The Past Revealed
Episode 17 of Mouse starts to lift the veil hanging over this series and provide us with some solid answers. To begin with, we kick off at Soo-Ho’s boxing club. Ba-Reum shows up and confronts Soo-Ho. He encourages the man to step into the ring and show what he’s capable of. Ba-Reum easily thwarts the threat, knocking the man down and tying him up. He forces Soo-Ho to read passages from the bible before watching him die in flames. We then cut back to see Jae-Hoon’s family, who bemoan what Jae-Hoon has done to Jae-Min and worry that he’s going to kill someone one day. In the morning, Jae-Hoon tells his Mother that he wasn’t going to kill Jae-Min, he just wanted to teach him a lesson. Well, his Mother silently cooks him up some food which makes Ba-Reum groggy. After trying to suffocate him with a pillow, Soo-Ho shows and throws her across the room. After leaving, Jae-Hoon awakens and speaks to his Mother, who admits that he has a special gene and that there’s one more person who was born just like him. As she passes away, Jae-Hoon is choked out by his assailant and awakens in a run-down building. Heading across the street, he finds the rest of the family murdered. Jae-Hoon never killed his family (at least if these flashbacks are anything to go by) and all the killings since that moment have been revenge killings for what happened to his family. Only, why was Jae-Hoon removed from the house? Something doesn’t add up. Ba-Reum heads back to his hometown and speaks to one of the locals. According to her, she was worried as she believed Yo-Han was actually Jae-Hoon. He showed up a while back and just stared at the house for a really long time. This took place on the day that he was shot dead. Even more mysterious, this woman confirms that around the time of the fire, Jae-Hee went missing and she wasn’t one of the bodies from the fire. Whispers around town claim that she was killed and buried somewhere; is this true? Well, as Ba-Reum heads to the local police station, Moo-Chi shows up asking about Jae-hoon. He begins to retrace Ba-Reum’s family tree but the adoption seems to have been messed up. He’s not showing on the records. Back home, Ba-Reum confronts Daniel Lee, who’s adamant that Ba-Reum’s Mother was going to have an abortion. While they’re busy together, Moo-Chi confronts Detective Lee. He claims he’s innocent, going on to reveal he picked up the statement from the floor. There’s no evidence that he tampered with the CCTV either, and for now Moo-Chi decides against opening a case on him. However, he can’t deny that something feels off. Ba-Reum tries to piece together this mysterious OZ link, believing all these deaths are connected. As he asks around at the hospital, it’s revealed through flashbacks that the doctors there actually recorded the experiment to switch the brains by the Head Hunter. Meanwhile, a strange set of men begin following and tailing Ba-Reum. They trace his signal to a warehouse, where Ba-Reum jumps out and surprises them, “Welcome to the mouse trap, you rats!” This scene is cut short though after several punches, with one of the men sliding a phone over and showing footage of Bong-Yi. It turns out this OZ organization have been following Ba-Reum since he was a child and seem to be linked to Daniel Lee too. This would explain his secretiveness, as it seems like he’s hiding from the organization to make sure they don’t track him down. As Ba-Reum continues to investigate, he finds messages from Yo-Han toward Daniel Lee, asking to meet and informing that the OZ organization are scaring him. Among the belongings is also Ba-Reum’s old diary. This ties in with the transfer student and scenes with Jae-Hoon’s cut being tended to. Jae-Hoon was annoyed by this but noticed that the boy was being followed and under surveillance too. Elsewhere, Bong-Yi does some investigating of her own, speaking to Yo-Han’s Mother. It turns out Yo-Han was the boy who helped her out as a child and found her on the bridge. This sees her start to doubt her own predispositions that Yo-Han was the one who murdered her grandmother. In fact, that transfer student also happens to be Yo-Han as well. As Ba-Reum continues on, he remembers what Yo-Han said before he died “We are lab mice.” At the same time, Moo-Chi manages to piece together the clues and realizes Ba-Reum was at the scene of the crime for several of the murders.
The Episode Review
Mouse returns this week with a revelatory episode, one that sheds light on the past and finally bridges everything together in a cohesive way. There’s still more twists than a fairground ride but at least now everything is starting to come into focus. So it seems that Yo-Han and Ba-Reum have ties together dating all the way back to school, and in fact both of them are these aforementioned lab mice. Could this be a direct reference to the OZ organization? This shadowy group seem to be following the pair around and the experiment could well be linked to Daniel Lee’s psychopath test in the past. I’m sure we’ll find out more in the foreseeable future though. For now, Mouse starts to tighten the noose around Ba-Reum’s neck as Moo-Chi – and Bong-Yi to an extent – start to realize Ba-Reum is the real culprit and actually Yo-Han is innocent. It’s been coming for a while of course, and now it seems likely that the truth will come tumbling out about what’s been happening. For the most part, Mouse has been a really enjoyable watch but the twists are so plentiful that it makes deciphering all the plot threads pretty challenging. Still, the ending certainly leaves the door open for more.
