bum make it okay? Well, let’s dive in.

With Chan-mi off having her crisis and realization in Busan, Jae-bum and Su-heon have a heart to heart. Jae-bum has saved Su-heon’s neck a bunch of times already, and it was nice to see them confiding in each other. Su-heon complains that Chan-mi is ghosting them, Jae-bum confesses that Oh-seong has been “filling in the blanks of his memory” (red flag alert!), and then Chan-mi herself calls. She’s at the school. And the way they run over to her made me melt into a puddle. Enjoy the cuteness, because it gets rough, and the confiding and planning amongst the three of them is great… while it lasts.

Su-heon is still bent out of shape that Chan-mi went A.W.O.L on him, but they barely have time to flirt when Jung-kyung and his gang tase and capture him. Chan-mi can’t call the useless police (more on this theme later), so she calls Jae-bum. He says he’ll look for him, but then… goes back to sleep? This will make sense later, but in the meantime, we revisit his bedroom later in the night and he’s waking up from a horrible nightmare… of his real-life memories coming back.

He was sitting on the roof with his earbuds in, and sure enough Oh-seong came up behind him and kicked him off. It’s a crazy good (and disturbing!) sequence, and things start to click into place for Jae-bum. Oh do they ever.

Meanwhile, Su-heon is getting beaten to a pulp for the million time, and Oh-seong turns up the next morning with an ax to grind (figuratively, but practically literal too). He wants to know if Su-heon was the one who attacked Jung-kyung. Then, he wants to know if he was the one who killed Won-seok. They’re both convinced the other is the assailant and… this doesn’t bode well because Oh-seong looks like he really didn’t do it.

Just in the nick of time, Su-heon is saved from getting beaten to death by some clever hired thugs who make short work of the entire situation. Ah, grown adults! But what are they doing there and why? We don’t find out until a certain someone pulls up in his jeep, and waltzes in. That’s right, they all bow to Jae-bum. *OMG*

Rather than end the quieted-down situation, Jae-bum grabs Oh-seong by the neck and nearly chokes him out. It troubles Su-heon a bit, but it’s also meant as a clue for us: Detective Jin and her partner are deducing that the murderer at the car garage was left-handed. And even though I don’t want to admit it, the choke hold looks exactly the same as the one Jae-bum gave Oh-seong.

It’s at this point that things get a little uneven — I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy all the permutations, but there was so much push-and-pull and fast plot movement that you can barely react to one reveal when you’re getting another (conveniently timed) reveal from another player.

So, in a quick succession wild scenes, we learn a lot about Oh-seong, first. He plays innocent to his father, but later confesses to him that it’s about to hit the fan… and it’s all because he’s in love with Ji-hyun. His father is horrified, but I’m finding this actually makes a bit of sense for his character?

Thanks to Jae-bum — who’s suddenly taking over the narrative — we learn that Jae-bum saw a video of Oh-seong forcing a kiss on Ji-hyun, and in the past, used it as leverage over Oh-seong. (This whole thing is a giant game of blackmail and leverage, as we’ll find out later, and this is an important layer of it.) Jae-bum also confronts Oh-seong over the fact that he remembers he was the one that kicked him off the roof — not Won-seok. It’s spine-chillingly good.

And then it gets more so. “When did you find out there’s another person inside me?” asks Jae-bum in his next maneuver. Noooo it’s true. What we learn in this scene confirms what we hoped wasn’t true a few scenes back when Jae-bum was paying for his hired thugs and used his left hand to sign “Jae-joon” and his right hand to sign “Jae-bum.”

Jae-bum tells Oh-seong that he only just realized this about himself… meanwhile, Oh-seong has known since his “accident” and used it to gaslight him. The terrible tragedy here is that Jae-bum now sees how he’s been played for months, but can do nothing about it. Oh-seong taunts Jae-bum saying, effectively, that he made him hate Won-seok enough to kick him out the window. Jae-bum thought he was paying back eye for eye and tooth for tooth, but really it was just the evil mind game of this psycho. It’s so upsetting.

Su-heon and Chan-mi get (rightly) suspicious of Jae-bum and come up with a plan to see if he is secretly hiding Won-seok’s phone. And he is. Ugh! And did anyone else notice the photos of Chan-mi and Su-heon in his secret hiding place? My heart.

Oh-seong “saves” Jae-bum and enables him to run off and hide, but really at this point, Jae-bum is a walking disaster. He’s not only recovered all his memories, but we see that when he very innocently followed Su-heon on the “errand” to the car garage that night, he happened across the guy Su-heon had been there to punish. This guy recognized and taunted Jae-bum enough for him to have a psychotic break, and the twin that died years ago came back. It’s here that Jae-bum splintered in two, and navigated both the sweet, heroic, and helpful guy we all fell in love with — and the dark and evil twin that did all the dirty work.

After following Jae-bum for so much of the episode, it’s eerie to have him disappear — and also sad, because this whole thing is just so unsettling. But, as the drama gods would have it, So-yeon is living in hiding (briefly, to protect Su-heon), and she spots the hiding Jae-bum brooding on a yacht.

Next thing we know, Chan-mi shows up. She seemingly hasn’t advanced at all from when she held her gun at Su-heon thinking he was the culprit. She now does the same towards Jae-bum, although it’s a much more layered scene — and dude, I love Seo Ji-hoon here — we watch him switch flawlessly from Jae-bum to Jae-joon. It’s chilling, but Chan-mi plays the heroine (or is that Luke Skywalker?) and insists that there’s still good in him. She practically commands “Jae-joon” to go away and let the Jae-bum they all love live in peace.

It looks like it wants to happen, but Jae-bum is so distraught (so many tears in this scene!) that he tries to shoot himself with her gun. But there was only one bullet, and so he winds up taken in by Detective Jin. He gives Chan-mi a meaningful look from the back of the car as they pull away, and that’s literally the last we see of him.

That scene was definitely the climax of the drama, but along the way a lot of questions were filled in, and the endless tug of leverage and blackmail is fully revealed: Won-seok and Se-jin were dating, and Oh-seong used it as leverage against Won-seok. Won-seok thus became Bully #1 and everyone hated him for it. Except Jae-bum, who defended him, and used aforementioned Ji-hyun video for leverage against Oh-seong, to win some relief for Won-seok. It all went wrong(er) when Oh-seong took out his fury on Jae-bum, kicked him off the roof, and then proceeded to blame it on Won-seok, which eventually led to Won-seok’s own fall from a height. Yipes.

This all mostly works for me, but where I get a little tangled is with the timeline. When Chan-mi first transferred to the school, I thought that was Jae-bum’s first return after waking from his coma — but maybe I misinterpreted that, because ostensibly Oh-seong had already been gaslighting him for months beforehand. Also, those dang polaroids were never fully explained, and based on what we know about those four guys now, there was definitely no smiley hangout times between them.

But anyway, with Jae-bum in custody, what about the true villain? Because I really don’t count the mentally ill, traumatized, and manipulated Jae-bum as our villain. That title is Oh-seong’s alone, and he’s not done yet. He has a box cutter at Ji-hyun’s neck (so much for true love) and calls Su-heon to the roof, forcing him to bow and beg forgiveness. As expected, this soon escalates into beatdown #59, but Su-heon manages to fight back this time. As the two are struggling over the blade, Oh-seong falls from the roof and dies on impact. Everyone is outside, everyone sees Su-heon, and then — in a kind of cheeky punchline — everyone also covers for him.

You see, the students found out not only that Su-heon was the “hero,” but information quickly circulated to everyone about what had happened to Won-seok and Jae-bum. The gossip consensus is fast and furious and it’s also rock-solid and sure of itself: Oh-seong was the true bad guy; Su-heon must be protected. And so, all the students lie and protect Su-heon. Poor Detective Jin, who, for all her efforts, has to admit failure once again and says: “If everyone decided to corroborate a lie then it becomes the truth.”

It’s a curious note to end the drama on, but one that fits its rather subversive take on justice. For all the good intentions of law enforcement, they couldn’t keep up with the underbelly at this high school — nor the ways and means the students were willing to engage in to serve justice according to their liking. It smacks of Lord of the Flies to me, in a way, but with much more forgiveness, because Chan-mi and Su-heon were always treated as heroes.

Speaking of those two, a few adorable handholds in, and we can consider them a couple. Su-heon leaves school to the rallying cheers of his classmates, and Chan-mi graduates and makes it into the Marine academy. But most importantly, they look happy. And don’t get me wrong, I want them to be happy — but if anything, the drama’s biggest misstep was this: somewhere along the way, its secondary characters became more interesting than the heroes.

For all of Su-heon’s suffering and sweetness, and Chan-mi’s fearless investigations, it was Jae-bum — used, abused, and basically destroyed — that captured my heart the most. And while I’m mostly happy with the ending, I wish the drama realized how compelling it made the Jae-bum character, and treated him with as much care as it did the leads.

Similarly, Oh-seong’s end doesn’t seem like quite enough. His psycho-villainy was the crux of everything our heroes had to endure, so his death felt a bit anti-climactic. Then again, the drama was built on the premise that this microcosm of a high school, and all the students in it, comprised their own justice system, so perhaps it’s all quite right in the end. The drama, at least, held tight to its own logic till the end, and I love it for that — as well as all the goosebumps and twists it gave us along the way.

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