Stealer: The Treasure Keeper: Episodes 1-2

by mistyisles

Part slick heist, part lighthearted caper, Stealer: The Treasure Keeper introduces us to an underground network populated with nimble artifact thieves, cold-blooded villains with elaborate hideaways, and smooth-talking brokers, all looking to line their own pockets at everyone else’s expense. But not to fear — our heroes are determined to bring them all to justice and put the nation’s treasures back where they belong.

EPISODES 1-2

The show kicks off with our titular thief mid-heist. As notorious black market broker KIM YOUNG-CHAN (Jeon Jin-oh) presents his wealthy customer with an illegally obtained antique, a masked man swan dives off the roof of the high-rise, his cable suspending him directly outside the room where the illicit deal is taking place.

The thief, commonly known as “Skunk” for his trademark odorized spray, takes his time drawing a giant heart on the window and kicking it in. Then he fights off Young-chan’s thugs, swipes the antique, and jumps back out the window, flashing finger hearts all the way down and landing safely on a gigantic heart-shaped inflatable.

This scene, we’ll come to learn, is a small window into the intricate network of brokers, buyers, thieves, and other agents who deal in precious cultural artifacts — most of which end up hoarded by wealthy collectors in secret compartments and lairs, waiting to be leveraged for the accumulation of even more wealth and power. Skunk is a bit different from most artifact thieves, however. Instead of keeping or re-selling his spoils, he turns them over to the authorities so they can be returned to their rightful places.

In this instance, “the authorities” means the Cultural Heritage police unit, which no one ever joins by choice. Our heroine CHOI MIN-WOO (Lee Joo-woo), for example, is transferred to the team as a supposed temporary demotion until a vaguely mentioned incident blows over.

And she’s not the only one. Team Leader JANG TAE-IN (Jo Han-chul) used to handle drug-related crimes, but after publicly smashing priceless pottery in a moment of hubris to reveal the drugs smuggled within, he was assigned to the Cultural Heritage unit as a sort of penance.

Min-woo’s first day on the job has her chasing an artifact thief through the streets and over rooftops. Just when she finally corners him, he makes a desperate and painful-looking leap off the roof. Only after following suit does Min-woo realize that Tae-in has swooped in to grab the thief, rendering her painful leap unnecessary. But it turns out this was not only a sting operation to catch the thief, but also Min-woo’s initiation test — and she’s passed.

Min-woo’s next assignment is to locate Cultural Heritage Administration Officer HWANG DAE-MYUNG (Joo-won) and enlist his help getting a known contraband collector to hand over the stolen ancient manuscript they know he has. This all turns out to be much harder than it sounds.

When Min-woo finds Dae-myung, she first mistakes him for a corpse because he’s sleeping in a dark, abandoned temple building with a giant kimchi stain on his shirt. Her opinion of him only goes downhill from there when they visit the collector, CHOI SONG-CHUL (Jung Eun-pyo), and all Dae-myung does is fawn over him and offer expensive gifts. Needless to say, they leave empty-handed.

But! Not all is as it seems. Those “gifts” are actually concealed cameras and clever excuses to get Song-chul’s fingerprints and retina scans. Because Dae-myung moonlights as none other than Skunk, and he’s got his own strategy for getting his hands on that manuscript. Oh, and the annoying ajumma who constantly shows up at Dae-myung’s office to complain and threaten lawsuits? She’s his hacker accomplice, LEE CHOON-JA (Choi Hwa-jung), secretly slipping him tools and intel for upcoming missions.

These two have worked together for years, fine-tuning Dae-myung’s super suit along the way. Now it can do all sorts of cool things (though they’ve yet to bulletproof it), like detect that Song-chul’s entire yard and house is crackling with high-voltage electricity. Undeterred, Dae-myung ziplines in and hops across the flagpoles before twirling down onto the doorstep. (I’m not sure which I find funnier — Dae-myung’s Skunk antics themselves, or the fact that he commits to them regardless of whether anyone’s around to see!)

Song-chul’s secret storage room is hard to find, but find it Dae-myung does. Both the room and the manuscript itself are booby-trapped like crazy, forcing Dae-myung to haul himself arm-over-arm up the aluminum-lined tunnel as it tries to cook him alive. In the end, though, he emerges with manuscript in hand and Song-chul none the wiser. Mission accomplished!

So what drives Dae-myung to risk life and limb stealing back stolen artifacts? He’s carrying on his historian father’s life work of seeking out and restoring lost cultural treasures, one of which involves tracking down a set of seven Joseon-era coins. One of those coins currently belongs to a pair of young orphans that Min-woo bonds with after learning their story, which mirrors her own.

And, of course, a villainous collector named CHAIRMAN YANG GEUM-DONG (Jang Kwang) is meticulously and ruthlessly hunting down the whole set. He successfully tricks a timid collector into bringing several of the coins into his private bowling lane lair… only to be out-villained by the not-so-timid-after-all JO HWIN-DAL (Kim Jae-chul). Who slaughters Chairman Yang’s armed minions with a pen.

Just before Hwin-dal kills him, too, Chairman Yang recognizes him. He’s supposed to have died long ago, but — in Hwin-dal’s own marvelous words — What I was looking for wasn’t in the afterlife. Meaning, of course, the coins and whatever they point to.

Young-chan, the broker from the opening heist sequence, witnesses the murders and turns himself in to the police, hoping to be safe from Hwin-dal in prison. He’s promptly murdered by Hwin-dal in the police station bathroom, right after promising to tell Tae-in everything he knows.

Having individually pieced together the coin connection, both Tae-in and Dae-myung (as Skunk) return to the scene of Chairman Yang’s murder late at night to do some sleuthing of their own. Dae-myung senses he’s being watched and bolts, but Tae-in stops him with a gun to the head. Considering they’ve met before, when Dae-myung was trying to recover artifacts in a more legal way that got bogged down in red tape, this could be a very interesting meeting.

Between progressively creative lairs, charismatic villains and heroes, acrobatic heists, and hints of a potential treasure hunt, Stealer: The Treasure Keeper is definitely anything but boring. And because it doesn’t try to take itself too seriously, even as the cast fully commit to their characters, it’s easy to just come along for the ride and enjoy both the over-the-top dramatics and the sillier jokes.

And yet, at the same time, the heroes are just fleshed out enough that they don’t just feel like caricatures. They’re easy to root for, fun to watch as they try to figure each other out, and interesting in the sense that I want to know more about them — especially Tae-in, and his history with Dae-myung. If this first week is a good representation of what’s in store, I think this is going to be a blast.

 
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