Vagabond – Season 1 Episode 3 Recap & Review

The Lone Gunman

Chock full of action-packed drama, Vagabond returns this week with another explosive episode, this time revealing some crucial clues over the crash while both Cha and Go begin working together to take down those in charge.

Pouring acid over his laptop, a masked figure is told to go home while Go continues to listen to the black box recording, closing her eyes and imagining being inside the cockpit as the camera shakes violently around.

Cha then heads inside a convenience store to get some food, only to be cornered by a gunman who arrives with a machine gun and immediately starts shooting the place up. However, some quick thinking allows him to thwart the gunman after a makeshift fireball blasts him inside. Unfortunately, Ho-Sik is shot in the chaos but they do manage to speed away.

Go finds a break in the case too as she realizes the malfunction times for the plane are identical to that of the ones spoken on the cryptic phone conversation she uncovered. After informing Cha of her findings over the phone, she’s attacked by a masked assassin before holding him up at gunpoint. She tells him to remove his mask and in doing so, reveals the hotel worker Cha said was involved in the scandal. On his knees, he tells her that he was paid 10,000 euros to kill her, prompting her to grab his gun from him. Unfortunately it’s enough of a distraction for the man to slip away while Ho-Sik staggers out the hospital, hurrying away with Cha in hot pursuit.

Cornering him with Go, they ask Kim who he’s working for but instead of giving up any information, he decides to kill himself, telling her that the people in charge are terrifying with his final breath. It’s here a sniper on a roof nearby makes his move and shoots at them as they slip behind the jeep. Determined to get away unscathed, Go and Cha work together to outsmart the gunman, giving themselves four seconds to get out of his firing line. It’s tense stuff and as we see the cross-hair pointing at them both, the gunman lines his shot up and prepares to fire. However, shady officials get there first and manage to take him away, leaving Go and Cha with little to show for their heroics as they head up to the roof and find him gone.

In the aftermath of the attack, Go phones Joo-Cheol and tells him about the evidence she’s found, including the details surrounding the black box. Upon hearing the news, he relays the information on to the others before putting Go on loudspeaker and telling them what she’s found. Cha tells her she can return alone but, deciding he needs to come back too, goes on to tell him that there’s clearly someone higher up pulling the strings and he should be there to help catch them.

Back at her apartment, Go talks to Cha about his feisty attitude before they dance around the idea of attraction to one another. She takes offense to his words and tells him she’ll stay up longer, only to see her snoring on the sofa several scenes later. As she awakens, she finds him gone but as she sneaks around the apartment to find him, she opens a door to find Cha crying and grieving. Deciding to leave him be, Go shuts the door and heads back to bed.

The next day, Cha and Go arrive at the airport, finally deciding to both head home together while someone watches them on the security cameras. Meanwhile the sniper is brought before an army General whom he tries to plead with. Unfortunately his words get him nowhere, instead seeing his mouth taped up and forced to watch as the army man picks up his gun and shoots him.

Thanks to an earlier altercation with Jessica at her estate, the Minister is forced to drop the terrorist case as the video footage has gone missing. The missing footage causes a rift to grow between the various officers too, as they all start blaming each other. However, in the shadows Lily, the self-proclaimed “Angel Of Death”, is recruited to take out Cha and as Cha and Go touch down following a pretty eventful flight home, she puts her plan into motion.

Cha and Go make their way into arrivals where they immediately run into trouble as a man looks set to hit Cha with an electric blast from his ring. With Lily watching on from afar, to her surprise Cha sees his reflection in Go’s glasses and spins round at the last second. Grabbing his arm and twisting it down, Cha pins the man down and demands to know who he is, leaving the episode hanging in the balance.

Between the end segment and the cat-and-mouse fight with the sniper early on, Vagabond’s latest episode keeps things consistently entertaining throughout the hour of drama. With more of the conspiracy uncovered and Cha and Go finally working on the same page, Vagabond leaves things wide open for tomorrow’s episode.

There’s plenty to chew through here too and although the series continues to rely a little too heavily on its shaky camera movements during action sequences, there’s enough excitement to look past that for the most part. Still, there’s plenty of questions left hanging over this one and right now Vagabond looks like it’s set to be one of the most action-packed Korean dramas of the year.