Summary
Pro Bono considerably ups the drama in Episodes 9 & 10, just in time for the final two outings. This is the K-Drama at its strongest yet.
There are only two episodes of Pro Bono left, which seems to have come out of nowhere. It’s part of the procedural format, I guess. The case-of-the-week structure keeps you distracted while the overarching story sneaks up on you. You can feel that quite strongly in Episodes 9 & 10. This is where a lot more connections are being made, knitting the bigger picture together more adroitly. Jae-beom’s personal crusade against Da-wit – including the whole inciting bribery matter – gives everything some stakes and shape, which feels about right as we approach the end.
To reiterate what we learned in the previous pairing, Jae-beom wants to take Da-wit down because he blames him for the death of his father. When Da-wit was a judge, he apparently leaked false information to the media to secure a conviction for Jae-beom’s father, who died in prison. Is that the kind of guy he is? It doesn’t seem to mesh with his righteous character, which has pretty much secured the future of the pro bono team, but you never know.
Since Oh is essentially forcing the team to take on Jae-beom’s case and sue Da-wit, the entire office wants to know the real story. And you know what that means – it’s time for some tragic backstory. After all, such a trenchant desire to fight for the oppressed doesn’t manifest in a vacuum. And Da-wit was famous for it, so something must have happened in his life that created such strong feelings on the subject. And it did. It happened to his mother.
Da-wit’s mother worked at a paper mill owned by Jae-beom’s father. And Jae-beom’s father wasn’t a nice guy, to put things mildly. Da-wit’s mother didn’t relish working for such an exploitative capitalist, but she had mouths to feed. However, when her hand was severed in a workplace accident, she was sent home without proper medical treatment or adequate compensation, and Da-wit’s protestations fell on deaf ears. This is what ignited his passion for the law, since he had to spend his nights brushing up on it to battle Jae-beom’s father in court and secure justice for his mother. Her health failed, and her dying wishes were for him to do good things and to scatter her ashes over a river. With the compensation money, he went to law school and positioned himself to make good on at least one of those wishes.
This is a sweet story, but from the perspective of a lawyer, it’s also a motive. Da-wit didn’t recuse himself from Jae-beom’s father’s trial, and he had every reason to prejudice it. There’s still more to come out, naturally, but Da-wit is tight-lipped. He and his team are going to have to face each other in court.
I think this is a really good hook for Pro Bono Episodes 9 & 10. It’s a bit silly, granted, with Da-wit and the team both employing underhanded tactics against one another, putting lessons into practice learned from him, but it’s obscuring a darker underside. We learn as we progress that Jun-u has been feeding information about the pro bono team to Oh and Bae, getting leg-ups in the case – including documents he shouldn’t technically have access to – in the hopes of securing a conviction for Da-wit, improving his own career in the meantime. The crookedness is a step too far for Jung-in, who is sick of her father’s interference and corruption, and she decides to step down. Like Da-wit, there’s a lot of trauma in her past associated with one of her parents, but it’s for the opposite reason. Oh was awful to her, and never accepted that she was her own person instead of his puppet. Now she has a bigger point to prove than ever, and she plans to prove it by representing Da-wit.
This storyline also connects to Gi-Ppeum, since Da-wit was the judge who granted their family bakery an exemption from debt collection after their first was ruined by a cheating business partner. Da-wit was the reason she got into the law in the first place, which is some revelation. It changes – at least to her – what it might mean if he’s guilty, but the only way she’s going to find that out is by beating him at his own game, at his own urging. Da-wit understands, and reminds Gi-Ppeum, that the only truth people care about is their own, the one that can be proved. But what’s his truth?
Inspired, Gi-Ppeum goes after Da-wit on the stand, pushing the angle that he couldn’t possibly have made an unbiased ruling in the case, given the circumstances. And shockingly – just in time for the finale! – Da-wit himself agrees. Apparently, he did it all for revenge. But is he telling the truth?
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