We finally got what we wanted with the sixth episode of the series. We have to appreciate the pacing of Lies Hidden In My Garden, where the building frustration has led to a very meticulous payoff, and we expect nothing less from the finale about to air in a week. Until then, here is the recap of episode 6.
Spoilers Alert
Why Did Seung Jae Kill Lee Soo Min?
The answer to this question became very evident in the previous episode. Lee Soo Min had run away from her pimp, most probably after the staged photograph in the parking lot. Park Jae Ho had told her that she “should not have been born.” Such a malice filled statement is what prompted Soo Min to seek out Seung Jae in school. She seems to have lied to him about living in the same neighborhood and asked to go to his house to borrow a book. Seung Jae looks like he finds her, for lack of a better word, extrovertedness odd, but he still takes her home. That is where she reveals to Seung Jae that she is pregnant with Park Jae Ho’s child and that she will return once she is further along. That is when Seung Jae, who had been looking like a deer caught in headlights this whole time, pushed her off the stairs. It is an act of pure panic and shock, and Seung Jae immediately calls his father, who proceeds to hide the body in a room upstairs before burying it in the garden later on.
The body had been buried for close to ten days when Jae Ho finally dug it out to throw it in the mountains. Joo Ran had been right all along about the smell, the fingers, and everything in between. Her continuous self-doubt had never let her get the answers she wanted, but she was right. In the present day, Joo Ran wants to go to the police because she believes that Seung Jae would be negatively affected by his guilt. Jae Ho is against it, as he thinks that it would ruin his life. But when Joo Ran is adamant, Jae Ho uses the one word he knows will get her to stop: he calls her weak. Joo Ran carries some guilt regarding her sister’s death, and she has lived with it her entire life. We don’t know why she feels that way, but she has carried that burden for a long time, and her family thinks she is weak for not letting go of it sooner. That is what Jae Ho says: that Seung Jae is not “weak” enough to let guilt ruin his life. But if Joo Ran still goes ahead with the case, then that would mean the breakdown of the family. Not only would Seung Jae be sent to juvenile justice, but since Jae Ho had helped cover up his crime, they would probably lose the house, and the merger of their hospital would stop. In light of all this, Jae Ho and Joo Ran’s marriage would be over. Joo Ran is not ready to let go of Jae Ho, no matter what she thinks of his current actions, and she is forced to keep her silence.
Later, she and Sang Eun find themselves at the police station, where they have to tell them about what made them doubt Jae Ho and how they followed the trail to Tae Gyung. Both their stories check out, and it is concluded that Yoon Beom’s death was a suicide. There isn’t anything Sang Eun can do without implicating herself. When she meets Joo Ran outside the station, she tells her that she did not tell the police that Yoon Beom got Soo Min’s phone from Jae Ho. If she had revealed that, it would have opened a whole new can of worms. But that would not have benefited Sang Eun since that evidence could have easily been denied and her real purpose is to extract money from the doctor.
Meanwhile, Sang Eun still has to take care of her mother, and she has no money to do that. On the other hand, she gets the call to evict her apartment in a few days since the new tenant is going to move in. Sang Eun has nowhere to go and nothing to do, and she is pretty much bankrupt and destitute now that she cannot even get the insurance money from Yoon Beom’s death. She collects his stuff from the police station, but she only takes his phone with her, leaving the rest at a bus stop. That proves to be her golden ticket to better finances.
Why Did Jae Ho Kill Soo Min?
Joo Ran and Sang Eun were not the only people called to the police station for the investigation of Soo Min’s death. Colleagues of Jae Ho, Min Soo Hyung, and someone else are also called in, and their first instinct is to turn to Jae Ho for help, who says that he has nothing to do with anything. These men were somehow involved with Tae Gyung and his racket, and Soo Min was clearly one of their victims. It is just that Jae Ho somehow played it a lot more smartly, so his name is not being dragged through the mud.
Back at home, when Seung Jae doesn’t come back, Hae Soo gives Joo Ran the address of the flat that he had been looking to rent out. When Joo Ran reaches there, he reveals the whole truth to her. Soo Min had survived the fall from the stairs, and Jae Ho must have known about it since he is a doctor. But he had definitely decided that he wanted her to die, and that is why, as she was struggling to live, Jae Ho strangled her with his own hands before he buried her in the garden. Joo Ran is in tears because she had heard the noises from the room upstairs when Soo Min was banging on the door for help, but she had simply ignored it because she doubted herself, and Jae Ho, as usual, had taken advantage of that.
As for Sang Eun, when she goes through Yoon Beom’s phone, she finds a picture of Joo Ran, and she remembers that he had spent a lot of time in her house on the day he died. Curious, she goes through the rest of his pictures, and she finds one that is of the same view as a picture on Soo Min’s phone. Sang Eun is able to corroborate that since she has still not deleted Soo Min’s phone’s data from her laptop. She also goes through Yoon Beom’s notes, where he speculates whether Soo Min and Jae Ho were dating or were involved in some capacity. The notes say that Soo Min’s last known location is Cornelia, which is Joo Ran and Jae Ho’s house. At the end of episode 6 of Lies Hidden In My Garden, Sang Eun finally has proof that she needs to get the money from Park Jae Ho. She knows that he or someone in the family killed her, and she has the evidence to support it. We believe that she goes to them at their house. We were not sure whether it was her, since she has never let her hair down in the series so far, but we can assume that this means that this is a more relaxed Sang Eun, since she knows that things are going to be okay.
Final Thoughts
We want a conclusive answer on how Yoon Beom got his hands on Soo Min’s phone. Additionally, if he said that Cornelia was where she last was, it means that he knew that she was either dead or missing. He also had to know about Tae Gyung’s racket and the involvement of the doctors in it for him to be so confident about his scheme. With the final episodes about to air soon, we need to get these details now, and more than that, we want to see Joo Ran finally standing up to Jae Ho.
