Flex x Cop: Episodes 3-4

by DaebakGrits

Our chaebol just wants to be a part of the team, but his chaotic approach to detective work isn’t winning him any friends. Determined to prove himself useful, he tries his darnedest to be a skilled detective — and when that doesn’t work, he uses his private helicopter to avoid a traffic jam and capture the suspect.

 
EPISODES 3-4

Our reluctant buddy-cop drama resumes exactly where it left off last week, with our heroes outnumbered — but not outskilled — by a large group of security guards. Given how quickly Kang-hyun and Yi-soo subdue their numerous attackers, it’s obvious that hand-to-hand combat wasn’t a prerequisite for their security jobs. But I guess when your primary duty is to intimidate poor people and block them from gaining entrance to your ritzy spa, vanity muscles can get the job done.

While Kang-hyun and Yi-soo wipe out their opponents, their prime suspect, the third son of DN Media’s chairman, watches the brawl from the sidelines — terrified but too dumb to realize this would be the time to run away. Instead, he hangs around until Kang-hyun and Yi-soo are the clear victors, and then he tries to make his escape. His bathrobe and slippers, however, make for a very unfortunate outfit choice when fleeing the cops (hello, pixelated pee pee), and he’s quickly arrested.

At the police station, Third Son admits that he was on the boat with the victim, but he swears he didn’t kill her — just strangled her a little bit until she was unconscious because he’s a misogynist who doesn’t handle rejection well. Instead of pleading guilty, he insists that the drugs the police found on the yacht are a sign that his druggie brother, the second son, must have used the boat (and killed the victim) after he left. And sure enough, when Jun-young reviews the CCTV, he sees Second Son board the fancy boat. Now, I’m no cop, but this oversight in their police investigation reeks of ineptitude — and a convenient plot hole that allows our story to first introduce a red herring and then pivot to another possible suspect.

Speaking of convenience, enter: Second Son. He oh-so-casually pops by the police station to check in on his younger brother. But there’s no love lost between these two siblings, and Third Son jumps at the opportunity to point the investigation towards his brother by frisking Second Son and revealing that his brother is, indeed, dumb enough to walk into a police station with a baggie of drugs in his pocket.

Just when you think the situation can’t get any whackier, more members of this dramatic chaebol family arrive one by one at the police station, and with each new arrival, Yi-soo is there to help his fellow cops identify all the new players (suspects) — and spill the tea. This family is as makjang as they get, and the violent crimes unit decides to sit back and watch the drama play out in front of them and (hopefully) let them incriminate themselves. The show’s so good that Yi-soo shares some popcorn with CHOI KYUNG-JIN (Kim Shin-bi), the rookie member of the violent crimes team.

Eventually, a full blown fight that erupts at the police station and the violent crimes unit breaks it up and gets back to doing their jobs. Second Son is arrested for drugs, but when asked about the murder, he, too, denies killing her — but he did push her in the water because he was high and mistook her for an evil ghost or something. Forensic evidence already determined that she died from blunt force trauma to the head after being pulled out of the water, so either Second Son is lying or someone else fished the victim out of the water before whacking her in the head.

As the investigation progresses, it becomes clear that, like every makjang story, all the backstabbing and killing is over an inheritance. The chairman of DN Media is dying from cancer, and his sons and their mothers are playing dirty to see who can come out on top. And what role did the victim play in all this mess? Well, she was the chairman’s illegitimate child.

At first, all the evidence points to Wife #1, the mother of the chairman’s first son, who wanted to kill off the newest contender for the family throne. But her elaborate attempt to flee the country — which was foiled by Yi-soo and Kang-hyun’s audition for Fast and Furious: Seoul Chopper — and subsequent confession, makes Yi-soo suspicious that she’s protecting her son. Sure enough, thanks to the illegal wiretapping of Wife #2, Yi-soo finds evidence that Wife #1 conspired with her son and secretary to murder the victim and try to pin it on the younger sons. And in the end, every member of the family is arrested for some sort of crime or another.

Although Yi-soo solved the case and Kang-hyun reluctantly agrees he won the bet, the members of the violent crimes team — minus fanboy Kyung-jin, of course — are too salty to include Yi-soo as part of their team and accept his dinner invitation to a fancy restaurant. Kang-hyun’s ego is bruised because she’s been out detectived by a silver spoon (again!), and Jun-young assures her that Yi-soo’s win was just a fluke. This latest murder was almost divinely tailored for his particular knowledge base, and there’s no way he’ll be as insightful when the case doesn’t involve chaebol families.

Kang-hyun’s prejudices against silver spoons has made her incapable of seeing the Yi-soo behind all the extravagant toys and frivolous spending habits. Oh, he may walk the chaebol walk and talk the chaebol talk, but the truth is that the case hits Yi-soo pretty hard in the feels because he actually relates more to the victim — an unwanted illegitimate child — than the spoiled and uncontrolled children acknowledged by their father.

After the violent crimes unit rejects Yi-soo’s dinner invitation, Seung-joo shows up to celebrate with him instead. As the brothers share a drink, Yi-soo ponders what his life would have been like if Seung-joo had viewed him as a competitor. And why exactly did Seung-joo choose to be nice to him growing up?

Well, Seung-joo admits, he pitied Yi-soo at first. It wasn’t Yi-soo’s fault he was born or that his mother died tragically so that he had to live with his father and step-mother, JO HEE-JA (Jeon Hye-jin). As they were growing up, it seems like Seung-joo felt compelled to off-set his mother’s mistreatment until a genuine bond formed between them, and in the present, Seung-joo still goes to bat for Yi-soo against Chairman Jin and Hee-ja. (Please, drama gods, don’t f**k with this brotherly love!)

Speaking of Hee-ja’s mistreatment, she gleefully kicks Yi-soo out of his apartment, so he moves back into his childhood home — which just so happens to be across the street from where Kang-hyun lives with her parents. (Dramaland is very small.) The close proximity allows for convenient ride-share opportunities, especially when they’ve got a new murder investigation to solve and Kang-hyun’s SUV is as unreliable as it is filthy.

The new case is not about another chaebol family, but it does metaphorically fall into Yi-soo’s lap while he’s browsing a new art exhibition — ironically themed around death — at a gallery. The painter, an art professor, was stabbed the night before the opening of the show, covered in red paint, and then left on display like a piece of performance art.

Immediately, Kang-hyun and Yi-soo identify three suspects: the suspiciously sweaty assistant; the art gallery owner who would gain financially if the paintings increased in value upon the art professor’s death; and the painter’s wife, who was having an affair and could use the insurance payout to help her boyfriend start his own business. Further investigation, however, reveals a fourth suspect: the angry mother of one of the professor’s former students. The paintings featured in the professor’s death-themed exhibition were actually plagiarized copies of pieces created by Angry Mother’s (now deceased) daughter, whose artistic career was ruined after she tried to prove that Art Professor was a fraud.

CCTV footage outside the gallery — but not inside, because those cameras were undergoing an upgrade — captured a woman entering the building the night of the murder. The unidentified woman was wearing a trench coat and a scarf identical to the one Angry Mother donned a week ago when she confronted the art professor and splashed red paint — like the paint covering the dead body — on one of his plagiarized paintings. Despite a solid alibi, all the initial evidence seems to point to Angry Mother… until it doesn’t.

Once our detectives dig a little deeper, they discover that an identical scarf was purchased by Sweaty Assistant, another one of the professor’s students who was recently screwed over by him. Yi-soo, however, is one step ahead of his colleagues, but it’s hard to say how much of it is due to his budding detective skills or sheer luck. From the very beginning, Yi-soo pegged Sweaty Assistant as the murderer, but he could have been jumping to conclusions because Sweaty Assistant was the first suspect he and Kang-hyun met.

Either way, Yi-soo’s breakthrough in the case occurs because he bought the painting that Angry Mother splashed with paint, supposedly because he anticipated the damage would increase its value, like Banksy’s shredded Girl with Balloon. When Yi-soo hung it on the wall of his childhood home, a mouse ran across his living room and terrified him so much that he knocked the painting off the wall and called Kang-hyun to save him from the scary rodent. Although the mouse lived to be exterminated another day, the painting took some damage. A large chunk of paint chipped off and revealed another painting — and Sweaty Assistant’s signature — underneath.

By the time Kang-hyun and her team figure out that Sweaty Assistant is a potentially dangerous murderer, Yi-soo is already having a one-on-one meeting with the killer, and Yi-soo foolishly reveals he knows too much. To be fair, we’ve seen enough of Yi-soo’s MMA skills to know he could easily wipe the floor with Sweaty Assistant in a fair fight, but Sweaty Assistant also (literally) stabbed the professor in the back twice before killing him. So, yeah, Yi-soo was a bit careless when he turned his back to Sweaty Assistant and gave him the opening he needed to grab a bottle and whack Yi-soo over the head.

As this week’s episodes come to a close, I find myself most curious to know: is Yi-soo downplaying his intelligence? One would assume that a man capable of obtaining his law certificate would be, at the very least, book smart, but how does he not know what blood spatter is? He’s obviously watched a lot of police procedural television shows, and blood spatter is part of Crime Podcast 101. So are the writers simply scrambling to find ways to remind viewers that he is out of his element despite having a growing knack for police work? Given how much inaccurate and unrealistic police work there is in this show, shoddy writing seems very likely.

Or — and I would love for this to be true — what if Yi-soo intentionally acts like a fool for the sake of maintaining the bond he has with his brother? As the first murder case demonstrated, Yi-soo and Seung-joo are the antithesis of what we usually see in K-dramas that feature illegitimate half-siblings, and if Yi-soo’s non-threatening persona is intentionally crafted so his brother will continue to love him, then that sets us up for some potentially interesting character growth the longer Yi-soo remains with the violent crimes unit. Yi-soo wants the team’s friendship and respect, and to earn it, he would need to drop the facade. The last thing I want is for Yi-soo and Seung-joo’s brotherly bond to crumble, buuuuuut I wouldn’t hate a little tension between the two — so long as it ended happily, of course.

Speaking of tension — anyone else get a kick out of Jun-young’s interaction with Ji-won in the autopsy room? Last week I thought there was a little something-something between them when he prevented her from stumbling on the yacht, but there was no denying it this week. He was flustered when Ji-won touched him in order to demonstrate where and how the victim was stabbed.

At this point in our story, I’m far more invested in their little side flirtation than whatever potential romance Yi-soo has going on with Kang-hyun. A Yi-soo x Kang-hyun pairing might grow on me with time — if that’s indeed where this drama is headed — but if not, I will happily ship the high-strung cop and the sexy forensics doctor.

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