Hye-Suk’s Sacrifice
Episode 13 of Bulgasal: Immortal Souls returns to Sang-Un stabbing Hwal with a pair of scissors. She’s desperate for the truth but Hwal’s memories are fractured and obviously different to Sang-Un’s interpretation. When Hwal returns to his family, Eul-Tae’s words about him killing everyone echo in his mind. He immediately turns his attention to Hye-Suk, claiming she’s to blame for putting them in danger.
Unfortunately, his language denotes that she’s not part of their family, so she packs up her things and decides to leave. However, Do-Yun and Si-Ho do their best to stop this from happening.
Meanwhile, Detective Kwon urges Hwal to let him try and find Eul-Tae. With his contacts, he can stay undetected and track him down without endangering the family. The thing is, Eul-Tae is smart and he uses the talents of Min-Su, a deranged killer, to go after Sang-Un.
Back at the house, Si-Ho speaks to Sang-Un and urges her not to get her memories back regarding her past. The thing is, they keep coming. Through the episode we see glimmers of flashes, including a potential love between Sang-Un and Hwal’s past selves and a child too.
With these fractured memories not making much sense, Kwon continues to play a process of elimination, knocking out Eul-Tae’s mansion and different properties in his name. Unfortunately the final one he arrives at happens to hold Min-Su, who menacingly clutches a shovel on his approach. The monster doesn’t strike though, but does tell him that Eul-tae isn’t there. Kwon can tell he’s not himself based on his mannerisms and confirms as much to Captain Han in the car soon after. To avoid a nasty altercation, he decides to leave.
However, drama at the family’s house sees Hye-Suk understandably cold and standoffish with Hwal. They’re all interrupted by police arriving in their numbers, surrounding the place and needing to talk. Apparently the various monster deaths have been called in as murders and they have a search warrant for the premises. Not only that, they also have orders to arrest both Hwal and Sang-Un. They were tipped off by someone… who’s obviously Eul-Tae. It’s clear his plan here is to divide and conquer, separating everyone out so he can strike.
With Hwal and Sang-Un on the run, we learn that the real targets here were actually Do-Yun, Hye-Suk and Si-Ho. The police are under orders from their higher ups, which leads them back to Eul-Tae. Captain Ham is unaware of this but he too is taken as collateral damage.Thankfully Kwon rings him first and warns the officer that he’s messing with dangerous people. The voice of Min-Su in the background is enough for Kwon to get a good sense of exactly where they are and scrambles up to find them.
As all the pieces begin moving into place, Eul-Tae rings Sang-Un and reveals that he’s doing all of of this to show who Hwal really is. Only, when she passes the phone to Hwal, his words fall on deaf ears as Eul-Tae hangs up.
Eul-Tae has bigger fish to fry right now, turning to Min-Su and offering up Si-Ho as prey to bring in Sang-Un. Unfortunately this doesn’t go well for them, with Hye-Suk fatally wounded in the ensuing skirmish.
As she passes away, Hwal eventually shows up and finds Kwon knocked out in the room too. Do-Yun and Si-ho are captured by Min-Su who takes them away from Eul-Tae’s hideout. However, Hwal and Sang-Un notice Hye-Suk lying dead on the floor and are crushed. Hwal turns his rage against Captain Han but before he kills the man, Sang-Un jumps in and urges him not to give up his promise of killing humans.
The Episode Review
After a relatively slow start, Bulgasal roars into life during the second half with a pretty dramatic and shocking climax. The death of Hye-Suk is difficult to stomach, and even more so when you realize it comes off the back off Hwal being horrible to her all day.
While some could argue that he doesn’t care about her death and is only angry about her shaman abilities being lost, the little tear that almost formed in his eye seems to be evidence that Hwal is moved by her death.
Either way though, Eul-Tae’s plan has grown more sinister and with Si-Ho and Do-Yun’s lives hanging in the balance, big question marks remains over exactly who is going to make it out of this in one piece.
The whole similarity thing between Eul-Tae and Hwal does feel a bit contrived, mostly because the two are so different and I’m just not getting the vibes about the pair being intrinsically linked with their motivations. Likewise, the romance between Hwal and Sang-Un has felt pretty labored and it feels forced. Thankfully, we don’t get a whole lot of that here.
However, the show does manage to keep us guessing right the way through regarding the origin of these three characters so we’ll have to wait and see where that leads next. For now, everything is left on a precarious knife edge ready for tomorrow’s follow-up!
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Episode Rating
(4)