Summary
The finale delivers a decent amount of closure with some surprising emotional heft while leaving the door open for another season.
Oh, poor Dong-ha. He’s naive, isn’t he? After everything he’s seen and done, for him to stand there incredulous that Kang-jun has been strangled in front of him is a little hard to believe. “I didn’t know you were going to kill him,” he whimpers in the aftermath. Well, what was he expecting? We saw this in the penultimate episode, of course — A Model Family Season 1 Episode 10 just provides a little context for how Dong-ha set Kang-jun up under Kwang-chul’s instruction. He still doesn’t believe he’s ever going to be let out of this arrangement, but still, better the devil you know.
A Model Family Season 1 Episode 10 Recap
When Dong-ha returns home — under explicit instruction to await yet another call — he finds the police, including a sweaty Joo-hyun, digging up his yard. But they mysteriously find nothing. After they’re gone, Deuk-soo reveals that he dug the bodies up and buried them in the neighbor’s yard. The idea that there wouldn’t be some sign of this is pretty far-fetched, but we’re not going to start quibbling about that kind of thing at this stage.
Anyway, Dong-ha digs up the dashcam footage which reveals what really happened to Han-cheol. He and Myeong-su were traveling with the money when the latter, after receiving a call, instructed the former to pull over so he could piss. Myeong-su attacked, Han-cheol defended himself, and both ended up dead. Han-cheol’s final words were directed to Eun-ju — there was nobody else, apparently, that he could trust.
Out of kindness, and perhaps guilt, Dong-ha sends Joo-hyun a picture of Han-cheol’s burial site, so she can dig him up and find some closure. But while she’s out, Jung-kook, having discovered her dashcam SD card is missing, ambushes Yun-seok at Joo-hyun’s little makeshift HQ, shoots him dead, and recovers the evidence. Luckily, though, Yun-seok had the mindfulness to set his phone to record before the lieutenant entered, meaning Joo-hyun has Jung-kook dead to rights.
But Joo-hyun, consumed by grief and rage, is just too far gone. She hands the evidence over, but then she heads straight to the station and shoots Jung-kook in the head. In that moment she becomes more similar to Dong-ha than perhaps she ever thought she would.
Speaking of Dong-ha, he decides, after some emotional scenes at the hospital — Hyun-woo can’t get a transplant, but believes it’s better when he’s sick because it brings his family together — and at home, to turn himself in. It takes him a little while of deliberation, stood teetering at a crossing as the lights change from red to green and back again, but eventually, he plucks up the courage to put one foot in front of the other. And when he does, his phone rings. The mysterious voice on the other end of the line tells him that he needs to keep his phone close — the lives of his family depend on it.
Do you have any thoughts on A Model Family Season 1 Episode 10, and the ending? Let us know in the comments.
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