The Auditors – K-drama Episode 2 Recap & Review

Episode 2

Episode 2 of The Auditors begins with Shin Cha-il meeting Vice President Hwang and telling him that all those involved in the corruption which resulted in the tower collapse will be punished.

Later, Han-soo comes into the office to find that Bae Young-sik has disappeared from the hospital room, making him even more suspicious. Meanwhile, it’s revealed that neither the laptop is with Shin Cha-il nor has the managing director received it.

After dropping Shin Cha-il’s wrecked car off for repair, Cha-il and Han-soo visit the crane driver, Choi. Choi reiterates how he has been lucky with the accident and how helpful Bae has been. However, Cha-il believes that he’s lying.

After leaving Cha-il, Han-soo makes his way to Bae’s daughter’s residence to find any trace of Bae Young-sik. However, it turns out that his daughter has no clue about what’s going on with her father and becomes extremely worried about his well-being.

Later, when Han-soo returns home, he retrieves Bae’s laptop from a locker. It’s revealed that he had used a taser to retrieve the laptop from a gang member and that the laptop has been with him all along. At home, since Han-soo wanted to become a white-hat hacker, he easily opens the laptop by hacking the password. There he finds evidence of corruption in the low-quality and dangerous tower crane. He goes back to the office to quietly leave the laptop for Cha-il to see the next morning, but Hwang gets hold of the laptop and leaves.

Han-soo calls Shin Cha-il and tells him about the laptop in Hwang’s possession, and Cha-il follows Hwang’s car into an abandoned warehouse where Hwang sets fire to the laptop, destroying it.

The next day, Shin Cha-il investigates the CCTV cameras at the construction site and the dashcam of Bae’s car. He then makes his way to the hospital to look at CCTV footage, where he meets President Se-woong. Se-woong leads him to a room where his elder brother has been hospitalized. He explains that once his brother fell ill, he took over as president, and their half-brother Hwang Dae-woong became the vice president.

Unlike the two brothers, Dae-woong is violent and corrupt, and the family intends to fire him once the eldest brother returns to his position as president of the company.

Elsewhere, we find that Hwang Dae-woong has a good relationship with the managing director and lets him embezzle money since the managing director helped him as a child, especially since he’s the illegitimate child.

Elsewhere, Shin Cha-il asks his team to give him the address of a different worker, An Byeong-jin. Han-soo immediately leaves for the address and enters the house to find the food deteriorating, signifying that An had never come back home in days. He also meets Cha-il at the residence.

Yoon Seo-jin informs Cha-il about a discrepancy she’d found. She had tracked Bae’s speeding tickets on the day of the accident. She finds that on the day of the accident, Bae spent five hours transporting driver Choi to the hospital, which is disproportionate to the time it actually takes to reach the hospital. Shin Cha-il follows the path Bae had taken, and Cha-il and Han-soo come across a lake.

Cha-il assumes that Bae might have either buried or dropped An’s body into the lake and later had driver Choi fill in his shoes, which accounts for the excessive time it took him to reach the hospital. He is about to call the police when Han-soo barely manages to persuade him to check a clinic across the lake, emphasizing that Bae is not a criminal. And sure enough, they find Bae along with a heavily injured An, who was the original crane driver in the accident.

Han-soo is able to calm a distraught Bae by telling him that his daughter is waiting for him to come back and that he’s going to be a grandfather. This makes Bae reveal the actual events of the accident.

An was the original driver of the tower crane, and while transporting him to the hospital, Bae found that he was not breathing. He called the managing director, who told him to dispose of the body to hide their corruption. However, Bae, being a kind-hearted man despite his participation in the embezzlement, decided to hide An in the clinic when he found that An was still alive. He then asked Choi to fill in because An had taken Choi’s place at the time of the accident, and that’s how they made Choi the driver.

Shin Cha-il relays all of this to the president in the presence of the managing director and Vice President Hwang and calls for a special audit meeting with the major stakeholders present. The stakes are high because if Cha-il fails to provide evidence behind his claims, it would impact the president’s reputation. Meanwhile, Han-soo realizes that Shin Cha-il has been right all along and begins to respect and follow him.

On the day of the special audit, the CEO of Myung Tower, the company that supplies JU Construction with the crane tower, is supposed to testify against the managing director, but he backs out. Shin Cha-il knew that it was a trap and had asked Han-soo to look for the dashcam footage. Han-soo has found from Bae that Bae had dropped all the evidence into driver Choi’s trash can the day of the accident.

Han-soo scoured the trash can and luckily found the video recording of the managing director admitting to his corruption and asking Bae to dispose of An’s body. The managing director is finally caught and handed to the police for criminal investigation, while Vice President Hwang is penalized with an apology and a pay cut for aiding the corruption.

It’s revealed that Hwang and Yoon Seo-jin know each other and share a good relationship, while Han-soo’s departmental transfer has been put on hold as Shin Cha-il recognizes his efforts to change and accepts his apology. The episode ends with the audit team encountering a rally of protesters outside the company building.

The Episode Review

An entertaining episode, although certain details are quite idiotic. For instance, Han-soo deciding to keep a highly important piece of evidence in the office rather than giving it directly to Shin Cha-il is quite illogical, even for a naïve character like Han-soo, since he’d been present when the thugs arrived to take the laptop and was certainly aware of its importance.

Other than this, there’s another shocking reveal that Vice President Hwang and Yoon Seo-jin know each other. What their relationship is, we are still in the dark about, but this little detail definitely makes the show complex and interesting.

The show will clearly be focusing on Han-soo’s character growth under Shin Cha-il’s guidance, and we can already feel them becoming great partners with Han-soo supporting Cha-il.