Summary
Gangnam B-Side gets off to a solid start in Episode 1. It isn’t reinventing the crime drama wheel, but it’s turning it fast enough to be engaging, while leaving enough lingering mystery to keep viewers invested.
There are two nightclub scenes in the first ten minutes of Gangnam B-Side Episode 1, which should probably be taken as a statement of intent. Drugs! Partying! Girls! A heavy bassline! Do you like these things? Well, the seedier underside of Gangnam is partial to them, and we’re along for the ride in this eight-part Disney+ Hotstar/Hulu K-Drama with a blessedly sensible distribution strategy (just two episodes at a time, which is pretty civilized by Disney’s usual standards.)
Those first two club scenes are three years apart but make the same point. There’s a pretty bedded-in crime culture in Gangnam that goes right the way to the top; in the cold open our lead, Dongwoo, busts a drug ring that involves his colleague, Jangho, and according to Jangho, everyone in the Major Crimes Unit. He cracks the case and is ostensibly promoted for it. Still, we later learn he was completely ostracized for rooting out the corruption and voluntarily retired to a small department in the countryside.
The second club scene introduces our female lead, Jaehee, and her predicament. Three years later Gangnam seems much the same. Thugs — all of them men, most of them pretty young — control the flow of drugs and cash and splurge it all on escorts, whom they ply with narcotics and summarily abuse. Jaehee is one of them. Her friend Junghwa is another, but both have made themselves targets for reasons we still don’t entirely understand.
Jaehee Goes On the Run
Jaehee is in possession of something that threatens the operation of the crime ring. Whatever Jaehee has, it’s clear that she planned to do something meaningful with it, but she’s trapped in a life that — some later flashbacks suggest, at least — she was pretty much condemned to by circumstance.
But Jaehee is smart. She knows to make herself throw up and slap herself in the face to get the drugs out of her system and sober up. She has a phone hidden behind one of the club’s toilets. She tries to warn Junghwa that they’re in trouble, before fleeing through speeding traffic to get away from the pimps.
It seems like Jaehee’s only ally is Gilho, whom we learn a bit about later, though admittedly not much. He agrees to go out and retrieve Junghwa but by the time he gets there, she has been killed. Gangnam B-Side Episode 1 ends with him discovering her body.
Dongwoo Returns to Gangnam
How does Dongwoo fit into all this? Well, there’s a personal element. He seems perfectly happy causing trouble in his local precinct by slapping around the mayor’s nephew for trafficking drugs and trying to bribe police officers, which most of the officers seem quite willing to let slide, highlighting that the corruption mentioned in the cold open hasn’t exactly abated in the intervening years. But, professionally at least, Dongwoo seems to have given up the fight. Mostly, anyway.
He’s drawn back in by his mentor, Commissioner Moon, who wants him back in Gangnam for a touchy missing persons case that stands to make the police look incompetent if they can’t solve it. Dongwoo’s “gifts” are wasted on podunk policing in the middle of nowhere. He would perhaps not be inclined to agree, but his daughter, Yeseo, who has attempted suicide and been institutionalized on the back of some significant trauma involving bullying, a rooftop, and Jaehee, personally asks him to help find her “best friend”.
Ji Chang-wook in Gangnam B-Side | Image via Disney
At this point, a one-year-earlier flashback adds some question marks to that friendship. Yeseo had introduced Dongwoo to Jaehee, but the meeting didn’t go well. Dongwoo blamed Jaehee for whatever happened on the rooftop, Jaehee felt judged by Dongwoo, and Yeseo was furious that her father allowed her friend to remain endangered rather than offering her real help. There’s a lot of detail that needs filling in here.
Luckily, Dongwoo’s colleague, Jisu, is still furious about how he was ostracised for exposing corruption in the department and has clearly been lone-wolfing things in his absence. After busting some perverted dark web goons who were released from prison after no time at all, she continued to look into their new spy cam business in the hopes of catching them in an act of illegality and sending them back to prison. Those spy cams are in and around the clubs of Gangnam, which allows Dongwoo and Jisu to track Jaehee’s movements, including her rendezvous with Gilho, whom Dongwoo recognizes from the original bust. In a flashback, we see he claimed to just be a chauffeur for the girls, but he was also violently attacking someone who exploited them, so he has a much more personal connection to Jaehee and the others than he’s letting on in this scene.
And Another Thing
Also of note in Gangnam B-Side Episode 1 is the fact that all of the evidence from missing person cases has been transferred to a particular prosecutor, for reasons as yet unknown. Very little is made of this in the premiere, but Prosecutor Min Seojin is mentioned a few times and shows up once or twice, so this is something we need to be keeping an eye on as we progress through the season.
All in all, though, while it doesn’t do anything spectacular or novel, this is an impressively functional crime drama out of the gate. There’s a lot we don’t know and plenty to chew on, and if the events of this episode are anything to go by, there’s going to be a fair amount of unpleasantness — the good, entertaining kind — coming our way.
RELATED:
