100 Days of Deception Episode 8 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Kim You-jung as Lee Ga-kyung
Park Jin-young as Kim Tae-ung (Sato Hideo)
Kim Hyun-joo as Yoo So-ran
Lee Mu-saeng as Yoo Philip
Jin Sun-kyu as Sato Shinichi

The morning after

Lee Ga-kyung dreams that Kim Tae-ung, the interpreter who lives as Sato Hideo, tells her he likes her, then says he is lying, just as she lied to him. She chases him, shouting his Joseon (Korean) name, and wakes at the Yoo house in Gyeongseong (Seoul). She remembers one or two beers with Hideo after work and nothing after. One memory returns: the moment he tells her his real name, she passes out in front of him.

The night before, Hideo brings her to the Yoo house. He tells Yoo Philip and Yoo So-ran that the Foreign Affairs Division went drinking to build team spirit and a wheel came off the rickshaw. Hideo carries her in. While Hideo is out of the room, the couple fear she let something slip and that he came to keep watch on them. They agree to find out what he knows.

Philip presses Hideo into a drink for two. He asks Hideo to forgive Keum Seo-hee, Ga-kyung's cover name, for anything she said, since she likes to invent stories. Hideo, who believes Philip is having an affair with her, asks whether his wife knows. Philip says feelings show however well they are hidden, and that pretending not to see them is sometimes best. Hideo curses him, and the two end up trading punches while So-ran tries to separate them.

In the morning, Ga-kyung learns about the fight and that Hideo slept in her room. She bursts in on him while he is dressing. He shows her the pawn ticket, now damp, and explains that it belonged to his mother, whose name he still does not know. The name on it, Sin Tae-jin, may lead him to her. He asks Ga-kyung to hold on to it for now, calling her his personal vault, and sends her out.

On the walk to work, she apologizes for anything foolish she did and swears she remembers nothing. She proposes a deal: if her memory returns, he grants her a wish. He agrees to exactly one, and she privately takes comfort that she does not think she said she was a spy. Back at the Yoo house, Philip, nursing a split lip, tells So-ran he is sure Hideo has feelings for Seo-hee.

Lessons in pneumatic tubes

At the Government-General, the Japanese colonial administration, Hideo gives Ga-kyung a chance to practice for her America plans. She interprets a briefing on the new pneumatic tube system for Philip, the American reporter. Metal pipes use air pressure to fire carriers between buildings. Trial runs are starting between the Keijo Post Office, Keijo being the Japanese name for Gyeongseong, and the Government-General. The lines to the Governor-General's and Inspector General's residences are nearly done. The network is to reach Incheon, Kaesong, Pyongyang, Sinuiju and finally Manchukuo, Japan's new state in Manchuria.

In a hospital, Suzuki Hiroyuki, the man inside the Government-General for the Gugukdan independence group, has woken after a long time unconscious. He has heard the group placed a spy there, a girl he once met briefly, and is told she does not know he is one of them. He supposes that the anonymous tips to the newspaper stopped while he lay in bed. He also opposes the marriage being arranged between Kim Myung-nam and Hideo, without spelling out why. His visitor, who calls him by his Korean name, accepts it.

Back at the office, Ga-kyung thanks Hideo and admits she thought the P in "pneumatic" was pronounced. He realizes he never told her the word starts with P and asks whether she read his papers. She says she saw them while dusting and learned the words in case she could ever help him. He asks why she works so hard when Philip will look after her. They might break up, she says, and she does not want to be a live-in maid again.

A bomb in Shanghai, a banquet in Gyeongseong

News arrives that a Korean man, Yun Bong-gil, threw a bomb at a celebration of the Emperor's birthday in Hongkou Park, Shanghai. The commander of the Japanese forces there is gravely wounded, and many are dead or hurt. Officials suspect the exiled government but do not rule out the Gugukdan. The Governor-General orders Sato Shinichi, the Inspector General, to postpone the tube ceremony. He recalls the disgrace when the 1919 Kyeam-ri riot reached the foreign press. Shinichi argues that a delay would make things worse and proposes a grand ceremony to show strength, with security as cover to round up activists on their watch list.

At the Yoo house, Philip and So-ran learn there will now be a banquet for foreign journalists and their spouses, senior officials and pro-Japanese Koreans such as the president of Joil Textile Factory. The small event has become a showcase of a peaceful Joseon, and they agree not to waste it. In a corridor, Fukuda, the police chief, warns Hideo that the Inspector General's son should be wary of keeping company with a Joseon woman. Hideo replies that the Shanghai news must have shaken him.

Myung-nam, the daughter of Joil Textile president Kim Seung-eok, models a new outfit, and her father calls her the prettiest girl in the world. In Jongno, police sweep the streets and drag men away.

The Gugukdan explain their plan to Ga-kyung. No bomb will get past the searches on the day, so Hideo's fiancée, Myung-nam, a Gugukdan member, will carry it in early. On her last visit she was spared any search as the Inspector General's future daughter-in-law. She will bring 30 packets of herbal medicine for Hideo, and the packets with the shorter string are bombs. Ga-kyung must take the bundle once it clears security, remove the bombs and hide them.

At home, Hideo apologizes to his little sister, Sato Hanako, for shouting at her. When a woman of the household brings his clothes and mentions the summer wedding his father wants, Hideo says he no longer wants to wear them.

The herbal medicine

Myung-nam arrives at the Government-General with the medicine while Hideo is in a meeting, and Ga-kyung greets her. The guards want to search her and the bundle, but the woman who searches female staff is not there. So Ga-kyung takes the bundle, and Myung-nam is waved through. Then a sniffer dog, added after Shanghai, starts lunging and barking. The smell of the herbal medicine gets the blame. In the confusion, Ga-kyung spots a bomb detonator, and Myung-nam's ring falls.

Hideo arrives and tells Myung-nam not to turn up unannounced again. The dog keeps barking at Ga-kyung, and a guard calls for her to be searched. She blames the ointment Hideo bought her, which she has put on her bruises. The dog is said to be a little agitated, and it is taken away.

Alone, he asks where she is bruised this time, and she says it is somewhere she cannot show him. The drunken night comes back. Hideo asks why she stays with a man who hurts her, when he should treat her like a princess. She insists she is not Keum Seo-hee, and he plays along, calling her Lee Gae-ttong, the joke name she once gave him. Near the house he offers his back, but she wants to be held in his arms, as on the train. She says a woman seeing a married man does not deserve to be treated like a princess, and tearfully asks him to do it just once.

In the present, Hideo can see she remembers. She denies it, arguing she would hardly hide it with a wish at stake, and vows to remember later and collect. He asks whether she really stays with the American for the job. She tells him her private life is not his business and congratulates him on his engagement. He answers that his marriage is none of hers and sends her home. In the ladies' room, where hardly anyone comes, Ga-kyung tucks the bombs into the ceiling vent.

The Kyeam-ri file

In the Gyodang-ri shanty town, Hideo drops in on Bang Kkot-nim although there is no lesson. He reads a neighbor, Geum-ok, a letter from her brother in Manchuria, which only asks her for money. Nearby, Ma Mun-mak beats Lee No-ma for losing a delivery job and tells him to pick rich men's pockets. When Hideo steps in, Mun-mak names him as the Inspector General's son and says No-ma has no idea who he is. He warns that people from Kyeam-ri live there and would burn Hideo alive too. Hideo does not understand.

A colleague takes Ga-kyung to the Camellia Club for news about the banquet. Instead, the colleague grieves over the rumor of Hideo's wedding and complains that a mouse dropped on her from the ladies' room ceiling vent. A trap goes into that vent first thing tomorrow. Ga-kyung invents an emergency at home and runs. In the records room, Hideo pulls the Gyeonggi police files on Kyeam-ri in 1919.

At the gate, a guard refuses to let Ga-kyung back in without a permit. Ms. Yamada was allowed through, but Ga-kyung is Joseon. An official relents when she says she left behind a press translation Hideo wants in the morning. His condition is that she enter by the way he points out and show the respect a Joseon person owes.

Hideo reads the report from May 4, 1919, on the Kyeam-ri riot. It names Keum Seok-jung, records 23 Joseon people killed and the village destroyed by Japanese soldiers, and includes a statement by Lieutenant Ishikawa Nobuyuki. Inside the building, Ga-kyung retrieves the bombs and tries one hiding place after another. She settles on a spot marked with the name of Interpreter Suzuki Hiroyuki.

Hideo confronts his father. He asks whether Ishikawa is Shinichi and whether he shot, burned and beheaded 23 people at Kyeam-ri. Shinichi reminds Hideo of the Joseon boy he shot in front of him as a pickpocket. "You were the real pickpocket," he says, and Hideo never objected. Instead, he took Shinichi's hand, chose to become Japanese and changed his name. He lived because an innocent child died in his place. Shinichi tells him to remember who gave him his comfortable life and to be grateful.

Afterward, Hideo finds that Ga-kyung has been there long enough to hear. He orders her out and asks whether she enjoyed it. She tells him everything came back at that moment. On the drunken night, she asked whether she could call him by his Joseon name, because it suited him better than Sato Hideo. She makes that her wish and begs him not to cry: "Don't cry, Interpreter Kim Tae-ung."

Up next: 100 Days of Deception Episode 9 Recap. See every episode in the 100 Days of Deception episode guide.