Reborn Rich: Episodes 12-14
by mistyisles
As we inch closer to the original timeline, a heavy loss slams our cast of characters, making them more desperate than ever to maintain what power they own and grab as much of each other’s as possible.
EPISODES 12-14 WEECAP
The board meeting when Chairman Jin plans to catch his attempted murderer off-guard is fast approaching, but Chairman Jin’s condition is getting worse. The car wreck exacerbated the malformations in his brain, causing unpredictable bouts of delirium that can’t be treated with medication without risking fatal side effects.
Chairman Jin, stubborn as ever, insists on going anyway, and it falls to Do-joon and Chairman Jin’s faithful secretary Hang-jae to explain that he’s not mentally fit to do so. Case in point, he’s suited up and ready to go, but it’s 9 p.m., not a.m., and he’s completely forgotten his trousers. It’s a tough scene to watch — they’re devastated and he’s embarrassed and confused — but it’s only a glimpse of what’s to come.
When the board meeting arrives, the first vote is on whether to establish Soonyang Financial Holdings at all. Do-joon secures a yes vote by pressuring Sung-joon with the revelation that Chairman Jin is awake and watching to see who acts against his wishes.
Next up is electing the finance company CEO, and it’s between Do-joon and Hang-jae (the latter being a throwaway nomination by Chairman Jin so as to make Do-joon the obvious choice). But Sung-joon had his own reason for letting Do-joon sway his initial vote. Appealing to the older board members, he points out that appointing a CEO as young as Do-joon will result in the whole company skewing younger with its hiring decisions, meaning they’ll all age out very quickly. His recommendation? Someone who shares their wisdom and experience — his own father, of course.
But just as the votes are being tallied, Chairman Jin makes his grand entrance after all. Against his doctor’s better judgment, he insisted on taking medication that would keep the bouts of delirium at bay for just a couple of hours. With Chairman Jin staring them down, everyone quickly throws their votes back to Do-joon instead of Young-ki.
After the meeting, Sung-joon tests Chairman Jin with a trivia question, clearly hoping to prove Chairman Jin isn’t in his right mind. Chairman Jin’s memory wavers in the middle of answering, and Do-joon quickly steps in to brush off the question and usher him away.
When they’re alone in the elevator (aside from a janitor), Chairman Jin explodes in anger and embarrassment that only gets worse when he loses control of his bladder. He freezes in mortification. Do-joon upends the janitor’s water bucket before she can see what’s happened and stoops down to clean the floor himself. It’s impossible to deny that Do-joon is the only person who actually cares about him, and Chairman Jin ultimately decides to alter his will while he still can.
Meanwhile, the investigation into who commissioned the Truck of Doom continues. Hyun-min produces proof that the painting given to the truck driver as compensation wasn’t the one Sung-joon took from her gallery, but rather a forgery. Chairman Jin’s underlings and Do-joon trace the counterfeit painting to its origin: Chairman Jin’s wife, who refused to see the company handed off to her stepson’s family instead of her own children.
Do-joon doesn’t tell Chairman Jin, but he figures it out on his own anyway. When Chairman Jin confronts Grandma, however, she discovers the truth about his mental state, and she uses that to her advantage. She takes him back home, where she can restrict access to him, and prepares to reveal his condition to the family and overturn Do-joon’s appointment as CEO. Do-joon, still one step ahead, challenges her with the proof that she ordered the murder attempt. If she reveals Chairman Jin’s secret, he’ll reveal hers.
Making that deal, however, means he has to lie to Min-young. And as she uncovers the truth herself, it becomes glaringly obvious that Do-joon is actively trying to hide it from her. Yes, he’s afraid of what could happen to Min-young if she becomes too much of a threat to the family, but he’s also bent on securing the CEO position for himself, and her investigation could ruin those plans.
The more he asks her to hold off on investigating, the more her disappointment in him grows. He swears he’ll stop asking for favors once he becomes CEO, but she doesn’t buy it. Eventually, she seems to give up on him entirely.
In the meantime, Do-joon needs to pass one more round of votes from Soonyang shareholders to be installed as CEO of the finance company. To establish himself, he sets about saving Soonyang Motors, which even Chairman Jin is all but ready to deem a total failure. And in true Do-joon fashion, he uses the 2002 World Cup to accomplish his goal.
To save Soonyang Motors, he needs the new Apollo compact car to sell like crazy. So he crafts a marketing campaign that associates those cars with feelings of hope and victory as the South Korean team unexpectedly advances all the way to the semi-finals. By the end of it, Apollo sales have skyrocketed into world-record territory.
But while Do-joon is en route to share the good news, Chairman Jin collapses — and he doesn’t recover. He does, however, cling to life while his will is read to the family. Only after Do-joon visits and quietly tells him the World Cup results (proving his predictions right once again) does Chairman Jin pass, as though he’d been waiting for that last confirmation.
As for the will’s contents, no one person is given total control of Soonyang’s assets. Instead, the shares are divvied up between them, and even Do-joon’s brother gets a plot of land. But Do-joon? He gets nothing at all.
No one is more shocked and confused than Do-joon himself, except perhaps Yoon-ki. He urges Do-joon to use the CCTV footage from Chairman Jin’s hospital room to prove Chairman Jin wasn’t in his right mind and annul the new will. Do-joon, disappointed that Yoon-ki isn’t so different from the rest of the family after all, and unwilling to expose Chairman Jin’s vulnerable moments, immediately asks Hang-jae to delete all the hospital footage.
But that comes back to bite him at the shareholders’ meeting. He’s accused of upsetting Chairman Jin in his final moments and giving him a fatal shock, which only the now-deleted footage could prove false. And then Hang-jae of all people lands the final blow by revealing that Do-joon expressly told him to delete the footage.
Do-joon is disqualified from the CEO position, but he’s not defeated. He convinces Chang-je, who’s now running for president, to campaign against the bill that allows Soonyang Financial Holdings to be formed in the first place. The bill and the finance company are struck down… and along with them, Chairman Jin’s reputation, as the whole country can see he tried to use loopholes to avoid hefty inheritance taxes.
Then, and only then, does Do-joon earn Chairman Jin’s final gift to him: a video from the day he altered his will. In it, he explains that he wants to push Do-joon to the point of desperation, because he knows Do-joon can and will do whatever it takes to win so long as his personal feelings don’t get in the way. Thus, Do-joon is only to receive this video once he’s thrown Chairman Jin himself under the bus to beat out the rest of the family.
Chairman Jin’s mind falters again near the end of the video, just as Hang-jae asks who Do-joon is to him. After a moment’s pause, Chairman Jin starts to cry and says simply that Do-joon is his grandson who takes after him, eventually smiling at the camera through his tears. It’s such a beautiful, cathartic moment, and Do-joon breaks down in sobs.
But there’s another gift waiting for him attached to this one: the very slush fund that got him killed when he (as Hyun-woo) went to retrieve it back in Episode 1. No one else in the family knows it exists, but it’s his for the taking. Exactly what he’ll do with it remains to be seen.
With Soonyang Financial Holdings scrapped, the fight for ownership of Soonyang becomes a scramble to gather the most shares. Dong-ki and Young-ki forge an alliance, but Dong-ki secretly plans to separate and start his own finance group through which to accumulate power and wealth. To do that, he needs a credit card company, and Do-joon just so happens to have one he’s looking to sell (he acquired it as part of the Apollo/World Cup campaign). Dong-ki can’t afford the price he names, so Do-joon oh-so-generously accepts Dong-ki’s 2% shares in Soonyang Corporation as collateral.
Of course, Do-joon knows that credit card debt in South Korea is about to hit a massive crisis. As debts and interest rates pile up, Soonyang Card runs out of cash and Dong-ki’s last-ditch effort to save it is to stop ATM cash-advance services, prompting (even more) customer outcry.
Young-ki takes it on himself to bail his brother and the company out, which means paying Dong-ki’s debt to Do-joon and getting those shares back. Do-joon charges him twice the original amount, both of them fully aware that those 2% shares make Young-ki the majority shareholder of Soonyang Corporation.
As the dust settles, so to speak, Do-joon reflects on the first time he lived through this debt crisis as Hyun-woo. His brother had fallen ill, and when his father had taken out a private loan to cover the hospital bills, Hyun-woo had started working night and day, running himself into the ground. In this life, Do-joon walks the same streets as Hyun-woo, but the presence or lack of generational wealth places them in completely different worlds.
You know, when Reborn Rich first started, if you’d told me I’d end up shedding tears at Chairman Jin’s passing, I doubt I’d have believed you. But if there’s one thing this week’s episodes made abundantly clear, it’s that the central relationship of this show — and its lifeblood — is the one between Do-joon and Chairman Jin.
As Hyun-woo, our protagonist looked up to Chairman Jin as an intangible source of inspiration. Like a celebrity or a long-dead historical figure. As Do-joon, he battled him first as an opponent and then an all-out enemy, but over time came to understand, respect, and even love him as a (grand)father figure. Their relationship has been as complex as Chairman Jin himself, and I’m curious to see how it will continue to drive Do-joon’s actions now that Chairman Jin is gone and we’re catching up to Hyun-woo’s time at Soonyang.
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Source: Buzz Pinay Daily
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