The Nice Guy: Episodes 11-12

by stroopwafel

Danger abounds for our hero, and happiness seems just out of grasp. Though he’s poised to leave his crime family behind for good, a new gangland war threatens to engulf him and the woman he loves.

EPISODES 11-12

Seok-chul is at a loss as to why Mi-young suddenly wants to break up. He asks for an explanation, but she can’t give him one. She simply tells him it’s her, not him. Seok-chul seems skeptical, and he asks if she’s sure. Mi-young can’t even look at him when he asks this, but she manages to tell him she’s certain she wants to break up.

Seok-chul lets her go, but as Mi-young leaves, he calls out to her and tells her to come back to him if things get too hard. His last words to her are, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

As Mi-young walks home, memories of their time together fill her head until she can’t keep going. She runs back, hoping to find Seok-chul but she’s too late. He’s already on a bus going somewhere, and now that he’s alone, he lets the tears fall.

They don’t stay apart for long, though they reunite under unhappy circumstances. When Mi-young’s mother passes away, Seok-chul steps up to be by Mi-young’s side every step of the way. At the funeral, Tae-hoon comes to pay his respects. He doesn’t make a fuss (or do anything stalkery), he just tells Seok-chul to take good care of Mi-young.

After Mi-young lays her mother to rest at the columbarium, she muses to Seok-chul that she’s never been able to just stop working and take a break. She plans to move away and maybe go on a trip somewhere. He offers to go with her, but takes her silence as rejection.

Before he can leave though, Mi-young finally confesses that she broke up with him because she was afraid he’d keep getting hurt. She can’t hold back anymore; she sobs that even now she wants to be with Seok-chul but she’s still terrified that he’ll get hurt because of her. Seok-chul holds her and apologizes for not taking better care of her so she wouldn’t feel that burden.

Now that they’re back together again, Mi-young packs up her things and moves onto Jin-ho’s farm temporarily. She and Seok-chul decide to go on a trip somewhere to get away from it all. Seok-chul leaves Mi-young to pack for the trip, making an excuse about stopping by his house and telling her he’ll be back to pick her up in a bit.

But instead of going home, Seok-chul pays a visit to Tae-hoon. Seok-chul doesn’t beat around the bush. He says outright that there is nothing Tae-hoon could do to keep him and Mi-young apart.

Tae-hoon takes that as a challenge, but Seok-chul scoffs at the thought of Tae-hoon doing something like killing, over a woman at that. He says that’s not who Tae-hoon is, and he asks that they go back to how they once were. Tae-hoon shoots back, what would he get out of it? Seok-chul says he’ll get a friend he could trust, one he could call up to have a meal with.

Things between Seok-chul and Tae-hoon come to a head very quickly, thanks to Sang-yeol’s nefarious scheming. When Chairman Kim ends up in a coma due to refusing surgery on his brain, Sang-yeol immediately starts to take control of the gang. His first move is to grab Seok-chul so he can mete out gangland justice for daring to leave the gang. The gang intercepts him as he’s on his way to meet Mi-young. With Seok-chul roughed up and trussed up, Sang-yeol commandeers his phone and sends a text to Tae-hoon. Pretending to be Seok-chul, he asks Tae-hoon out for a meal. The trap has been set, and Sang-yeol is determined that tonight is the night Tae-hoon dies.

It’s a testament to Park Hoon’s acting that I even care at all about Tae-hoon, and it’s only in this penultimate week that we see more of the layered character Tae-hoon could have been. When Tae-hoon gets the text, it immediately puts him in a good mood. He tells his boys he has dinner plans with Seok-chul, and Bok-chun and Cheon-ho both get a little spending money just so they can treat themselves to something nice.

At the restaurant, Tae-hoon quickly realizes he’s fallen into a trap–one that he thinks was set by Seok-chul. He’s outnumbered, but just as things start to look really bleak, Bok-chun and Cheon-ho pull up with backup. They’d been worried and dropped by just in case. That caution ends up saving Tae-hoon, and they all escape mostly unscathed.

Seok-chul manages to escape Gang HQ, thanks to the loyal softie, Heung-man. Seok-chul races to Jin-ho’s farm to get Mi-young, and he now has both his former gang AND Tae-hoon’s gang after him.

Mi-young is mostly concerned about the state of Seok-chul, but Jin-ho realizes just how dangerous things are. Seok-chul takes off to lead Tae-hoon’s gang away from the farm, and Jin-ho makes sure that Mi-young gets to the bus station safely. It’s at this point that the story converges with the start of the first episode. Seok-chul continues his long, hurried escape (literally and figuratively) from the gangland life he’s known for so long.

He makes it in time to catch the last bus with Mi-young, but as he’s about to board, someone rushes up and stabs him in the stomach. This time though, we see that Seok-chul recognized the person who stabbed him. It’s the same high school boy who had been desperate to join the gang, but Seok-chul had turned away over and over. The boy wanted to make something of himself by being part of the gang, but Seok-chul had warned him that nothing good could come of it.

Seok-chul falls into a coma, but when he wakes up to see Mi-young by his side. He feigns ignorance of who his attacker could be when asked by Byung-soo and Sang-yeol.

The chairman is still out of action, but it’s Tae-hoon whose situation is most precarious now. Everyone knows about Tae-hoon’s attack on Chairman Kim’s turf, so they all assume that Tae-hoon was behind Seok-chul’s stabbing as well. It’s a terrible hit to Tae-hoon’s reputation, and a fellow gang boss advises Tae-hoon to take care of the matter by finding the culprit or having one of his underlings take the blame. Even Mi-young is convinced that Tae-hoon is the culprit. She calls him and asks to meet. (Please don’t do anything dangerous!)

The family largely took a backseat this week, and I can’t say I minded too much. To the surprise of no one, Seok-hee pulled her money out of the bank to help pay off the family debt (a.k.a Seok-kyung’s debt). In a twist of fate and bad timing, Ki-hong chose the same moment to put on his big boy pants, tell off the hospital director, and put in a leave of absence so that he could join Seok-hee abroad. He says they should still go together, but Seok-hee can’t see how.

Dad is full of regret at how his decisions and actions have hurt his children. Better late than never, and he’s now determined to do right by them all going forward. Seok-kyung seems to finally be leading a more responsible life, minus a little lottery purchase ticket. Seok-hee ultimately ends up with the lottery ticket (she “bought” the ticket in exchange for lending Seok-kyung her money) and I hope there’s a deus ex machina moment that lets her win and go abroad to chase her dreams.

 
RELATED POSTS