Summary
Weak Hero Class 2’s villains play divide and conquer and make their moves in Episode 4, but Si-eun and the others don’t make it easy.
It was pretty obvious what Baek-jin had planned for Si-eun after Seong-je confronted him at the end of the previous episode. It’s a classic divide and conquer approach, and that defines Episode 4 of Weak Hero Class 2. Si-eun already feels guilty about Su-ho, so the fear of his new friends being hurt on account of him is a serious threat. Baek-jin instructs him to stay away from Baku, and he listens. For a while, anyway.
But it doesn’t last for the same reasons Si-eun started smacking bullies around in the first place — he just can’t ignore the injustice. Baek-jin has some kind of longstanding and deeply personal rivalry with Baku that even Seong-je doesn’t understand, and he’s perplexingly determined to bring Eunjang into the Union because of this, even though the collective wouldn’t stand to benefit a great deal. This episode smartly keeps Baek-jin out of the action aside from a brief, tense conversation with Baku, but it still positions him as the Big Bad who is the driving force behind all the other stuff that happens in this chapter.
That other stuff largely boils down to a string of separate fights that eventually conjoin. Because Si-eun doesn’t want to imperil his friends, he pitches the idea of them all just ignoring each other, which Baku agrees with, clearly because he can tell what’s really going on. When Baek-jin has Baku’s family business threatened to compel Baku into meeting with him, that takes two players off the board — Baku goes to meet Baek-jin, and Si-eun is isolating himself for the good of the others. This is when Seong-je and his goons strike, targeting Hyun-tak and Jun-tae.
There’s history between Seong-je and Hyun-tak, too. In a very brief flashback, we see that Seong-je was responsible for damaging his knee. Seong-je wants to fight him personally while his goons chase down Jun-tae, who, at a los,s calls Si-eun. Si-eun hears him being attacked and captured, to be taken back to Seong-je, who’s fighting Hyun-tak on a rooftop.
Meanwhile, Baku goes to see Baek-jin to tell him in no uncertain terms to leave him and his friends alone. Baek-jin is unbothered — he’s a gifted student, apparently, but not as gifted as Si-eun, which was intimated in their conversation earlier; incidentally the only real reference that Weak Hero Class 2 has made to Si-eun’s academic abilities — and tries to coax Baku with the idea that the Union will morph into a legitimate and profitable business once they all graduate. Baku is having none of it and storms out, beating up several of Baek-jin’s goons on his way out. Baek-jin lets him go, but the stage is set for a confrontation between them down the line.
The confrontation between Seong-je and Hyun-tak, meanwhile, is in full swing. Hyun-tak is enormously outmatched and gets brutalized, all of which is being live-streamed. This, at least, allows Si-eun to find the location, and he arrives in the nick of time. He gets into it with Seong-je, who takes him much too lightly, and they both end up on the floor, barely conscious.
I love how Si-eun fights. In my review of this season, I referred to him as “the wounded animal personified”, and that’s really evident here. Si-eun can’t compete with Seong-je toe-to-toe, so he uses every dirty trick in the book, smashing him in the head with a plant pot, stealing his glasses and stabbing him in the foot with their broken stem, pulling his blazer over his head, the whole nine. His superpower is just having more dawg in him. And he’s able to take Seong-je down as a result, though not without taking some licks of his own.
At the end of Weak Hero Class 2, Episode 4, Baku arrives to find his new friend and one of his nemeses both on the ground. Si-eun, a little delirious, confuses Baku for Su-ho, telling him he got in another fight. Something tells me it won’t be the last.
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