Shark Episode 14 Recap

An obligatory rehash of the final five minutes of episode 13 starts us off.  

If you forgot, all gloves are off with the Chairman and forces related to Yi Soo have kidnapped Jo Ui Sun. He's freaking out since he can hear that his father isn't even close to agreeing to save him. Well, there's that and the fact his direct captor is slipping into his holding location with a weapon.

Meanwhile, Hae Woo is following our hero in her car and having dear Detective Byeon track her dad's cellphone. During the other sequences in this section, Hae Woo is jittery and her sleuthing partner is for the results of her request.

Yi Soo's conversation with "Jo Sang Geuk" is expanded slightly this episode; we see him resort to threats rather than bend. Unfortunately his threat is pointed at Yi Hyun, whom we already know is being stalked around by the poison pen minion. It seems pretty clear to me she's in danger whether his son is hurt or not, but Yi Soo doesn't bat an eyelash.

As the man holding Ui Sun comes into view and slowly stalks toward his captive, the Chairman seems to start to waver. He starts asking if he'll really get his son back if he does as Yi Soo asks. Our resident shark affirms because this kidnapping isn't his ultimate goal. Grandpa must think he's clever, because he asks for more time to think in response...

...but Yi Soo knows what that means since he played that game with Prosecutor Oh too. You're not hitting this guy with a truck.

Jo Ui Sun trembles as he hears his father use a cheap metaphor about destiny to apparently abandon him. "Perhaps the time for me to part with my son has come."

His skii-mask wearing captor ends the audio feed before he can hear the rest. The Chairman goes on to say that no father would abandon their child...and begins talking about how both he and Yi Soo's father took steps to ensure good futures for their sons. Oh my.

At that moment, Detective Byeon gets a lock on the cellphone location and mobilizes his guys in the police force.

Meanwhile the Chairman tries to use the memory of Han Young Man to deter our hero.  He says the past is best left resting for his sake. It's pretty clear Yi Soo doesn't like it when his arch enemy talks about his father. Something chilling is that when "Jo Sang Geuk" says he's not wholly to blame and that Yi Soo doesn't know everything...it's probably true.

It doesn't matter to Yi Soo. He may be unclear on what darkness surrounded Han Young Man;  what is clear is that not only has the Chairman ended many lives, he also feels no remorse.  He continues to use the strength of his late driver's memory to his advantage, saying that both of them felt guilt. When Yi Soo isn't having that, the old man finally loses his cool and offers information about his father he never knew.

Implacable Yi Soo responds that knows his father better than the Chairman ever could. Any retort made in turn is shrugged off. The time to choose has concluded and so has this phone call.

Chairman Jo rings up (presumably) his assassin-minion to find his son right away. Yi Soo is already back on the phone telling his accomplice to carry out their plans just so. It seems the wound on his side is still bothering him too.

Hae Woo follows Yi Soo into this super nice apartment complex despite receiving a call that the trace was successful. She enters the stairwell where a waiting Yi Soo pins her to the wall. He clearly wants to kiss her, but asks instead why he's being followed.

She accuses him of the kidnapping outright. He must certainly be working with someone else, and she knows the trace is likely leading to a separate location from the holding grounds. Hae Woo begs him to stop too,  but he intensely grasps her shoulders and tells him to end this herself. Finding out the truth is the only way!
Her answer is that his life is more important than all that, while his is that he may as well give that up too if he can't follow through. Hae Woo tries a new tactic, to have him think of Yi Hyun...

...which leads him to suddenly pull in close. Their lips almost brush and his eyes are devouring her; it's understandable if you need to turn up the air conditioning because you can almost feel the tension melting your screen. Poor, poor Joon Young.

Since this is not a time for kissing, Yi Soo bypasses her lips and whispers into her ear that Yi Hyun will understand. Hae Woo tells him to think of those that love him, because he's hurting everyone including himself.  More killing won't help anything.

He finally tells her that he had no involvement in the incidents of the two Ohs, detective and prosecutor, murder or accident. Our heroine is dead wrong when she thinks that this will end on both sides once Yi Soo stops; but he doesn't say this and instead remarks the order must be right. His desperate swim can only end once the truth is revealed.

Hae Woo passionately cries that any revelations are futile should Yi Soo be ruined. He's clearly moved. A heart-thumping moment comes when he takes her into his arms. She struggles but eventually gives up;  he asks her to do the same in her current efforts.  "I won't stop,"  he whispers.

She's less than tender when she responds. Our heroine promises to punish all of the guilty parties in this matter. There can be no exception, not even Yi Soo, who answers coolly that he's looking forward to her strike.

Once Yi Soo exits the stairs, there's a miserable instant when he nearly turns back. His hand wavers over the door knob. But there is no room to waver in his life, so he leaves a desolate Hae Woo to stand alone.

Meanwhile the masked kidnapper finally gets to use his knife...



...but cuts the bonds of his captive instead.

The police and Detective Byeon are making their way toward the location of Ui Sun's cellphone. Hae Woo, finally driving there after her confrontation with Yi Soo, receives a call from Soo Hyun to let her know he'll be there also.

Next we see the kidnapper popping into his car to answer a call from his "friend," Yi Soo. Seconds before he removes his mask,  his voice finally reveals his identity.

It's Soo Hyun. There's no denying those deep tones or that unique face. Something has always been suspect about him, despite his propensity for adorable bumbling. It's still funny how he takes time out to fix his hair, though.

Our hero praises his good work in following orders as he stands outside the bookstore once again. He's clearly getting ready to move against the assassin-minion and his darned pen.

The police arrive at the warehouse and sweep out of their cars in a flurry of readied guns and serious expressions. Seeing Soo Hyun wrongly deflates their tension, but since they don't know what he really is it makes sense. The team makes their way to the room where Ui Sun had been kept, but like Hae Woo suspected, all they find is the cellphone...



...and a business card for a professor Robert Yune, affiliated with the University of Chicago. The confirmed suspicion about Soo Hyun adds something dark to all of his expressions now. The way he watches Byeon finding the clue is so calculating.

Hae Woo arrives on the scene as our good detective uses the cellphone to ring up Chairman Jo, who answers the call with raging threats. He's visibly startled when he hears Byeon's voice; of course,  as the two speak he changes tone entirely. Victim mode activates as the Chairman goes on about how he was asked for a ransom in turn for his son's life.

Detective Byeon asks what happened next. Grandpa fibs that he'd do anything to save his son's life and that he doesn't know the identity of the criminal. He should be Chairman Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire with the infrequency of truth passing his lips. Hae Woo clearly things there's something up too when her sleuthing partner soon tells her there was a ransom.

Soo Hyun was listening in on the exchange, smirking. So devious, that one.

The next sequence shows police officers discovering Jo Ui Sun, alive but sniffling, in an abandoned car. Joon Young's making calls and hanging out in his own outside the Jo Residence when they bring the one-time captive home. They enter the house together and the Chairman flies out to act the part of the concerned parent.

Ui Sun isn't having any of that and responds by retreating to his room to be alone. Things are frightfully tense when his father pops in despite this wish. All this conversation amounts to is the shaken son asking his father whether they're truly related in such a way. What he heard in the warehouse has shaken his perception of reality.

Alone in his dark office, the Chairman wonders if this was what Yi Soo was after.



If you talk about a shark, it will appear: Yi Soo openly meets with Soo Hyun at a bar.

Joon Young stalks outside the Jo household, waiting for Byeon and Hae Woo to arrive.  Once they do,  he informs them that her father is refusing to talk and only babbles when he does;  this leads Hae Woo to ask the good detective for time for her father to recover a bit before prodding him for answers.

High drama meets them as the married couple enters the house. Ui Sun comes flying past the group in a tizzy, ears hands tight over his ears. He makes a beeline for his father's study, interrupting the rare call not made in the dark, apparently to demolish that vase from a few episodes ago. You know, the one that "contains the soul" of Chairman Jo's "father."

Joon Young attempts to disengage his father-in-law from the ensuing confrontation. Much of it probably sounds like stress-induced incoherence to the newly-weds. However, it's striking to hear Ui Sun say he won't be abandoned like his mother. What happened there?

When he finally turns on Hae Woo, posing the fact she respects her grandpa most in this world, "Jo Sang Geuk" calls his son's name in a warning tone. This  prompts the now totally unhinged man to first cheer Korean Independence as a jab to his father...

...and then call pathetically for his mother. Mom again, huh? In any case, I think I finally feel sorry for Hae Woo's dad. It's likely the Chairman's fault he's become such a person.

We return to the meeting between Yi Soo and his newly revealed friend. Soo Hyun begins to brief our hero on what he's learned about the book-store owning assassin. We hear a lot of common information on him, from his name and family circumstance to military service and his stint as police. After he retired, the records end and nothing in them connects him to "Jo Sang Geuk."

The conversation turns to Yi Hyun. Soo Hyun promises to continue protecting her, but Yi Soo wants more than one man on the job.

Detective Byeon is agonizing over the video file from the kidnapping when he gets a text that nearly shocks him out of his seat. "Keep watch over your daughter."

He calls his wife right away. Luckily, the two are together with Dong Soo at the restaurant snacking on chicken and not, well, dead. Our good detective starts yelling, clearly out of deep concern, ordering his family to stay put. He's says he'll pick them up and that it's imperative their adoptive daughter isn't left alone until then.

Since they don't have details, Yi Hyun and company take the warning lightly. There's a cute exchange with the ever-garrulous Dong Soo, though. Before Byeon rushes out to meet his family, he asks his partner to find out whose number the text came from.

Mrs. Park and Hae Woo have a little pow-wow about her grandmother in the interim. This is brought on by her father's earlier rants, of course. It turns out the woman she knew wasn't her father's biological mother.The Chairman remarried after that woman up and disappeared. Eek. Knowing this show, it's probably more murder.

Afterward, our heroine and her husband have a scuffle over Yi Soo's schemes. Joon Young is determined to look into things, as he's totally convinced what happened to his father is related. Hae Woo tries to talk him down, but fails to give him the truth or the details he'd need to understand things. I'm sure he'd listen, but the best course is always to keep secrets from your husband. Right?

I'm still firmly feeling sorry for Joon Young when the childhood sweethearts have their contemplative montage set to sad music. It's awful watching him see his wife ruminating on another man, relationship token in hand. This marriage is already gushing trust on its way down to ruined town.

Yi Soo is waiting at the cafe with a gift box for Yi Hyun. Detective Byeon has taken to escorting her closely, even to work. Good,  because the assassin is definitely still tracking her. It's probably time to do something about that.

When his sister sits down to the table with him, our hero insists this prettily wrapped box with a bow on it isn't a present, but some kind of crazy hand me down. These exchanges are so awkward they're cute, but I don't know what to do with myself when they occur. Fierce Shark Yi Soo is the norm, so Sweet Brother Yi Soo is always jarring.



Anyway, the not-a-gift is a pair of lovely pink shoes which are clearly not hand-me-downs. Yi Hyun loves them and Yi Soo, struck shy, makes an abrupt excuse to leave once she's put them on.

It seems the gift has a double purpose though. We clearly see our hero checking out a GPS application on his phone once he's out on the street. There's a tracker in those shoes. It seems like a good idea, but what happens when she wears a different pair? Girls often have dozens.

Secretary Jang and Dong Soo suddenly wink into existence to beg Yi Soo's presence at breakfast. This sequence is pure comic relief as the secretary says they should eat together often -- prompting Dong Soo to wonder out loud if she meant just the two of them. Of course she included Yi Soo, but it still sends the silly driver over the moon.

If you watch any part of this episode, it has to be a clip of Dong Soo's subsequent butt-touching dance. This recapper cannot do it justice here.



Joon Young visits his father in the hospital and manages to run into that pedophile CEO from a few episodes back. The man offers him excuses for what happened with Kim Jun that he's not willing to hear. Suddenly the conversation turns to how being too trusting is a mistake.  "Even your wife."

The pervert pokes at the fact that Hae Woo and Kim Jun seem like more than acquaintances, and Joon Young looks more than angry. He's honestly threatening as he warns the man to stop talking bad about his wife. When he's alone in his car, though, it's clear his words were more out of desire to believe in Hae Woo than actual sustained trust.



On the subject of his wife, she and Detective Byeon are being blocked from questioning Ui Sun. The Chairman is making obvious but polite excuses. It's clear he's nervous his son will say something that will incriminate him; the look on his face when the man appears to opt willingly for the questioning himself is priceless.

The only thing that might be a problem is the subject of ransom. Otherwise,  the bulk of the conversation is spent in paranoia, linear details involving the kidnapping, and interruptions from the visibly nervous Chairman.

After this exchange, Hae Woo voices her concern that both her father and grandfather are hiding something. Detective Byeon wonders if she isn't doing the same with him. She says nothing and he walks off with a call as she receives one of her own from her husband. He's got good timing, since he's probably the person she's lying to the most. Their words feel cold and uncomfortable.

Meanwhile,  Byeon finds the newspaper ad regarding Chun Young Bo was answered. Robert Yune was the one that responded. That's the name from the business card found at Jo Ui Sun's holding site! So the two go to check out this new turn of events.

He might have looked unflappable when the Chairman mentioned it, but Yi Soo is truly bothered by his father's mysteries. He calls up Soo Hyun in order to have him investigate them, but decides to handle it alone. Since our hero seems distracted, his accomplice cheers him by letting him know he's watching his sister...and she's wearing the GPS Shoes.

This works to momentarily set Yi Soo's mind at ease, though he doesn't forget the threats made against Yi Hyun.

Soo Hyun is doing his job at the cafe,  but his charge is noticing the increasing frequency of his visits.  When he asks to drive her home,  she refuses. Her adopted father is already on driving duty.  He then flicks her on the forehead when she gives him grief.  

This would be cute, but it's marred for me now as I wonder how much of this is for show. Things seem fine at the cafe, though.

Except for this super suspicious guy playing Plants Vs. Zombies at one of the tables. Coupled with the creepy music and deliberate camera angle, the way he looks at Yi Hyun is worrisome.



Our sleuthing pair wishes to meet with Robert Yune, so they head over to his apartment. The building in which he lives is the same as the one from Hae Woo's intense stair confrontation with Yi Soo. The realization stuns her; he's truly leading her everywhere.



Professor Yune runs into them outside of his place and now, as a trio, they move their meeting to a cafe. Because everything should be talked about in public places.

We learn that Yune knows a lot about Chun Young Bo. He hasn't any personal ties to him, but rather the knowledge comes from his position as a professor of history. To him, the mysterious man from the ad is a historical figure -- one he has even given lectures on. All of the information he has came from previously classified documents from the United States Army.

That sounds full of villainous promise, but here come the details.

Chun Young Bo was a North Korean soldier who later spied for the United States. He had no respect for allegiance and, apparently, even less for life; his name is closely linked with massacre after massacre. As a soldier for the North, he slaughtered both soldiers and civilians from the South. Once he turned coats, he sold out his former comrades and helped in their executions.

The fire that took out Great Grandpa Jo In Suk's village? Professor Yune has nothing but speculation, but it seems possible Chun Young Bo is responsible. Apparently, the terrible man is also dead, but there are no records of how or when it happened.  

Hae Woo seems to sense its important, and asks if there's a photo. Unfortunately there isn't, because it'd make things too simple. But we get information instead: our friendly professor mentions someone contacted him and also asked for a photo. The caller also hinted that Jo Sang Geuk might have further details...

...because apparently the Jo family kept Chun Young Bo's father as a slave.  Oh my.

Detective Byeon asks who the informant was -- and the professor says the name given was "Han Yi Soo."

The two part ways with Professor Yune and Hae Woo tries to part with our good detective without a word. He stops her to talk, because -- hello, this is about Yi Soo? -- but she forks over the much-talked about photo instead. This is one of those things she held off telling Detective Byeon, so she lets him know that Prosecutor Oh received a copy from Detective Oh just before that Oh died.

Our heroine doesn't allow questions as she says there's someone she has to meet. He presses her, but she only promises to call later.

Meanwhile at work with Yi Hyun, that creepy gamer from before slips a folded note to her over the counter. He doesn't stay to see her reaction, so at least it's not one of those cliche robbery tactics.

She opens it and reads: "Han Yi Soo is alive." Okay, this might be more dangerous.



Yi Hyun tries to follow the guy that passed her the note,  but before she can catch up he's already speeding off in a car. She hails a taxi and orders the standard drama-land car chase. Instead, she gets a surprise kidnapping for her troubles. The driver is Chairman Jo's assassin and there's no telling what he'll do. Where the heck was Soo Hyun? It seems he really wasn't enough protection.

Yi Soo is stalking around the book shop again. He rattles the door, clearly looking for confrontation this time...but the killer isn't there. A bad vibe has our hero check the GPS program. He sees his sister's dot zooming across the map, spiriting away from her proper location.

When Yi Hyun doesn't answer her phone, Yi Soo rushes to his car in a panic. He follows the trace, knowing something has gone wrong.

Things are a little more calm with Detective Byeon, who finally gets to take a gander at the lost CCTV feed from the library.  Everything seems routine until he notices "Kim Jun" sitting at a table adjacent from the late Detective Oh. A flash of realization comes to Byeon as the strange occurrence with the smart key finally makes sense to him. He basically flies out of the police station at this point.

At the Jo house, the Chairman is strolling in his garden. Hae Woo comes across him as he studies a replica of the incredibly famous The Thinker. Honestly it seems a bit convenient such an obvious metaphorical piece of scenery would just be hanging out in one's backyard,  but it's fine.

She wastes no time and skips pleasantries. Point blank, she mentions Chun Young Bo and asks her grandpa if that's his identity after all.

The Chairman is thunder struck and seems ready to confess.  He admits to killing someone and that person is...

Chun Young Bo?!  Is this another trick?  

Yi Soo rushes into the building where he lives, brushing off Secretary Jang as she greets him in the lobby. His sister's dot has stopped and it's a matter of reaching that point to find her. Right?

The map leads him directly to his own apartment. We see him hestitate, fearful of what he might find on the other side. It's telling, watching Yi Soo hands so tremulous as he fishes out the smart key to open his door. This is like his worst nightmare coming true.

Once inside, his initial visual sweep finds nothing out of the ordinary. He seems ready to turn around, but something catches his eye and leads him toward the living area. Our hero looks like something has just died as he shambles toward his couch and reaches down toward something we can't see. The shot slowly progresses downward and we see his hands gently enfold...



...Yi Hyun's pink shoes. Yi Soo brings them to his chest desperately, eyes closed. When he reopens them, a vicious determination shadows his entire face. The Chairman and his minion will regret messing with Yi Soo's sister, you can bet on that.