Summary
Unmasked continues to sag a little in Episodes 5 & 6, but it helped along but a surprising last-minute reveal.
I haven’t exactly been coy about not knowing quite what to make of Unmasked, and I was more undecided than ever throughout most of Episodes 5 and 6 until a late twist at the end of the latter gave the Disney+ K-Drama a jolt of energy. But I’m still not convinced. These two episodes are saggy for the most part, splitting time between the aftermath of the building collapse cliffhanger and then a case about a stalker, but I was becoming less and less involved.
Perhaps it’s that the overarching Dr. Trigger plot and everything involving Seongwook is more interesting than the case of the week plotting. Or maybe it’s because the balance between the two elements is off, or because the theming is a little heavy-handed, so the plotting becomes predictable. I’m not sure. Sometimes a show just has something “off” about it that’s hard to put a finger on, which is the case here.
Like, the building collapse thing. A bus driver parked in the wrong spot when it comes down is posthumously pilloried by the media, but the company at real fault turns out to have a long history of covering up negligence and accidents on their sites. Han Do’s initial reluctance to cover the case closely because it’s already being recounted by the mainstream media shows some naivete; Soryong’s insistence that he looks into either way highlights how she has been around for long enough to know a cover-up when she sees one. The pop press can’t be relied upon to hold the truly guilty to account, which is why a team like Trigger needs to exist in the first place.
But this is fairly obvious stuff. An unfeeling CEO caring more about making money than the safety of the workers who earn that money isn’t exactly revelatory, nor is that CEO having a political ally willing to sweep things under the rug. Legal retribution for shining a light on the truth is an obvious deterrent, and finding a way to challenge the powerful is a standard heroic arc. It isn’t that this stuff is badly delivered – it is, on the contrary, delivered just fine – but it’s fairly run of the mill.
I do like the personal component of this case, though. Soryong’s mother was a bus driver who, 20 years prior, was similarly vilified in the wake of a collapsed building that killed all of the bus’s occupants except Soryong’s mother and the child of the pregnant woman whose waters had just broken on the journey. Soryong’s mother committed suicide out of guilt without ever learning that the kid made it – the kid who just so happens to be Songi, one of the interns at Trigger.
The case in Unmasked Episode 6 feels a bit less corporate. In it, a woman named Ms. Nam worries that she’s being stalked by the same man who had once killed her fiancé while they were exchanging vows. She’s engaged to someone else now who strikes me as an incredibly creepy figure from the jump – perhaps she has a type? – and the original suspect is proved to be at a care facility after being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The CCTV footage doesn’t match the description of the guy either.
This isn’t totally resolved here and will likely become a whodunit in the next episode or so, but in the meantime, this latest pair of episodes ends on the revelation that Han Do is Dr. Trigger – or at least he claims to be to Soryong. This is unexpected since the previous episodes have worked on creating the feeling that it’s impossible it’d be him, and I do suspect there’s more than meets the eye here either way, but it’s a welcome injection of energy all the same. Goodness knows Unmasked needed it.
