Flex x Cop: Episodes 1-2

by DaebakGrits

What happens when a tough as nails detective meets an adrenaline junkie chaebol who likes to cosplay as a cop? A wrongful arrest, the most ridiculous PR stunt since Tesla put a car in space, and an unwilling buddy-cop pairing bound to be an absolute shit-show or an epic hate-to-love romance — probably both.

 
EPISODES 1-2

I’ve met a lot of dramaland chaebols over the years, but I think JIN YI-SOO (Ahn Bo-hyun) may be the wealthiest — or, at the very least, the most frivolous with his family’s money. Although we’re first introduced to Yi-soo via a somber monologue that hints at darker plot points ahead, our story quickly jumps back in time two months to a more lighthearted and carefree era of Yi-soo’s life. And what better way to provide us with insights into his character than with a tour of his swanky man-cave and expensive toys?

His apartment is modern and as spotless as one would expect of a bachelor with CHOI JUNG-HOON (Kim Myung-soo) as his personal assistant/wrangler/valet, but unlike our typical chaebols, whose domiciles look staged for mansion-themed magazine spreads, Yi-soo’s home has personality and showcases his costly and varied hobbies. Does it also give off subtle man-child vibes? Absolutely, but who doesn’t want to have an elaborate key storage system that incorporates a model car for every overpriced vehicle parked in their ten-car garage?

Yi-soo starts his day by shirking his responsibilities and skipping an important meeting, where his father, CHAIRMAN JIN MYUNG-CHUL (Jang Hyun-sung), and brother, JIN SEUNG-JOO (Kwak Shi-yang), stare pointedly at his empty chair. While all the adults discuss business, Yi-soo sleeps most of the day away, and then when night falls, he suits up as a member of an elite SWAT team and takes down multiple masked kidnappers and rescues a damsel in distress — wait, what?!

Yeah… what initially looks like a legitimate, high stakes situation is actually just an extravagant and exceedingly pricey live-action role-playing game bankrolled by Yi-soo — well, his daddy. Seriously, the fact that Chairman Jin hasn’t yet put a stop to Yi-soo’s antics and frivolous spending says a lot about the kind of money we’re talkin’ about here. Like, this goes above and beyond the level of parachuting into work on the first day as an undercover boss.

After a hard day of cosplaying as a cop, Yi-soo rents out a whole club so he and his LARPing buddies can party the night away. But when one of them goes missing, a concerned Yi-soo personally leaves the club to find him. Outside, the friend in question is getting high in his car, and Yi-soo, as straight-laced as the cop he roleplays as, holds a mini intervention and disposes of his friend’s remaining stash of drugs. Unfortunately, Yi-soo looks away for a moment to take a phone call from Seung-joo, and when he turns back around, his friend is harassing a random bystander for a lighter. As Yi-soo approaches the pair, the bystander spots Yi-soo’s (fake) SWAT uniform, panics, and cuts Yi-soo’s friend so he can run away.

Yi-soo chases down the bystander, and when they come to a dead end, Yi-soo uses his professional-level MMA skills to break the man’s arm, rid him of his knife, and knock him out. It’s at this point that our police detective heroine, LEE KANG-HYUN (Park Ji-hyun), arrives on the scene and sees Yi-soo standing over the unconscious man’s body and holding the makeshift weapon he used to subdue his opponent. Because these two leading characters are destined to start off on the wrong foot, Kang-hyun misreads the situation and arrests Yi-soo. (Womp womp.)

Despite his insistence that he’s innocent, Yi-soo spends a night in jail, and the timing couldn’t be more unfortunate because the very next day, Chairman Jin announces he’s running for mayor. And thanks to LEE KI-SUK (Seo Dong-won) — a nosey reporter who likes to camp out at the police station for gossip — Chairman Jin is immediately made a laughingstock when he finds out from the reporters at his press conference that his son has been arrested. Needless to say, Chairman Jin is pissed, and instead of listening to his youngest son and helping him expose the truth, Chairman Jin threatens to disown Yi-soo. Given the tension in the room, it’s clear that there’s a lot to unpack with this particular father-son relationship.

Meanwhile, as biased as she is against spoiled chaebols, Kang-hyun can’t shake Yi-soo’s insistence that his actions were in self-defense and that the supposed “victim” had a knife. Sure enough, when Kang-hyun returns to the crime scene, she finds the knife in a rain gutter — but that’s not all! The guy Yi-soo beat to a pulp is the murderer that Kang-hyun’s team has been trying — and failing — to track down for months. The police now have a major PR nightmare on their hands, and they’re stumped as to how they will fix it.

This is where Seung-joo steps in and proves that he’s not the stereotypical eldest son who hates his younger half-brother because he sees Yi-soo as his competitor for the right to one day lead Hansu Group. Seung-joo, unlike Chairman Jin, has a soft spot for Yi-soo, and when he overhears — via gossiping cops in the hallways — that the guy Yi-soo beat to a pulp was a murder suspect in an ongoing case, he offers up a solution to both his father’s and the police’s awkward situation: make Yi-soo a cop.

Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, not really. Because Yi-soo collects hobbies like 90’s kids collected Pokemon cards, he also just happens to have a lawyer’s license, which means Seung-joo and the police can claim that Yi-soo was hired as a detective as part of a special program. This cover story saves the police from the embarrassment of admitting a civilian captured the wanted perp, and Chairman Jin now has the clout of having a son that’s giving back to the community.

Yi-soo, however, is not terribly interested in being a real cop — that requires lots of boring down time and work. The man’s an adrenaline junkie, not a desk jockey, but he doesn’t have much of a choice when Seung-joo emotionally blackmails him into going along with the fabricated backstory. Yi-soo may not care much about his father’s political aspirations, but he won’t put his brother in a situation where he has to recant the lie he fed the press and face the media maelstrom on his own.

And so, Yi-soo defies Kang-hyun’s expectations and actually shows up at the police station — not that he plans to do any actual work. If he had his way, he’d just play video games at his tricked-out desk all day, but Kang-hyun and her teammate PARK JUN-YOUNG (Kang Sang-joo) engage in a little hazing to try and get him to realize that being a real cop is nothing like his role-playing games. Much to Kang-hyun’s annoyance, though, Yi-soo’s fame and fortune opens doors and allows him to take shortcuts that prove effective and efficient at undermining Kang-hyun’s attempts at making him miserable.

When a model is found dead on a yacht, Kang-hyun and her team are assigned the case. Yi-soo is encouraged to tag along to the crime scene, but Kang-hyun makes sure he stays on the sidelines where he can’t get in the way or contaminate the crime scene. Then Kang-hyun drags him to the model’s agency, where she tasks him with interviewing all of the company’s employees while she speaks with the CEO. A handsome, playboyish chaebol tasked with questioning a bunch of models? Yeah… if Kang-hyun was trying to make him hate the more mundane aspects of being a detective, she failed with that one.

Although Yi-soo has a way of making the most out of Kang-hyun’s hazing attempts, Yi-soo is bothered by the fact that Kang-hyun won’t take him seriously. Could it be that our chaebol, who so obviously copes with his daddy issues by getting love and affirmation from his fans via social media, can’t stand it when someone like Kang-hyun inexplicably dislikes him? Well, it’s not like she doesn’t have her reasons, Yi-soo’s friend points out. The police still have egg on their faces from when Yi-soo captured that murderer. The last thing they want is for Yi-soo to one-up them again. So what better way to pay Kang-hyun back for hazing him than to solve the case first?

The next day, Yi-soo surprises Kang-hyun by attending the model’s autopsy. Yi-soo has a rocky start, as the sight of the body triggers his PTSD (mark it off on your Bingo cards, Beanies). It kind of goes downhill from there as he tries to impress Kang-hyun and YOON JI-WON (Jung Ga-hee), the forensics doctor, with his pseudo-intellectual insights that are quickly dismissed by the more experienced women. What should have been a rather humbling experience is instead fuel for Yi-soo’s determination, and he officially issues a challenge to Kang-hyun. If he fails to catch the murderer before Kang-hyun, he’ll stick to desk duty, but if he beats Kang-hyun to the arrest, then she has to admit that he’s a real cop.

Thanks to CCTV footage, the team identifies the youngest son of DN Media as a possible suspect in the case, but no one can seem to locate him. This is where Yi-soo’s extravagant lifestyle gives him an advantage. He recognizes the location featured in the suspect’s last social media post, and without telling the rest of the team where he’s headed, Yi-soo breezes past the security at a pricey members-only spa where the suspect is busy getting his tan on.

By the time Kang-hyun figures out where the suspect is hiding, Yi-soo has already wrestled the man out of his tanning bed and dragged him to the spa’s entrance, where Kang-hyun is currently arguing with the security team that’s (I’m assuming) unlawfully denying her entry. More security guards arrive on the scene, and Yi-soo and Kang-hyun temporarily set aside their feud to team up and take down all the overpriced thugs preventing them from arresting the suspect.

The groundwork has been laid for a funny buddy-cop story and a hate-to-love romance, and so far I’m totally here for it. Yi-soo is amusing despite his frivolous spending, and even though he has a lot of talents, I appreciate that his skill level doesn’t surpass that of the experienced experts. He’s as exasperating as he is lovable, and I can’t wait to peel back the layers to discover why he acts out the way he does. Obviously, there are some daddy issues and the trauma from witnessing his mother’s death, but I’m mostly curious to see how he was able to form such a close relationship with his brother under those circumstances.

Kang-hyun also has hidden layers to her personality. On the surface she’s a no-nonsense cop, but at home it’s clear she has a healthy relationship with her parents — especially her father LEE HYUNG-JOON (Kwon Hae-hyo), a retired cop. But the biggest sign that Kang-hyun is a big ol’ softy at heart is the fact that relaxes and falls asleep watching cute kitten videos. I guess if you deal with death on a daily basis you’ve got to find a way to brain-bleach those images from your mind, but I’d love to see what Yi-soo would do with this information.

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