Dongjae the Good or the Bastard: Episodes 1-2

by solstices

It’s weasel time! Branching off from the acclaimed Forest of Secrets series, our favorite rascal prosecutor finally gets his turn in the spotlight — and what a hilarious, compelling, and downright entertaining ride it is.

 
EPISODES 1-2

Our story begins in the provincial prosecutor’s office of Cheongju, where a nerve-wracked prosecutor SEO DONG-JAE (Lee Jun-hyuk) clicks on this semester’s promotion results. Alas, his name isn’t on the list. It’s far from the first time — in fact, it’s perhaps the third or fourth — and a disheartened Dong-jae can barely conceal his anguish.

While his peers rejoice over their promotions, Dong-jae leaves the office, spine wound tight. Once he’s alone in the elevator, he curses at the top of his lungs, stomping his foot for good measure. Then the elevator doors open mid-tirade. HAHAHA. Offering a sheepish smile like nothing’s wrong in the least, Dong-jae simply presses the button to close the doors again. And there we have it — a very fitting introduction to our favorite weasel and his latest predicament.

After briefly drowning his sorrows in convenience store ramyun, Dong-jae pulls himself back together. No setback can drag our tenacious prosecutor down, and he waltzes straight into the bowling alley his colleagues are having fun at. Already, a few distinct personalities stand out.

There’s the condescending JO BYUNG-GUN (Hyun Bong-shik) who needles Dong-jae at every opportunity, and the reticent KIM JI-HEE (Jung Woon-sun) whose silence belies her exasperation at the men’s office politics. Most important of all is the Cheongju senior prosecutor JEON MI-RAN (Lee Hang-na), whom I’ll call Chief Jeon for convenience. She’s Dong-jae’s direct superior, and amidst his usual flattery, it’s clear they have a comfortable dynamic.

The next morning, Dong-jae nearly gets into an accident when a car suddenly swerves into his lane. Thus begins Dong-jae’s dreadful week at work — endless sheafs of papers, all of which describe cases that are far from big enough to net him a promotion.

With that, Dong-jae’s headache of the week comes knocking on his door. A man is suing a restaurant owner for stepping out into the road to retrieve some spilled potatoes, causing a car accident that broke his arm and shattered his valuable porcelain vase in the trunk. The accused LEE KYUNG-HAK (Kim Sang-ho) is obstinately unrepentant at first, but soon reveals a sympathetic background. Kyung-hak runs a diner for elderly people to eat a proper meal at just $1, and he’d even turned down a government commendation award for his charitable deeds, preferring to focus on his diner.

Needless to say, our opportunistic prosecutor zeroes in on the government recognition, digging into the case with gusto. Once Dong-jae finds a loose thread, it all unravels fairly quickly. The driver JOO JUNG-KI (Jung Hee-tae) specifically requested to transport the vase himself, despite the gallery’s usual protocol of having its artworks insured and delivered. And as luck would have it, the hasty driver who cut into Dong-jae’s lane was none other than Jung-ki.

With his dashcam footage and Jung-ki’s car GPS, Dong-jae exposes Jung-ki’s scheme — he’d been circling the area for a full eight minutes before deliberately crashing in front of Kyung-hak. The jig is up, and Jung-ki stands liable for fraud.

But the case isn’t all that cut and dry. When Kyung-hak finds himself plagued by a clogged water pipe, Dong-jae takes it upon himself to call in the professionals to sort out the drain in the backyard — and in true Dong-jae fashion, his meddling causes everything to go very wrong (yet also very right).

After Chief Jeon invites Dong-jae out for a meal, he arrives at the restaurant to find her heavily drunk and sitting opposite NAM WAN-SUNG (Park Sung-woong), CEO of Ehong Construction. That’s none other than the company that employs Jung-ki, and their goal is clear: chase Kyung-hak out of the neighborhood, redevelop the area, and profit. To that end, Wan-sung tempts Dong-jae with a black credit card, but our reformed (?) prosecutor doesn’t bite the bait.

Still, Wan-sung is as smarmy as he is persistent. (Interestingly, they’d met a decade ago through Season 1’s Park Moo-sung (cameo by Eom Hyo-seob), back when Wan-sung hadn’t climbed up the ladder yet.) Offering Dong-jae a free ride to the National Assembly, Wan-sung gets under his skin by insinuating that Chief Jeon is corrupt and deliberately assigned the case to the malleable Dong-jae. Then Wan-sung saunters off with a skip in his step, leaving Dong-jae seething.

Backed into a corner, Dong-jae heads to the diner. The lights are out, so Dong-jae circles around to the back door — and that’s when he witnesses Kyung-hak hauling a skeleton out of the ground. Oops. Dong-jae’s greeted with a shovel to the head, and when he regains consciousness, he’s all trussed up. (A tad too familiar, methinks.) Kyung-hak eyes him with a sickle in hand, ready to silence him forever.

As it turns out, the generous restaurant owner is a murderer by night. When the curious family dog had sniffed out the buried corpse in the backyard, Kyung-hak had sent both it and his wife six feet under. Survival instinct kicking in, our wily weasel attempts to convince Kyung-hak to free him. 1) The case against him will be dismissed due to fraud! 2) He could potentially make millions! 3) He can get off scot-free if Dong-jae files the bodies away as unidentified corpses!

That last offer finally sways Kyung-hak, though it comes with a fresh set of problems. Since external access is prohibited, Dong-jae needs to enter a legal building to settle the documents. That’s basically asking Kyung-hak to walk into the lion’s den, but our smooth-tongued weasel manages to get his way.

Marched into his office at sicklepoint, Dong-jae obediently prints the documents, then seizes a moment of distraction to slip past Kyung-hak. It doesn’t work, but the ensuing ruckus (read: frantic sickle chase) alerts the few prosecutors still in the office after hours. The incompetent Byung-gun quivers in fear, the staunch Ji-hee disarms Kyung-hak with a book, and poor maknae SUNG SHI-WOON (Baek Sun-ho) gets taken hostage — but the elevator is apparently on the side of justice, because it malfunctions and crashes to the ground. Thankfully, Shi-woon is unscathed. Our heroic weasel is sent to the hospital (he got scraped by the sickle), and Kyung-hak is hauled off to prison.

Wan-sung and Jung-ki visit Kyung-hak in jail, offering a luxurious prison life and Jung-ki’s attorney services as long as Kyung-hak hands over his land. It all clicks in Kyung-hak’s brain, and he agrees to sell his valuable land — on the condition that Wan-sung kills Dong-jae. Wan-sung scoffs at his absurd request, but Kyung-hak’s right on one count. Wan-sung will do anything to acquire that land.

When the adorably clueless Shi-woon unknowingly accepts a bribe hamper on Dong-jae’s behalf, our indignant prosecutor decides it’s time to show Wan-sung who’s boss. Clad in his spiffiest suit, Dong-jae meets Wan-sung, where he tosses the bills back in the arrogant CEOs lap. But Wan-sung reminds Dong-jae of the land he’d gifted him a decade ago. The price has multiplied to an exorbitant amount since — my, my, what a scandalous bribe Dong-jae received.

Wan-sung has the upper hand here, especially considering Dong-jae’s less-than-stellar reputation. Worse yet, he’s not bluffing. Ransacking through his apartment, Dong-jae finds the land deed in a tucked-away box, forgotten ever since Wan-sung slipped it into a drunk Dong-jae’s pocket ten years ago. Dong-jae has no choice but to convince Kyung-hak to hand over the land — unless he devises another way out, in true weasel fashion.

Aside from the main plot, the seeds of future conflict are also being sown. For one, Byung-gun gets insider information on his narcotics cases from the drug dealer PARK CHAN-HYUK (Heo Dong-won), who’s the front man for the real mastermind CHOI GEUM-HO (Han Jae-young). Geum-ho launders his money through his bar, and so the prosecution (namely Chief Jeon and Byung-gun) denies the search warrant to prevent Geum-ho from falling into the police’s hands. Looks like Season 2’s conflict still looms large over the criminal justice system.

The other burgeoning plotline relates to Dong-jae, who runs into a familiar face in the hospital. It’s the bowling alley staff IM YURI (Choi Joo-eun), clad in a high school uniform with a nasty bruise on her cheek. Yuri takes cover in Dong-jae’s ward to hide from the blonde NAM GYEO-RE (Kim Soo-gyeom), though she denies that he hurt her, and won’t elaborate on who he is to her. (The reason why she keeps a duffel bag of cash stowed away at work, perhaps?) Still, when Dong-jae offers her macarons and remarks that he can’t indulge in sweets at his age, she reciprocates by leaving a plain bun and a small handwritten note behind. It’s nice to see a glimpse of Dong-jae’s softer side, and I’m curious to learn more about Yuri.

In case it wasn’t obvious already, I am absolutely loving this spin-off so far! It truly feels like an extension of the series we’ve come to know and love, with its understated attention to detail, disparate hints that converge into a full-fledged case, and prosecutor politicking — just with the humor dialed up a notch (or two, or five) higher, courtesy of our resident laugh generator.

Like we all expected, Dong-jae is as hilarious as ever, preserving his pride and acting like a smug know-it-all that has everything under his belt. All while tripping into situations and wriggling his way to survival, of course. The road Dong-jae’s taken to get here makes his current dilemma all the more compelling — he wants to set right his moral compass and bask in public admiration, but his blemished past won’t free him from its clutches. Now that he’s well and truly ensnared in Wan-sung’s trap, I can’t wait to find out how our endearing weasel extricates himself from trouble once again. Because surely he will, right?

 
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