Queen of Tears Episode 12 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Kim Soo-hyun as Baek Hyun-woo
Kim Ji-won as Hong Hae-in
Park Sung-hoon as Yoon Eun-sung
Kwak Dong-yeon as Hong Soo-cheol
Lee Joo-bin as Cheon Da-hye
Kim Kap-soo as Hong Man-dae
Lee Mi-sook as Moh Seul-hee
Jung Jin-young as Hong Beom-jun
Jeon Bae-soo as Baek Du-gwan
Hwang Young-hee as Jeon Bong-ae
Kim Shin-rok as Hyeon-suk (special appearance)
Kim Young-min as Kim Yeong-song
Kim Joo-ryoung as Grace Ko

Before the episode card, Hong Hae-in calls for a stop: she recognizes a truck. She saw it the day her grandfather suddenly wanted the ventilators replaced and sent the family out. If it carried his secret fund, she reasons, the money should be at home.

Episode 11's ending, in the rain, then runs again. Baek Hyun-woo leaves Hae-in under cover while he fetches the car, and she greets the driver who pulls up as Hyun-woo. As they drive, still believing she is with him, she wants to call the police because three men attacked him last time; the driver tells her to wait.

The wrong car

Then Hae-in sees who is driving: Yoon Eun-sung. He mocks her for taking him for Hyun-woo. Hyun-woo catches up and calls for her, and Eun-sung suggests she spare him the shock and say they had plans. She opens the door and tells a relieved Hyun-woo that Eun-sung invited her home and she wants to see her grandfather. Eun-sung declines to include Hyun-woo, so she asks him to pick her up later.

Elsewhere, a man turns up where Cheon Da-hye is living (she later calls him Jun-ho) and says he meant to kill her once he found her. He calls Hong Geon-u by the name he chose, Dong-u; Da-hye insists the boy is Geon-u. The man boasts that Hong Soo-cheol will soon be arrested. He set Soo-cheol up to take the blame for crimes he committed as a finance director, and tipped off a prosecutor before leaving Korea.

In Yongdu-ri, Baek Du-gwan cannot reach his son. He and his wife, Jeon Bong-ae, wonder whether they are too relaxed about a divorced couple staying out together, then decide nobody can stop Hyun-woo now. Du-gwan is told to quit calling.

Hyun-woo's phone shows his father's missed calls, but he is in no position to answer. He comes to demanding what has been done to him. His captor, the real estate broker Pyeon Seong-uk, offers to light a briquette to keep him warm while he sleeps.

Dinner at the Hong house

At the Hong house, Eun-sung insists Hae-in change and eat before she sees her grandfather. He fusses over steak, a yuzu salad the staff say is her favorite, and wine. Pyeon calls to say Mr. Baek is taken care of and asks for his money and plane ticket. Eun-sung tells him to lie low and powers off the phone.

At the table, Hae-in refuses to eat and says the house no longer feels like home. Eun-sung wants to correct a misunderstanding. She once accused him of pushing her into a ditch so he could play the rescuer. Now he shows her something that was hers long ago and says he is the one who saved her from drowning, before they ever met.

That night in Yongdu-ri, Bong-ae cannot sleep and is paging through old albums when a guest asks to join her. Bong-ae boasts that young Hyun-woo boxed, swam, went to a children's Marine Corps camp and once saved a child from drowning. The guest pauses on one photo: the beach looks familiar.

Back at dinner, Eun-sung says he was there to see his mother and fell for Hae-in first. He kept quiet because his mother had left him at an orphanage to guard her secret. Eating with her at this table was always his wish.

Hae-in goes in to her grandfather, Hong Man-dae, and asks whether he knows her. Outside, Moh Seul-hee is furious that Eun-sung let her in. Seul-hee asks what a dying woman hopes to dig up. Hae-in reminds her that the power of attorney lasts only while he lives, so she trusts Seul-hee to keep him well. She adds that her family has grown close thanks to Seul-hee, though she is not grateful.

Then Hae-in gets lost in her family's house and cannot find the main gate. Hyun-woo reaches her, hurt again. Unsure it is him, she asks whether he got beaten up. He scoffs that he could take three men at once, and she settles it: "Seeing how arrogant you are, you must be Hyun-woo."

How Hyun-woo walked out

A flashback shows how he got there. Hyun-woo tells Pyeon to check that his employer will keep the promise. Pyeon's earlier call replays from his end, and when he redials Eun-sung, the number is unavailable. Hyun-woo lays out the sums: as a real estate scammer, Pyeon faces about three years, maybe probation if the landowners settle. Killing him would mean attempted murder, an Interpol Red Notice and at least 20 years. Later, when a voice asks whether he simply let Hyun-woo go, Pyeon demands to be paid now or he will tell the police who hired him.

Hyun-woo takes Hae-in to the place he has rented since the divorce, where he has been sleeping on the sofa. She needles him that he must sleep well now that his dream of divorce came true. Not at all, he says: she is not there, and he has caught himself picturing them living here as newlyweds. She says she is hungry, and he cooks her stew.

Over the meal she asks whether he will cook for another woman after she dies. Nobody would want him, he says, since everyone thinks she saved him out of love and blames him for not knowing and for leaving her. She lists his virtues and says that if she were reborn a hundred times, she would marry him every time.

Elsewhere, Seul-hee tells Eun-sung that Hae-in is only using him. He says his mother used him too. She hints at the fates of those who hurt him: adoptive parents who never drank but died drink-driving, and an orphanage director killed in a fire. She asks whether those were coincidences. She will let nobody, Hae-in included, stand in the way of making everything his.

At the apartment, Hyun-woo blames his injuries on a minor car accident and asks about the visit. It replays with more: her grandfather calls her lady. Hae-in leaves him a recording pen he had engraved for her when she became CEO, so he can record anything he wants to say. Only the two of them know about the pen, she tells Hyun-woo.

At the house, Seul-hee berates Man-dae for hiding the fund. She tells him Hae-in has a rare brain tumor and will die soon. That he cannot even grasp it, she says, serves him right.

At the boxing gym, Soo-cheol asks Baek Hyeon-tae why nobody ever sees his wife. When they married, Hyeon-tae explains, his mother told her a daughter-in-law is not a daughter. She hits her own daughter, Baek Mi-seon, and could never do that to someone else's child, so they would keep a polite distance. Her one condition was to try to fix her flawed son but never send him back. Soo-cheol sulks at the bragging.

The man with Da-hye accuses her of taking the Hongs' art and a golden Buddha statue. She denies the statue until he goes near Geon-u. Then she says it is in a private safe and they will go in the morning.

The ring at sunset

In the morning, Hae-in says she likes Hyun-woo's place. Elsewhere, someone has worked out that Hyun-woo slipped into the Hong house the night before through the back gate. Its camera was broken, but a dashcam caught him. Grace Ko complains that he is putting her in a bind with Seul-hee. He says he is close to the fund, and agrees when she asks for 3 percent, then 5.

Seul-hee fires Grace for siding with the Hongs again. Grace claims Hyun-woo offered her 10 percent and haggles Seul-hee for a cut of her own. She also reveals that Hyun-woo thinks the money is in this house.

In Yongdu-ri, a woman spots men photographing from behind a wall and preens. Then she hears they have been coming by in a black van, and she confronts them in her dung-stained heels. At the gym, Soo-cheol longs to join a new village patrol, the Yongdu-ri Quintet. Du-gwan begs off because he has just left office, and Kim Yeong-song cannot leave his mother. Five members are needed for funding, so Soo-cheol is in without trying.

Hyun-woo drives Hae-in to a lookout where, he says, every confession of love has worked. When she asks whether he will confess, he says it is a request instead: "A divorce withdrawal." Remarrying would be too much to ask. He has a ring in her size; she tells him to get a refund. She did say she would marry him every time, he reminds her. Only if reborn, she answers.

Then she explains. Last night she followed Eun-sung because she thought he was Hyun-woo, forgot where she was and failed to recognize Hyun-woo himself. She reminds him she once said they should not stay together if her illness worsened, and the time has come early. In the warm light she asks, "Are you even really Baek Hyun-woo?" She cannot tell what is real, so she cannot promise anything, and she apologizes.

As night falls in Yongdu-ri, Yeong-song's mother is missing. Someone calls out directions to the Fairy Peak, where she is found. Afterward the helper envies Yeong-song: the helper's own father is sick, and their last words to him were a promise to see him at his funeral. Yeong-song says his mother fled his abusive father when he was small, and he took her out of a nursing home when dementia set in. Everyone carries heavy stones in their pockets, he says, so there is no need for envy or self-blame.

The search for a secret room

The truck has been traced from a warehouse in Gyeonggi Province to the Hong house in Hanil-dong. The family doubt it: at 600 million won per apple crate, the fund would fill 1,500 crates and need about 100 pyeong. The floor plans show nothing. Hae-in recalls her grandfather offering her his air-raid shelter if war broke out, and others remember talk of a secret room nobody has found. At the Hong house, Seul-hee, apparently, scoffs at Grace's tip; she would have known.

That night the patrol, down to a trio, watches a taxi drop someone with a suitcase. It is Da-hye, returning the money minus travel costs and an apartment in the U.S. she promises to recover. Hae-in's mother, Kim Seon-hwa, orders her and the child out. Soo-cheol answers that this is not even their house, and that Geon-u is his son. He cut the cord, sang the lullabies, and heard him say Dad before Mom.

Alone, Da-hye says she came to return everything and to warn him that Jun-ho plans to make him the scapegoat. She married to live off a rich fool, she admits, and never expected his kindness. Ashamed, she says she cannot live with him. Soo-cheol says he will never let her or his son leave again. Soon after, village women gossip about her midnight arrival with the Buddha's head, which has given one woman's husband, Park Chun-sik, sleep paralysis.

Hae-in tries on the ring by herself. Hyun-woo returns, says he pushed too hard and will return it today, then sees it on her finger. She was studying the trends, she says, and she likes it, but he must not read anything into it. He decides to leave it where it was so she can keep studying.

The designer's son

The hunt turns to the house's designer, who has died. His son, who runs the firm now, has no plan and has stopped answering. A second visitor goes along, and the son greets that visitor as the lifesaver who rescued his building in Pangyo. The plans show no air pipes for a shelter, someone notes, but the chairman's elevator to the basement was specially built with a second door at the back, which might lead to the hidden room. Then word comes that the chairman has had no rehabilitation or memory training since going home and no new appointment for medication. That is grounds to report the confinement and enter with the police at first light.

That night Seul-hee finds Man-dae lucid. He calls the house a living hell and his punishment, and she realizes he has stopped taking the pills she gave him. He asks whether this was always her motive. She asks whether he thought she truly loved him. She offers to let him see his children if he gives up the fund, and screams at him to tell her where it is.

In the morning, Hyun-woo and the family arrive to find emergency crews; the officer he contacted has not even come yet. An official at the scene reports that Hong Man-dae, 80, appears to have died of a cervical spine fracture and will go to Daemang Hospital. Someone begs for CPR. One of his children pleads with Hong Beom-jun to do something because the hands are still warm, but the crew takes him away.

A news bulletin follows. The former chairman, who started as a shoeshine boy, has died at 80, and the power of attorney held by his partner, Moh Seul-hee, is now void. Later, someone announces that his fortune passes under his notarized will, effective at once, and orders the listener to pack up. The reply asks for one last tour of the house he loved.

The album conversation replays, and this time it carries into a memory. There is shouting, and someone calls for Hae-in and asks why she went in. Seon-hwa cries for her son, Hong Su-wan, Hae-in's late brother.

Thoughts

The episode stacks up rescue stories around the water. Eun-sung says he saved Hae-in from drowning, Bong-ae's album says Hyun-woo once pulled a child out, and the final flashback apparently puts Hae-in in the water on a day Seon-hwa is crying for Su-wan. The show is clearly not done with this, and I trust the album more than a man who lays out steak, salad and wine for a woman who came only to see her grandfather.

The sunset scene is the heart of it. Hae-in's refusal is not coldness: she followed the wrong man and then had to identify the right one by how cocky he sounded. Her question about whether he is really Baek Hyun-woo hurts more than any villain's scheme so far, and her trend analysis of the ring is the perfect release valve. Soo-cheol's speech about the cord and the lullabies is his best moment yet.

Man-dae's death changes the board. Seul-hee loses the power of attorney, the notarized will now decides everything, and the elevator door is still unopened. I want to know what the recording pen caught during his last lucid stretch.

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