And I STILL don’t know who the stranger is supposed to be, nor what the Secret Forest is.

However, I’m not sure I ever cried so hard for a bad guy before. That Yoo Jae Myung guy was freaking amazing in his final moments.  The way he delivered this line right here, especially, broke my heart:

I thought the way he decided to sacrifice himself to bring an end to the corruption destroying the country was noble and heroic and showed an epic level of foresight and wisdom.  It was distressing to me that our hero still called him a monster and that he was so rigid and small-minded that he made the perfect the enemy of the good.

It’s a horrible call to make when you have to kill some people to achieve a greater good. But according to our hero, if you can’t spare one life, might as well let the other millions die too because all lives are equal. Like what kind of sense does that make.  If an unresponsive plane carrying 200 passengers and a nuclear bomb were hurtling towards a city of 10 million people, would you shoot it out of the air over water far from its target, or refuse to “murder” the 200 innocent lives aboard and let the bomb take out the whole metropolitan area instead? Obviously you need to weigh the bigger picture.  But I guess they wanted to leave the audience with the idea that the end does not justify the means regardless of how pure your motives.

Now that said, I don’t understand at all why WHY–like in every other Kdrama known to man–do people taking “revenge” over the deaths of their family members always start out by killing the low-level messengers and thugs, but lose all instinct to kill when facing the actual culprit, the rich, powerful guy who caused everything in the first place.  No, at that time, I guess a bullet is too good for him, he needs to face the LAW.  As if the “law’ has ever successfully prosecuted the rich and powerful. If anything it should be the other way around.  Bullet in the head for the top guy and let all his shifty minions go to prison.

So frustrating.  Sigh.

And then the bad guy said he started down the slippery slope by doing a favor for someone who didn’t deserve it… and in the end, our hero did a “favor” for his nemesis and allowed him back as a prosecutor where he started doing the same shit all over again, restarting the cycle of corruption. He should have arrested his punk ass, he was guilty of so many crimes.  Apply the law evenly, why does this fool get a pass???

More frustrating. Sigh.

Anyway, it took me a long time to finish this drama but it was entertaining while it lasted.