Longing For You looks like a worthy successor to Lies Hidden In My Garden, which had us constantly guessing as to what would happen next. This series has a very different tone from the latter drama, but it promises to be equally interesting without the awkward screenplay, and this is the recap of its first episode.
Spoilers Alert
The Suspects In The Murders
We see a total of three murders in the first episode of Longing For You, and two of them make us suspect a particular person. Regarding the first murder, the suspicion is on Bae Min Gyu, the victim’s husband, who was known to be abusive and was also having an affair with an actress, Lee Eun Byul. However, the theory is that he killed his wife when he found that she was having an affair of her own. But the police are unable to arrest him because he has a good alibi. He was at a karaoke club with his girlfriend until one in the morning. But the prosecutor in charge of the case, Go Young Joo, believes that he may have found a loophole because there was a backdoor out of the club not covered by CCTV.
Additionally, the video presented by his girlfriend does not show Bae Min Gyu’s face. Therefore, they neither have solid evidence to hold him down nor can they completely rule him out. However, when a second victim is found murdered in pretty much the same manner as Bae Min Gyu’s wife, Cha Young Won deduces that this must be the work of a serial killer. He asks to turn this into a joint serial killer investigation, but that hugely bruises Young Joo’s ego.
Though it looks like Young Joo is currently dating Oh Jin Sang, we suspect that she may have been romantically involved with Young Won in college. He had expressed an interest in her back then, and she had smiled back, and we know the possibilities of how that could have turned out. From what we saw of Young Won’s home life, his mother is highly particular about her overachieving son’s health, and we wouldn’t be surprised if that control extended to other parts of his life. Maybe that reached Young Joo, and that is why she is so bitter about him taking over her investigation, despite his coming from a place of reason.
Young Won continues doing his work, and he finds that the fatal wounds of the victims contained traces of saline and something else that could only be found on knives used to cut seafood. Some further probing reveals that Eun Byul was gifted a set of knives by her boyfriend, Bae Min Gyu, that perfectly match the murder weapon. There is something fishy about the way this video came to light. It had been uploaded by the actress close to a year ago but was deleted, probably because Bae Min Gyu was an Assemblyman’s son having an extramarital affair with her. But it was reuploaded to the internet and emerged at the precise time of the investigation. This is either an amazing coincidence or a carefully plotted plan. But it is enough evidence to focus back on Bae Min Gyu. However, the plan once again goes for a toss when Eun Byul reveals that the sashimi knife was stolen from the set a year ago, and she had even reported it since it was so expensive. It is absurd to believe that they had been plotting Min Gyu’s wife’s murder for that long. This brings things back to square one, though Young Joo is a lot softer now that Young Won has soothed her ego by crediting her with the investigation results.
Meanwhile, there is a different kind of trouble brewing in Woojin. Jin Sang has been placed in jail for beating up some gamblers, and he must pay them the settlement money to be able to get out. His younger brother, Jin Woo, takes care of the matter with his savings, and that annoys Jin Sang because he wants him to think about himself. He takes back the money by showing the thugs evidence of their misdeeds, and he asks Jin Woo to work and save for himself since his family is unable to do that for him.
Is Oh Jin Woo The Killer?
A wise man once said that “life stinks, and then you die.” But his wisdom forgot to take into account the people who kill. Everyone has repeatedly called Oh Jin Woo the personification of Buddha, as he is calm and collected and completely ignores his needs over others. His mother doesn’t favor him one bit and takes his labor for granted, all because he is the younger son. We are not from Korea, but coming from an Asian culture, we can understand the blind devotion towards an older son, who is understood to be the one to take care of the family in their old age. Even though it is rather evident that Oh Jin Sang is far from that, his mother is not thinking logically and is still insisting on placing Oh Jin Woo second to his brother.
Jin Woo is a smart kid who can cook like no other and is frugal enough to have kept aside a good amount of money, something his brother, with a government job, wasn’t able to do. He says that the sea talks to him, and he is also interested in the arts. We got the hint that there was a criminal in the Oh household to begin with, and we assumed that it was Jin Woo and Jin Sang’s father. Maybe it’s a gene that has been passed on, or we may find out later that it was an entirely different conspiracy. The one thing we know for sure is that Jin Woo has knives that can be considered murder weapons. He lives by the sea, and he uses it often. Additionally, the night he went to Seoul, he visited the cafe where the body of the woman was found the next day.
At the end of episode 1 of Longing For You, if Jin Woo is the person to have killed the girl, Hae Ju, it was on the day he met Cha Young Woon. The one thing that was common on both days of the murders is that Jin Woo was made aware of how he might be behind in life. Nobody was attacking him personally, and it actually came from his well-wishers, but he may have felt that. On the day of the cafe murder, Jin Sang told Jin Woo to not hold himself back, and on the day the schoolgirl was murdered, Jin Woo met a highly accomplished person. Both of these things may have triggered an inferiority complex that made him commit the murders. This is either a very easy clue or something to deliberately mislead the audience. We will find it out soon in Longing For You‘s upcoming episodes.
Final Thoughts
The precap of Longing For You Episode 2 shows us that Jin Woo is suspected of being the killer and is going to be arrested. Additionally, Jin Sang is joining the team in Seoul, and he is going to protect his brother at all costs. Seeing how this is going to happen in the first 2-3 episodes, we believe that Jin Woo might not be the killer after all. We will know the rest going forward.
