Tempest: Episodes 6-7

by mistyisles

A betrayal rocks our heroine’s world, shaking her faith in the one person she thought she could always trust. But while she may be adrift and uncertain of where to turn, she’s far from helpless — and she has never been alone.

 
EPISODES 6-7

With only a few hours until doomsday, Moon-joo and San-ho decide to pretend — just for now — that they’re an ordinary couple on an ordinary night. To that end, they relocate to the bedroom and let passion take over. In the heat of it all, San-ho suggests they run away together, and Moon-joo agrees. They don’t really intend to follow through, but San-ho does have a hypothetical destination in mind: The Gobi Desert, where he lived after he first fled North Korea, and where the unmoving North Star made him feel like he could find his own direction at last.

While those two are busy getting to know each other in almost every way, the international crisis is averted (for now). North Korea shoots down the US bomber, and President Chae issues the all-clear for civilians to return to everyday activities. The big problem now is that Moon-joo has turned public opinion against President Chae, but NIS DIRECTOR YOO UN-HAK (Yoo Jae-myung) assures President Chae he already has plans to “take care of” Moon-joo.

Whether it’s his doing or not, someone leaks an audio recording of Moon-joo and San-ho’s lovemaking from last night. Just like that, Moon-joo’s name is smeared with accusations of betraying her late husband and being a North Korean pawn. San-ho tears the cabin apart, looking in vain for the hidden bug, until Moon-joo stops him. She doesn’t regret last night, and if the nation no longer wants her, she’s ready to leave after all.

Only after San-ho goes to confront Valkyrie about planting extra bugs does Moon-joo realize the audio came from the bug she hid in his Saint Anthony necklace. That still doesn’t explain how it was leaked from her secure cloud backup, but it does explain why San-ho couldn’t find any other devices. And it allows her to listen in while San-ho is ambushed and arrested by Director Yoo, who reveals that the anonymous client who hired San-ho to protect and surveil Moon-joo was none other than North Korea’s leader, KIM HAN-SANG (Uhm Tae-goo). Director Yoo then threatens harm to San-ho’s grandmother if he won’t help the NIS capture Moon-joo. Oof, Moon-joo can’t see the rage on San-ho’s face, so it sounds to her as though San-ho has both admitted to seducing her and agreed to the deal.

San-ho cooperates with the arrest only until he’s in the elevator. Then he neutralizes the NIS agents with their own guns and races back to the cabin. But by then, Moon-joo has fled into the forest. Just as she collapses, exhausted and directionless, a text message comes through on Joon-ik’s secret phone but addressed to her: the submarine does exist (wait, what?) and the sender wants to meet her at the port.

Fortunately, Moon-joo isn’t completely alone. She still has Mi-ji and Chang-hee, who secure a new safehouse and help her and Anderson piece together what went wrong with the submarine research. There now appear to be two submarines, one harmless and one nuclear, and Anderson concludes that someone set him up to “prove” the nuclear one was fake. Chang-hee, by the way, is fully on Moon-joo’s team now. Not only does he confess to hacking Moon-joo’s accounts under Ok-sun’s orders (ahh, there’s the leak), but he also repeatedly urges Moon-joo to consider giving San-ho another chance.

Moon-joo, however, has been hurt too badly to trust again so easily. When she and San-ho come face-to-face at the port, she rapid-fires questions about his true identity and motives. But no matter how sincerely he says he only wanted to keep her safe, she can’t bring herself to forgive him. In the end, she pulls out the gun he gave her and threatens to shoot him if he follows her.

Joon-ik’s lawyer from Argentina reveals that Moon-joo’s inheritance includes a huge fortune in foreign real estate assets. And guess who handled all those transactions on Joon-ik’s behalf? That’s right — Stella Young. By now, all clues to her identity point straight to Han-na. But Moon-joo isn’t convinced that Han-na/Stella is only after her inheritance, massive though it may be. Some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.

Which brings us back to San-ho. After learning that it was Stella Young and not Kim Han-sang who hired him, San-ho pays Han-na a visit. She’s just come from publicizing her relationship with Joon-ik, and swears she didn’t kill the man she loved. San-ho concedes… because while she has used the name Stella Young, she’s not THE Stella Young. They fight, and San-ho has to 1) stop her from swallowing a poison pill and 2) suck more poison out of his own hand when she slashes him with a poisoned knife.

Meanwhile, Moon-joo catches up with Professor Im, newly released from police custody. She confirms that she’s leaving on a boat tonight… and then kidnaps him at gunpoint. Because she suspects he’s the real spy. Professor Im clarifies that he’s a spy hunter for the NIS, but the way he explains it makes him sound more like a spy maker (possibly spy fabricator) instead. Thanks to Joon-sang’s tip, Professor Im was planning to expose Joon-ik as a spy — which he also did to Moon-joo’s father when she was a little girl — so that public outrage would stop the reunification efforts.

Professor Im waits for the right moment to attack Moon-joo, but a bullet stops him in his tracks — Moon-joo called San-ho ahead of time to be her backup. Now that they have Professor Im as a hostage, they set a trap of their own. Thus, that night in a warehouse, Moon-joo faces off against the real Stella Young: Ok-sun. Joon-ik, you see, was the son of her husband’s mistress, and when it came down to it, she chose to have him killed rather than let him expose her identity. Now, she orders Han-na to shoot Moon-joo, but Han-na prefers to avenge Joon-ik. Before she can, though, Director Yoo and his agents swarm the building.

Of course, Moon-joo and San-ho have prepared for this. San-ho cuts the lights and fills the room with smoke, picking off NIS agents with his gun as he rushes to Moon-joo’s side. One bullet finds his back, but he gets Moon-joo safely to the window, and they jump together into the sea. Mi-ji has a boat waiting to pick them up, and while they wait for rescue, they kiss. Moon-joo may never fully trust San-ho, but she can trust that he’ll always be there to protect her, and maybe that’s enough.

Whew, that was a lot to process. It’s hard to escalate from war is about to devastate our homeland and kill us all, so I liked that this week focused on upping the personal stakes over the global ones. And I especially liked that the rift between Moon-joo and San-ho wasn’t drawn out overly long — just long enough for Moon-joo to stand on her own and choose to rely on San-ho again on her own terms.

 
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