Summary
The plot thickens in a slower episode with a much stronger thematic focus, even if it remains a little clunky.
This recap contains spoilers for the 2023 Netflix K-Drama Black Knight Season 1 Episode 2.
The first episode of Black Knight ended in tragedy, and the second takes in the scene of its last-minute twist from two angles.
The first is 5-8’s. He bursts in, surveys the damage, and then takes Sa-wol — who is just about alive — with him. The only surviving would-be assassin takes his own life rather than be captured.
The second is Seol-ah’s. Her dead daughter is carried out on a stretcher, covered in a sheet that clings to the contours of her face. With a brief flashback memory to Sa-wol waking for the first time in her care, she orders the investigation into what happened in the apartment to begin. The evidence thus far points to a spate of similar kidnappings in the General Districts.
Black Knight Season 1 Episode 2 Recap
How does Sa-wol survive being shot?
There’s something funny going on with Sa-wol.
How did he survive a close-range gunshot to the head? The bullet seems to have bounced harmlessly off, itself crumpled and demolished. When 5-8 looks over Sa-wol’s body, he sees a cut on his ankle that seems to show metal poking through. Is Sa-wol some kind of robot?
Later, 5-8 meets with “Grandpa” and suggests Sa-wol might be a “mutant”. His condition seems to have something to do with his father working in the oxyanium mines, and must also be connected to the kidnappings.
Who is behind the kidnappings?
We learn that, predictably, Ryu Seok of Cheonmyeong Group has been organizing the kidnappings, using Deliveryman 5-7 as the key to the general districts. However, 5-7 is beginning to have second thoughts after hearing that the people he’s taking away are being subjected to terrible experiments.
Ryu Seok controls his employees Suicide Squad-style using an implant in the back of their heads that can kill them instantly at the push of a button — a button on his computer terminal. This is the fate awaiting 5-7, who tries to take his own life but is stopped by 5-8. He’s not able to give anything away, though, beyond a vague mention of experiments, before Ryu Seok kills him from afar.
We also learn that Ryu Seok is operating independently of his father, who seems to have genuinely altruistic motivations and always intended the Air Cores to help people. Whatever Ryu Seok is trying to achieve with the experiments, an educated guess would assume it is related to the process by which those cores convert oxyanium to oxygen. Given Sa-wol’s “mutant” status thanks to — it’s presumed — proximity to oxyanium, perhaps Ryu Seok is trying to create a private army of these so-called mutants.
How does Sa-wol try to commit suicide?
A strong emerging theme in this episode is grief. The death of Seul-ah has hit both Seol-ah and Sa-wol very hard. Both feel responsible. When Seol-ah brings 5-8 in for questioning about the crime, Sa-wol sneaks off back to the apartment, and he’s there looking at photographs of him and Seul-ah when Seol-ah returns home.
Through more flashbacks, we come to learn that Seol-ah took Sa-wol home during a purge of refugees who were protesting against the Cheonmyeong Group. Seol-ah, obviously appalled by what she was doing, deliberately avoided killing any of the survivors, and took Sa-wol home in secret.
But he can’t remain there with her now. In a touching farewell scene, she gives him his bag — and the vial (I think) of Seul-ah’s ashes — and sends him to be with Grandpa and his friends. On his way there, though, he stops off to hassle the gang he beat up in the first episode. In his guilt, he’s looking to find penance in them beating him up or potentially even killing him.
Luckily, his friends have figured out that he might do this. They intervene, but they’re not able to prevent him from taking a baseball bat to the back of the head, which lands him in a coma for several days.
Black Knight Season 1 Episode 2 Ending Explained
Sa-wol wakes up just in time to enter a tournament put together by Ryu Seok.
Sa-wol thinks this is just an opportunity to fulfill his dream and become a Deliveryman, which is what it is being advertised as. But it has really been put together by Ryu Seok after 5-7’s death to find a new key to the general districts.
The final shot of the episode is Sa-wol standing in the middle of the road, right in front of 5-8’s oncoming truck. Seeing him there and congratulating him on making a big entrance, 5-8 puts his foot down and races towards Sa-wol.
You can stream Black Knight Season 1 Episode 2 exclusively on Netflix.
