Summary
Yeon-jin continues to suffer, but it isn’t all victory for Dong-eun in a chapter that subjects her to immense personal emotional pain.
It’s the morning after the night before, and there’s very much that kind of hangover quality to this episode of The Glory. After the public spectacle made of Sa-ra in Episode 12, she’s in police custody, gossip about her and Yeon-jin is all over the internet, and Dong-eun, despite that unfortunate and deeply personal confrontation with her mother, seems to be faring much better than anyone else. If we’re sticking with the hangover analogy, she had a few glasses of water before bed.
The Glory Season 1 Episode 13 Recap
It’s always interesting in these kinds of stories to see how the leader being deposed affects the underlings. No sooner has Yeon-jin been asking Do-yeong if he’s finally ready to leave her after the latest embarrassment than Hye-jeong has taken the damning recording on Myeong-o’s tablet to Jae-jun. The vultures are already circling. And both have a motive to want to secure the top spot — Hye-jeong for obvious reasons, since she has always aspired to status and has remained only fractionally better off in Yeon-jin’s company than Dong-eun did, and Jae-jun because he wants to raise Ye-sol as his own and evidently isn’t willing or able to do all the childrearing himself. These two fancy themselves as a bit of a power couple.
Hye-jeong is empowered by this new arrangement. She spends her days lounging around Jae-jun’s place, and when Yeon-jin confronts her, she finally stands up for herself. The implication is clear — Yeon-jin isn’t a queen bee anymore. And things only get worse for her throughout the episode.
What is Detective Shin’s retirement plan?
For instance, Yo-jeong’s purchase of the funeral home pushes Detective Shin to move Myeong-o’s corpse posthaste. Since he has nowhere else to put it, we quickly get a sense of what he meant when he said earlier that Myeong-o’s vacuum-sealed corpse was his retirement plan. He blackmails Yeon-jin, demanding a retirement home in Hawaii and some spending money. Since Myeong-o’s body was never buried, he can have it turn up at any point. However, we see it has already been found, which one assumes will dissuade Yeon-jin from paying up and throw Detective Shin’s retirement into some jeopardy.
READ: Will there be a Part 3 of The Glory on Netflix?
On a character level, Dong-eun and Yo-jeong really begin to take precedence here, with the latter’s backstory beginning to take some kind of shape. His lust for revenge is obviously informed by the actions of a remorseless killer, the irony being he’s not so far removed from becoming the same thing himself, but he’s similarly shaped by trauma in the same way Dong-eun is, and it’s interesting to see how their different plights have shaped them in distinct but similar ways. They share a moment of closeness here that is tender but still doesn’t cross the transom into outright romance; I’m glad the show has been restrained in this regard.
How does Dong-eun’s apartment catch fire?
Besides, Dong-eun has other things on her mind for now, least among them her mother, who has been using her apartment as a kind of drug den, seeing a man she calls her “boyfriend” but who could just as easily be a stranger. Dong-eun resigns from teaching, as per her mother’s wishes, and then tries to turf her out of the crib, but she’s absolutely loaded and upends a platter of frying meat on the carpet. The whole place goes up in flames. But the depth of Dong-eun’s emotion really cuts through here, the pain of her own mother having betrayed her again, the razor-sharp invective she’s subjected to. One gets the sense that she could remain in that fire and let them both burn in it, perhaps believing they’d be better off, and at this point, I’m not entirely sure she’d be wrong.
You can stream Netflix K-drama series The Glory Season 1 Episode 13 exclusively on Netflix.
