Summary
Juvenile Justice moves onto a new case and questions the nature of home with a helping of ambiguity.
This recap of Juvenile Justice season 1, episode 4 contains spoilers.
After the previous episode’s mostly one-and-done case, Juvenile Justice moves into the first half of another two-parter, though it continues to build on the more serialized elements, including most notably Tae-Ju’s background. Having discovered what Eun-seok was really up to, he’s apologetic about how he confronted her, and he shares some details of his past with an alcoholic father. It isn’t necessarily clear if he shares with Eun-seok as much as the flashbacks share with us, but it looks very much like Tae-ju was a young offender himself after having tried to kill his father. Of course, with Eun-seok being how she is, the next day she tells him she’d prefer to keep their relationship purely focused on work since details of other people’s lives make her uncomfortable. Fair enough.
Juvenile Justice season 1, episode 4 recap
As we’ve been building towards, Judge Kang plans to leave the court and move into the Assembly, so he’s more fastidious about his public reputation than ever. This quickly becomes a problem when he takes Eun-seok and Tae-ju to inspect the Pureum Home for Girls, a kind of halfway house facility run by star lecturer and youth counselor O Seon-ja, since shortly after arriving Tae-ju gets a tip that there have been reports of child abuse and embezzlement there. Since Kang has to leave, he has to trust that Eun-seok and Tae-ju won’t pursue the accusations, and, well… they do.
To be honest, it’s a bit of a leap that Kang would expect these two to look the other way, especially knowing how stubborn Eun-seok is and how idealistic Tae-ju can be. The former is obviously more inclined to see Kang’s point of view, but when they begin to interview the kids, accusations and personal accounts come out in torrents. As the kids put, Seon-ja is a monster who makes them eat spoiled food and beats them regularly; we see a flashback to a scene around the dinner table in which these things happen. But it seems too easy, too clear-cut. Luckily, when Eun-seok and Tae-ju speak to Seon-ja, she recounts her own perspective, and we see a different version of the same scene in which Seon-ja is victimized. Her story seems more likely. She worked for years to even get permission to build the facility thanks to pushback from the locals, who all saw the girls as simply criminals.
With Seon-ja’s testimony, Eun-seok is able to trick the girls into giving themselves away by asking them to call the hospital and inquire after Yu-gyeong, one of the girls who was supposedly hospitalized by Seon-ja when she broke her femur with a chair. But the hospital call gives away the fact that Yu-gyeong was hospitalized by the girls themselves, not Seon-ja, although that isn’t to say that Seon-ja is entirely innocent. The facility has received a lot of funding that, judging by the receipts, hasn’t been going to the right places. Seon-ja has been pocketing it for personal reasons, and that’s something that Eun-seok won’t let stand. Pureum obviously fails the inspection, and Seon-ja is looking at potential legal ramifications.
However, when Eun-seok and Tae-ju visit Yu-gyeong in the hospital, they learn that Seon-ja used the money to pay for her surgery. The revelation weighs heavy on Eun-seok’s mind, so she returns to Pureum, but she finds the place trashed and almost empty. Seon-ja’s daughter, A-reum, is the only one present, and she explains that after the judges left, Seon-ja collapsed. In a fit of rage, A-reum blamed the girls for that, and for the fact her father — who had apparently been transferred to an overseas branch of his company, but had really left Seon-ja — has never returned. She smashed the place up and made all the girls leave. It’s also revealed that A-reum was the one who reported the abuse and embezzlement at Pureum, obviously not anticipating what the ramifications of that would be. The episode ends with the girls all on the loose.
You can stream Juvenile Justice season 1, episode 4 exclusively on Netflix.
