Vigilante (2023) Episode 8

Choi Mi-ryeo s Kidnapped

The Vigilante season finale begins with Choi Mi-ryeo having gone missing as Mr Bang kidnapped her at the end of Episode 7, even though his face isn’t unveiled till the final episode’s opening sequence. He tortures Mi-ryeo in excruciatingly painful ways to drive her to the edge in answering who the Vigilante is, but he has no clue that she still doesn’t know his real identity yet either. As soon as Kang-ok is informed of her extended absence, he checks out her apartment, which is left behind in a dishevelled condition. He soon informs Ji-yong of the same too, and the two get on to bringing her back to safety.

Ji-yong’s first response is to again attack Sam-doo’s men and push him to strike a deal with him so that he would bring her to the World Cup Stadium Concert Hall. Later, it’s revealed that Ji-yong knew it all along that she hadn’t been kidnapped by Sam-doo, rather Mr Bang was responsible for this development. He knowingly approaches Sam-doo by bribing him with an exchange deal for the crypto wallet.

Sam-doo then moves on to make an offer to Mr Bang and offers him thrice the amount handed by the Vole. Bang instantly catches scent that the Vigilante would’ve pushed him to make to this call. Sam-doo ups the price, and even offers Bang the chance to kill the Vigilante when they meet at the Stadium. Meanwhile, Sam-doo has his own plans to eliminate every one involved in this exchange to protect his skin.

At the same time, Seon-wook catches Ji-yong with Kang-ok and confronts him for having skipped his classes. He advises him to do better if he wanted to become an officer, and though Ji-yong is left feeling conflicted, there’s not much he can say to him.

At the World Cup Stadium

Ji-yong had carefully picked the venue and the time, as it was just in time for the Seoul EDM Festival, where every attendee turned up dressed as the Vigilante in all-black attires and hoodies. Ji-yong and Kang-ok also arrive in time, but unbeknownst to Ji-yong, Seon-wook also tails him.

All parties gather at the same place, and Kang-ok distracts Sam-doo’s army of men in the beginning while Ji-yong gets Mi-ryeo to safety and then enlists her help to livestream the whole thing in order to attract Jo Heon and Eom Jae-hyub’s attention. It all works out in his favour for the first part, and just as he’d expected, seeing the broadcast, Heon quickly starts driving in that direction in his police vest while Kang-ok and Ji-yong singlehandedly deal with Sam-doo’s men.

In the meantime, Eom Jae-hyub is off having dinner and drinks with the political leader as they’re interrupted by this news too, and the politician isn’t too happy about Choi Mi-ryeo still being alive.

Just as things are getting worse for Ji-yong back there, Jo Heon reaches there and tries to get things under control, but in the crossfire, Sam-doo finally gets his hands on Ji-yong, and just as he’s about to stab him, Seon-wook comes to the rescue, but is stabbed in the process. Asking Mi-ryo to get him medical aid, Ji-yong takes off to deal with Bang and Sam-doo and Jo Heon also catches up with them eventually.

A bloody mess unfolds, and Eom Jae-hyub joins in and shoots down Sam-doo. He then turns on the water supply which floods these secluded tunnels, but Jo Heon helps Ji-yong get out once Jae-hyub starts shooting in the water. He comes up to tackle the Vole down while Heon catches up to stop Ji-yong from killing him. Jae-hyub pressures Heon to kill the Vigilante, but he instead decides to let the law decide the Vole’s sentence while Mi-ryeo would support the case by reporting of hid misdoings to the world.

However, things are far from over as Bang comes back up too and attacks Ji-yong while Jae-hyub also gets the chance to recover his gun. Once Jae-hyub fires at Ji-yong, Heon loses all calm and starts battering his face. At the same time, as Bang recovers from his fall, he comes up to sneak attack Heon, but Ji-yong catches him in time and presses his hands down to stab him with his own dagger. Even if reluctant at first, and given the most unlikely conditions, Heon and Ji-yong end up joining forces for the final battle after all, and return in a bloody mess, but victorious or so it seems nevertheless.

Vigilante Episode 8 Ending

After everything is behind them, Mi-ryeo is taken in for interrogation regarding that day and she confesses that the Vigilante was a National Police University student, but instead of giving away Ji-yong’s name, she hands in Seon-wook’s name, who also ended up dead after it all. The politician watches over the interrogation and releases her eventually when nothing consequential turns up in his favour to twist further.

However, he still had plans of turning around how the police had been painted in a bad light due to her report. Additionally, it turns out that Kang-ok also had a bigger fish to catch on his side as he wanted to incriminate his company’s chairman using the evidence against Sam-doo. Since he wasn’t able recover enough evidence against him, he already caught an idea about how the chairman would be able to slip out of harm’s way again.

Mi-ryeo comes clean to Heon about why she supported the Vigilante. She tells him that her father was a civil servant who’d been framed for doing the dirty work and he killed himself during the investigation. None of the media sources opted to back his case at the time, which is why seeing the Vigilante now motivated her to work for his cause. And now, she and Heon, both, shared that link in common so they couldn’t just take off.

Ji-yong, on the other hand seems to have had enough after his friend’s tragic death. To add salt to his wounds, the politician behind it all pushes for a new report stating that Eom Jae-hyub, though dead, was never in the wrong, and is even posthumously promoted as Commissioner General. Ji-yong is even further disheartened of this new development as it meant that all his sacrifices and his friend’s death had all been in vain.

As one of the significant moments of the finale, the National Police University’s students are appointed as officers. Seon-wook and Ji-yong’s friend is announced the valedictorian as he leads the swearing-in oath. Meanwhile, as the other students raise their hands for the oath, Ji-yong doesn’t and the Professor Jun-yeop keeps an eye on him from the stage, hinting at him knowing more than he had been letting on or possibly pointing at his regrets following Seon-wook’s death.

Vigilante Episode 8 Review

Nam Joo-hyuk’s latest acting enterprise brought about a shocking and tasteful transformation for his onscreen roster of characters so far. Shifting his focus from the usual rom-com side of thing, he’s more than welcomingly honoure his role as the Vigilante. While the show cinematically proves to be a standout owing to the casting choices, it still had suffered from quite a few setbacks too.

Watching this series instantly took me back to my memories of the Disney+ Kdrama that came before this, Moving. What made it an essentially great series wasn’t the fact that it was centred around super-powered characters, rather it was the way each of these characters’ personal lives were intermingled with the “super” part of it and each and every character’s presence was made felt by making their stories into personally narrated tales. Vigilante, on the other hand, fails to rope in this profound aspect of the personal lives led by its few main characters.

Ji-yong’s sad history is relayed to us in a brief flashback, but it never comes back to haunt him or show the major impact it had on his heart, other than his obvious transformation into the Vigilante. The other three main characters’ back stories are not even handed out to us, except for Choi Mi-ryeo finally narrating her tragic motivations for backing the Vigilante’s case in the last episode, but, that too, again briefly.

Jo Heon and Lee Joon-hyuk’s unusual dispositions or their histories are never explained to us, which again snatches away the chance for us to connect with these characters. The Vigilante finale only begins to scratch the surface of their layered personalities, and yes, of course, the short course of the 8-episode-run prohibits this growth and depth from showing onscreen any further. But even otherwise, the storytelling tactics employed by the show-runners of the Kdrama again go on to illustrate that the intention was always to flesh out the hardened and bloody action sequences and no other connections to emotional baggage beyond that, much like how the recent premiere of Believer 2 on Netflix was a letdown.

A lot of unsaid and unspoken dynamics in the drama are left unexplored, and if some of them were eventually invested into, they only turned out to be token sacrificial lambs in the end, as seen in Seon-wook’s case. Not much time is spent in fleshing out his friendship with Ji-yong, but suddenly we’re expected to be emotionally burnt out when the show ends with his anticlimactic death, which also becomes a ploy to cover up Ji-yong’s identity in some ways.

Still, I do hope for this series to return for another season for the sake of seeing this bunch of actors together again, and with Season 1 ending like this, there is a lot of unexplored potential that can be tapped into the next time around, especially with Ji-yong having put together a support system of sorts (including Heon, Mi-ryeo and Kang-ok). You can’t not wonder about why Jo Heon feels so naturally inclined towards Ji-yong. What’s the story here? Does he see someone else reflected in Ji-yong’s actions and personality? One can only hope for this dynamic to be resolved in a potential Season 2.