The K2 Episode 16 Recap
Choi Sung Won plays Chicken. Learning that Jang Se Joon’s got the memory card, he refuses to diffuse the bomb when he’s lost everything: “I’ll just die today,” he tells Choi Yoo Jin when she accuses him of being stubborn.
The reason why this memory card is so important for Choi Sung Won to get back is that not only is Choi Sung Won involved in the fraud surrounding Kumar oil and gas development (dubbed as Kumar-gate), Choi Sung Won is more or less the one behind it all. It was a trap which he and his father-in-law set for the consortium members involved in Kumar-gate. He was meant to stay off the list of members in the consortium, because he knew this would blow up sooner or later, but ended up being on the list when Kim Suk Han got him onto it. It was Kim Suk Han’s defense mechanism.
All hope’s not lost for Choi Sung Won to get out of this alive and the memory card back in his hands—if not in his hands then at least in the hands of his “ally”, Park Kwan Soo (at this point he still has no idea he’s been betrayed by the assemblyman). Not long after Choi Yoo Jin’s suggestion for Choi Sung Won to sign over his portion of shares to her, Choi Yoo Jin learns from Chief Kim (who learns from Song Young Choon) that Ko Anna is in the building and running from the bad guys (a.k.a Park Kwan Soo’s men).
Both Choi Sung Won and Choi Yoo Jin know that with Ko Anna on the run and in danger of being captured by Park Kwan Soo’s men, there’s a good chance that Jang Se Joon would give up the memory card in exchange for his daughter. So, it was important to bring in both Jang Se Joon and Ko Anna into Cloud Nine before Park Kwan Soo’s men gets to them.
When Jang Se Joon arrives at JSS Headquarters, his concern is with finding his daughter, with a likelihood of handing over the memory card if that’s what it took to see her safe. However, he’s convinced by Choi Yoo Jin to head to Cloud Nine whilst her people locate Ko Anna. Choi Yoo Jin’s reasoning is that in order for him to trade the memory card for Ko Anna or whatever he chooses to do with it, he and the memory card must be safe. Neither he or his daughter will be safe if he’s captured. So, Jang Se Joon, along with Chief Joo, is brought to the safety of Cloud Nine.
As for Ko Anna, it’s not Choi Yoo Jin’s agents who finds Ko Anna, and fortunately it’s not Park Kwan Soo’s men, either. It’s Kim Je Ha. Whilst all the agents struggle to locate her, Kim Je Ha almost immediately locates her the moment he makes it back to JSS Headquarters. Smartly, he thinks of heading straight to the JSS surveillance room to look for her. Ko Anna doesn’t appear in any of the monitors, but men in bulletproof vests filling the monitor to the boiler room indicated that was where she was.
Down in the boiler room, yet another fight with the bad guys stand in Kim Je Ha’s way. Kim Je Ha’s fought four rounds already since going after Park Kwan Soo at the apartment construction site, and has been struck in the back, head, gut by punches, kicks and shovels. He’s bleeding from the head, his shot wound’s open and is starting to have trouble maintaining his balance. Still, he manages to take on and disable another group of Park Kwan Soo’s men to rescue Ko Anna.
He did have a bit of luck on his side. His fifth fight could have seen Kim Je Ha possibly being taken out by more bullets at close range, but the bad guys didn’t want to alert the JSS agents of their location by firing guns. They needed to get Ko Anna and not risk lowering their chances of achieving their mission by having the JSS agents show up. So, they opted for knives and hand-to-hand combat, allowing Kim Je Ha’s clearly more superior stamina and fighting skills to take them all down with a stab to their legs. One had almost gotten Ko Anna when he had her in a headlock, threatening to shoot if Kim Je Ha made another move, but the prepping Kim Je Ha did with Ko Anna for situations where they couldn’t communicate openly, allowed Kim Je Ha to use a couple gestures (a closed palm and a lowering open palm) to tell her to freeze, stay still and drop to the ground so he could shoot the last attacker.
It’s the last thing he does before he finally succumbs to that re-opened shot wound in his abdomen, collapsing slowly to be caught and cushioned by Ko Anna and her lap.
Chief Kim and the JSS agents locate them sometime after. Their location had been discovered through the sound of Kim Je Ha’s firing of the gun on that attacker. Brought out on a stretcher, Kim Je Ha is wheeled into the infirmary for treatment, while Ko Anna is dragged away to Cloud Nine as per Choi Yoo Jin’s orders.
This is the point the power shifts from Choi Yoo Jin to Choi Sung Won, and she never gains it back. Not long after Ko Anna is brought in, Choi Sung Won shocks everyone with producing a gun he’s been hiding in his pocket and firing it at Chief Kim’s leg, leaving her in pain, bleeding and unable to move to do anything about Choi Sung Won’s next move which sees him hold Ko Anna in headlock and pointing a gun at her head.
It forces Choi Yoo Jin to comply with Choi Sung Won’s demand and open that glass door that’s been separating her and Jang Se Joon from him. With the door open, Choi Sung Won makes his next demand for the memory card, which Jang Se Joon looked ready to give in exchange for his daughter, but Choi Yoo Jin wasn’t going to let that happen. She starts commanding Mirror to turn off elevators to secure Cloud Nine (to try take control over the situation again) only to pause mid-sentence. Choi Yoo Jin finishes off her command a few seconds later, but she’d been shot was slowly descending to the ground.
Seemingly having grown impatient with Choi Yoo Jin’s insistence on dragging this out till time ran out, Choi Sung Won had turned the gun on her and shot her in the pelvic area. He repeats his demand again: hand over the memory card or Ko Anna is next. He gets the card this time, against the shake of Choi Yoo Jin’s head. Jang Se Joon wasn’t going to test Choi Sung Won a second time, flinging the memory card over to land by Jang Se Joon’s foot.
A smug grin spreads across Choi Sung Won. He probably thinks he’s won this one, but it’s not long before he learns from Jang Se Joon (who gets informed by Chief Joo who hears it from the recently awoken Kim Je Ha) that the bomb can’t be diffused. The report has Choi Sung Won panicking and running to the bomb to input the PIN to see if what Jang Se Joon just heard is true. Once, twice he enters. The bomb continues ticking. It’s true. It can’t be diffused. He’s been betrayed by Park Kwan Soo.
Choi Sung Won rushes back to the pale and bleeding Choi Yoo Jin and (as Choi Yoo Jin describes) brazenly tells her that she needs to reactivate the elevator because they need to get her to a hospital. Choi Yoo Jin’s not that ruthless as to let them all die down there and moves to reactivate the elevator, only to be informed by Mirror internal electricity as well as cell reception has been shut down and they were being switched to emergency power.
In response to Choi Yoo Jin’s demand to the Consortium for all Police to vacate her building, leaving (what we think is) Park Kwan Soo without people on the ground to take Ko Anna hostage and get that memory card, Park Kwan Soo moves to threaten the Consortium with the fact that a bomb was going to go off shortly and kill everyone there, leaving only him with evidence on the Kumar people. He will also be the only presidential candidate. In other words, they’d have to answer to him later if they don’t do what he wants. So, succumbing to the threat, power and communication is cut as Park Kwan Soo wanted.
With only back-up electricity and no means to get outside help, the only way for a rescue is via Kim Je Ha. Ahead of all the JSS agents who were in much better condition than he was, he fearlessly abseils down the elevator shaft, prices open the elevator door and gains access to Cloud Nine.
Choi Sung Won, who had rushed out of Cloud Nine into the corridors the moment he learned the bomb cannot be diffused, rushes back ahead of Kim Je Ha to get to Ko Anna again, just so he can threaten to harm her and make sure he’d be the first one out of there. The JSS agents don’t listen to commands to be pulled up ahead of Ko Anna. They listened to Kim Je Ha, and he had demanded Ko Anna be lifted up first. Choi Sung Won wasn’t going to let that happen and forces the agents to lift him up first by sending a bullet into Kim Je Ha’s leg before shoving Ko Anna away.
There’s not a lot of time left after this. There’s only a little over nine minutes before the bomb detonates. Choi Yoo Jin and Jang Se Joon were still in Cloud Nine, with Jang Se Joon applying pressure to Choi Yoo Jin’s bleeding wound. Chief Kim was still on the floor with her shot leg and unable to move. They all still needed to be rescued.
With a limp, Kim Je Ha returns to Cloud Nine, right after instructing the JSS agents to wait for his orders to cut the elevator cables with gun fire. His plan and hope is that maybe the elevator’s safety features during free fall might save them. Upon returning to the room where Choi Yoo Jin is, he heads straight to her and tells her she must get out of the place immediately, but Choi Yoo Jin makes no move.
She was pale and has been bleeding for 15 or 20 minutes. It’d take some effort to get her into a harness and lifted into the elevator. It’s not guaranteed she would survive. Most importantly, there was no way Cloud Nine and Mirror was going to survive when the bomb detonates.
“Just give up.” She tells Kim Je Ha. “It’s too late.”
Kim Je Ha persists, shouting that they don’t have time and must hurry. Jang Se Joon encourages her to get going, too, in a softer tone. They’re met with a Choi Yoo Jin who’s ready to go with Cloud Nine:
“There isn’t a place for me to go anymore. I want to get some rest now.” She then tells them to take Chief Kim with them, to save Anna. She also admits that she was wrong.
Choi Yoo Jin doesn’t expand what wrong she was admitting to, but she might be talking about the Ume Hye Rin incident, about letting her die instead of calling emergency services when she found her dying on the floor, just so she can prove to her deceased father that she made the right decision till the end.
Finally, it’s been revealed Choi Yoo Jin didn’t kill Ume Rye. Telling Jang Se Joon, she professes she didn’t order Ume Hye Rin to be killed either. This statement comes when he accused Choi Yoo Jin or wanting to take the memory card from him earlier in the episode. It was her deceased father who ordered it after finding out about the actress. Then later, telling Ko Anna who in the end helped apply pressure to Choi Yoo Jin’s bleeding wound, she reveals the whole story of what happened that night at her mother’s place. It was Song Young Choon who carried out her father’s order to get rid of Ume Hye Rin. He was the one who injected the substance which killed her. She showed up after when Ume Hye Rin was already dying.
Although she didn’t kill Ume Hye Rin, Choi Yoo Jin does end up blaming herself for indirectly killing her, because she could have saved her that night. Ume Hye Rin was on the floor, asking Choi Yoo Jin to please save her. For a moment, she did think about saving her, but went against it and left her to die.
As part of her admission, she apologised to Jang Se Joon for making them both live the way they have been. She never had to prove to anyone she was happy to anyone, but just so she could prove that to herself, to others and her deceased father she was happy and that she didn’t make the wrong choice, she did what she did in order to try make her decisions the right ones.
In a last-ditch effort, Kim Je Ha rushes over to the bomb to see if there was any way he could diffuse the bomb. As he looks at the wires, he tells Jang Se Joon to take Chief Kim out of there. It’s not a sign that he might be able to somehow diffuse a bomb that’s been said as being not possible. There’s only three minutes left. Kim Je Ha really can’t diffuse the bomb and they must start making a move out of there.
Choi Yoo Jin left behind in Cloud Nine, Chief Kim supported by Jang Se Joon and Ko Anna, they head to the elevator with Kim Je Ha leading them. There was a bit of hesitance in Jang Se Joon when he was made to leave Choi Yoo Jin behind. As much as it looked like he hated her and wanted to get away from her, this final episode saw Jang Se Joon display a genuine care for Choi Yoo Jin. Aside from the short time he stepped away from her side to survey what was going on in the corridors after internal electricity was cut, he stayed by her side the whole time applying pressure to her wound. It’s true Jang Se Joon was the only person there to apply pressure, but the worried frown on his face, the softer tone he spoke to her with, showed it wasn’t because there was no one else to do it. When he was told by Kim Je Ha to leave with Chief Kim, Jang Se Joon would not remove his hand from Choi Yoo Jin’s wound. He just stared at it as if thinking he couldn’t possibly release the pressure and let her bleed out. It took Choi Yoo Jin to tell him to “Go” before he left her.
However, Jang Se Joon couldn’t leave her in the end. Once they got inside the elevator, and per Kim Je Ha’s instructions the JSS agents started to shoot at the elevator cables in hopes the elevator’s free fall safety mechanisms kicked in to save them, Jang Se Joon steps off the elevator. He was not only going to go back to Cloud Nine and accompany Choi Yoo Jin in death, but he wanted to lessen the impact for Ko Anna (and everyone else in the elevator) when the bomb detonated.
Handing the care of Ko Anna over to Kim Je Ha, he forces the elevator door shut with his two hands and leaves behind a crying, pained Ko Anna calling for him. He heads back to Cloud Nine. Choi Yoo Jin thinks he’s only back to drag that bomb into her room when he tells her his intentions: after he finally has the heavy case holding the bomb in there, she tells him to “Hurry up and go so I can close the door.” She doesn’t know, he was going to go with her.
“Close the door now,” Jang Se Joon says from just in front of where the glass door would slide across.
They share a small bittersweet moment looking directly into each others’ eyes. Like Choi Yoo Jin said after she commands Mirror to close the door and he asks her be his companion to the underworld in an embrace, they almost seem like a happy couple acting like this.
The bomb goes off shortly after. The elevator goes into free-fall. The agents who were above shooting down the elevator cables—Team Leader Seo, Song Young Choon, J1 and Jang Mi Ran—are thrown off their feet. In the surveillance room, Chief Joo and two other agents struggle to remain on their feet as the floor shakes. They’re all alive, though.
The fate of Kim Je Ha, Ko Anna and Chief Kim aren’t known for a few long moments as repeated calls for their status are met with silence. The very real chance they didn’t make it has them devastated with Chief Joo slamming his fist against the desk in the surveillance room, J1 and Jang Mi Ran ready to shed tears and Team Leader Seo about to give up and resign to thinking they were all dead.
But then, Ko Anna responds, “This is K2. This is K2. I’m answering. Over.”
Ko Anna is alive, but what about Kim Je Ha?
“Hey, get us out of here. I’m in so much pain. Over.”
They’re both alive! Chief Kim is alive, too. Everyone, except Choi Yoo Jin and Jang Se Joon, survived the explosion.
With Choi Yoo Jin and Jang Se Joon gone, their whole fortune, all that power (minus the now gone Cloud Nine) is inherited by Ko Anna. It worries the Consortium members. Though she isn’t as threatening as if she had Cloud Nine, she possessed incriminating information which could bring them a whole lot of trouble. She had picked Kim Suk Han’s memory card up from the floor of Cloud Nine, just before she was made to leave the place. Choi Sung Won had dropped when he had her in a headlock and was threatening to kill her if he wasn’t pulled up and allowed to leave Cloud Nine first. She could release that information and they’d be done for.
Although the above may be a possibility, they seemed to also believe she won’t act rashly. They’re counting on her becoming like Choi Yoo Jin: “Choi Yoo Jin was once an innocent young girl too, wasn’t she? And it’s only after girls grow up that they become witches.” They think she will grow to enjoy having all that power once she gets a taste of it, and it’s only a matter of time she will approach them to make a deal.
But this is where they are wrong. A day in the life of Choi Yoo Jin saw her tell Kim Je Ha how boring she found it. Ko Anna doesn’t care for that power. No amount of convincing from Chief Kim or advice to think through it carefully from Kim Je Ha was going to hold Ko Anna back from releasing the information. She’s told by Kim Je Ha that if she goes through with it, she’ll lose all that power Choi Yoo Jin left her, that she’ll reveal that the politicians and the rich are all the same. None of that concerns her. In fact, she seems quite happy to let that power go and reveal it all. Before Kim Je Ha finishes his sentence about whatever else he wanted to say, she hit the Enter key to send the email containing the contents of the memory card.
That had Kim Je Ha telling her off for not waiting for him in sending the email off together. It seems this was a historical moment they were meant to share together. It’s not the kind of moment she want to do together. That has Kim Je Ha sulking (in a non-serious kind of way), accusing her of always doing whatever she wants. That has Ko Anna slowly approach him, a small grin spreading across her face before she gives him a peck on the lips before jumping away,
“See? You’re always doing whatever you please,” Kim Je Ha accuses again. “You’re not being considerate of my feelings,” he continues. That gets Kim Je Ha another peck on the lips. This time, there’s no jumping away from the other as Kim Je Ha continues the kiss.
The drama ends with Kim Je Ha and Ko Anna in what looks to be back in Spain. No longer one of Interpols’ Wanted Man after standing witness against Blackstone massacre of civilians, he and Ko Anna are able to travel abroad freely. Back in Spain, they stare out into the sunset. They hug each other and they kiss some more. In a voiceover, Kim Je Ha is heard asking whether Ko Anna has any regrets about not restoring her mother’s reputation. Ko Anna tells him she doesn’t because in return she got her dad. A declaration of love is made before a pressing question is asked by Ko Anna, “What’s your real name, anyway?” We never get to hear the answer as Kim Je Ha gets as far as saying “My real name is…” before the episode ends.
Thoughts
OMG those Choi Yoo Jin scenes near the end of the episode is just so sad! It’s not like there weren’t hints. As we mentioned in the recap for Episode 15, we had a feeling this was how it might end for Choi Yoo Jin, but still to see her so defeated, lying on her bed, bleeding out from the side makes us cry. But, we are super happy that Choi Yoo Jin is not the one who killed Ume Hye Rin.
She’s not exactly a good guy/purely a victim like said though. She’s a partial victim and partial evildoer. Before the Ume Hye Rin incident, she was a victim, but after it when she turned into someone who killed without hesitation to achieve her goals of making Jang Se Joon president and preserving her happily-married public image.
The way she was made to die and go down with Cloud Nine might be suggesting she’s actually no longer someone you could consider a good guy, and is as Kim Je Ha said: she was no different than Park Kwan Soo when achieving her goals.
She once suggested to Kim Je Ha he handle his revenge on Park Kwan Soo by denying the assemblyman any chance of getting back up to achieve his political aspirations, make him see this reality and have him end it all himself. It feels a lot like Choi Yoo Jin was the one made to suffer her definition of the perfect and more effective revenge rather than Park Kwan Soo.
Park Kwan Soo’s end involved Kim Je Ha tying him up, putting him in the boot of the car and driving him to a place where Park Kwan Soo’s right-hand man forces Park Kwan Soo to take his own life.
Since Choi Yoo Jin was the one who died by her suggested method—a method which comes off as more sadistic and tormenting than simply killing someone off quickly—does that mean she was actually the bigger evildoer between her and Park Kwan Soo?
Whatever the case, as much as we liked the Choi Yoo Jin character, it was probably the right kind of end for her. She was pretty ruthless in the earlier episodes and showed how ruthless she still is at the end when she threatened to go after JSS President’s grandchildren because he allowed Choi Sung Won to enter Cloud Nine.
Speaking of Choi Sung Won, he ends up being killed by Chief Kim. In a car, she shoots him right in the the heart. With him dead, that takes care of everyone in the drama who deserves to die or face justice.
This ends our recap on The K2. It took us a while to complete it, but we’re so glad we finally completed it because The K2 is an awesome drama that was worth watching and really enjoyable to recap. So much happens. There’s so much to hang out for: the story behind Choi Yoo Jin, Jang Se Joon and the truth behind Ume Hye Rin’s death; the seemingly ruthless Choi Yoo Jin who seem to also deserve pity; Kim Je Ha and his alliance/friendship with Choi Yoo Jin; the story behind what really happened when Kim Je Ha was in Iraq; and of course the power struggles between Choi Yoo Jin, Jang Se Joon, Park Kwan Soo, Choi Sung Won and their companies; it’s all so interesting!
The K2 lead characters are Kim Je Ha and Ko Anna, but it’s really Kim Je Ha and Choi Yoo Jin who drives the story. So, we found the relationship between Kim Je Ha and Choi Yoo Jin and what happens to Choi Yoo Jin most interesting and not so much Kim Je Ha and Ko Anna.
We were also more interested by how things way things tied up for Jang Se Joon and Choi Yoo Jin than for Kim Je Ha and Ko Anna. Though it was a bittersweet end, we still really love how their relationship ended. The whole drama, they despised each other so much. They were against each other, was always suspicious of each other. They only thought the worse of each other. It was a pretty dysfunctional husband-wife relationship, but Episode 16 saw the two finally start acting like a loving, caring couple. It was a shame it took a situation like a bomb that can’t be diffused and impending death for them to be that way.
One thing we would have loved to find out is a little more of Ume Hye Rin and Jang Se Joon’s story, their separation and Ume Hye Rin’s apparent marriage to Director Ko Joon Ho, and who this Ko Am Wook is that Song Young Choon had mentioned as Ko Anna’s father legally.
We can make guesses and say that Ko Am Wook might have been some guy Ume Hye Rin dated and had agreed to make Ko Anna his daughter; or, maybe he was randomly put as Ko Anna’s father under orders from Choi Yoo Jin’s deceased dad, so that media didn’t get a whiff of Ko Anna being actually Jang Se Joon’s daughter and cause problems for the assemblyman. But, then we don’t see any reason why the drama couldn’t just say Ko Joon Jo is Ko Anna’s legal father and leave it at that.
It’s very tiny part of the story and not all that important to tie up, but the way the drama threw the Ko Am Wook name into the story in Episode 7 and not mentioning it ever again feels so much like the mention of the name only had one purpose and that was to confuse and throw us viewers off track.
All in all, though, as we said already, an awesome drama!
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