Our friendly time-traveler judge is here to stay, and a lot has gone down in episodes 5-8. The show follows Han-Young, a fallen judge who can right himself after returning to the past. The fast-paced show is certainly very technical, which is a fault I find in many K-dramas. At the end of episode 4 of The Judge Returns, Han-Young got his hands on Hanguk Hospital Director Lee’s ledger, which held records of the various sons of the rich and powerful he’d helped avoid military service by falsifying medical records. With his foresight, he’s already got plans on what he’s going to do with it and how to position himself just right to get what he wants. In the process, he’s definitely going to step over some lines, but will it all be worth it? Let’s get into episodes 5-8 to find out.
Spoiler Alert
How Does Shin-Jin End Up Noticing Han-Young?
The assassin who killed Han-Young in the future timeline ends up following Han-Young after he finds the ledger at his parents’ garbage recycling plant, and they end up having a fight, over the course of which Han-Young ends up being stabbed in the hand. He manages to get away with the ledger, though, taking it to reporter Na-Yeon and having her photograph it so she can release it even if someone yoinks it from him. This is when Han-Young gets called in to have a talk with Judge Kim Jin-Han, who tries to persuade him not to release the document. He goes ahead and does it anyway, though, handing the ledger over to Judge Baek Yi-Seok after his buddy, Jeong-Ho, convinces the thief, Open Sesame, to turn himself in at the police station.
The exposé has pretty immediate results, especially because General Prosecutor Eom Jun-Ho refuses to give in to corrupt men like Justice Kim Jun-Man and his son, Kim Jeong-Gyun, causing Shin-Jin to remark that Eom is another righteous Yi-Seok type. When Jin-Han confronts Han-Young over his decision to release the ledger, Han-Young tells him a story about how he saw the name of one of the bullies in the ledger, and so he had to release the files to get his revenge. Nobody’s going to believe that, but he sticks by the story anyway, and even Shin-Jin thinks it’s ludicrous when Jin-Han tells him about it.
At this point, Shin-Jin comes back from a meeting of a shady organization called Suojae, chaired by the former president, which seems to be a political fixing body that basically decides from the shadows how Korea’s going to be run. This body nominated an assemblyman named Woo Gyo-Hun for the role of Minister of Justice, leaving Shin-Jin silently fuming. Later, we see an interaction between them where Gyo-Hun corners him and asks if it’s true that Shin-Jin was raised in a brothel. This might be what finally prompts him to go to Han-Young and ask him to get dirt on Gyo-Hun before his confirmation hearing in two weeks, promising him a transfer to Seoul and career advancement in return.
How Does Han-Young Bag Prosecutor General Eom for Haenal Law Firm?
After the draft dodging scandal, a massive restructuring takes place, and a relatively minor judge from Jeju ends up being appointed as chief justice, and he purges the Seoul courts, ultimately bringing Yi-Seok to Seoul as chief judge, even though Shin-Jin had predicted his career was dead. Yi-Seok brings Im Jeong-Sik and Han-Young with him, determined to clean things up. His first move is to cancel his own inauguration ceremony and instead call a meeting to make it clear that no judicial favoritism shall be tolerated under his watch, all while an amused Shin-Jin looks on. Now that Yi-Seok’s brought Han-Young to Seoul anyway, he thinks he has no leverage over the man, and so he’ll have to think of some other way to take on Gyo-Hun.
This is when Han-Young comes to him with a proposal that helps both of them out. He has intel that suggests Gyo-Hun’s daughter is a frequent drug user right here in Korea and also that she’s involved with Prosecutor General Eom’s son, who’s currently studying abroad. He wants to offer him Gyo-Hun on a platter, as long as Shin-Jin helps him get Eom to join Haenal Law Firm in the role of a legal advisor as a wedding present of sorts in the course of his courtship with Se-Hee. Shin-Jin is amused, and he gives him the go-ahead. Han-Young ends up relying on Jeong-Ho for this again, and he gathers the evidence, with it eventually being dumped on Eom’s table, from where the case eventually finds its way to Prosecutor Kim Jin-A. Yoo Seon-Cheol, CEO of Haenal and father of Se-Hee, is impressed by how quickly Han-Young brought Eom on as an advisor but is also somewhat intimidated.
Are The Perpetrators Behind The Nammyeon Sinkhole Case Brought To Justice?
The Nammyeon Sinkhole case has been foreshadowed right from the start, with the Yoo kids fighting over who gets to take it on and the journalist researching it. Of course, like always, Han-Young uses his perfect memory to recall exactly how the case panned out, with Mayor Chu being revealed to be a member of the Obok gang, who had ties to the Taemyeon Construction, the very people who built dodgy water and sewage pipelines, causing the sinkhole to appear. In the timeline that ends in Han-Young’s death, the mayor and his cronies get off with no trouble, even after all the details emerge, but this time around, he’s determined to make sure the case has a different outcome.
There’s a particular emphasis on an old man called Heo Dong-Gi, whose son was the only human casualty of the incident, though several other people were injured, and a dog died too. We see Na-Yeon trying to make inroads with him and struggling before finally getting through and listening to his story. Turns out, Chu hasn’t decided to leave the old man alone yet, and he sends his lackey, Hak-Su, to offer the family “compensation,” though he takes a couple goons along to intimidate the couple. Eventually, he provokes them to cut him with a knife, and then he starts threatening them with legal action. This is when Han-Young and Jeong-Ho break in and beat up the men, abducting Hak-Su in the process.
Han-Young then goes on to do something insanely illegal, using his car to ram Mayor Chu off the road late at night, abducting him too. Next thing the man knows, he wakes up in a dark pit, with his hands and feet bound. Outside, he hears the voice of a man in an excavator asking Dong-Gi what fate the murderer of his son deserves. After the old man says he wants him to die, Han-Young, the man in the excavator, announces the death sentence and starts burying Mayor Chu alive. All this is happening while Hak-Su watches on at the same time, also bound hand and foot, but suddenly, Dong-Gi changes his mind, and Han-Young ends up pulling Chu out of his pit, though he and Hak-Su are warned firmly never to threaten Dong-Gi again. In the process, they somehow get convinced Han-Young and Jeong-Ho are loan sharks who Dong-Gi owes money to.
Eventually, Chu starts offering more and more compensation to Dong-Gi, and Han-Young tells the grieving father to accept it; he’s got something up his sleeve. Elsewhere, Na-Yeon tries to hit up Han-Young for dinner one night, but then she sees him hand-in-hand with Se-Hee, whose sister, Yoo Ha-Na, is representing Mayor Chu in the sinkhole case, and she starts thinking he’s collaborating with the defendant, meaning he’s corrupt, and she immediately goes sour on him. But Han-Young rushes after her and tells her to look into one of the victims: the man who lost his dog. The next time the case goes to court, because the victims have accepted compensation, Han-Young starts to say Chu has fulfilled his obligation towards them, but then the claimants’ lawyer asks to submit fresh video evidence. A video starts playing, and it’s of Hak-Su and his cronies bullying the man with the dog into accepting the compensation, and then later, a recording of an interview where a woman mentions how she too was intimidated into accepting the money and dropping her fight plays as well. All this is Na-Yeon’s handiwork, after Han-Young pointed her in the right direction.
The new evidence makes Han-Young escalate this from a civil to a criminal case, and he ropes in his prosecutor buddy, Cheol-Woo, to manipulate Mayor Chu and set him at ease. But when Chu walks out of the interrogation room smiling and relaxed, he gets a call from the assemblyman who’s been backing him all along, Kang Jeong-Tae, the representative from Nammyeon district, given he now suspects he’s being sold out. He offers Chu and Hak-Su Filipino passports and says he’ll get them on a ferry out of the country, but Jeong-Ho and Han-Young find out, and when they get to the pick-up point, they realize Jeong-Tae’s plan was to kill them, not rescue them. It’s the same assassin as always, and Han-Young manages to hold him off long enough that Jeong-Ho can show up.
Now that Chu knows his old allies want to kill him, he agrees to work with the prosecution and testify against Jeong-Tae about how he paid him 10 billion won in kickbacks over the years. In the middle of this, Cheol-Woo gets a call from Jeong-Tae asking him to come see him, but Han-Young thinks it’s a trap and he shouldn’t go alone. When he does get there, he sees Jeong-Tae dead, and then all of a sudden someone strangles Cheol-Woo too, but he wakes up by the time Han-Young gets there. Chu ends up finally realizing the gravity of his actions, and when his sentence is passed, he accepts the 10-year and 5 billion won sentence with his head bowed.
Does Gyo-Hun Pass His Confirmation Hearing?
Shin-Jin has really taken Han-Young under his wing, even though his lackey, Jin-Han, keeps trying to tell him he’s “not one of us.” He opens up to him at one point and reveals how he grew up an orphan on the streets until he found a high-end hostess bar where he started cleaning just to get a bowl of food. He brings Han-Young to a restaurant now run by the same hostess who showed kindness to him as a child. All this is in thanks for the help with Gyo-Hun, but he knows Han-Young is definitely hiding something. He got files on Han-Young’s backstory, so he’s aware by now that his father was the man who was sentenced to 18 months in prison after protesting against S-Group back in the day, and he suspects he wants revenge; he was, after all, one of the judges involved in the ruling that day.
But Han-Young can sense this coming and throws him a curveball; he wants revenge against Hwang Nam-Yong, the presiding judge on the day his father’s case was heard. He says he remembers Shin-Jin from that day, but he was only a minor judge at the time, but he’s the only man who can help him. Smiling, Shin-Jin says he’ll give him Nam-Yon on a platter when the new chief justice nominee is announced. Meanwhile, Gyo-Hun’s confirmation hearing stretches on for basically an entire day, and he comes up with all sorts of excuses for the questions coming his way. Why did he falsify his residency? My daughter had depression, and I wanted her to go to school with her best friend. Did he engage in stock parking with his brother? I’m afraid I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. Has your wife been involved in shady business? I would like to keep my family out of this.
In The Judge Returns episode 8’s ending, Jin-A takes the evidence she’s been handed and makes an emergency arrest of Gyo-Hun’s daughter, which hits the news, causing the man to panic and reach out to anyone who could help. Nobody answers the phone, though, and the reporters end up cornering Gyo-Hun with questions he can no longer answer. After this, Shin-Jin goes ahead and nominates Nam-Yong at the next meeting of Suojae; somehow, this is going to bring him down. Also, Im Jeong-Sik and Yi-Seok confront Han-Young over his relationship with Shin-Jin, and when he doesn’t tell them what he wants from the man, Yi-Seok basically cuts ties with him. Next thing we know, Han-Young is at Haenal, offering them Yi-Seok on a platter, and that’s where the episode ends. Haenal and Shin-Jin have just been allies of convenience so far, but Yi-Seok represents the man Han-Young wants to be, so surely he’s not going to actually betray him, right? We’ll have to wait for episode 9 to find out.
