The End of The Beginning
Episode 12 of L.U.C.A.: The Beginning starts with Mr Plot Armour himself arriving and trying to take down Ji-O. Yi-Son rasps that he’s going to kill Ji-O’s daughter and has nothing else to live for. With no reason to stay alive, Ji-O grabs Yi-Son and throws him into the fence. Finally, mercifully, he’s now dead. Attorney Jung heads back to the church and examines the devastation. Jung-A is beside herself with anger but Jung keeps a straight face and tells her they’ll clean up this mess. While they argue, Ji-O shows up and asks for Jung’s help. Given she’s from the government, he agrees to comply in exchange for finding Goo-Reum. Jung-A is against this plan, calling him a crossbreed, as Ji-O looks set to use his electric powers. He eventually kills Jung-A, squeezing her neck and letting his electric powers do the work. On the back of this, Jung decides to turn the church into a research facility. The cultists are gone, seemingly scattered after the death of Jung-A, and leaving Jung and co. to have full reign over this operation. While Joong-Kwon does his best to keep Ji-O by his side, Goo-Reum meanwhile ditches her baby on the rooftop and leaves a note asking Yoo-Cheol to look after her for the time being. Cradling the baby, he takes off. While he does, Goo-Reum helps herself to a burner phone (despite just phoning Yoo-Chool on her normal phone) and rings through to Yoo-Cheol, asking him to phone the number from Cheol-Soo’s business card. Only, upon doing so he gets an unknown number. He feeds this back to Goo-Ruem, letting her know that the number is from a burner. Eventually the pair meet up on the rooftop. They both sit at their laptops and notice some irregularities in Cheol-Soo’s phone records. It seems to be a breakthrough, and they both cling to this and work to come up with a solution. They get a ping on a parking lot and Goo-Reum goes searching. Eventually she notices Cheol-Soo heading into the building and races after him. She heads up the stairs and immediately rings the fire alarm. This brings Cheol-Soo out of hiding as Goo-Reum blindsides him and begins beating the man down. He ties him up and questions the man over why he killed her parents. As he admits everything, she reveals that she’s been recording this whole conversation. Cheol-Soo scoffs at the threat, claiming that there’s corruption everywhere and she won’t win. Goo-Reum however, decides to use this to her advantage and phones Yoo-Cheol, letting him know that she’s captured the boss. Despite his goons doing their best to stop her, Goo-Reum takes off with Cheol-Soo in her car. Unfortunately they’re blindsided that evening. Despite Yoo-Cheol’s valiant efforts to fight them off, he’s inevitably killed while Cheol-Soo manages to free himself from his binds. At the same time, Goo-Reum takes off with her child. This cuts us back to the opening moments from episode 1 as Goo-Reum charges up the abandoned building with her baby. She tries her best to control its electric powers but it’s no good. Across the way from her happens to be Cheol-Soo, who brandishes a sniper and prepares to fire. Goo-Reum drops her baby down the hole, allowing it to cocoon itself in a big bubble of electric energy. Ji-O arrives at the scene and chokes out one of the guards. As they ask him to stop, they stand around and watch as Ji-O and Goo-Reum reconcile. He asks where their daughter is but Goo-Reum lies, claiming she’s gone far away. As they talk, Goo-Reum realizes that a sniper is pointed at Ji-O and sacrifices herself to save him. Ji-O does his best to try and resuscitate her but it’s no good. Ji-O inexplicably uses his electric powers to rush out the building and shrugs off bullets from Cheol-Soo. He eventually kills the boss man, taking off with Goo-Reum on his back. Unfortunately it’s too late and she passes away. In the morning, a worker finds the baby on the ground. Time passes and as the baby grows up, it’s revealed that that’s not the only one. It seems Joong-Kwon was successful in creating his cloned babies. Ji-O looks over them all and steps up to Jung and Joong-Kwon, looking like Neo from The Matrix. Electric currents reign down as the babies begin to awaken. Will we get a sequel? Will people tune in to watch? Who knows.
The Episode Review
L.U.C.A The Beginning feels like a Netflix K-drama. Of course, I don’t mean that to sound disrespectful but the way this has been built up lends itself nicely to 2 or more seasons to flesh everything out. As it stands though, this k-drama has been chock full of botched characters, illogical decisions and some glaring plot holes. All of this adds up to a promising sci-fi premise that’s squandered its own potential and ended with a whimper rather than a roar. Goo-Reum’s sacrifice at the end is perhaps an obvious one, and dropping the baby to make sure it doesn’t experience memory loss any more takes the hard work out of Joong-Kwon and Ji-A’s experiments too. Meanwhile, Ji-O decides to embrace the idea of being a new creation and teams up with the bad guys to make brand new clones. Cheol-Soo meets a timely demise while Jung-A and the cultists just sort of fade away in favour of this new mysterious government represented by Jung. These guys have just sort of shown up without ever really getting involved in the plot. It also doesn’t help that the show has really messed up with its plotting and pacing, delivering some contrived character decisions and killing off some characters (like Yoo-na) without much development while others (Yi-Son) are kept around for far too long. On the whole though this has not been a show to remember. A shame for sure, but L.U.C.A. is unlikely to bring the much-needed spark to Korean sci-fi.
