Pro Bono is a weekend Netflix show that has, after a really long time, given me mixed feelings. Sure, there has been some questionable content on Netflix lately, but it’s usually like the show goes downhill as time passes, or there’s something that doesn’t sit right by the time it ends. It’s not a major distaste of the whole thing. But Pro Bono is nostalgic for the strangest of reasons. It’s one of those shows that doesn’t seem to know exactly what it’s trying to tell us and ends up being quite bad with its messaging, or rather, like a naive uncle who isn’t 100% certain about what he’s trying to say. Anyway, these two episodes of Pro Bono were okay, though too long, and I’m really getting tired of this trend of making one episode almost 1 hour and 30 minutes long. Ultimately, those extra 20 minutes are genuinely not worth our time. Also, the ending of episode 4 definitely doesn’t have me feeling happy about how things turned out; there is still the feeling of “anti-choice” here, which isn’t really feeling very popular K-drama to me. But with that said, let’s jump into the events of episodes 3 and 4.
Spoiler Alert
Does Gang-Hun End Up Suing God?
After Da-Wit’s early success with a win over a pro bono case regarding dog ownership, he and his team were diverted to other non-court activities, including setting up a desk at a pride parade, where Gi-Ppeum forces Da-Wit to do drag. But ultimately, after Da-Wit sits in on an interview about the pro bono team and boasts about how they’ll be fighting for the voiceless, he gets a visitor: a young boy named Gang-Hun who wants to sue God for forcing him to be born paralyzed from the waist down. Da-Wit sends him away without a second thought, but the boy is persistent and keeps showing up day after day, despite the long commute. Finally, one day, his mother, So-Min, comes to the office after he’s spent too long away from home and seems to be on the verge of hitting him before the pro bono team intervenes. When Gi-Ppeum threatens to call child protective services, Gang-Hun himself intervenes, saying he has nowhere else to go. Da-Wit gets chewed out at a team dinner that night, and he ends up calling Gi-Ppeum privileged for caring so much about disability rights, disgusting her. She ultimately convinces the team to take on the case anyway.
Cue the pro bono team’s scramble to find a mailing address for God. Ultimately, Gi-Ppeum decides they’ll be sending their claim for damages to the Woongsan Charitable Foundation. The logic? So-Min had gotten pregnant while she was living in a shelter for abandoned youth, and the foundation had sent her to Woongsan Hospital, where she’d repeatedly asked for an abortion and then repeatedly been denied. The hospital didn’t even give her an ultrasound that would have revealed the birth defect, forcing her to give birth to an unwanted, disabled child. Because it’s been more than 10 years, meaning the hospital isn’t legally required to hold onto records from back then, Da-Wit tries to get Woongsan’s attorney, Myeong-Hun, to reveal their hospital’s abortion rate but faces pushback. Finally, he goes directly to the hospital’s managing director and threatens to reveal both his embezzlement and his adultery unless he releases the data. Finally, Da-Wit comes to court and reveals that Woongsan has a whopping 91% lower rate of abortion than other hospitals of comparable size.
Myeong-Hun makes things personal though, asking Gang-Hun personally if it made the world a worse place that he was born. Things get real emotional, and Myeong-Hun tries to defend Woongsan’s chairman, Chairman Choi’s beliefs. Essentially, he claims that all life is worth living, and Korea respects the right to life of all citizens. The fact he makes this argument before a visually impaired judge makes it all the more significant. Ultimately, the court rules in favor of Woongsan purely because it couldn’t specifically be proven that the defendant’s personal belief led to this situation, but the judge does sympathize heavily with Gang-Hun. Da-Wit’s not inclined to give up so easily though, and he convinces his team they’ll be filing an appeal, so Gi-Ppeum decides they need a special sweet treat to power them up. She takes them to a bakery called Joie De Vivre, or the joy of life, run by her hearing-impaired parents, and suddenly, Da-Wit can better understand her perspective. Apparently, her family had fallen on hard times and sold their old bakery after her father was scammed by a close friend too, making Da-Wit feel even more ashamed for what he said earlier. Further, he’d even gotten into her father’s taxi before, and both men had respected each other at the time.
Do Gang-Hun and Chairman Cho Come to an Agreement?
When it’s time for the appeal, Da-Wit starts out strong by making two demands: Chairman Choi will specifically be the defendant, and to make the judge and the defendant’s attorney feel what life is like for Gang-Hun, they will both be invited to an “on-site inspection.” Essentially, a day out where both of them are put in wheelchairs and forced to get by. This predictably ends in hilarity, with them getting yelled at by angry drivers and having difficulties with curbs and accessible infrastructure. Ultimately, Myeong-Hun ends up wetting himself. Back at court, he decides the time to play it soft is past, so he calls So-Min to testify and aggressively questions her about whether Gang-Hun’s birth made the world a worse place, finally getting her to admit she couldn’t survive without him. This feels like it should tear their case apart, but Da-Wit still manages to get Chairman Choi to show up.
From the cutaways we’ve seen of him fiddling with a Go board, it’s already been heavily implied that he’s the anonymous challenger Gang-Hun’s been playing against online. Gang-Hun breaks protocol by asking to question the man himself, bypassing Da-Wit, and the judge allows him to. He ends up asking Chairman Choi to justify his hospital’s abortion policy, and the old man ends up admitting that he’s responsible for it, much to the horror of Myeong-Hun. But he still goes on to justify it by saying that all life is beautiful and deserves to have a chance, though this clearly ignores the question of the mother’s consent when it comes to childbirth. The whole episode has this shallow anti-choice rhetoric in that it never directly addresses the fates of the mothers. Turns out, an organization called the Elliot Foundation has been funding “pro-life” bodies throughout the country, and their office is the same as that of the Woongsan Group, meaning he’s been spreading his church-driven ideology with his money. Anyway, we also know how Korea feels about birthrates right now.
But this is swept aside too, and instead, when he learns that Gang-Hun hasn’t been able to attend the Woongsan School after an act of bullying, he follows him around and sees his mother and the pro bono team beg a team of NIMBY-ers to let them build a special-ed school in the neighborhood. That seems to change something in Chairman Choi. Also, an incident happens on the anniversary of So-Min’s own abandonment, where she seems almost on the verge of taking her own life before Gang-Hun calls the payphone on the bridge she’s standing on and tells her he can’t live without her either. She’d been partly aggravated by Gang-Hun looking up adoption resources, but it turns out he’d just been trying to make life easier for her. He’s not the lead of Capernaum, but it turns out he’s a little closer to Forrest Gump, just a mama’s boy.
In the ending of Pro Bono episode 4, the big reveal comes: Chairman Choi was Gang-Hun’s Go partner all along, and he knows pretty much everything about the little guy. He says he stands by everything he said about the value of life and that he’s willing to put his word on the line if the pro bono team withdraws the case. What do they get in return? He offers to adopt So-Min even though she’s an adult, making Gang-Hun his grandson for real, and also says he’ll build a special-ed school in the neighborhood, too. This is played off as a grand happy ending, but his hospital’s still forcing women and teenage girls to give birth to unwanted children without having the option of opting for safe abortions, so I’m not sure he’s the hero the show’s making him out to be. On top of that, Gi-Ppeum receives a copy of the video of Da-Wit accepting the bribe now, so clearly someone’s trying to plant dissent among the team. Turns out Oh’s already seen the video too, but she has no obvious motive to sabotage her own pro bono team just yet. Maybe we’ll find out who sent her the video soon. Obviously, someone is eager to sabotage Da-Wit, but who might it be? It’s not the scam artist himself for sure.
