Recap Korean Drama "Shadow Detective (2022)" Episode 5

Will his team including the new and much younger leader than him, Kuk Jin-han (Jin Goo), Lee Sung-a (Kyung Soo-jin), and Song Kyung-chan (Lee Hak-joo) find the actual culprit before Taek-rok is wrongfully implicated for the murder?

-Shadow Detective Episode 5 Contains Spoilers-

Taking a step further into the story, the conspicuous ‘Friend’ targets Jin-han and pulls him into an accident, which severely damages the evidence in his car. Taek-rok deems it his priority to save Jin-han’s life rather than the evidence and is able to get him out just in time. The veteran requests him to stop meddling with the case but now that he’s already exposed, he doesn’t want to sit back quietly.

Chief Gwang-su meets up with his confidantes as they all indulge in talks regarding redevelopment. While they acknowledge Director An’s absence, they also view it as an opportunity with him having pulled out of his candidacy for the elections. Chief Gwang-su asks them all if they had any direct connections with Section Chief Hyun-seok as Director An did.

The police prepare for Section Chief Hyun-seok’s burial. Taek-rok’s regret takes shape in hallucinations as he starts seeing Hyun-seok, the young girl he couldn’t save, and his own daughter’s young persona. Meanwhile, Seong-a and Gyeong-chan look into Jin-han’s accident. They don’t find any CCTVs on the spot. After recovering the back box footage, they find that Jin-han’s car had been hacked.

Taek-rok once again urges Jin-han to drop the case but the latter unpacks this as a mere game for the ‘Friend’ who won’t stop at ruining Taek-rok’s life. He not only killed Hyun-seok, but is also blackmailing the veteran and even almost killed Jin-han too. This is why Jin-han plans to “go all the way” in stopping the man whether Taek-rok likes it or not.

Moving out of Neoul Gosiwon, Taek-rok moves in with Jin-han as the two decide to take their investigation to the next level while being on the same plane. They start narrowing down the possible suspects in Hyun-seok’s murder while considering Chief Gwang-su as yet another victim of the ‘Friend’.

Kyung-chan keeps his suspicions up about Taek-rok but continues alongside Seong-a as he trusts her. The two visit Jin-han’s residence where Sung-a confronts Taek-rok for keeping everything hush. Jin-han finally comes clean about Taek-rok being blackmailed and she’s more furious than ever to have been excluded from it all despite Jin-han being roped into the mess.

Taek-rok is against her being exposed but she claims to work on the corrupt ties of the Chief together. They bring up all of his previous cases to confirm if the ‘Friend’ is after the Chief. Yang Ki-tae meets up with Taek-rok and spills some information about Mr. Cheon, which leads the detective to come up with his own hypothesis of the man’s relations with both the Chief and the Section Chief. Simultaneously, the Chief is troubled by bloody visions of his own.

Detective Bae is on about his own investigation and approaches the same cafe he saw Hyun-seok visiting with someone in previous footage. The ‘Friend’ calls again but this time Taek-rok isn’t alone, he’s accompanied by Jin-han, Sung-a, and Kyung-chan. He assigns the detective another case related to a supposed suicide which was actually murder. It matches the list of cases narrowed down by the team so Taek-rok declines the offer, saying that he knows he’s after the Chief. The ‘Friend’ doesn’t dawdle this time and admits that he wants him to dig into the Chief’s corrupt doings.

The ‘Friend’ has his own ways of taunting the detective and pulls up the visuals of his daughter in a video call once Taek-rok rejects working with him anymore. All four detectives rush to Ji-woo’s home. Taek-rok finds her safe and sound but obviously, neither of them is mentally or emotionally recovered from the past as it is finally revealed what happened during Ji-woo’s childhood.

She was abducted by one of the convicts Taek-rok was after, and as a means of exacting revenge from the detective, he’d planned to kill his daughter. Although Taek-rok shot him before he could harm his daughter, the violent image of the incident and the blood being spattered on Ji-woo’s face never quite stopped haunting either of the two.

Shadow Detective Episode 5 Ending

Mr. Cheon’s history is expanded upon and how he became a loan shark and got in contact with Section Chief Hyun-seok is also discussed. Taek-rok nails him down as the possible prime suspect of being the ‘Friend’. The other three detectives gather all black box and CCTV footage, meanwhile Sung-a gets a lead, but rather reaching a dead-end, as one of Mr. Cheon’s old contacts named Antenna claims that he’s dead. Upon reaching out to Ki-tae, Taek-rok asks who’s currently in charge of Mr. Cheon’s business, and, turns out, it’s been Ma Sang-gu all this time.

While Sung-a is at Kyung-chan’s place, going over all the footage together, a disturbing revelation awaits her. Kyung-chan’s computer storage is full of recordings. He’s been spying on Taek-rok since the beginning.

Taek-rok has a job to do on his own. He takes a step closer to Sang-gu at an arcade, as revealed by Ki-tae as his new hiding ground. However, Sang-gu catches a glimpse of him in the CCTV recording. At the same time, back at Kyung-chan’s home, Sung-a tells him to cuff himself while asking if he’s the blackmailer.

Shadow Detective Episode 5 Review

My favorite moments in the episode have to be the ones shared between Taek-rok and Jin-han. As perceived early on, whenever the two are together, they bring in contrasting interpretations, almost as if you flip Jin-han’s thought process, you’d be granted Taek-rok’s.

In spite of these clashing ideas, their team is the best out there because it’s these same differing conceptions of the two that expand their purview of the case and possibilities. Both actors know how to bounce off each other’s opposing energies and improve our viewing experience of the investigation so mapped out on the screen.

Also, if Kyun-chan truly is the ‘Friend’ (even though it doesn’t look like it), his motives are yet to be uncovered. As the series nears its finale, it seems that a lot of ground hasn’t been covered yet and we’ve barely scratched the surface as far as his character is concerned. We know that he had ‘his own reasons” to work under Taek-rok but other than that we don’t know anything at all.

The tension between the two characters has seemingly been rising since the first episode so my only hope at this point is that the finale’s closure is cathartic and giving enough so that the series which has been gritty so far, doesn’t fall off the cliff towards the end with a forced storyline curving its arc.