Teach You a Lesson Episode 7 Recap

Gyu-cheol's apology and a father's plea

At the juvenile prison, the wounded inmate's cut is deep, while Min Ji-ung is unhurt and kept apart from his attacker. The injured man is Cho Gyu-cheol, the student convicted of killing Choi Ga-yun. Weeping, he tells Na Hwa-jin that Ga-yun alone among adults cared about him and that his guilt torments him daily. He apologizes again and again.

Afterward, Minister of Education Choi Gang-seok reminds Hwa-jin that he warned him about meeting Gyu-cheol inside, and about a rage that never leaves either of them. Only a psychopath would have felt nothing, he says, and Hwa-jin had to choose between being Ga-yun's fiancé and being an inspector of the Educational Rights Protection Bureau (ERPB). Gang-seok tells him he did well. When Gang-seok suggests a drink, Hwa-jin says time with his father-in-law is not high on his list, and Gang-seok tells him to get out and walk.

At work, Gang-seok hears updates on the hunt for hidden drug pills, new mandatory urine tests in middle schools, and the trace on an online gambling site and its loan sharks. Gambling, he tells his staff, is as serious as drugs. Then a man pushes past security, begging for his attention. Stammering, he spreads out research on gambling harm, complaints, medical records and a journal kept by his son, Lee Jae-yun. Gang-seok sits him down, and the man admits his son is not blameless.

His story plays out in flashback. At a sales meeting, Jae-yun's father takes a call from a man demanding he pay his son's debt. At home, Jae-yun claims he only plays games, but he owes 85 million won. The parents pay, and over dinner they tell him he cannot make the same mistake twice. Soon gambling-site bonus offers fill his phone, his father catches him betting again, and his mother begs her husband not to hit him. Someone hands Jae-yun a phone to use only for webtoons, the online comics.

Collectors later confront the father in front of his colleagues, and he resigns because he needs the redundancy money. Back in the present, he tells Gang-seok he has tried a psychiatrist, medication, a shaman and the police, who said blocked sites simply reappear. Then he shows a note from Jae-yun, who has run away, and says he does not know whether his son is alive. Gang-seok tells him he needs to explain nothing more.

Geun-dae goes undercover at Nakwon High

At Nakwon High School, Deputy Director Bong Geun-dae poses as a transfer student. He sits in front of Ji Seong-bin, whom the teacher asks for any word of Jae-yun. The class bets on phones, and one student wins a million won. Meanwhile, Gang-seok's staff report that teenagers do much of the labor in online gambling and that over half of those arrested in recent raids were minors. Indebted children, they add, often turn to crime or run away. Gang-seok cites the proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" and vows to drag in any ministry that will not help.

Seong-bin treats his friends to dinner on his winnings. Geun-dae, who says he came from Guun High, asks whether the game is really gambling. The boys insist it is just a game played with sign-up bonuses. Using Seong-bin's referral code, they register Geun-dae for a 50,000-won bonus and start him on an odd-or-even bet, which he wins.

The team lays out the method: recruiters like Seong-bin lure players with easy money, freeze out anyone who refuses and call it a game so it sounds harmless. The plan is for Geun-dae to lose, though he argues that basic statistics say he should not. He plays through the night, winning at first, until his balance runs dry.

By morning, he has lost a million won of his own. Seong-bin pitches the Martingale strategy, doubling the stake after each loss, and connects him with a lender who asks for his parents' phone number as insurance. Of the million borrowed, only 800,000 arrives after a 20 percent cut. Interest compounds at 3 percent a day, enough to pass 48 million won within a year. Geun-dae breaks down in tears, and the team consoles him: being deep in debt is exactly the point, because the collectors will now come for him.

Bait outside Nakwon High

The collector calls the number given for Geun-dae's parents, and Inspector Im Han-rim answers. She snaps that she is not Bong's mother, then plays the part. Told her son owes 20 million won, she refuses to keep paying and tells the caller to do what he likes. The team's plan is to follow the money: whoever comes to collect should lead them to the people at the top.

Outside Nakwon High, Geun-dae waits as bait while Han-rim watches from a van. A tteokbokki stall, selling spicy rice cakes, distracts her, and she loses sight of him. Men order Geun-dae and other students to hand over their unlocked phones, and Geun-dae says his has fallen onto the road. Han-rim's calls go unanswered. A collector says the debt must now be worked off. He sends one boy to fetch cash from an ice-cream parlor and threatens to kill another who begs to be spared.

Hwa-jin has the van's plates run and its route checked on security cameras, and says he will go to traffic control himself. Han-rim blames herself for losing Geun-dae over tteokbokki. Hwa-jin calls her to attention as Sergeant Im Han-rim: a soldier can make up for a mistake, he tells her, but quitting now would mean failure. She pulls herself together.

At the gang's base, the boss has the new boy put to work. The gang takes Geun-dae's bag and orders him to text every number on a long list. He spots Jae-yun among the captive teenagers, but Jae-yun hushes him because cameras are watching. After the messages go out, traffic spikes and the gang's Cambodian server starts lagging. Caught dozing, Geun-dae offers to fix it with a reverse proxy relay. The boss lets him try, threatening to gouge out his eyes if it fails; it works, and the gang feeds him.

A message in the banner

At the bureau, the van turns out to be registered under a fake name, and cameras lost it at the Susaek intersection. Geun-dae's phone has been recovered but stays locked. The team hauls in Seong-bin, who swears he only encouraged others to play, and makes him show them the gang's site. Its VIP banner blinks slower than the others. Geun-dae has hidden Morse code in it, spelling out a location: Musangol Mansin Aegi.

The name leads Hwa-jin and Han-rim to an empty shrine. Guessing that Geun-dae saw it from another building, they move on. At the gang's base, Han-rim storms in shouting for Geun-dae and describes him to the gang as tall, smart-looking and rather cute, with small, sparkling eyes. Hwa-jin warns her not to let her emotions take over and reminds her they are not there to kill. She fights through the gang's men until Geun-dae calls out, and she finds him unhurt.

Told that the boss is upstairs, Hwa-jin leaves Han-rim with Geun-dae and the others. He takes down the gang's fighters and catches the boss as he flees. Noting that the man likes games, Hwa-jin offers him rock, paper, scissors: a win buys his freedom, a loss earns a smack. The boss loses round after round until he pleads that he will lose whatever he does. Hwa-jin lists the boss's crimes: costing children their friends, their families and the joy of school, and breaking their parents' hearts.

The real victims

The team finds Jae-yun, who begs for help and is told he is safe now. Afterward, Geun-dae tells Han-rim how scared he was: she promised to watch over him, and a gang member held a knife to his eye. Han-rim apologizes and vows to protect him forever, then narrows it to forever at work. Geun-dae fixes on her description of him and protests that, statistically, his eyes are of average size, until she tells him they are big.

Jae-yun's father returns to give thanks. He admits he never knew his son had been kidnapped and beaten, and that he had blamed the boy for the gambling. He is told he is a good father who never gave up, and that the bureau now stands with him. When he fears a relapse, he is urged to keep believing in Jae-yun.

Pressed to tell Jae-yun himself, Seong-bin confesses that he gave him up, got him hooked in the first place and used the phone to lure him back after he quit. Jae-yun is furious; they have been friends since elementary school. Seong-bin says the gang threatened him and his parents, and Hwa-jin tells him he faces expulsion or suspension and criminal charges. Seong-bin protests that he is a victim of adult criminals too. Hwa-jin describes the parents: a father beaten in front of his colleagues, a mother washing dishes after her husband quit work to watch their son, and a father brushed off by the police and the bureau who never stopped trying. "The real victims here are your parents," he says, and this is their last chance.

The boys are put to hard work scrubbing and told that money comes from honest labor. By the bureau's count, they now owe their parents more than 98 million won. Instead of phones, they get pagers and a reminder of what the old number codes mean. When they ask for their phones back just for calls, they are told, "Never trust the promise of a gambler."

Han-rim, who says she is the reason Geun-dae's phone broke, takes him to buy a new one and tells him to choose the latest model. He admires a fast new handset, but a flip phone is requested instead. Geun-dae insists he has stopped gambling and is not addicted.

Gang-seok and Gi-tae share a table

Opposition leader Hwang Gi-tae is campaigning at a restaurant to chants of his name. A news report says Gang-seok has passed 50 percent approval, 17 percent ahead of Gi-tae, and asks whether he will run for president. Gang-seok, who says he is a regular at the same restaurant, invites Gi-tae to join him, and the two men share a table. Gi-tae says the talk in Congress is that Gang-seok is using his daughter's murder to run for president.

Gang-seok replies that Gi-tae's own party is holding an emergency meeting that day without him, perhaps to find a new candidate given his low ratings. Gi-tae, enraged, says he is heading there now and insists he is the party's leader. Then an aide tells him a visitor is waiting with important information about the ERPB.

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