Recap Korean Drama "Glitch (2022)" Episode 3

Episode 3 of Glitch starts off at a nursing home in 2014. Members of an organisation called the New Beginnings Peace Corps are singing songs with a group of old women. A small girl named Young-gi comes in to meet her grandmother. One of the organisation members then directs everyone to say a certain Cleansing Prayer. Later on, a nurse spots the girl crying in a room by herself. When she goes in, she finds that all the old women have hung themselves.

At present, Ji-hyo has been trying to find out the meaning of a symbol. A woman at an office of alien languages claims to know it but asks Ji-hyo to pay a membership fee to get more information. Ji-hyo leaves and crosses another name off a list.

She gets a call from the detective who says a girl is making a report against her at the police station. It turns out to be Bo-ra who is making a complaint against Ji-hyo for breaking the mirror of her scooter. Bo-ra swaggers out of the police station and tells Ji-hyo to follow her and make up for the damage. Ji-hyo ends up settling the issue by buying her a meal, although that meal consists of multiple plates of food and several drinks.

Ji-hyo narrates that Bo-ra is part of her dark past. She was known as the glue girl in school. After convincing Ji-hyo to try some, Ji-hyo had passed out and was found 72 hours later.

Bo-ra knows that Ji-hyo doesn’t believe the police. She says all the evidence they found can be fabricated with a few clicks of a keyboard. She takes her to the UFO forum’s café and shows Ji-hyo one of the videos from her YouTube channel. It details the story of a man, with the username Direct Kim, whose 16-year-old daughter disappeared. He was investigating a church and around that time, vanished himself. The screen then shows the same symbol Ji-hyo had found on the ground.

As Ji-hyo’s e-cigarette has previously broken down, Detective Kim gets a new one for Ji-hyo. He lands up at her house where Ji-hyo’s stepmother finds him at the door and invites him in. While talking with her parents, he inadvertently reveals that Ji-hyo is looking to find a missing Si-guk.

As Ji-hyo learns more about Direct Kim’s case, she gets more convinced that the case is connected with Si-guk’s disappearance. As the other three boys — nicknamed Cho Phillip, Captain Price, and Dong-hyuk respectively — argue about EMPs and the crop circle symbol, Ji-hyo has an outburst about how all she wants is to find her boyfriend. Bo-ra agrees to help if` Ji-hyo signs a contract that allows her to use the investigation as content for her streaming channel. For the sake of Si-guk, she ends up agreeing.

Later, Ji-hyo goes to a restaurant to meet her father for their usual father-daughter dinner but is surprised to find her boss, a friend of her father’s, over there as well. Her father invited him to try and smooth things over between them. On the way back, Ji-hyo tells her father to not blindside her like that again and to stop interfering in her career. He says he is well aware of Ji-hyo going to alien meetings and having broken up with Si-guk. They argue until her father mentions how Si-guk suddenly moved out of his apartment. At this, Ji-hyo is struck with an idea.

Bo-ra is streaming in Captain Price’s café. The latter tells her she needs to find a place of her own. Bo-ra mentions she was kicked out of her home. She gets a call from Ji-hyo who says that if Si-guk was kidnapped, the person who moved out all his stuff from his apartment is their next best lead.

Under the guise of two friends looking for an apartment, Bo-ra and Ji-hyo get the real estate agent to show them Si-guk’s apartment. Ji-hyo asks for information on the landlords and the moving company. After the ‘visit’ ends, the two girls sneak back into the apartment as Bo-ra saw the entry code.

She takes out a bunch of equipment and starts scanning the apartment. On Ji-hyo’s questioning, Bo-ra says she is looking for narrowband microwaves, similar to the ones on Si-guk’s watch. The SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) standard artificial electromagnetic bandwidth. She tells Ji-hyo she should know all this since she was the one who invented the device. Everything Bo-ra is now doing, she learnt from Ji-hyo in school. Ji-hyo seems shaken at the realisation. Bo-ra tells her to repeat the words “My boyfriend was abducted by aliens”. Ji-hyo is unable to do so.

Right then, they hear noises of the real estate agent coming back with some other people. The two girls hide upstairs. Turns out, the new group of people aren’t looking for a new place to rent. Instead, they gather around in a circle, project starry lights around the room, and put on VR headsets. They then start chanting a Cleansing Prayer, similar to the one heard in the very first scene, as Ji-hyo and Bo-ra look on in shock.

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The Episode Review

Finally, momentum! Episode 3 of Glitch not only pulls us deeper into the mystery of these missing people but also brings forth some hair-raising deaths and a spooky cult-like group of people. Coupled with Bo-ra’s alien-detecting gear and antics, it feels like we’re finally on the main track of the story.

As expected, Ji-hyo and Bo-ra make a fascinating pair who are lovely to watch. Bo-ra’s quirks and eccentricity are a delight against Ji-hyo’s matter-of-fact behaviour. Although, it was nice to see Ji-hyo have a bit of an outburst.

There’s definitely something important in Ji-hyo’s past with Bo-ra, something that explains her lack of memory and her change in attitude towards aliens. Not knowing it is an itch that keeps you going forward and hopefully, the following episodes offer an insightful look into Ji-hyo and her life. Overall, an exciting episode that made for a refreshing change!