Episode 9 of The Good Bad Mother made us realize that Kang Ho is as simple as his mother is complicated. Young Soon had a multitude of reasons for her actions throughout her life. As for Kang Ho, his character was so simplified here. We are finding it hard to believe that love was the only emotion that motivated him to break the hearts of people he felt that very emotion for. It is twisted but in a way that is irritating and not heart-touching. Here is a recap of The Good Bad Mother Episode 9 for you to decide how you feel about that.
Spoilers Alert
What Does Young Soon Find On The Sd Card?
Oh Tae Soo’s daughter, Oh Ha Young, is engaged, and the villagers learn about it when they see an article online. It looks like Ye Jin’s crush is still going strong, and she is stalking everyone that Kang Ho must have been involved with in the past. The villagers decide not to say anything to Young Soon about it, but she already knows everything. She just wants to find what message Kang Ho had left for her on the SD card, and she asks Sam Sik’s father to help her figure out how to read the contents of the chip. Once he tells her, Young Soon starts looking at everything Kang Ho left for her. He recounts how, at an incident in college, when he had gotten into a fight with a student who had placed top in class due to his connections, Young Soon had forced Kang Ho to apologize to the guy. That was the day Kang Ho realized that he needed to be a prosecutor so that he would be the more powerful one in any situation and would never be helpless again.
Kang Ho had started investigating his father’s case right from his college days, but without much success since he was just a student. Kang Ho worked hard to complete his education, and when he started training for his bar exams, he uncovered the facts one by one. This was also around the time he started dating Mi Joo, and they would have married if Kang Ho did not have to deal with the burden of revenge. Kang Ho visits Kwak Sang Cheol, one of his father’s closest friends who had turned hostile during the court proceedings. Kwak Sang Cheol admits that he did so because he was scared that Song Woobyeok would hurt him and his family if he did not testify against Choi Hae Sik.
Kang Ho continues his investigation, and in the interest of keeping the people around him safe, he doesn’t invite his mother or even Mi Joo to his oath-taking ceremony. But once he is sworn in as the prosecutor, he does what he has been meaning to do for years: he gets the investigative reports on his father’s case. Kang Ho raises the exact same question as his mother did in Episode 1: that it is suspicious that Choi Hae Sik’s wound marks were so clean. Kang Ho questions the investigating officer about his lack of accountability and the fact that he bought certain assets for himself and got a promotion right after the case was done. Kang Ho is sure that his father was murdered and that his case was covered up by outside forces. That is when he breaks up with Mi Joo because of the path he has chosen to walk. Kang Ho loved Mi Joo with all his heart, and he still loves her to this day, but he had to break away from her so that she wouldn’t be swept up in his struggles. It was soon after, that he moved on to the next stage of his plan, which was making Ha Young fall in love with him. It was during this time that he also found a way to approach Song Woobyeok.
The Chairman’s grandson, Yoon Jae Min, had accidentally killed a woman, and a second person, Jung Jong Gu, was arrested in his place due to incomplete circumstantial evidence. The prosecutor in charge wants to let the case go and simply arrest Jung Jong Gu because if he pursues the truth, Jong Gu might be murdered, and his death staged as a suicide committed out of guilt. If not for that, Yoon Jae Min was still Song Woobyeok’s grandson, and he was powerful enough to cause many problems. That is when Kang Ho asks to take charge of the case and deal with it in his own way. We believe that he cut a deal with Jung Jong Gu and promised to prove his innocence, albeit in time. In court, Kang Ho proves Jong Gu guilty, but it must have been a temporary thing until he found better evidence. Since Kang Ho kept Yoon Jae Min’s name from coming up during the proceedings, that gets him into the good books of the Chairman, and we know how the rest of it goes.
Why Did Kang Ho Try To Sever All Ties With Young Soon?
Kang Ho’s research showed that Song Woobyeok and Oh Tae Soo had been in cahoots for almost three decades. In fact, it was Oh Tae Soo who actively influenced the direction of Choi Hae Sik’s suicide investigation. Kang Ho comes to know of their recent rivalry since Oh Tae Soo started gunning for power in politics. Neither can afford for the other to be more powerful than them due to their shared murky history, and that is why Song Woobyeok has been looking for ways to bring down Oh Tae Soo. It was his secretary, that Oh Tae Soo had an illegitimate family with, not realizing that it was a honey trap all along. Kang Ho contacts that woman, and together, they uncover all the illegal dealings of Oh Tae Soo. Contrary to what we saw in Episode 1, Kang Ho did not kill those two. He sent them away on a boat to the Philippines and simply pushed the empty car into the water, making it look like he had killed them. He was severing all ties with his mother so that he could protect her from the danger of the manipulations he was placing himself in.
As Kang Ho says, he cannot avenge his father legally since the statute of limitations has passed. But he wants to take revenge for his mother, who has been forced to lead a life of hardship and unhappiness because of those people. She could not be the loving person Kang Ho had always known she was. When Young Soon was pregnant, she wished that her child would grow up to be an artist, like she wanted to be when she was young. True to her wish, Kang Ho was born with an interest and aptitude for art, but by then, Young Soon was hell-bent on him being a prosecutor. We thought that Kang Ho always felt that his mother was cruel to him. But he saw her eating his leftover food after she forbade him from eating so that he wouldn’t fall asleep. Every time she destroyed his drawings or his art supplies, she would piece them together again, and Kang Ho found them all in the attic one time. He knew how much his mother loved him, and he had realized long ago that she was withholding her love against her wishes so that she could push him harder. He wanted to avenge the suppressed love and the kind of relationship they had all these years because of those people.
At the end of Episode 9 of The Good Bad Mother, when Young Soon comes to know this, she bursts into tears as she realizes what her son had been doing. All the hurt she felt at his cold treatment comes to the surface as it gets ready to heal. But Young Soon doesn’t want her son to take any sort of revenge and just wants him to live a good life. Therefore, she burns all his old belongings, though Kang Ho manages to save his ID card. We are going to see the repercussions of these revelations going forward.
Final Thoughts
Kang Ho was never going to be a negative character, but we wish he had been gray rather than being so black and white. He need not have been corrupt, but did he really have no lasting trauma or feelings of anger toward his mother? It would have been nice to see them explored and resolved instead of doing away with them entirely with such a twist. Regardless, the story of The Good Bad Mother is interesting, and we will keep watching.
