Ji Sung and Jeon Mi-do become collaborators in crime when a former high school classmate is found dead on a construction site. The police and the prosecutor-in-charge are eager to wrap this suspicious death up quickly as a suicide but Ji Sung’s character Jang Jae-kyeong a narcotics cop has serious doubts about that conclusion. Park Jun-seo had visited Jae-kyeong only the day before asking for forgiveness over an event that occurred 20 years earlier, cryptically promising to set things right. When Jae-kyeong and Oh Yoon-jin (Jeon Mi-do) attend the wake for their late friend, they discover that he had named them both as beneficiaries to a 5 million dollar payout. Jae-kyeong, Yoon-jin and Jun-seo were members of an extracurricular school club known as Audiophiles. From flashbacks, it’s clear that all three including insurance agent Heo Joo-song were great friends until Jun-seo witnessed the death of a classmate possibly perpetrated by another gang made up of wealthy and/or ambitious boys. Jae-kyeong and Jun-seo fell out over this leading to a 20-year resentment.
Suspects abound in this seemingly untimely death of an ex-classmate who was dealing in real estate. There are many contenders including Park Tae-jin (Kwon Yool), a savvy deputy chief prosecutor, Won Jong-soo (Kim Kyung-nam), the heir to Big Pharma; and their faithful sidekicks Chi-hyun and Yoon-ho. These men were likely perpetrators in that 20 year-old case and in present day, appear to be up to their necks in some kind of conspiracy involving a large piece of real estate, a highly addictive substance known as “Lemon Mulberry” and of course, a lot of serious money.
Ji Sung of course is reliably excellent in this. His narcotics cop is at the peak of his career, recently promoted, only to find himself caught in a web of financial interests made up of known and unknown forces. Jang Jae-kyeong is an outstandings seasoned detective who walks somewhat on the wild side and the meticulous attention given to his thought processes is one of the highlights of this intense police procedural. It’s certainly a plum role for a veteran of the stage and screen. Things become very complicated very quickly for Jae-kyeong when he’s hit over the head one evening and then drugged by a shadowy figure known as Doctor with Lemon Mulberry. It’s now a race against the clock trying to manage his forced addiction to the narcotic and to follow the breadcrumbs left behind by Jun-seo without anyone finding out.
Someone who does find out sooner rather than later is Jeon Mi-do’s Yoon-jin, a reporter who has seen better days. She a divorcee who is trying to make as much money as possible to bring her daughter over from Canada. She comes off mercenary and is after that elusive scoop that will improve her fortunes. The mother lode drops into her lap when she discovers that two persons of interest in the dead friend’s case are having an affair. Yoon-jin was also the girl that three of the boys in the Audiophiles club liked. Although there’s no romance build-up thus far, it’s clear that Jae-kyeong holds a lingering fondness for her (thanks to Ji Sung’s stellar performance) when they are thrown together to solve the crime of the decade.
A drama of this calibre usually means a tightly woven script. There’s no doubting that the plotting is the key behind the well-paced action, well-presented character motivations. There’s no lack of good actors in South Korea so what often makes or breaks a drama occurs at the script level. The writing here is stellar — what one might expect from a classic US or UK police procedural — chock full of interesting reveals with plenty of misdirects. It’s a windy trail and people aren’t always what they seem.
One individual who doesn’t appear to be what he seems is Kwon Yool’s Park Tae-jin. On some level he is your typical social climbing prosecutor who is riding on the coattails of a former classmate a chaebol heir aiming for the top job. He’s certainly the brains behind their operation but also seems to be running his own scheme on the side. Or is it the other way around? After six episodes, that’s one of many questions haunting the show. Usually in these stories the errant chaebol heir is the most powerful person calling the shots but it’s not obvious here who the actual mastermind is here. The chaebol progeny Won Jong-soo seems to be on a very short fuse and is often reliant on his co-conspirators to prop him up. It’s also the case that the conspirators aren’t as closely knit as they seem to be. While money can bring people together, it can easily divide them when things don’t go according to plan.
Big Pharma has had a very checkered history since its consolidation in the economic landscape. The more one digs, the fouler the air around them smells. Pharmaceutical companies have a history of cover ups and mammoth payouts. There’s even a Wikipedia page listing all the largest legal settlements which number in the billions. Even before the Covid era, the crimes committed by Big Pharma were well-known. In the last few years, the term “the medical industrial complex” has surfaced, named after the military industrial complex of yesteryear. The phenomenon is real enough causing incalculable harm to people all over the globe. Ji Sung’s other drama The Devil Judge also exposed with horrifying accuracy the way these companies and governments are unsavoury bedfellows to defraud taxpayers and end users. In light of what’s occurred in the last few years, V for Vendetta is becoming more like a documentary. It’s also telling that Lemon Mulberry is a street drug made to look like a pill from your garden variety blister pack. The implications/allusions can’t be ignored. Many widely used prescription drugs are addictive and have terrible side-effects with long-term use. Unfortunately health care in our day has been reduced largely to pharmaceutical interventions.
It will be fascinating to see where all of this goes with all the various elements at play but the storytelling in and of itself is sufficient to keep that play button busy.
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