Angry Mom:Episode 1

In a small restaurant named Pig Mom, a woman narrates that a power dynamic emerges in every relationship, pitting strong versus weak. Sometimes age is the determining factor, and at other times fists are more effective. Demonstrating her point is a table of three, where a minor tiff escalates into a full-blown brawl.
That brings our narrator out from the kitchen to break up the fight: She’s JO KANG-JA (her name happens to mean Strong One; she’s played by Kim Hee-sun), an ajumma with frizzy hair and a (pixelated) mouthful of swears. She screams at the men, shutting them up into contrition.
As the conflict resolves, Kang-ja notes that there’s a third way to assert power: a loud voice, which she’s just proven she’s a pro at. But there’s a force even more powerful than that: money. And those with it always win.

Kang-ja arrives home to her family: There’s the snappish mother-in-law who complains about the dinner that’s not made, the wimpy husband (Im Hyung-joon) who slinks off to avoid having to defend her, and the teenage daughter AH-RAN (Kim Yoo-jung) who shrugs her off with monosyllabic answers.
Ah-ran is in that adolescent phase where she doesn’t want anything to do with Mom and pushes aside any attempt to help. Kang-ja takes it in stride and watches her daughter heading off to her night academy, explaining to us that there’s one exception to all those rules of power, because the person who loves more is always in the weaker position. “To me, my daughter is like that,” she thinks. “I am a mother.”

Outside the academy, Ah-ran gets pushed around by a trio of bullies after defending her friend Yi-kyung. Ah-ran is remarkably composed in the face of the violence, telling the girls to keep their jealousy in check since head bully WANG JUNG-HEE (Lizzy) is only picking on Yi-kyung for being prettier than her.
Ah-ran’s refusal to back down and strong words (calling Jung-hee pathetic) escalates the violence. It also attracts the notice of other students nearby, particularly a boy (Baro) who dials a number on his phone.
It’s to a friend, GO BOK-DONG (Ji-soo), who shows up just as Jung-hee’s about to flip her lid. His presence makes the mean girls instantly deferential, and they stop bullying to do his bidding. What is he, the alpha bully? Yet Bok-dong’s intervention acts to help Ah-ran, which makes this an interesting dynamic.

Jung-hee and her mean girls shuffle off apologetically, and Bok-dong kneels down to look Ah-ran eye to eye. She’s trembling, and he drawls that they’re seeing a lot of each other lately: “Let’s not see a lot of each other.”
Ah-ran hurries away with her friend, who apologizes for causing her trouble yet again. Smiling, Ah-ran just tells Yi-kyung to run since it’s raining, and the two girls laugh and twirl in the downpour.
At home, Kang-ja worries about Ah-ran being caught in the rain, but her immature husband and naggy mother-in-law are more interested in having her whip up a snack for them. She excuses herself to go out looking for Ah-ran, leaving them griping after her.

Kang-ja arrives at the academy just as class is being let out by its teacher, PARK NOAH (Ji Hyun-woo), for whom the word hapless seems tailor-made. He’s super earnest as he encourages his kids to try harder and not sleep through class, and they just yawn and grimace in his face.
Kang-ja lights up when Ah-ran exits the building, calling her over. Ah-ran pulls Mom aside in annoyance and rejects the ride home and the umbrella, leaving Mom frustrated. Kang-ja asks why Ah-ran never wants to be picked up from school, why she locks herself up in her room, why she recoils from touching her, why she won’t say a word.
Finally Ah-ran bursts out that she dislikes talking to Mom. Her twitchiness makes me think this is more about the bullies than about hating Mom, but Kang-ja doesn’t understand, wondering if she did something wrong. Then Ah-ran flinches from Mom’s hand on her shoulder and says harshly, “You being my mother is the mistake.” Ah-ran runs off, and Kang-ja swallows her hurt.

Ah-ran joins her friend Yi-kyung, and they head off with Teacher Noah’s umbrella. Upset, Kang-ja drops the umbrella she’d brought for her daughter, and Noah hurries after her to return it, calling her “student” since she’s wearing Ah-ran’s old gym clothes.
Kang-ja ignores his help and heads into a nearby pojangmacha to order a bottle of soju. Noah bursts inside the tent to cancel that order, determined to keep this student from a path of delinquency (which is adorable). He puts on his deepest teacherly growl (which really isn’t very deep) and orders her to go home.
Kang-ja snaps that she’s not a student, but he points at the school name on her jacket and demands her class number and name. Temper flaring, she jumps up and lets loose a torrent of bleeped swears, mixing in her hometown saturi accent. Noah just stares in shock. Blink, blink.

Kang-ja storms off, replaying Ah-ran’s words in her head. It makes her think back to her own schoolgirl days, and the strained relationship she had with her own mother, a tough ajumma from Busan who’d once grumbled to Kang-ja, “If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have lived like this.” Teenage Kang-ja had snapped back, “Did I ask to be born?”
Ah-ran takes the bus home, and flinches in pain when bumped into. Now we know her real reason for pushing Mom’s touch away, since it looks like she’s pretty bruised under that uniform.
When Kang-ja returns home and finds Ah-ran’s door locked yet again, she lets herself in with the key, determined to have a talk. But Ah-ran is asleep, and Kang-ja sighs and starts to tuck her in… revealing Ah-ran’s badly bruised wrist. In alarm, Kang-ja pulls back the covers and finds more injuries all over her arms and legs.

Ah-ran snaps awake, but it’s too late to hide. Kang-ja demands to know what happened, not buying the “I hurt myself in gym class” excuse. Ah-ran says Mom couldn’t do anything anyway and tells her to butt out.
Kang-ja sits down to discuss it with her husband Jin-sang, ready to barge into school tomorrow to demand a solution. Jin-sang argues that they should be more careful; they don’t want this to backfire on them, and that there’s not much they can do legally. He suggests inquiring quietly and transferring Ah-ran to a new school.
Jin-sang’s words make sense, but Kang-ja eyes him with bitter disappointment. “If she were your biological daughter, would you say that?” she asks.

Jin-sang declares that Ah-ran was his daughter from the moment he married her, and then returns, “She’s not your biological daughter either!” Huh. That’s interesting, but we don’t get an explanation because Jin-sang realizes he went too far and backs down.
Kang-ja leaves the room and finds Ah-ran standing outside, having heard everything. She agrees with Dad, not wanting Mom to do stir the pot, saying that whatever Mom does to help her might not in fact help. “Don’t do anything,” Ah-ran requests.
Kang-ja drinks by herself for a while, then takes a deep breath and tells herself to act like an adult, like a mother. Don’t act rashly. So the next day, she meets a teacher at a cafe to discuss this calmly.

Meanwhile, let’s meet the players behind the bureaucracy: Myeongseong Foundation runs Myeongseong High School, and there are a handful of players we’ll have to get to know. I can’t promise it’s exciting, but it is important so here are the nuts and bolts: The foundation is headed by Chairman Hong, who’s been accused of misusing public funds. He’s wheelchair-bound and sickly, so his secretary, JOO AE-YEON (Oh Yoon-ah), handles the media and ushers him off. The sharp look in Ae-yeon’s eye tells us to watch out for her.
Also worth watching out for is Myeongseong High teacher DO JUNG-WOO (Kim Tae-hoon), who has a distinct shark-like quality. He’s also well-connected, putting in a courtesy call to the minister of education.

Kang-ja’s meeting with the teacher prompts Do Jung-woo to inquire into the bullying allegations, and he interviews the students. They predictably downplay the accusations: Head bully Jung-hee swears that she never laid a hand on Ah-ran (only scared her a little), and the indifferent HONG SANG-TAE (Baro), who happens to be Chairman Hong’s son, feigns ignorance. Clearly a lie, since he was the one who called alpha dog Bok-dong to intervene the other night.
Bok-dong tells Do Jung-woo to ask the victim herself. If she’s too scared of retaliation to say anything, well, then she can just keep getting beat up. I can’t read this guy, but it’s intriguing.

Hearing that students are being questioned, timid Yi-kyung worries that this will escalate and involve her mother. Ah-ran assures her that Yi-kyung won’t get dragged into this, but urges her friend to tell her mother before things get any bigger. But Yi-kyung can’t have her mother knowing, ever.
Chairman Hong is wheeled into a meeting with the school’s vice principal, then leaps at the man in a fury, completely able-bodied after all. You big stinkin’ faker! He attacks the blubbering vice principal for passing along internal information to the prosecutor’s office, getting quite violent. The music in this scene is disturbingly lighthearted.

Chairman Hong’s definitely a baddie but we aren’t told much about the particulars; all we know at this point is that everybody in his camp seems incredibly sketchy. His two underlings, secretary Ae-yeon and her chief secretary boss, snipe at each other and about him; Ae-yeon seems to hold herself above her crude boss, but Chief Secretary Ahn insinuates that she only got this far via sponsor relationships.
She’s disappointed that the education minister stepped in and prevented something, having thought it would happen this time. Everything about the scene direction hints that she’s Up To Something.

At school, Teacher Jung-woo calls Ah-ran in next for questioning. She tries to deny the whole situation, but he doesn’t believe that. He suggests that Ah-ran not ruin her own prospects with her friendship with Yi-kyung, which is the source of her trouble. She replies, “Yi-kyung is my friend. I will protect her, so nobody can mess with her.”
Kang-ja has a follow-up meeting with the high school teacher, whose only solution is to transfer Ah-ran to another school. He says that Ah-ran’s troubles stem from her friendship with another girl (which has spurred lesbian rumors) and tells Mom that the safest thing to do is keep quiet and move. Don’t rock the boat.
Kang-ja blows up at the teacher, demanding to know if the teacher would just shut up and let it slide if his daughter were beaten from head to toe. She threatens to take this to the police, the government, the court—as far as she can take it.

But Kang-ja finds herself thwarted at every turn. There’s no proof, no witnesses, not even a victim’s statement. The police won’t help, and can’t file a report.
Even so, Kang-ja’s aggressive stance has the teachers nervous. Jung-woo puts in a call to someone to “proceed as discussed,” in order to take care of the problem.
Kang-ja heads to the courthouse next, calling in a favor with a judge she knows. He’s in trial, and Kang-ja sits in as a bullying student reads a tearful statement apologizing for taking out his pain and anger on his victim. Both boys cry and the judge guides the victim into accepting the bully’s apology. The judge commends the bully for recognizing his wrongs and sentences him to community service.

Afterward, the judge greets Kang-ja warmly and asks her to wait in the cafe nearby. Her spirits lift, but while she waits she overhears a disturbance nearby—the sobbing bully is right back to threatening his victim, having put on a convincing show.
Kang-ja heads back to the courthouse, where she sees a distraught mother clinging to the judge, demanding that he save her child: “You told me to fight till the end, and I’d win! But my child died! My child committed suicide while the bully lives well!”
Stone-faced, the judge stands there looking away while the mother wails that the law can’t be trusted. That rocks Kang-ja deeply.

Ah-ran walks to her night academy, and senses that she’s being followed. She starts running, and with her stalker in hot pursuit, Ah-ran comes to a dead end in an alley. In a panic she tires climbing over a wall, but as she falls, her pursuer catches up to her and corners her.
She trembles as a knife is held to her throat—it’s Bok-dong, reminding her that he’d warned her to stay out of Yi-kyung’s business. “If you want to live, shut your mouth, shut your ears, and erase everything in your head. I know nothing.”
She protests, “But Yi-kyung…” He says that everyone “who knows about that” could end up dead, and that the world is a lot meaner than she thinks. Ah-ran is nothing to “them” and they’ll think nothing of swatting her dead like a fly.

“If you don’t wanna die, live like you’re dead,” he growls. Terrified, Ah-ran agrees.
Bok-dong leaves her with a final warning that telling her mother could get Mom killed too, by somebody even stronger than him. Ah-ran collapses into a sobbing, scared heap.
Kang-ja trudges home feeling helpless, then hears something from around the corner. It’s Ah-ran, bloody and shaking from shock. Kang-ja rushes to her side in alarm, holding her as she starts to fade. “M-mom,” Ah-ran murmurs before her eyes roll back into her head.

Kang-ja takes her home, the warnings ringing in her ears about retaliation and blowback. A text from Yi-kyung arrives asking why Ah-ran isn’t in class, and suddenly Kang-ja is bursting out of the house and driving to the academy in a hurry.
Poor Teacher Noah, whose earnest literature lecture is slept through and thoroughly ignored. As he leaves his classroom, he spies Kang-ja in the halls, asking everyone if they know Yi-kyung, and recognizes her from the pojangmacha. Given what he thinks of her (she’s tough, she drinks, she swears), he assumes she’s going to terrorize Yi-kyung and threatens to report her to police—although when Kang-ja snatches his phone away, she finds that he just called the operator. Haha, he’s adorable.

When Noah tries to stop her, she grabs him by the throat (thereby reinforcing his misunderstanding), just as she hears Yi-kyung’s name down the hall. Thinking to protect the girl, Noah lies that it’s not her, but then Yi-kyung is snatched and yanked away by somebody.
Kang-ja runs after them, but loses them in a crowd of students outside. While trying to make her way through them, in the commotion a low voice (Bok-dong’s?) growls into her hear, “If you keep going, ajumma, your daughter might die.” And then he’s gone.

In a darkened room, a man kicks down a student and issues a warning to shut up and butt out. It’s Chairman Hong’s Chief Secretary Ahn, who proceeds to violently kick the bejeezus out of her… and then we see that his victim is Teenage Kang-ja, and we’re in her memory. He tells her to stay away from his younger sibling or have her face torn off.
Kang-ja considers everyone’s warnings and suggestions, understanding just how much the system won’t help her. She goes into Ah-ran’s room that night and finds her daughter huddled under her desk, mumbling, “Save me, Mom. Save me…” Oof. What could a mother say to that? Kang-ja holds her close and cries.

Kang-ja tends to Ah-ran’s injuries, then heads out to a nightclub, ready to do some kind of battle.
It looks like a club for the middle-aged gangster set, rowdy and roughneck. A bouncer grabs Kang-ja and tells her this is no place for kids, just as a ruckus breaks out. A disgruntled ajusshi is shoved over, and grabs the nearest person ready for a fight.
Kang-ja easily strikes him in the throat and steals his belt off his trousers to use as a whip (though she doesn’t have to when his pants just fall down). She handily dispatches all the men who come swinging at her, then tells one of the gangsters to pass the message to his boss: “Beolgupo Sashimi is here.”

 

Angry Mom:Episode 2

 Episode 2

Kang-ja mulls over recent events—her daughter’s victimization, the broken system that won’t help—before coming to a decision. She makes a call, asking her contact whether they know where to find “Princess Han” these days.
That’s what takes her to the nightclub, where Princess Han is waited on hand and (literally) foot by a team of minions. (I love the detail where the men wear tiny crowns in their hair, to match the boss’s big one.) Princess Han orders her gangster army to tighten entry checks, to prevent underage girls getting pushed into drinking with adults. (Her bloodthirsty threat makes the men simultaneously shield their crotches, ha.)
So Kang-ja fights her way through the gangsters, then orders Crowny to tell his boss that “Beolgupo Sashimi” has arrived. Princess Han, a tattooed ajumma with a saturi accent, recognizes the name and description (“She looks like a high schooler, all skinny with huge eyes”) and asks, “Could it be Bang-wool?” (A nickname referring to large eyes.)

Thus Princess Han comes out to meet her visitor, decked out in an elaborate royal getup with ornate gown and glittery scepter. Somehow the absurd costume looks menacing rather than ironic.
The two ladies come face to face, and then we flashback to their high school days, when Kang-ja was known as Beolgupo Sashimi (her mother ran a fish restaurant), better known as Bang-wool to her circle of friends. Ah, and the boss’s real name is actually Han Gong-joo (which means Princess Han—she’s since adopted the literal meaning as her persona).
Gong-joo narrates as we see Teenage Kang-ja sneaking out of school. Gong-joo tags along as Kang-ja finds a pervy teacher outside a restaurant, after he’s just bragged about all the girl students he leers at freely.

Kang-ja slams him against the wall he just peed on, warning him to stop groping his students. Gong-joo explains that she could never stand to see injustice, and always delivered payback in double measure.
With a father in prison and a mother who works every single day, fearless Kang-ja rules the school. She helps at her mother’s fish restaurant, and one night while prepping sashimi, Kang-ja casually mentions that the school wants Mom to come in. We can see that this matters to her, but she acts blasé and says that she knows Mom doesn’t care and wouldn’t come anyway.
This is the scene we saw previously, when Mom says her life could have been better and Kang-ja retorts, masking her hurt, “Did I ask to be born?”

Then Kang-ja hears that Gong-joo’s in trouble at a huge showdown between the various high school gangs, and hurries to help her friend. Gong-joo is a pretty mean fighter but ends up bested by a mean-looking guy, who’s about to wail on her.
Kang-ja’s appearance comes in the nick of time and she flies at the guy, thereby securing her reputation as a legendary badass. (She was in the air so long that in Gong-joo’s exaggerated memory, the bully has time to rest, while Kang-ja cracks open a book and takes a nap midair.)
So now we return to the nightclub. The former friends stare each other down, eyes narrowed to slits…

And then Gong-joo grabs Kang-ja in a bear hug, saying that she thought Kang-ja had died after she left without a word—she’d worried that that bastard Ahn Dong-chil (now the school foundation’s Chief Secretary Ahn) had gotten to her. Kang-ja explains that she needs a favor, and asks for Gong-joo’s help in going to school (which Gong-joo first misinterprets to mean prison, heh).
At home, Ah-ran wakes up in the middle of the night and trembles at the memory of the alpha bully, Bok-dong, threatening her at knifepoint. She huddles into herself as she recalls Bok-dong’s warning to forget “all about that business” if she doesn’t want to die.

Kang-ja explains the situation, and her plan to pose as a student. Gong-joo’s first reaction is to scoff, but she concedes that Kang-ja always did look young (and her minions pipe up that they thought she was a high schooler). Once she sees that she’s serious about there being no other way to protect her daughter, Gong-joo readily agrees to help.
There’s one complication: One person from school knows Kang-ja’s face. There’s the homeroom teacher she’d tried to appeal to, but Gong-joo says she’ll handle things.
Gong-joo sees her friend off and marvels at Kang-ja being a mother. Then she does the math, and the timing strikes her—this means Kang-ja got pregnant her second year of high school. A flashback fills in the blanks to the attack Kang-ja suffered at Ahn Dong-chil’s hands… and now we see that after he kicked her brutally, he started fumbling with her clothing. Ackkk.

Looks like Ahn Dong-chil never changed his ways, because in a dark room somewhere, he confronts a scared Yi-kyung, who doesn’t know who he is or why he had her brought here. He comments, “You’re pretty. But why don’t you obey?” He reminds her that she was told to transfer schools, which she ignored. He pulls out a switchblade and says that because of her loose lips, she’s made trouble for him and put her friend in danger.
He tells Yi-kyung to transfer, and lets her go. Worried about Ah-ran, she calls her right away. The phone rings unanswered while Ah-ran huddles to herself, and then Kang-ja returns home and checks on her. She promises, “Don’t worry. Mom’s here. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

In the morning, the judge Kang-ja had sought out gives her a call, wondering why she disappeared on him. He leaves a message urging her to let him help using the law (rather than brute force)—and then we see that he is Teacher Noah’s father. Well.
They have a warm father-son relationship, and Noah has taken all of his father’s teachings over the years to heart, reciting them back to him. But then a phone call casts a pall over the mood—Noah’s just been fired from his academy teaching job. Judge Dad says the principal is blind, but Noah sighs that seven principals can’t all be blind, and that he must not be a good teacher.

Then Dad says that he just wasn’t suited to teach at academies, and Noah points out that schools don’t like him either—he’s failed every interview. Dad counters that in a country of one-eyed people, the one with two eyes is the oddity, and all those one-eyes don’t know how to pick good people. Aw, this is a sweet pair.
We get a bit more insight on bully Bok-dong, who reports to Ahn Dong-chil and calls him hyungnim—he’s a gangster minion in training. Ahn gives him money for his recent terrorizing job and a letter from his brother in prison, whose release he has promised to look into.
Ah-ran isn’t better by morning, and her family is upset to find her on the bathroom floor, having hacked her hair off with a utility knife.

On a more lighthearted note, Gong-joo makes good on her word to take care of the homeroom teacher problem: She has her minions stuff the teacher into a refrigerated snack box and tells him to admit his wrongs. Is it her fault he’s committed so many that he honestly doesn’t know which one she means? She leaves him there and says he’ll have to stick it out until he can figure out what he’s done.
Gong-joo sends his resignation letter to the school via courier, leaving them in the lurch. Two of the administrators (who, just as a reminder, are closely affiliated with the shady school foundation’s shady chairman), Vice Principal Oh and Teacher Do Jung-woo, wonder what to do. Rather than bothering with a lengthyl hiring process, the VP fishes through a stack of resumes and picks one at random. Teacher Noah!

We still don’t know exactly what kind of nefarious deeds our education officials are up to, but everything we’ve seen points to some kind of corruption. Myeongseong Foundation’s Chairman Hong blatantly sucks up to the minister of education before asking his favor: He wants to make Teacher Do Jung-woo the foundation director. The minister rejects this idea.
Kang-ja takes Ah-ran to the hospital and trims her hair while Ah-ran just stares blankly. The doctor had explained that this kind of behavior can arise in witnesses of school violence and had advised keeping her for observation, and allowing Ah-ran some alone time without Mom around.

Kang-ja swallows back her tears and tells Ah-ran that she doesn’t want her to just be nice and still like a doll. She wants her to be like before, and get angry and yell. “The feeling of being wronged and enraged—pour it out to me,” she asks. “You can tell me anything. I can hear it all.”
But Ah-ran is frozen in fear of Bok-dong’s warning: Telling Mom would make her a target.
Kang-ja steps aside to listen to her voicemail from Judge Park, which only makes her look grimmer. The mood lightens when Gong-joo takes her to a salon for a makeover and briefs her on the cover story she’s put together. Oh, this is awesome—Gong-joo’s set up a whole elaborate operation here, so it’s not just a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants scheme.

Some pertinent details: Gong-joo is listed as Kang-ja’s mother, and their address is Gong-joo’s office. Kang-ja supposedly left school in her second year because of heart surgery, and they can say the illness aged her. Last but not least, her fake name is now Jo Bang-wool. Hee.
The makeover complete, Gong-joo asks what Kang-ja means to do when she identifies the culprit. Kang-ja replies that she’ll make them pay double, and kneel in apology before Ah-ran. Gong-joo wisely says that while dishing out a beating is easy, changing someone’s heart is not. Then she adds that although Kang-ja’s real mother never came to school for her, she’ll go right away: “So if you need a mother, call me anytime.” Aw, tears. These ladies are awesome.

And like a true mother, Gong-joo says that she’s holding back from asking all the questions she wants to, because she’ll wait until Kang-ja is ready to tell her. The sweet scene even has Gong-joo’s goons fighting back tears, though I can’t blame ’em because so am I.
Kang-ja comes home to (what else?) a grumpy mother-in-law and weak husband, who are surprised at her new look. She just says that she’ll be coming home late for a while, and her mother-in-law huffs that Kang-ja’s totally overreacting about Ah-ran being ill. She grumbles, “You’d think it were her kid, not her dead unni’s!”
But that’s just another cover story, as we find when Kang-ja flips through Ah-ran’s journal looking for clues. Pages and pages have been torn out, but one that’s left intact grabs Kang-ja’s attention.

Ah-ran has written that the world is full of liars, and the worst is her mother, because there is no dead sister. “If she couldn’t tell people openly I was her daughter, why did she have me?” Ah-ran writes. “Mom has turned me into a liar too. I hate her. Mom has no right to be a mother.” Hard words to hear.
Although Teacher Jung-woo has been denied the foundation director post, Chairman Hong is fond of his protégé and suggests an alternative: corporate planning chief, which is the foundation’s most important position. He calls it the “washing machine” that needs to run in order for the foundation and the school to work properly. Jung-woo thinks it’s too early to make such a bold move, but Chairman Hong says that the education minister is gearing up to make a bid for presidential election, and that means he’s wanting money. He needs Jung-woo to run the washing machine.
The chairman makes it sound like good news, but Jung-woo knows better and leaves the meeting sneering, “You’ll use me as your bulletproof vest?”

Sharp-eyed Secretary Ae-yeon watches the whole exchange, and afterward the chairman asks what she thinks of Jung-woo. Ae-yeon gives a noncommittal answer about trusting the chairman’s opinion, but he flies into a temper and starts to beat her around. He accuses her of trading looks with Jung-woo and having a secret relationship with him, and backstabbing him.
The chairman’s son, Sang-tae, overhears the sounds of violence and hardly reacts, though he does rev his motorcycle (parked in his bedroom) loudly enough to cover the noise.
Yi-kyung crumbles more when she receives a torrent of abuse via text messages from her classmates. She tries calling Ah-ran again, begging her friend to pick up, but only gets the dial tone. Ah-ran lies in bed crying, not hearing her phone.

Kang-ja thinks to herself that her daughter was right; she doesn’t have a right to be a mother, but she became one anyway. Perhaps her decision is wrong, and perhaps her daughter will hate her for it: “But even so, I only have one choice. As I did seventeen years ago, this time also, I’ll protect my daughter.”
Noah greets his father with good news that night: He got a job with Myeongseong High School. Judge Dad just says he’s not at all surprised, because his son is exactly the type of person who should be an educator. Curiously, Judge Park seems to know more about this than he lets on, though all he says is for Noah to continue walking steadfastly on the right path.

“Like you?” Noah asks proudly. “You can’t be like me,” Judge Park says. It’s a strange way to react, but Noah doesn’t pick up on it. Judge Park says that judges shouldn’t judge children lightly, whereas teachers have to kneel down to see them eye to eye. He encourages Noah to try to win as the two-eyed oddity in the land of one-eyes.
In the morning, Kang-ja hurries through her housewife tasks like making breakfast, then heads out to put her plan into motion. She puts up a “temporarily closed” sign on her restaurant, and dressed in a school uniform, she heads off to school.

Noah arrives on campus with bright eyes and full heart, making a painfully earnest introductory speech to the faculty, promising to do his best. He’s happy to hear he’ll be a homeroom teacher in addition to teaching literature.
Then Kang-ja arrives at the faculty room, and Noah ushers her to homeroom. He tries to place why she looks familiar and tries to chat with her, but she remains stony and silent.
Noah is introduced to their class first, and some of them already recognize him as the “sleeping pill” teacher from academy. The whole class cringes and gags when Noah starts to recite literature, though it doesn’t dampen his enthusiasm at all.

Next is Kang-ja’s turn, and the class bursts into laughter to hear her name, calling it dog-like. (Bang-wool is a little silly-sounding, but not completely ridiculous.) Kang-ja scans the room, already scoping out the scene here, and notes how Yi-kyung protests to have the new girl assigned to Ah-ran’s desk.
In a spare moment, Jung-woo asks Noah how he got this job, surprised that he didn’t have connections through the administration. Vice Principal Oh ruffled Jung-woo’s feathers by selecting the new teacher without his input, and now Jung-woo thinks Noah bought his way in. But Noah is so innocent he doesn’t get the subtext, and answers in his guileless way.

Kang-ja takes a seat and is shocked to see all the graffiti written on Ah-ran’s desk—hateful comments calling her all sorts of epithets. She wells up in rage, and that’s when the trio of mean girls descends on her desk, led by Jung-hee, who says Bang-wool was her dog’s name. Jung-hee laughs at her tears, thinking it’s from her teasing, but Kang-ja asks if Jung-woo wrote all the stuff on the desk.
Jung-hee readily admits to it but assures her that Bang-wool is safe, since she reminds her of her dog. Quick as a flash, Kang-ja grabs Jung-hee’s head and slams it into the desk. Damn, that was satisfying. I know, I know, violence doesn’t solve violence, but still: satisfying.
Kang-ja grabs Mean Girl 2 and snaps at 3 to lock the doors. Jung-hee whimpers in pain and switches to jondaemal, asking to be let go. Now she’s polite.

In the faculty room, Noah takes a look at Bang-wool’s file, trying to place how he knows her. Only now does he remember the foul-mouthed girl from the pojangmacha and the academy, and he makes the connection.
By the time he makes it to the classroom, a crowd has already gathered outside the windows, watching Kang-ja wield a mop inside. The three mean girls kneel penitently, as she snaps off the mop’s head and demands answers. Did Jung-hee do that to Ah-ran’s desk?
Jung-hee mumbles feebly, “It’s not like that… just once… as a joke…”

Kang-ja slams the stick into the desk and screams, “A joke?! The stone you throw as a joke could kill a frog!” She raises the staff to use it again, but this time a hand stops it.
It’s Bok-dong, and he tells the new girl to give it a rest: “If you keep it up, you could die at my hands.”
That rings a bell. It’s exactly what the mysterious voice said in her ear the night Ah-ran was cornered and collapsed.

So rather than being intimidated by Bok-dong’s languid menace, she whirls around, whipping the stick out of his grasp, and grabs him by the throat. She pulls her other fist back for a punch—but this time, it’s Noah who grabs that arm to stop her.
She glares at Noah for a second, then reverses his grab easily, yanking him near and grabbing him in a headlock. Jaws drop—even Bok-dong’s—and the class stares in amazement. Bully in one hand, wimp in the other. Badass in the middle.