Agent Kim Reactivated Episode 2 Recap

Kim's last mission and Min-ji's birth

Years before the present, at the Cheonsan Unit in Gangwon Province, Manager Kim receives an order. Two South Korean covert operatives and a diplomat preparing inter-Korean peace talks have been murdered abroad. The man blamed is Kim Jeong Seon, a hard-line deputy director at the North's General Bureau of Intelligence on South Korea. In a car with the target, Kim tells him this is where both of them will die. North Korean state TV later reports that a People's Army officer killed the deputy director on impulse and died with him. Watching the report, a man remarks that the operative must badly want his discharge.

At an obstetrics surgery center, Kim arrives as his wife, Im Yu-jin, goes into labor and then surgery. The baby is healthy, but the doctor stops short when it comes to the mother. Dying, Yu-jin asks Kim to name the child Min-ji, to leave his past behind and to live as Min-ji's father.

In another flashback, Kim, addressed as Sergeant Kim, holds his own unit at gunpoint and demands his discharge. He reminds the officers that they promised him his freedom after this mission, and after the two before it. An officer gives in. Kim then raises Min-ji alone as Yu-jin's words replay. He studies a formula-feeding guide and calls his friend Sung Han-soo when the baby runs a fever. At Min-ji's graduation from Myeongeun Elementary School, she pulls him in for a photo.

The trap at the back gate

The night before, Ju Hye-ri and her friends corner a schoolboy, Kim Nam-hoon, and take him aside. A message in his name asks Kim Min-ji to meet him at the school's back gate. At a fenced-off site, she finds Hye-ri's crowd instead, and tells Hye-ri to have her father get her transferred or expelled. Hye-ri wants to see her on her knees, and Min-ji says she is not like her dad. Goaded, Min-ji hits Hye-ri, a boy hits Min-ji back, and the group piles on. Min-ji ends up on the ground, bleeding and whispering for her father, while her phone shows a call from Dad.

When someone moves to call an ambulance, one of the group stops it, calls everyone an accomplice and has the phones collected. Instead, a call goes to Oh Min-cheol, a south-side collector for the Golden Teeth gang, as he hands his boss the week's takings. Min-cheol refuses to get rid of a body. A girl on the line then says her father is Ju Gang-chan, chairman of Juhak Construction, and offers any sum. Min-cheol hangs up in disbelief, but his boss overhears the company's name and orders him to call back and agree.

At the site, the boss looks Min-ji over and needles Hye-ri, who insists money is no object as long as nobody finds out. He says he owes Chairman Ju, so he is making an exception. A body, he explains, must be gutted before it goes into the sea, or it will surface. He drops Hye-ri at home and suggests they keep the matter from her father.

Kim follows the trail to a loan-shark crew

In the present, Kim presses a young man from the group for Min-ji's whereabouts. The man claims he only meant to scare her. She fell while running away, he says, and he phoned Min-cheol and fled. Kim demands to know where Oh Min-cheol is. At home, Min-ji's voice asks a rain-soaked Kim why he skipped work. At Sangsaeng Savings Bank, coworkers note he has never been late, and his phone shows a call from his colleague Jung Sang-a.

Elsewhere, a loan-shark crew tells a debtor that a special clause signs over his family's organs. The leader admits he added the clause himself. The crew takes the man's student daughter away to be put under. A delivery that one of them says he canceled arrives at the door, and a crew member goes to send it away. Kim then tears through the crew while they ask whether he is a cop.

At Dowon Police Station, Han-soo insists he never touched anyone. He says he only held back the wild boar, Park Jin-cheol, who sleeps in the cell. Online, a clip of a 17-against-1 brawl spreads.

North Korea spots its most wanted fugitive

At the North's General Bureau of Intelligence on South Korea, the clip reaches the Media Surveillance Room. It is labeled a Mangyun-dong barbecue restaurant assault by a middle-aged Marine, and the system flags a tier-one fugitive on camera. Director General Ri Eung Ryeong wants an infiltration team sent south for the man's head. Other officials point out that high-level inter-Korean talks begin in under a month. They would rather ask the South for cooperation and send operatives with the delegation to make the arrest. Ri Eung Ryeong calls the man a traitor and is told to follow the Party's orders.

In private, Ri Eung Ryeong says only someone like Park Yeong Gwang, known as Number 66, could take the man. Yeong Gwang wiped out a South Korean commando platoon on his own. He died long ago after a traitor betrayed him. Told that Yeong Gwang's younger brother is an operative of equal skill, Ri Eung Ryeong sends for him to win back the stolen number.

At the Republic of Korea Special Missions Directorate, an officer reports unusual activity around Agent Kim, its top surveillance subject. Footage of Jin-cheol's rampage three days earlier, with Kim beside him, has reached North Korean intelligence. The director, Kang Guk-cheol, codenamed Mole Cricket, learns that the North has sent an official arrest notice over the hotline. It wants its operatives in the country during the talks. The government denies Kim exists, but stalling may force it to agree. Guk-cheol orders his team to reach Kim first.

Min-cheol goes silent

Kim holds a crew member, who says they work in small cells and hear from the higher-ups only through an anonymous group chat. The captive threatens to sue and claims the law cannot touch minors. Kim answers that there is no word for a parent who has lost a child, someone with nothing left to lose. He draws a gun and says, "I'll just be a middle-aged outlaw." The captive admits he is over 20. Kim tells him he stays alive only because Kim believes Min-ji is, and that otherwise he, his friends and his family will die.

With Kim watching, the captive calls Min-cheol, who is with his boss. The boss tells Min-cheol to ignore it because it is the police, to delete the chat room and to dump the phone. The call goes to voicemail, and the chat will no longer open. The captive begs Kim to believe there is no other way to reach them.

Headlines report that the bodies of high school girls have been found, and Kim's question about a hair tie found on the ground plays again. At the Ju home, Gang-chan learns that Hye-ri has stayed in her room all day. He assumes Min-ji is the reason and dismisses her as a crude girl from a troubled home. Hye-ri asks what Min-ji's father does for a living. Gang-chan tells her to make anyone who crosses her pay several times over, and he promises to protect her.

The boss's men ask why he let the chairman's daughter go without squeezing Juhak Construction for money. Ju Gang-chan would eat them alive, he says. The chairman is a former hired thug who took over construction companies and runs ex-special forces mercenaries as bodyguards. Meanwhile, Gang-chan makes a kneeling contractor, who has fallen behind on a demolition, bow lower and apologize sincerely. Asked what he owes the chairman, the boss says it is none of their business.

A new 66 heads south

Ri Eung Ryeong tells Park Yeong Gwang's younger brother that a traitor got his brother killed, murdered their comrades and stole the number 66. He gives the younger man the number and orders him to bring back the head of the fake 66. In the South, a local contact who failed to find the target points him instead to the police station holding the target's companion. The new 66 brushes off a request for money and takes the car key.

At Dowon Police Station, Han-soo swears never to speak to Jin-cheol again. A man in an oversized police uniform brings food, asks for Park Jin-cheol and demands to know where 66 is. Jin-cheol claims to be 66, joking that he could fit a size 66 if he lost weight. A detainee then gives the visitor an address above Dowon Laundry in Mangyun-dong and warns him that he is the one who will die. Called away by an officer, the visitor promises they will meet again. Soon after, a cry that someone cannot breathe brings an officer in, and Jin-cheol slips out, promising to be right back.

Elsewhere, the boss's men beat a resident who is blocking a construction project. They keep at it until he signs. The boss watches an edited recording of his meeting with Hye-ri, in which he appears to refuse her, and praises his own acting.

At a police station, officers log a gun and a mobile phone as evidence. Kim has stayed silent all night, so a captain orders his fingerprints run. In a car, men open a trunk to a body that reeks of blood. The fingerprint search demands an access approval code, then denies access. Kim's confiscated phone lights up with a call from the contact saved as My daughter, and the episode ends on the words "Is that you, Min-ji?"

Up next: Agent Kim Reactivated Episode 3 Recap. See every episode in the Agent Kim Reactivated episode guide.