Kokdu: Season of Deity (2023) Recap Episode 9-10

After leaving us hanging and pondering why Gye-jeol would give up her sweet gig in the small seaside town for a life in Seoul, where she’d — presumably — work for our drama’s main villain, our story resumes by first replaying the ending of last week’s episodes. This time, though, we get a little more context to the situation that explains why Chairman Kim believes he can protect himself by keeping Gye-jeol at his side — and it’s not simply because she’s Kokdu’s woman.

Nope, while Joong-shik spied on Gye-jeol’s clinic through his hidden cameras, he managed to figure out that Kokdu was magically bound to obey Gye-jeol’s commands. So Chairman Kim lured Gye-jeol to his office with a job offer — which she actually rejected, BTW — in order to trick her into commanding Kokdu to stay far away from him. As we saw last week, she didn’t say the magic words that would protect Chairman Kim from Kokdu’s icy death choke, but she did manage to drag Kokdu outside, where Gye-jeol unleashes the extent of her savior complex.

Except, this time, the part where Gye-jeol said she was considering Chairman Kim’s offer and wanted to move to Seoul was noticeably absent. Yo, writers! You can’t try and mislead us into thinking she’s going to fall into the villain’s grasp and then retcon the whole thing by deleting a conversation and pretending it never happened! That’s cheating!

Aside from that very noticeable omission, the conversation is roughly the same. Kokdu is angry because she stupidly put herself in harm’s way, and Gye-jeol is upset that his method of protecting her before he “disappears” involves violence and, well, attempted murder. She wants him to be a better person (yadda yadda), and he doesn’t understand why she cares so much about righting his (im)moral compass. Because she loves you, Kokdu! Duh!

Before she can confess her feelings, though, he silences her with a kiss because, once the words are out of her mouth, it means the curse is broken — and he isn’t quite ready to leave yet. As far as K-drama kisses go, it was visually pretty because of all the yellow autumn leaves, but that’s the extent of my praise. The tone was all wrong, and upon second viewing — thanks to the drama’s extended cut of last week’s ending — it wasn’t better.

If anything, I was left scratching my head even more, wondering why I’m supposed to buy these two as a couple. Gye-jeol is so caught up in the fairy tale of having a handsome man rescue her from falling down a set of stairs, that she’s completely avoiding reality (as she knows it). I mean, without the context that Kokdu is a god cursed with killing bad people, he’s — at best — a man whose severe head injury has triggered a second, more violent personality that’s become irrationally protective and obsessed with Gye-jeol.

Instead of focusing on all these red flags, though, Gye-jeol gets upset with Kokdu for going MIA after their kiss. She mistakenly thinks he’s only interested in a friends-with-benefits type of situation, but here’s the kicker: he only ran away because her brother showed up unannounced at her house the morning after she fainted from locking lips with Kokdu, and she made him hide because she knew her brother wouldn’t approve of her dating Jin-woo.

Unlike the woefully ignorant Gye-jeol, Cheol knows Kokdu is capable of murder, and he’d prefer it if his sister stayed away from Kokdu until he can find irrefutable evidence. Proving Kokdu is a murderer will have to wait, though, because Choong-seong’s body was found — with it a tell-all suicide letter forged by Gak Shin. It seems Kokdu is attempting to appease Gye-jeol, and instead of murdering Chairman Kim outright — because he still totally can — he’s going to bring him down using the mortals’ justice system.

Stocks drop as the news reports on the allegations against Chairman Kim that were written in Choong-seong’s (forged but factual) suicide note, and he does what any businessman would do in this situation: try to cover up his scandal with another one. And that scandal is the rumor that Jin-woo/Kokdu is the illegitimate brother of Ok Shin’s chaebol persona. Now all eyes are on Kokdu, which Chairman Kim believes is an added layer of protection against Kokdu.

Yeah, sure, Kokdu can literally make your glasses shatter on your face while he’s standing outside your home, and you think having people recognize him while he’s walking down the street is going to stop him from harming you? Among this drama’s many, many flaws is an imbalance in power between our anti-hero and villain, and literally the only thing preventing this story arc from ending is the fact that Kokdu has allowed Gye-jeol to become his moral compass. Personally, I prefer Kokdu when he’s bringing his maniacal A-game, so I’m extra annoyed with Gye-jeol for being a massive wet blanket and dampening Kokdu’s darkly appealing side.

Ok Shin’s solution to helping Kokdu regain some of his anonymity is to have them all uproot and move to Seoul where chaebols are so common they’re boring. I guess we’re saying goodbye to the Hometown Cha Cha Cha setting so Kokdu can don his new persona as a chaebol heir. And, of course, because he’s been trying to get Gye-jeol to live with him (so he can protect her) ever since their kiss, Kokdu convinces Gye-jeol to move to Seoul with him and live in the house that Ok Shin renovated to look exactly like Kokdu’s home in Yeongpo.

I guess the entirety of the drama’s budget went into the nifty special FX they used in the scene where Chairman Kim’s glasses shattered, because they obviously had nothing left over for a new set, which explains the lame excuse they used to keep everything exactly the same. I joke, but the whole move to Seoul thing added nothing to the plot. Kokdu and Gye-jeol certainly didn’t need it as a reason to cohabitate, and there are less complicated ways for Kokdu to find Jin-woo’s missing list than by having a moving crew come and lift the sofa the list had fallen under.

However, with the list found, our main plot inches forward some more. Ok Shin did background checks on the listed names and discovered that they were all deceased — but seemingly from various different causes. With none of the other family members willing to open an investigation into their loved one’s deaths, Kokdu borrows Jin-woo’s identity and, as the son of one of the people on the list, makes the request himself. His new fame as an illegitimate chaebol ensures that the press is gathered outside the police station when Kokdu publicly announces his intention to turn the list of names over to the police, thus preventing Chairman Kim from sweeping the allegations under the rug.

But inside the police station, an entirely different situation has been arranged. You see, while Kokdu and Gye-jeol have been playing house — and I mean that in the literal sense of two children with no relationship experience trying to pretend they are a couple living together — Cheol has been recruited to be part of a team investigating a series of murders committed by — you guessed it — Kokdu. What Kokdu doesn’t know, though, is that there was a witness to one of his killings, and the witness just woke up from his coma.

So the day Kokdu arrives at the police station to request a reinvestigation of Jin-woo’s mother’s death, he’s directed to an interrogation room under the pretext that it’s more private. At the same time, Cheol and the witness — who is being looked after by Gye-jeol — enter the room on the other side of the two-way mirror. The witness, who is in such a stupor that one has to wonder exactly why Gye-jeol allowed him to leave the hospital, looks up and appears to react negatively upon seeing Kokdu’s face.

Ugh, it really was another boring couple of episodes with far too much nonsensical filler going on, and I’ve reached the point that I groan whenever Gye-jeol and Kokdu have a scene together. Kokdu is far more interesting when he’s doing his solo murderous god thing, and I actually wish that this drama had been a melodrama focused on him instead of a romance.

When I wasn’t bored out of my mind this week, I found myself surprisingly more engaged in Cheol’s pursuit of Kokdu. He and Joong-shik are literally the only intelligent characters, so it’s somewhat interesting that they’re both connected to Jung-won. That’s right, Joong-shik is Jung-won’s father, and although she puts up a brave front, her body language says she’s afraid of him. Considering she’s somehow the reason Joong-shik went to jail at some point, it’s understandable that she’d fear some sort of retaliation, but instead he only asks her for money, which seems rather bizarre. Does Chairman Kim not pay him enough to kill people?

Although Cheol doesn’t know the whole story — or Joong-shik’s connection to Gye-jeol and Kokdu — Cheol is softening towards Jung-won, and so am I. Normally I’d be annoyed that the drama is trying to do a complete 180 with her character after first presenting her as a classic female antagonist who can’t get over her ex boyfriend, but there is so much that’s wrong with this drama — and Gye-jeol’s idiocy — that I’m starting to root for her. She seems like a more interesting female character, and I’d like to see the drama seriously explore her story with her father. Plus, I’m a fan of Cheol, and if their budding romance means he gets more screen time, then I’ll take it.