[KD] City Hunter: Episode 1

We open in October 9, 1983, in Burma, at the Martyr’s Mausoleum in
Yangon (Rangoon). The drama incorporates the real 1983 visit of South
Korean President Chun Doo-hwan and his cabinet, who arrive just as a
bomb goes off, killing sixteen people and completely destroying the
venue.
Two agents survive the blast, LEE JIN-PYO (left) and PARK MU-YEOL,
best friends and spies in an anti-North Korean unit. In horror, they
take in the carnage of their compatriots in the wake of the blast.

Back home, a secret council of five high-ranking government officials
receive reports that point to North Korean involvement, and try to
decide what to do. The most decisive among them is CHOI EUNG-CHAN (below
right, the future president), who leads the group in deciding that this
is an act of war and a counterattack is in order.
However, for political reasons that involve South Korean relations
with foreign nations, their plans to assassinate North Korean officials
in Pyongyang must remain between the five of them. Not even the
president will be made aware of this black ops mission.

Choi Eung-chan turns to two of his remaining special agents, Jin-pyo and Mu-yeol, and puts them in charge of this secret task.
Bachelor Jin-pyo tells his friend that he’ll do the mission without
him, because Mu-yeol has returned to Seoul a new father: His wife
Kyung-hee has just given birth to their son, and they’re thrilled.
However, Mu-yeol disregards that, unwilling to leave his friend to this
dangerous mission alone, and tells his wife that he’ll return after this
job is finished.

The two agents round up a team of men and begin tactical planning on
the Pyongyang raid. Choi Eung-chan drops by toward the end of the
training period to express his pride in their exemplary work, and
promises to put his own life on the line to ensure their safe return:
“This is my promise as man to man, as your countryman, as your sunbae.”
The black ops team successfully infiltrates Pyongyang dressed as
North Korean soldiers and assassinates their targets efficiently.
Mission complete, they make their way offshore to await pickup, which
arrives in the form of a submarine.

And yet, at the same time in Seoul, the council of five is informed
that the president has taken the official stance that South Korea will
not retaliate against the Burma attack. That means they must disavow
knowledge of any state-sponsored act of war, but worse yet, in order to
tie up loose ends, they must forsake their own. Choi Eung-chan is
horrified, because he has sent those men out on an honorable mission and
strongly opposes the idea of turning their backs on them. He accuses
his colleagues of only caring to protect their own positions of power.
However, it’s not like he has an alternative. To preserve national
security and keep from setting off a political powder keg, he has to
concede, agreeing to sacrifice those twenty men for the bigger picture.

So when the first of the team climbs up to the submarine deck, hidden
snipers open fire. Mu-yeol and Jin-pyo’s teammates are sitting ducks
with nowhere to hide, and wiping out the team is a matter of almost
literally shooting fish in a barrel.
The sniper turns his rifle to each man in turn, and Mu-yeol sees that
he and Jin-pyo are in his sights. He dives to cover his friend with his
own body, and shoves Jin-pyo underwater while he’s shot through the
back. He finally lets Jin-pyo surface after the sniper is satisfied that
there’s no more sign of life in the water and re-enters the sub, which
then dives away.
Dying, Mu-yeol tells Jin-pyo to survive and return home to take care
of his family. With one last breath — “I loved you, my friend” — he
dies.

Jin-pyo cries in grief, and sends his friend into the depths of the
water with one heartbreaking salute. He washes ashore, the sole survivor
— and now sole witness to the council’s actions.
Choi Eung-chan is the only council member who’s greatly conflicted
about this turn of events, and he’s baleful upon receipt of the news
that all twenty agents were killed. Perhaps for that reason — because he
knew better, but didn’t stand his ground — he’s the one whose betrayal
stings the most. He’d vowed so sincerely to bring them back alive,
promising on his honor as a man and fellow patriot.

Jin-pyo manages to sneak into his office and corners him with a
knife, reminding him of that promise. Choi Eung-chan knows he deserves
this reaction, and tells Jin-pyo regretfully to go ahead and kill him.
But he’s spared by a knock at the door, and that gives Jin-pyo the
chance to slip out the window.
He leaves a note stabbed into Choi’s desk with his knife, which
reads: “I vow to repay the cost of the twenty lives betrayed by their
own country.”

Next, Jin-pyo seeks out Mu-yeol’s widow Kyung-hee — and when she
steps aside, he steals her son. All he leaves her is a note that reads:
“Mu-yeol is dead. I’m taking the baby to raise. This child must go away
in order for you to be happy. Start anew. You must become happy.”
Kyung-hee sobs and runs out into the neighborhood, but she’s unable
to find him or her baby. Jin-pyo flees the country on a boat, where a
kindly woman comforts the crying baby while he swears to come back with
“the cruelest revenge in the world,” which will become his reason for
living.

Ten years later, we find Jin-pyo living in the Golden Triangle in
Southeast Asia, which is prime drug-producing territory. Jin-pyo has
become a hardened drug boss, ruler of this particular domain with a
militia of men under his authority. He’s harsh and unforgiving, and
doles out punishment — like a bullet through the heart for stealing
drugs — without batting an eye.
He’s also a demanding father to young YOON-SUNG, making sure the boy
is taught to shoot and fight. He’s unrelenting in his demands for
perfection, drilling it into the boy’s head that the moment he misses a
shot through a vital organ, he’s dead.

Yoon-sung bears this grueling regiment without complaint, but the one
question that continually presses on his mind is his missing mother. He
finds an old photo in Jin-pyo’s desk — one of Jin-pyo with his
biological parents — and asks his father if this is his mother, sensing
that she is.
Jin-pyo refuses to indulge the boy’s pleas for information, telling
him only that his mother is dead. He rips up the photograph pointedly,
and Yoon-sung runs out heartbroken.

He looks longingly at a village woman who watches over her son, who
sleeps in her lap (the same woman who’d comforted him as an infant on
the boat ride over). When she beckons him over, he runs over eagerly and
joins her, head resting in her lap.
Despite his upbringing, Yoon-sung grows up to be a playful,
mischievous, impetuous youth, as we see when we next meet up with him
seven years later.

As a rash teenager, he’s slipped away from the compound — upsetting
his father, who worries about land mines — to cruise the village with
his buddies. It’s here that he overhears a voice speaking Korean, and
looks on curiously at the scene unfolding in a nearby gambling den,
where a local gang boss is threatening to kill the Korean gambler.
He sizes up what’s about to happen and interrupts the impending
amputation (the Korean man’s hand) by hurling his apple through the
window with sniper precision, knocking down one of the minions. The men
look out the window to see Yoon-sung boldly smiling up at them, who then
hurls another apple, this time into the boss’s face.

Like I said, he’s impetuous, full of that youthful confidence in his
own invincibility. He’s motivated partially by sympathy for a soul in
trouble, and partially at his curiosity over the Korean — he speaks the
language with his father, but he marvels, “You’re the first Korean I’ve
ever met.”
He grabs the man and runs through the village streets, managing to
escape capture by hijacking a boat. He takes the man — BAE SHIK-JOONG —
home with him, which earns him a slap from Dad, who’d warned him never
to bring outsiders in. Yoon-sung protests that the guy was about to be
killed, and Jin-pyo relents a little, asking if there’s anything
Shik-joong’s good at. Thankfully, the man can sputter a response:
“Cooking!”

Proving his facility with Korean cooking earns Shik-joong the right
to stay, which comes with Jin-pyo’s warning that “If you try to run
away, you die.”
Yoon-sung looks curiously at the photo of a pretty girl Shik-joong
carries with him, KIM NANA, who he initially presumes is the man’s
daughter. But they share different surnames, meaning that for now, her
relation to him remains unclear.

Yoon-sung acts as guide to Shik-joong: He acquaints him with things
like Jin-pyo’s fearsome sleeping habits (always sitting up, with a gun
at the ready) and shows him his now-improved skills at target practice.
That’s interrupted by the arrival of his father’s men, who drag along
that village woman with them — the woman who’s become like Yoon-sung’s
surrogate mother — and tie her to the target for her execution. Her
crime: Her husband ran off with some drugs.
Worse yet, Jin-pyo orders Yoon-sung to be the one to shoot her,
insisting that his rules be followed to the letter. When Yoon-sung
balks, Jin-pyo takes out his gun, ready to do it himself.

Yoon-sung knows he’ll have to bargain his way through this, so he
hurriedly proposes a deal — that he’ll do the shooting. But if he
manages to accurately shoot all the targets, Dad will relent and try
exercising forgiveness, just this once.
Dad agrees, and Yoon-sung prepares himself mentally, then fires. He
shoots a few hanging fruit and the wooden target, then throws the gun
away angrily, having proven his point.

Lying in his bed, he looks over at the photo of Nana, which he’s
apparently taken to talking to. He asks incredulously how he could be
expected to shoot somebody he cares about, and muses, “You’re probably
off in that place called Seoul, living happily, aren’t you?”
At the same time, a team of gangsters infiltrates the compound,
taking out a few guards and making their way to the inner rooms, where
the leader spies Yoon-sung lying in bed. This is the gangster he’d saved
Shik-joong from, and they’re here for some payback.
Thanks to Yoon-sung’s finely honed battle skills, however, he hears
the telltale click of a gun and rolls out of bed smoothly, ducking in
time to get Shik-joong under cover before the attackers open fire.

Jin-pyo hears the commotion from a distance — he and his armed men
are outside — and races for the house, where the gangsters find
Yoon-sung crumpled on the floor. Playing dead.
Yoon-sung waits for his moment, then leaps up and fights back, nimbly evading their attacks and finding safety behind a pillar.
But it’s that woman, his surrogate mother, who fears for his safety
and runs toward him to shout a warning. That gets her shot, and his
shock is so tremendous that Yoon-sung doesn’t even care about being
exposed as he rushes to her crumpled body, sobbing at her to wake up.

He’s about to get shot through the back, not that he cares, when his
father arrives and shoots his would-be attackers. Yoon-sung’s grief
quickly turns to fury, and he grabs a gun and leaps outside to get his
revenge, vowing to kill them all.
He chases the three remaining gangsters through the fields, trying to
fire and run at the same time. But when a telltale click goes off under
his foot, he immediately stills, recognizing the ominous sound of a
land mine being activated by his weight.

Yoon-sung freezes, all the while keeping his targets in his sights,
ready to shoot… if only he weren’t out of ammo. His attackers realize
their good fortune and raise their guns to shoot him — only to be picked
off by Jin-pyo, who’s arrived to save his son.
Jin-pyo quickly gets to work on the land mine under Yoon-sung’s foot, not betraying any fear while Yoon-sung sweats bullets.

Dad gives him a reassuring look — right before he launches himself at
him and knocks him out of the way as the land mine explodes.
The blast takes off one of Jin-pyo’s legs, and Yoon-sung carries him
home on his back, crying frantically all the while, begging the doctor
to help him. Jin-pyo bears the pain stoically and tells Yoon-sung to
listen up: If he’s about to die, he has something more important to
address, and starts to explain the story of Yoon-sung’s true father.

Yoon-sung listens in shock as Jin-pyo tells him of the man who’d
saved his life with his own, who’d been betrayed by his country, whom
he’d vowed to avenge, who’d been Yoon-sung’s father. He says in a
half-request, half-command: “Put a bullet through the heart of your
father’s and my enemy.”
He fades into unconsciousness but survives, and throughout his
pain-fueled recovery, Jin-pyo is assailed with flashbacks of his life,
begging his friend not to die while also apologizing to his wife.

Yoon-sung finally understands why Jin-pyo had raised him the way he
had, and why he’d trained him so fiercely. He contemplates the old photo
of his mother that he’d taped back up at some point, now understanding
that the other man is his father.
And then he goes to Jin-pyo for more information before committing to
this plan of vengeance, and is told that there are five men who must be
killed.

Yoon-sung: “And if I kill those five men, will you and I be able to live well again, in a place where nobody knows us?”
(Jin-pyo nods.)
Yoon-sung: “I’ll ask one last thing. Is my mother… s-still alive?”
Jin-pyo: “She’s alive.”

That seals the deal. Grimly, he comes out of that meeting and tells Shik-joong: “I’m going to change now. That’s my fate.”
And the next time we see him, it’s seven years later (making him 24, for those of us who are counting).

He arrives at the airport in Seoul, having come from the States, no
longer the playful, laughing youngster but now a serious, determined man
on a mission. The first thing he does is take a call from Jin-pyo
confirming his arrival and naming his first target from the council of
five: Lee Kyung-wan. One last reminder: “Forget your life in the States,
but never forget your father’s death.”
Yoon-sung asks the taxi to pull over for a moment, and gets out of
the car to look around a plaza in the midst of the city, which is marked
by the famed statue of Admiral Yi Soon-shin.

He takes in the sights of ordinary life, closing his eyes
contemplatively as Jin-pyo’s words echo in his ears: “Don’t love
anybody. If your identity is uncovered, you and those around you will be
stained blood-red.”
And then, a face comes into view — ours, not his — smiling and
handing out cards to passersby, oblivious to Yoon-sung standing so close
by, unaware of her presence.