Recap Korean Drama "The First Responders (2022)" Episode 8-9

Ho-gae wakes up after his near-death experience and immediately tries to go to work, life threatening injuries be damned. Seol ends up acting as his personal nurse for the day, making sure he doesn’t literally kill himself working, since he insists on leaving the hospital.

Seol and Ho-gae continue to have some tension-filled moments between them where it’s clear they like each other but neither is admitting it outright. Seol gets a commendation for saving his life, which makes Ho-gae all awkward. And then there’s the fact that she donated her blood to him. Ho-gae doesn’t like being indebted to people, but he promises he’ll pay her back.

Elsewhere, Tae-hwa almost manages to evil his way out of justice by claiming that Ho-gae attacked him. Since there’s no camera footage or evidence, the team pivots back to the murder charge. We spend several riveting minutes watching Tae-hwa and Seok-doo walk so they can match their gaits to the CCTV footage of the drug deal that has been serving as Tae-hwa’s alibi. And what do you know, the gait analysis proves Seok-doo is the one in the footage, not Tae-hwa.

In a match made in terrible parent heaven, Chief Prosecutor Jin and Tae-hwa’s father ASSEMBLYMAN MA (Jeon Gook-hwan) commiserate over how hard it is to sacrifice your children for your career and then conspire to spin this to their advantage. Assemblyman Ma cuts Tae-hwa off publicly and privately. He even changes his phone number – it’s pretty brutal.

And because no one likes Tae-hwa, his lawyer peaces out the second Tae-hwa is abandoned by Assemblyman Ma and passes along a hard drive to the police. With no one to protect him, Tae-hwa finally cracks and admits to murdering his then-girlfriend after she discovered his spy cams all over her apartment and threatened to expose him for the creep he is.

If you think that’s the end of this case, think again because we’re not done yet. There’s all the other criminals involved that we’re going to watch get caught one by one. First up is the man who was contracted to kill Seok-doo. Ho-gae being Ho-gae decides Pil should hire the man for a fake hit on Chief Baek. They come up with this whole backstory that Pil gets way too into, and in no time at all – really, it takes about three minutes – they’ve got the perp.

They’re then able to get the gangster loan shark with a contract murder side hustle, as well as the cop who set Ho-gae up and has been feeding Tae-hwa intel. Ho-gae’s final boss is his father who is much wilier. By the time they get to him, he’s already had one of his underling prosecutors take the blame for colluding with Tae-hwa.

With the case mostly done, Ho-gae moves out of the apartment, to Seol’s chagrin. He moves into a house that I’m guessing is his old place. It’s not clear if he’s from Taewon or if he moved there later, but he’s clearly lived there before.

It really is the Ho-gae show at this point. There’s barely any effort to pretend the drama is about all the first responders. I’d be surprised if Do-jin’s total screentime this week amounted to more than 15 minutes. He pops in here and there, mostly to do things for Seol, and then he disappears into the background again.

I wasn’t sure we’d get any unrelated cases this week, but we get two cases that end up being connected. First, Seol and Do-jin (in his first real role this week) save a teenage girl who tries to commit suicide. She’s a top student at her prestigious school with a mother who only cares about her grades.

Ho-gae skips out on this case to visit Tae-hwa in prison to ask who the real criminal mastermind is; he knows Tae-hwa didn’t manage all this alone. Tae-hwa has a breakdown, seeming genuinely terrified. He claims that whoever it is killed his fiancée when he only wanted her “silenced.” (I don’t know if this was supposed to be funny, but LOL at the magazine clippings murder note.)

Meanwhile, the police are involved in a second case that involves a dead baby, so be warned, it’s another rough one. The tiny newborn was left in a handbag after being stillborn. They trace the bag back to a rich woman who insists it wasn’t her and unsubtly drops in that her husband is a judge. She’s telling the truth: the DNA proves the baby was her teenage daughter’s. And that daughter is none other than Ha-eun, the girl who tried to commit suicide.

Seol is the only one who can get the girl to talk. Ha-eun admits the baby is hers and gives a list of several boys who could be the father. After some rich mom fighting, the police get permission to take samples of the boys’ DNA… and none of them are a match. Back to square one.

This case is somewhat personal to Seol who has a hard time staying objective since she herself was an abandoned baby. Her mother left her at the hospital, never even bothering to name her. Seol shares this with Ho-gae and coaxes him to speak a little about Hyun-seo, the girl Tae-hwa and the girl’s grandmother (who runs a local restaurant) accuse Ho-gae of killing.

He won’t say much, but we do learn that this took place seven years ago when Ho-gae was a wee traffic cop. Hyun-seo had come to him about her fears that she was being stalked, but Ho-gae didn’t take her seriously. That was the last time she was ever seen.

There must be more to the story because that still doesn’t answer why Ho-gae supposedly “killed” her. Was he negligent? Yes. But that’s not the same as murder. Plus, from what we know, the girl disappeared and was never found, so is there even proof she was murdered?

Back to the current case, Do-jin contributes by noticing a detail in his bodycam footage of when they saved Ha-eun – she wasn’t alone in the house. Ho-gae and Pil do some illegal? stealthy DNA collecting by stealing a pair of earbuds from Ha-eun’s older brother and spit (ew) from her father.

In this week’s final scene, Ho-gae and Pil pop by Ha-eun’s house and confront her family during dinner. They’ve got photos of someone hiding in her brother’s room the day Ha-eun almost jumped off the balcony and the brother’s cell phone records. Ha-eun smiles while her brother looks nervous.

Yet another really heavy case this week. Going in, I did not expect the drama to deal with these intense, traumatic topics, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Not that there’s an issue with depicting these very real traumatic situations when done sensitively, but switching between the almost caricature-like villain Tae-hwa to these heavy-hitting traumatic cases is jarring. Maybe that juxtaposition is what has been feeling off to me. Rather than integrating the overarching case into the case-of-the-week format, the disjointed tone makes it feel like you’re watching different dramas depending on the scene.