Han-jun wakes up in a hospital bed with Jae-hui by his side. He’s come to the realisation that even though he scares easily, if he runs away, he’ll always come back to Jae-hui. He asks her to wait for him to catch Gopuri to earn Jae-jeong’s approval so that he can give her his heart.
Detectives Jang and Jae-hui visit Han-jun the next morning as he is discharged from the hospital. When Jae-hui pulls out the portrait she saved from Tae-su’s trailer, Detective Jang produces the identical one he took from the old arson site. ..
Jang is certain that Lim Yeong-ju is the suspect in his first murder case. He remembers the day his father threatened to kill him with a pickaxe. Yeong-ju’s fear propelled him as he knocked his father to the ground and wounded him with his own weapon.
Detective Jang has revealed that Yeong-ju didn’t stop there, setting fire to his family home while his father was still alive. He’s been missing ever since. Han-jun notes the white shoes Tae-su’s mother wore in the portrait – the last picture she ever took with her son.
That night at Café Minamdang, the crew is joined by Jae-hui. Hye-jun has found pictures of the gopuri knots with the victims’ names on them as well as videos of the prostitution. It’s likely Tae-su and Aunty Im had a two-person system, one where she gave prophecies and Tae-su fulfilled them through blackmail and favours. ..
The group recognises the Do-won video and files names from it. They join forces with the other videos to identify the club as N.Joy Club. The group believes that the profits generated by the club were from selling drugs there. The rumours of drugs being sold there lead the group to believe that this is true.
The cartel can’t be pinned down on charges of narcotics trafficking alone because it would be too easy for them to claim that they are unrelated to the club. Do-won suggests that they go undercover, and Han-jun readily agrees.
The meeting ended and Han-jun and Jae-hui took a romantic stroll. They promised to do more normal things when the case is over.
The next day, the Minamdang crew, along with Jae-hui and Do-won, get all dolled up to infiltrate N.Joy Club. Inside, the men change into staff uniforms. Do-won is peeved by his waiter costume – the source of Han-jun’s easy agreement the night before. Jae-hui and Hye-jun get eyes on a man dealing pouches of red crystals and mark him for Su-cheol and Han-jun.
Do-won and Na-dan spy a man spiking a woman’s drink with a single red crystal. Despite Na-dan’s worried protests, Do-won gets involved and saves the woman. The shady drink-spiker is outraged since the club’s employees are supposed to turn a blind eye. ..
Na-dan, the man behind the “hot girls” scheme, tries to control the damage by calling Hye-jun. When the shady men call the club manager, Su-cheol answers. He and Han-jun have the club manager kneeling before them and scare him into admitting that he knows Tae-su. ..
Na-dan, Do-won, and Han-jun meet up with Su-cheol, who has learned that the drug is called ‘Ruby’ and Tae-su managed the trafficking of it at the club. They need to find his ledger, which would be decisive proof that the dividends are drug money, but it’s hidden in a safe on the building’s top floor.
The crew migrates to their van, where Hye-jun hacks into the building’s CCTV. It’s crawling with security, but Han-jun has already taken care of it. He discloses that he told Detective Jang to conduct a raid by using Jae-hui’s name. ..
Jae-hui and Do-won join the detectives when they arrive all the same. They end up in a messy tussle with the security guards in the lobby, where Jin-sang and Min-gyeong have been moping after getting rejected by the N.Joy Club bouncers.
The two of them spot Han-jun sneaking through the lobby and, ever the faithful disciples, run up to him excitedly. He pretends that the spirits sent him to save Jin-sang’s family from ruin, which aligns with the building being owned by Dong-gi and the top floor being under Tae-su’s control.
Han-jun and Su-cheol take the private elevator as per Jin-sang’s instructions. Hye-jun tries and fails to keep them off the CCTV, so Su-cheol is left to deal with the posse of guards that meet them. Tae-su sees the fight and answers a call to confirm that he’ll collect some files and leave.
Han-jun makes it to the safe, opening it with a date provided by Jin-sang. Inside is the ledger and some other files, including an inspection report on Seung-won. Tae-su emerges and the men are pulled into a rematch that Tae-su wins. He leaves with all the files but one, which Han-jun managed to hide under a rug. Tae-su takes the last file and leaves, leaving Han-jun with a feeling of betrayal. ..
Han-jun tells the story of how a group of investors invested in Joyce Entertainment, which then reinvested in N.Joy Club, where Tae-su generated profits by selling Ruby to pay out the cartel members. The cartel will get richer while Seung-won reaches for the president position.
Han-jun believes that Dong-gi prepared a ledger of the cartel’s crimes, including the inspection report on Seung-won, as a contingency plan. He also found another document in the safe that showed that Seung-won sold the Jakdu-dong land at a marked-up price. With Choekang doing the construction on the project, Seung-won was able to sell his cheap land to the government for a higher price while setting the construction plan into motion.
Meanwhile, Aunty Im and Tae-su sit before Seung-won with the inspection file. Seung-won clicks a pen with ire, realising that Dong-gi played dumb while positioning himself in the way of Seung-won’s succession.
Seung-won commands Aunty Im to fuel a media frenzy and begin selling apartments right after the ground-breaking ceremony. Even if things go astray, the contract they entered into means that they get half the fee anyway. Seung-won also orders them to deal with Dong-gi – an outcome they planned for after siphoning off his assets overseas – before the shareholders’ meeting.
Do-won and Han-jun are investigating the discrepancies in the cash flow at Minamdang. They find that the dividends that used to be invested into the Jakdu-dong development have been diverted into KM Leaders. Do-won thinks that Aunty Im established it as a paper company to direct all Dong-gi’s investment money into. Hearing this, Han-jun concludes that Aunty Im and Seung-won are going to steal the Jakdu-dong development investments through KM Leaders after conning the cartel and gaining their trust. He’s also sure that they’ll dispose of Dong-gi.
Tae-su is, in fact, escorting Dong-gi to the old arson site at that moment. After Jin-sang alerts Han-jun to this, Han-jun, Jae-hui, Su-cheol and Hye-jun drive to the last place Tae-su’s car was captured on CCTV before he entered a blind zone. ..
Han-jun explains that if this is Aunty Im’s last big job and she’s planning to wrap everything up, she’d choose a place that holds meaning for Tae-su so that he’ll stay silent even if he becomes the fall guy. His old family home.
They arrive in time to save Dong-gi from choking to death. Tae-su stands with a lighter held over a gas cannister, ready to set them all ablaze.
Yeong-ju/Tae-su walks away from his burning home, a fresh burn scar on his forearm. He falls to the ground and is found by Aunty Im. Peering out from behind her is a young boy, who remarks that Yeong-ju is like a blackbird – they’re all the same but one is called an ominous crow while the other is a welcomed magpie. He claims Yeong-ju as his very own magpie. ..
We then jump to Jae-jeong’s murder and the gopuri knot.
The Episode Review
We’ve transitioned into the romance subplot proper, and the first half of this episode dragged because of it. Han-jun’s profession of love in the hospital felt so out of place. He has only known Jae-hui as an adult for a very short period (most of which she spent behaving atrociously towards him), and there’s been no substantial romantic build-up between them.
He can’t help but feel this way when he remembers her as Jang-mi because she was a child. The flashbacks don’t suggest that this feeling is anything other than natural.
The casting choices for this drama have been puzzling when it comes to character ages. Han-jun is supposed to be older than Jae-hui, Jae-jeong and Su-cheol, but he passes as younger than all of them. This has led to some confusion among viewers about who will play which age role.
Jae-hui is supposed to have miraculously grown up from the little girl in the flashbacks while no one else aged a day. And now we have Aunty Im, who was an adult when Tae-su was a child, but the actor playing him is 14 years older than the actress playing her. None of it is convincing.
Café Minamdang’s writing and direction favours dialogue-heavy infodump scenes over trusting its audience enough to show us the mechanics of the plot. This episode highlighted the way this favours scenes over ones that are more engaging, especially when the mystery is not gripping enough to keep you engaged through all the yapping. ..
The mystery of Seung-won continues to baffle those who know him. Is he the child spinning riddles about blackbirds? The crow adopting Tae-su as his magpie points to misdirection. It also explains the man Han-jun saw walking away from Jae-jeong’s apartment during the fire. A man whose presence came with a clicking sound eerily like Seung-won’s obsessive pen clicking. ..
I’m having a hard time reconciling the child’s behaviour from the past with what I’m seeing now. It seems like there might be something wrong with the writing, or maybe there’s more to this story that we don’t know yet. ..
