lol. I just had to post this wonderful “companion guide” that @Growing_Beautifully prepared for me for Ep 2 because I’m such a baby. Thank you, @GB!!

My comments are included.

Summary Recap Episode 2 with Stress Level Ratings
Please note that I’ve deliberately curated the episode in portions, bringing all of the same characters together rather than relating them according to the minute-by-minute flow of the episode.

Ji Won has a dream in which we see the backstory of how she met HS. She was studying to enter the police force while working at a store in 2006. HS came in to buy beer but looked too young. She checked his ID and was surprised that he was supposedly born in 1982.

[It’s possible that 1982 is the real Baek Hee Seong’s birthday, and Hyun Soo is maybe 5 years younger. My guess is that in middle school 2002, he’d been around 15 years’ old, which might have made his birth year around 1987.]

In the present we see that HS is the efficient house-husband, cook and caregiver of Eun Ha. JW is not familiar with her own fridge or Eun Ha’s friends.

Thanks for this @GB.

I wonder why she suddenly dreamed of their first meeting. Did something trigger her? Maybe her phone conversation with her mother-in-law? Maybe the case she just solved about the cheating husband?

Hyungsoo and MooJin are the same age, and younger than JiWon. The real Heesong is older than JiWon because she calls him Hyungsoo “oppa” in Episode 3.

Hyungsoo’s noona is as old as JiWon, right?

So the real Heeseong > Jiwon and Hyungsoo’s real noona > Hyungsoo and MooJin

Yes, I thought it was funny that HS had so many different kinds of kimchi (like a house-husband) in the fridge that JW didn’t know which container had it. He wanted the RADISH kimchi. I read somewhere that you can make kimchi out of anything even fruits. lol.

Summary of the Case
If the first episode gave us a case to foreshadow the hidden reality of JW’s family, this second case ties her directly with the past murders by Do Min Seok.

Timestamp 08:00 – 10:15 – Stress level rating 8/10 if you don’t like blood and the sight of a corpse.

A social worker, Park Seo Yeong discovers the body of an elderly lady, Jung Mun Ok when she goes up long flights of steps to visit her. Ji Won and colleagues recognise the trademarks of the Yeonju City serial murder case in which Do Min Seok had killed 7 persons, before he committed suicide, 18 years earlier. Some of what might have been copy cat details: the victim’s thumbnails had been removed, an ankle broken and a rope had been around her neck. She’d died from loss of blood from stab wounds. Later it is found that this is not a copy cat killing at all as the details of the killer’s trademark were wrong.

This is interesting.

1. The Yeonju City serial murders.
7 persons dead, in 2002

both thumbnails removed
Ankle broken
rope around neck: brandname: Hound Dogs

It ended when Do MinSeok died.

2. The Gagyeong-ri Murder Case.
1 person dead, in 2002 too right?

seemed like the man died from a stab wound to the neck: just like demonstrated by Jiwoo to the social worker.

“Carotid artery, 12 seconds. Subclavian artery, 3.5 seconds.”

The results of the autopsy showed that the rope had not cause any ligature marks, and that lipstick had been on the victim’s thumb. Suspects were the victim’s son who gambled and wanted money and Park Seo Yeong who was the main female around Jung Mun Ok who might have had the lipstick.

When the arrest of the culprit takes place, …
Timestamp 57:00 – 59:10 Stress level 6/10 the perpetrator resists arrest but we hear more than we see the fight. The interesting part of the scenes leading to the arrest is that it raises the question about whether JW herself is hiding any strange tendencies.

True. JW seemed odd there. Like given the opportunity, she wouldn’t have minded killing the social worker.

Summary of the scenes between Hee Seung (Hyun Soo) and Kim Moo Jin
Timestamp 12:07 – 13:41 – Stress level 6/10 We get more of their backstory of Summer 2002, which showed that MJ was far from ‘nice’ and that he had cruelly tied up HS with 3 other guys and stoned him. We don’t see the actual torture. The present day interlude in the basement was HS’s payback.

Timestamp 13:42 – 14:55 – Stress level 6/10 back in the workshop basement we worry when HS takes down a hammer to intimidate MJ with, but he does not hurt him.

HS gets the pass code to MJ’s phone.

HS has MJ call his office and it’s evident that MJ won’t be missed for another 3 days. MJ foolishly tries to talk his way out of the basement until he realises that Hyun Soo is Baek Hee Seong. In their chat, HS surprisingly speaks about his role in the foreman’s death.

HS was playing mind games with MJ. First with the hammer, and then when he said that he killed the foreman.

HS: Do you want to know the truth? You will have to face the consequences if you know.
MJ: What? (pauses) No. I don’t think I want to know.

MJ was a bit slow here. Heesung was channeling “Top Gun.”

HS: MooJin. To be honest I know who killed the village head.] MJ: (shaking his head) I really don’t want to know.
HS: You’re curious, right?
MJ: (shaking his head) Hyunsoo, don’t do this.
HS: The person is…
MJ: (trembing) No. I don’t want to hear this. Don’t tell me. I’m not listening. I’m not listening.
HS: (tapes his mouth) That’s right. I killed him.

It looks possible but the blood splatter is mostly on his left side of his shirt, instead of the right. Weird.

In the flashback to HS’s youth …
Timestamp 23:28 – 24:22 – Stress level 4/10 we see another bloody corpse but nothing worse. We see that HS was not alone, but that his sister was with him. He had been looking at the dead man, and was surprised, and said: “I actually feel quite all right.” He stares at the corpse and smiles. Camera angle tilts to show us that he was not in the right frame of mind.

“I actually feel quite all right.”

I don’t know what he meant by that. He could mean that he felt fine after killing the man. Or that he felt fine after seeing a dead man. Or that he felt fine taking the blame for his sister.

Summary of the scenes with Nam Soon Kil
HS pretends to be MJ and speaks on the phone to NSK who had a tip to give. I turned out that he and HS had been delivery men for the same restaurant. NSK claimed that he was being threatened in the mornings at 4am by phone calls from Hyun Soo. His belief arose because he had wronged Hyun Soo.

I find it hard to believe that HS would wake up and leave JW’s side at 4 am, every day for one whole month, just to harass NSK. What for? It seems to be that HS has moved on for his previous life and found a new home, “Where the Morning Star Rises,” to build a future.

To me, the killer must be someone who’s stuck in the past and MJ’s article about the “Yeonju City serial murders” reopened and rekindled old anger and violence.

Timestamp 54:55 – 55:58 Stress level 6/10 Flashback of when NSK and HS had been out in the forest looking for NSK’s wallet, the latter had attacked HS with a switchblade and cut him. But the fight is short and we cut back to the present.

Soon Kil tells HS that he wants protection from Hyun Soo [what irony].. HS dismisses the threats and tells Soon Kil that Hyun Soo is dead and to forget about him. In the meantime, we see someone buying a certain brand of dog leash.

I explain my interpretation of this conversation here:

Flower of Evil: Episode 2

To me NSK was a scumbag. Although he didn’t deserve death, he was still a scumbag. He should have let sleeping dogs lie. But I wonder how the killer found him?

When was MJ’s article written anyway? More than a month ago?

Timestamp 1:01:32 – 1:03:38 Stress level 7/10 The killer attacks NSK but the scene quickly cuts so suspense is halted.

NSK sits in his restaurant looking at KMJ’s article. When the killer enters in a dripping wet raincoat, NSK panics and says Hyun Soo has come to get him. The stabbing cuts to…killer pins a now blood-covered article by KMJ on a noticeboard that’s covered with many other articles on DMS and the murders. The place seems to be an abandoned indoor pool.

The man wore ill-fitting pants. He should have hemmed in the lengths of the pants. HS wore his slim pants a bit higher. The length of his pants doesn’t crease and the pants ends at the ankle bone.

Summary of the family life scenes with JW, HS and Eun Ha
Eun Ha has an incident in school where her friend Soo Young gave her a bloody nose over EH’s touching her doll. Both JW and later on HS turn up at the school where Soo Young’s mum refuses to apologise. HS apologises first, and gets EH to apologise as well, much to JW’s chagrin. She’s upset with him and he has to watch her expression carefully to figure it out.

He mollifies EH with egg tart and an explanation that he was raising her to be a nice girl with a good reputation, so that no one would doubt her when something bad happens. Also that in future, EH would be considered good while Soo Young would have a bad reputation. [This sounds like he’s trying to prevent what happened to him from happening to EH.] He also cheers her up with the news that Soo Young had been in tears because she had lost her doll. We see that HS had thrown the doll away in the men’s washroom. [He’d taken revenge like a true psychopath.] EH goes to stay with JW’s mum.

[Sidenote: is it worrying that Eun Ha is taught to think that she should act to manipulate how people think about her, and so that her ‘enemy’ would get short shrift later, and also to take pleasure in her enemy’s distress?]

Agree. This whole conversation was weird.

I don’t think however he told Eunha exactly what happened to the doll e.g., dumped. I think he just explained to Eunha that Sooyoung lost her doll because she was careless and left her items everywhere.

As for taking pleasure in her enemy’s distress, 🙂 there’s a German word for that.

The grandma also expressed the same feelings with the lady who brought anti-depressant from her. “I like it when others are unhappy. If I can’t be like others, then I want others to become like me.”

On the night NSK is killed, JW wakes at home at 3.30am wondering when she’d fallen asleep. She’s in the living room when someone unlocks the front door and comes in, in a dripping wet raincoat. JW stares at the man as if she does not recognise him.

My sense is this show will be like Yoon Shiyoon’s “Psychopath Diary” except that the male lead isn’t a klutz. YSY’s character in that drama believed he was a psychopathic serial killer so his personality alternated between the good underdog that he actually was, and the brutal Alpha Dog that he mistakenly imagined himself to be.

But I wouldn’t put it past this director to set us up with a plot twist at the penultimate episode. 🙂

Thanks again for doing this for me.