Agent Kim Reactivated Episode 5 Recap

A lost child on moving day

Years earlier, Manager Kim moves into a new home with a young Kim Min-ji while his friends haul the boxes. The friends grumble about the missing elevator and trade insults over who carries the heavy loads, and Sung Han-soo, a taekwondo athlete, insists his sport is not about strength. Outside, neighbourhood children invite Min-ji, the new girl, to the playground. While the men wrestle with the fridge, Kim realizes she is gone.

Kim and his friends split up and comb the streets, calling her name and showing her picture to strangers. At the Jeilwon Senior Welfare Center, a worker checks whether anyone is left inside and locks up for the night. Back at the house, a neighbour scolds Kim for not watching her. Then Min-ji runs up shouting for her daddy. She hid during hide-and-seek, she explains, could not get the door open and never cried. The student who walks her home says she gave directions by landmarks: a fish-shaped bun stand, a post box and a red house. Kim tells her never to go off on her own again, and she apologizes.

Kim closes in on the cold storage

In the present, at Myeongpo Port, Golden Teeth, the gang boss, hears pounding inside the cold storage warehouse. The girl his crew took for dead is alive. He orders her to stay where she is. Then he takes a call from a subordinate, Seok-jung, who is on his way with reinforcements, and sends him to the office. Two of his men, Sang-man and Gang-min, are not picking up.

The reason is Kim. Face to face with him, Kim Sang-man demands to know whether Ju Gang-chan sent him or whether he is a police officer. Kim wants one answer only: where Min-ji is. Sang-man says she is frozen in the cold storage. The crew merely moved her after Gang-chan's daughter phoned them, he claims, because she was already dead. Kim promises that if Min-ji really is dead, he will kill every one of them.

Elsewhere, Park Jin-cheol, who surrendered to the Special Missions Directorate (SMD), lectures his guards on the firing rates of the MG42 and M249 machine guns. Two of the agents who kept watch on Kim talk over him. The dry cleaner says life was simpler when he only ironed clothes. The other is Jung Sang-a, Kim's colleague at Sangsaeng Savings Bank. They recall Kim as the easiest man to push around and were never sure he was really 66. Then word comes that the SMD director has been found, and every unit pulls out except the headquarters escort. Jin-cheol declares his lesson over and tells the rest to go home.

Seok-jung reaches the office and reports that Sang-man seems dead and Gang-min is missing. Golden Teeth wonders aloud whether Gang-chan is behind it, decides it is too soon for that, and orders everyone to the cold storage warehouse. Kim has already grabbed Gang-min, who begs for his life and swears he only did as he was told. Kim makes him lead the way to the warehouse and tells him he can die afterward.

Downstream, Han-soo drags the SMD director, Kang Guk-cheol, codenamed Mole Cricket, out of the water and complains that the man cannot swim. Jin-cheol is waiting on the bank. He read the wind, the current and the terrain, he explains, to work out the one spot where Han-soo could come ashore, and sent his SMD guards home safely. He hands Han-soo a health drink. The two head for Myeongpo Port, splitting up so the agents cannot follow them both.

At the port, Gang-min's gang mates catch up with Kim and his captive, and Kim fights his way through them. At the cold storage, Golden Teeth tries to strike a deal with Min-ji through the door: he will let her go if she stays quiet. She refuses. She knows he killed the security guard, she tells him, and that he will kill her the moment she comes out. He settles in to wait for her to freeze.

Park Gang Seong's grudge

As Gang-min points Kim toward the warehouse, Park Gang Seong steps out and taunts Kim that he will never see his daughter again. The two men fight. Gang Seong says Kim has gone soft and demands that he fight the way he did when he killed his brother. On the road, Ju Gang-chan's party is 20 minutes out, and Chief Nam is sent ahead. When Gang Seong says his brother was Number 66, Kim recognizes him. He remembers the boy left behind at the orphanage the day Park Yeong Gwang was driven away, and tells Gang Seong he did not kill his brother.

A flashback returns to the training camp in the North. One boy hands his food to the other out of pity, saying he must keep losing because he does not eat enough. The other accepts, replying that friends have no use for pride. On the eve of an operation, Yeong Gwang, then Number 66, says they have been promised a house and their families if they succeed. Kim scoffs that he cannot even remember his own name, and Yeong Gwang reminds him it is Kim. After months of beatings, he says, he forgot his own name but never his friend's surname. He asks Kim, his only friend, not to forget him. Kim answers that he could hardly forget his rival, calling himself Number 73 and Yeong Gwang the lesser 66.

On the mission, Kim finds Yeong Gwang with a leg gone and begs him to get out. Yeong Gwang refuses to move. Kim says he would rather pull the trigger than be taken prisoner and will not let Yeong Gwang die alone: they will die together. Yeong Gwang reminds him that they survived that hell for one reason, to live, and makes him promise to survive whatever happens. Moments later, someone orders Kim to drop his gun and put his hands on his head.

Min-ji refuses to freeze

In the freezer, Min-ji remembers shouting at her father for kneeling before Ju Hye-ri's powerful father. She asked whether he had any pride and why he ever had her. She also remembers a message from him afterward. In it, he apologizes for shaming her and says a parent's pride means nothing next to a child: "Min-ji, you're my pride." She vows that she will not die and will make it home.

In pouring rain, Golden Teeth finds Gang-min badly hurt. Gang-min manages to say a man claiming to be the girl's father did it, which Golden Teeth cannot make sense of. At the cold storage, Golden Teeth opens the door and calls Min-ji out of hiding. She makes noises to draw him in while he taunts her about her little tricks and offers once more to let her go. When he goes in, she hits him and runs, with him shouting after her.

Back at the port, Gang Seong calls Kim a traitor to the regime and refuses to believe him. Kim replies that Gang Seong can think what he likes, but all of them were thrown away. A flashback shows an interrogator in the South telling a captured Kim that his talent is too valuable to waste, since he is probably the only fighter from the North who can match Jin-cheol. The interrogator reveals that the unit was bait. Their bureau's second-in-command leaked the infiltration to get rid of Director General Ro Tae Sik and take his post. That man was Ri Eung Ryeong.

Kim passes on Yeong Gwang's last words to him: stay alive, no matter what. Gang Seong recognizes the same words his brother shouted to him from the departing car at the orphanage. He tells Kim to stay alive too: "Leave the past behind… and live as Min-ji's dad."

A message in the cold storage

Kim reaches the cold storage and finds it empty. He finds only a message from Min-ji saying she is sorry and scared, and he realizes she is alive. He runs through the storm-soaked port, shouting her name.

On the riverbank, SMD agents find Guk-cheol. They report that Kim is at Myeongpo Port and Han-soo was already gone. Jin-cheol, after surrendering, slipped away during transport. The director explodes at them. An agent hands over his wallet, found by the roadside without his cash or cards, and a payment of 1,673,000 won has gone through on his account. At Deokjeon Service Area, Jin-cheol phones Han-soo on a phone he took from an SMD agent. He chatters about germanium bracelets, huge red snow crabs and the combat rations he has stocked up on, and Han-soo asks how he can eat at a time like this.

At the cold storage, his men find Golden Teeth, and he sends them after the girl. Then Gang-chan's men arrive and seize him. One of them passes on the chairman's final orders: Golden Teeth is to take the blame for killing the girl. Golden Teeth asks whether he dies too. When they ask where the body is, he mocks them. There is no body, he says, because the girl is still alive. The men rush off to find her, leaving one behind to finish up with Golden Teeth.

Min-ji runs for the highway

On a road out of the port, Min-ji waves down a passing car and begs the driver to stop. Moments later, Kim reaches the spot, shouting her name. He phones Sang-a, gives her the location on National Highway 87 and asks her to pull the camera footage from ten minutes earlier. Finding Min-ji is the only way any of this ends, he says, and asks her to call once she has tracked Min-ji.

At the SMD, the director refuses to trust Kim. One agent argues that Kim is chasing his daughter, not running, and that he is a man of his word who will surrender once he finds her. Others back the point. The director concludes the daughter is Kim's weakness. He orders his agents to find Min-ji and take her hostage first, which stuns the room. The footage shows Codename 66 entering Myeongpo Port at 23:01 and Min-ji on the road at 23:45, and the agents identify the car she climbed into.

Inside that car, Min-ji thanks the driver for the ride. Gang-chan's men report by phone that they still cannot find the girl and are headed to the villa, where Nam will join them. In that car, as the rain stops, Gang-chan asks an aide he calls Jung whether he knows what hojae means. Gang-chan explains it means an unexpected advantage, or good material. Gang-chan says the night proves Hye-ri is blessed with good fortune, and adds, "She just delivered herself right to us."

Up next: Agent Kim Reactivated Episode 6 Recap. See every episode in the Agent Kim Reactivated episode guide.