[Drama Review] '38 Police Squad' - Episodes 13 & 14

Posted by jubilantj182 pts Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Episode 13 was depressing af y'all.�

The look you get from your parents when you ask for money.�

Parts of the episode were so utterly sad and instilled in you such a suffocating feeling of helplessness, especially against those with unimaginable power and money. We are led to believe, for a good length of the episode, that Sung Il bid bye-bye to his lofty ideals and sense of justice. I sincerely believed that Sung Il and Jung Do were done for, along with their will to fight for justice. But in the two years that Jung Do served�his time, Sung Il fanned the fire to his desire for justice to greater heights. He played the role Mayor Chun Gap Soo expected him to play--a subservient, sycophantic lug--so well that he had most everyone (including myself!) fooled.�

The mayor is getting tired of playing Choi Chul Woo's dog.�

But I was dead wrong; Sung Il and Jung Do--as they always do--had everything planned out in advance. Sung Il vowed to serve justice on a platter to everyone who wronged the people around him, even joining hands with an unlikely ally: Ma Dong Seok. I honestly had a hard time trusting Ma Dong Seok, and internally, I was dreading the moment that the sleaze would sell the squad out. Lo and behold, when the smarmy Director Ahn (now the director of a company run discreetly by Choi Chul Woo) tips off Choi on the phone that "someone he's worked with before" disclosed the squad's plan, I had an inkling that it was Ma Dong Seok.�Then there is the detective, looking just as smug as he did before he was thrown in the slammers, going about with his own secretive agenda. Yeah, I don't trust any of these people.�

This old man is going downnnnnn.�

At last, we also get more than a 2-second-long glimpse of Chairman Wang, who, by the way, we still don't know much about. I'm not too concerned about Chairman Wang because he genuinely seems to be on the squad's side and care for Jung Do. Plus, he carried out Sung Il's plan without the batting a single eyelash, offering to sponsor Chun Gap Soo in the upcoming election. But Chun Gap Soo is a man grown wry and weary of all the politicking, and he suspects that Chairman Wang wouldn't just act magnanimously for the simple sake of being magnanimous.�

My cynical ass still don't trust this guy.�

But I refuse to believe that the crew doesn't have a backup plan handy in case things go awry. Perhaps it was Sung Il's plan all along to bait Choi Chul Woo? The squad does have an uncanny knack for making us fear that everything will go to shit when, in fact, they have everything under control. There are only two more episodes to go, so unless the production crew is adding more to the story, it won't make sense for them to drag out this let's-wreak-total-destruction-upon-Choi-Chul-Woo with further complications. I'm just waiting to taste that sweet victory and see Choi Chul Woo grovel and beg on his knees like Bang Pil Gyu did.�