‘Agent Kim Reactivated’ Premiere Recap – Getting Back to Work

You know exactly where Agent Kim Reactivated is going in Episode 1 and 2, but this isn’t a criticism. It’s one of those stories – think John Wick or Nobody – that hinges on the catharsis of a seemingly ordinary, run-of-the-mill guy secretly being an all-action killing machine, so the premiere is about fostering that vibe. Here’s Mr. Kim, walking home and being bullied by thugs. He’s Mr. Kim’s daughter, Min-ji, being bullied at school. It’s creating an environment of injustice so that you feel properly righteous by the time that Kim has decided enough’s enough and takes matters into his own hands.

And it’s working. It perhaps didn’t need over an hour of build to get to that point, but I’m way beyond complaining about K-Drama episode runtimes at this point. And besides, it helps us to settle into the idea of Kim as a struggling single father, trying his best to do right by Min-ji and keep his head down while he works a relatively run-of-the-mill nine-to-five at Sangsaeng Savings Bank (SSB). But the clues are there, including an Equalizer-style fastidiousness and attention to detail that speaks to principles and skills that Kim is keeping under wraps.

It also helps us understand the difficulties of a father raising a teenage girl; financial, emotional, and logistical. Min-ji is spirited, but considers her dad an unremarkable old man, an impression he wants to perpetuate while still being responsible. She’s being viciously bullied at school by a student named Hye-ri, who is the daughter of Mr. Ju, an extremely influential businessman with connections that could ruin their lives. Kim is at an age where he has learned to sacrifice his pride on the altar of safety. Min-ji is not.

To be fair, this isn’t exclusively an age thing, at least not based on Kim’s relationship with a taekwondo teacher, Han-su, and Jin-cheol, a military veteran. They’re all on the older side, trying to maintain some kind of friendship in the gaps between their real lives and responsibilities. But Jin-cheol is almost the opposite of Mr. Kim. When he’s provoked, he gives in to his baser impulses immediately, while Kim slips off quietly without getting involved. It’s the same dynamic, just presented in two wildly contrasting ways.

But Kim threatens to take the pacifistic approach a little too far. When he’s called into school because of an incident involving Min-ji and Hye-ri, he begs forgiveness from Hye-ri’s parents instead of defending Min-ji, upsetting Min-ji over what she perceives as cowardice and an inability to defend her (Kim’s position is justifiable, but crucially, you can see her point too). Min-ji refuses to go home with Kim and instead decides to stay with her friend Hye-reong for the night, threatening Kim that if he calls her, she’ll run away.

This threat is precisely why Kim leaves things too long when Min-ji doesn’t come home and then subsequently can’t be reached after being lured into a meeting spot by Nam-hoon, a student at school who had shown her some kindness. It’s obvious to the audience that something has happened to her, and eventually, to Kim too. The trail leads him to a construction site, where he locates a pool of blood and Hye-ri’s hair tie, and then shortly after, Hye-ri herself and an accompanying thug. This is the turning point. It’s when Kim refuses to be pushed, and also when the show, albeit in vague terms, reveals his past as “Codename 66”, a former North Korean defector who was recruited by South Korean intelligence for dangerous, deniable missions behind enemy lines.

Agent Kim Reactivated Season 1, Episode 2 then leans into its premise even further, while also expanding its scope. For one thing, we come to understand more about what happened to Min-ji, who was predictably lured into an ambush by Hye-ri and her friends, using the phone of Nam-hoon, who had also been assaulted. She was attacked so viciously that Hye-ri thought she was dead, and enlisted the help of a gangster named Gold Tooth to dispose of the body, which was stuffed into the trunk of his car.

This obviously introduces a gangland element tied into Mr Ju, increasing the scale of the threat that Kim is up against. It also implies that Min-ji is dead, though later reveals she isn’t, though she doesn’t seem to be coping especially well either way.

But in uncovering more about Kim’s past, we also widen the net on the other side of the aisle. As was implied in the previous episode, Kim was Codename 66, a North Korean defector turned South Korean agent. His past makes him a target of extreme interest to North Korea, even now, and CCTV footage of the restaurant brawl caused by Jin-cheol alerts the nation to the fact he’s alive. Accordingly, they send a deadly assassin to deal with him. This guy, Kim’s equally skilled brother, becomes the new 66.

At the same time, South Korean intelligence attempts to protect Kim from becoming a target of their northern neighbors, creating a race-against-time espionage plot on top of Kim’s mission to find and rescue his daughter from corrupt money men and organised crime. It’s a great stew of different ideas and influences, and with a ready-made trio to fight back against the bad guys in the form of Kim, Han-su, and Jin-cheol, there could be quite a large amount of catharsis in store for the viewers.