Summary
Agent Kim Reactivated delivers some important, albeit brutal backstory, while also continuing to serve up great buddy comedy and action that people love about this show.
Maybe it’s just me, but I never particularly bought into the idea that Min-ji might be dead. A show about a highly dangerous and ticked-off dad rescuing his teenage daughter doesn’t have much in the way of legs if the daughter doesn’t get out of the first two weekends. Sure, she was largely absent in the previous episode, but even so. Agent Kim Reactivated needs a goal, I think, and Min-ji is as good as any.
And at least Min-ji isn’t passive, at least when she’s not comatose from blood loss. The gimmick of everyone thinking she’s dead – which, you’ll recall, is how all this began in the first place – couldn’t be sustained much longer, so having her awake and actively participating in her own escape attempts makes much more sense. It’s another detail to add to the show’s endlessly fun balance of action and goofy buddy comedy, particularly among the ahjussi trio.
What’s also deployed heavily here are explanatory origin cutaways, which are useful both for the sake of character development and for ensuring that the entire show isn’t just a string of violent action sequences. There’s an early one that shows Kim’s training in North Korea and explains why 66’s brother thinks that Kim was responsible for his death, which is pretty effective at communicating the brutality of the situation and the amount that Kim has already had to endure.
There’s another of these digging into Gold Tooth’s backstory, exploring how he became a gangster after being thrown off an apartment building he was once the cleaner of. He turned to crime to take his revenge and then ended up being hurt even worse, force-fed boiling potatoes until his teeth fell out. Gotta be honest – I’d be annoyed too.
These sequences are grim and brutal, but they’re doing important character legwork. One could argue that they drag on just a touch, enough to slightly detract from the excitement and energy of the main plot, but if the main plot were the only focus, each episode would only run for 30 minutes and wouldn’t have a great deal of dramatic rhythm. Sure, the action scenes are pleasurable on their own terms, but not in a single unbroken run.
Anyway, as regards the main plot, Kim is able to escape the attack by 66’s brother thanks to the South Korean intelligence guys, so he and Han-su escape and quickly reunite with Jin-cheol. The gang, now back together, locates the homeless dude who found her phone in the garbage and uses the CCTV footage of the general area where he saw a guy in a BMW toss it to identify the vehicle and the suspect. With that, they uncover his connection to Gold Tooth and his present location at a port, where, logically, they believe Min-ji is being held.
On the way there, though, they’re waylaid by an ambush laid by Mole Cricket, forcing Han-su to run interference right off a bridge and into a body of water, while Jin-cheol surrenders himself. Just like that, our trio is separated again, with Kim burning off in Mole Cricket’s car towards the port.
Agent Kim Reactivated Episode 4 ends with all roads converging on that port, and in this way, the additional context about Gold Tooth is helpful, since his vendetta against Mr Ju, who was behind the whole apartment building and hot potatoes debacle, comes to the forefront. Gold Tooth believes he can finally get one over on Ju by blackmailing him over Hye-ri having killed someone, and in response, Ju himself – and several of his goons – set out to the port, where Kim is also arriving.
The problem here is that Gold Tooth has assumed Min-ji is dead and dumped her in the freezer, but she isn’t and attempts to escape. That’s where things end, with Gold Tooth stunned, Kim fighting his way closer, and Mr Ju on the way. You can see why people are moaning that this season didn’t drop all at once, can’t you?
