Episode 2
Episode 2 of Undercover High School begins with Hae-seong getting caught while exploring the old building on campus. It is none other than Su-a who is pointing a gun at him. He soon realises she was on patrol and is holding a tear gas gun. He manages to deflect her and run away.
Later, Hae-seong narrates the incident to Seok-ho while Su-a relates it to her mother. As they head home, we see that both of their houses are next to each other.
At school, the three bullies (including a boy named Park Tae-soo) give Hae-seong a video game on a phone and order him to get it to the final level. Yoo-jung meets Hae-seong on the roof and warns him to stay wary of Tae-soo.
In the staff room, Vice Principal Baek punishes Su-a with menial work because she let the intruder leave. Meanwhile, Seo Myeong-ju learns about the intruder. Her right-hand man, school principal Park Jae-moon, tells her that a video jammer was used to interrupt the CCTV footage. She tells him to let the intruder come back and see what he does.
Even the teachers discuss the old building. Su-a’s colleague, Min-ji mentions spooky stories about a ballet studio in the basement. Just then, the vice principal comes by and Su-a drops her drink on him, infuriating him further.
Class resumes and Su-a notices that Dong-min isn’t present. Tae-soo says he fell sick but Hae-seong knows something is off. He later spies Jae-moon going into the old building and follows but the security guard pulls him away, complaining about how much of a fuss the owners make of the building.
Hae-seong calls his team and relays the information. He then hears a noise from a nearby dustbin and finds Dong-min tied up inside. He lets him out and Dong-min asks him not to tell the teachers because that would make it worse. Su-a comes by them and calls Hae-seong into her office.
She asks him if he’s bullying Dong-min. She suddenly thinks his eyes look like the intruder’s and tries to check but he dodges her and she falls. Back at the NIS, the team sees a news report of Seo Myung-ju’s plan to launch an Edu-City Project which costs about 800 million, the same value as the hidden gold bars.
At the student council meeting, Yoo-jung tries to stand up to Tae-soo when he brags about tying Dong-min up. He reminds her that she was nobody till Ye-na (who is Myeong-ju’s daughter) decided to be her friend.
But Ye-na agrees with Yoo-jung and threatens Tae-soo’s father’s position (he’s an assemblyman and Myeong-ju has the power to select or not select him) to apologise to Yoo-jung. However, she later tells Yoo-jung not to speak out like that again and leave that to her.
Meanwhile, Seo Myung-ju tells Principal Park Jae-moon to add a special class of students with more perks than before. When he says people are complaining about the treatment of the top 10%, she tells him to add more divisions among the students to pit them against one another.
At lunch break, Hae-seong sits with Dong-min when he claims to know spooky stories about the old building. He says there was a ballet student being bullied by her classmates.
One day, she was running from them and got into an accident which took her legs. Unable to dance anymore, she hung herself. The bullies hid her body and since then, her ghost haunts the basement.
Dong-min says he’s seen the ghost and shows Hae-seong a video showing a figure in the ballet studio. In the video, he notices a digital lock on one of the doors. Before Dong-min can move on to the next story, Tae-soo and his troops come by and start bullying Dong-min again.
This time, Hae-seong can’t stop himself from standing up to Tae-soo. Tae-soo picks a fight but, of course, Hae-seong gets the better of him.
Su-a arrives and calls them both to the counselling office. The vice principal brings Tae-soo out and Su-a enters and questions Hae-seong. Hae-seong wonders if she is knowingly turning a blind eye to Tae-soo or if Tae-soo’s that good an actor. He asks if she really cares about her students.
The words stick with Su-a, who ends up drinking at her mother’s diner again. At the NIS office, Seok-ho is just telling his colleagues about how he trusts Hae-seong to carry out the mission when Director Kim turns up with a video of Hae-seong punching Tae-soo.
We then see Tae-soo with an older man who says that Tae-soo owes him money. If he doesn’t have cash, the man says Tae-soo can get him a few ID cards as payment as well. Elsewhere, Hae-seong and Seok-ho meet with Director Kim, who tells both of them off.
He also makes a comment about how Hae-seong followed his father’s footsteps in the NIS and how he shouldn’t do anything to make him ashamed. A flashback shows little Hae-seong with his father. We see his father leave for a job the night before Hae-seong’s birthday.
Elsewhere, Tae-soo turns up at Dong-min’s house and makes up an excuse to his grandmother, asking for her ID. Dong-min is at his part time job delivering food when he sees Hae-seong sneaking into the school.
He catches up with him and assumes that Hae-seong is testing the ghost story. He enters the building despite Hae-seong’s protests. They hear noises coming from the ballet studio and see a man in a hat nailing one of the floorboards. He realises he has company and runs away.
Hae-seong then goes to the locked door and uses the device that Seok-ho had given him to break in. Inside, he finds a room with lots of books and papers on a wall detailing an investigation. He calls Seok-ho and tells him that it looks like Myeong-ju is also looking for the gold bars.
Meanwhile, Dong-min lifts the floorboard the man was working on and sees a dead body underneath. Elsewhere, Myeong-ju sees Hae-seong in her room through a hidden camera.
The Episode Review
Undercover High School Episode 2 isn’t quite as lighthearted as the previous one. It dives a bit further into the bullying storyline of the show, offering a look at how teachers often turn a blind eye. In light of his own experiences in the past, the scene where Hae-seong questions Su-a about it feels like a poignant one.
We also get a glimpse into Hae-seong’s childhood with his father, played affably by Oh Eui-sik. There’s trauma here for sure, even if we are only getting hints of it right now.
Overall, the episode leans more towards the serious and the somber but there is enough going on to keep viewers invested. There is a markedly lower amount of comedy but a few moments hit the right notes, like the scene where Seok-ho proudly claims to trust Hae-seong only be confronted by the video of him punching Tae-soo.
The ghost story is an odd but quirky addition to the episode and the final reveal of the dead body is bound to stir things up and take this momentum further.
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