Buried Hearts: Episodes 11-12 » Dramabeans

KDramaHQ AdminMarch 31, 2025

Buried Hearts: Episodes 11-12

by mistyisles

Reeling from last week’s revelation, our protagonist goes on a quest to discover the truth about his past. The question is, can he trust the answers he finds? And who’s really holding all the cards here?

EPISODES 11-12

Upon learning that he and Eun-nam might share a biological father, Dong-joo’s first instinct is to bury the knowledge. He confirms that Secretary Gong knows everything, but swears her to secrecy. Though he does accept the book and postcard his supposed father, YEO SOON-HO (Joo Sang-wook), left in her care, he rips it up as soon as he reads it, unwilling to dig any deeper into his family history.

That is, until he talks to Eun-nam again. Even as a child, she suspected that Sung Hyun (er, Sung-hyun — his mother’s surname was Chu) was her half-brother, and since Dong-joo hasn’t told her he’s Sung-hyun, she believes both he and his mother died in the car crash with her father. She also shares the horrifying conversation she overheard that night when her mother and Secretary Gong thought she was asleep: Deok-hee confirmed that Il-do deliberately caused the “accident.” As an adult, Eun-nam has tried to investigate the wreck, but all records were scrubbed from news outlets.

Suddenly, Dong-joo feels a burning need to uncover the whole truth. Between business meetings, helping integrate Sun-woo into the family (more on that in a bit), and trading metaphor-wrapped threats with Jang-sun, he enlists his investigative team to help hunt for any surviving evidence of Il-do’s crime.

Finally, Won-bae comes across a single article in a newspaper small enough to have escaped Daesan’s PR team. It only lists surnames, but identifies four victims of the crash: Sung-hyun and his parents, both of whom died, and Il-do, who sustained severe injuries and spent weeks in the hospital afterward. A few nightmares later, Dong-joo calls Yi-hyun and requests another hypnotherapy session. This time, we get the full story — half from Dong-joo’s memories, and half from Il-do’s.

That night, Il-do had followed Sung-hyun’s family back from a gathering of their college friend group. A truck had come up from behind, passed Il-do, and rammed Soon-ho’s car into the guardrail. Then the truck driver gave Il-do a DNA report confirming Sung-hyun’s relation to Soon-ho and ordered him to finish the job. While little Sung-hyun looked him dead in the eyes and begged for help, Il-do smashed his car into theirs, sending both cars careening over the edge. In the aftermath, both Il-do and Sung-hyun emerged alive, but Il-do convinced himself he’d hallucinated Sung-hyun standing over him.

Dong-joo is all too happy to set the record straight. Once again, he confronts Il-do in his office, shutting down Il-do’s lie that the truck knocked both cars off the incline that night. Dong-joo does, however, agree to keep the truth from Eun-nam. In fact, he straight-up lies to her, using the newspaper article to “prove” that Il-do was also a victim and helping her convince herself she misheard her mother. I’m not sure how he plans to keep dodging the marriage question now that she and Hee-chul are officially divorcing (even Chairman Cha is rooting for Dong-joo to become his grandson-in-law now), but — spoiler alert — it doesn’t matter in the end, and at least this way Eun-nam is spared the fauxcest angst. (For now, at least. There are still four episodes left…)

See, the DNA report Il-do received mid-murder isn’t the only earth-shattering file floating around. Remember the Dandelion files Dong-joo needs to pin corruption charges on Jang-sun? Yang-chun finally gets desperate enough to spill their location. But when Dong-joo and Won-bae arrive, they find the safes empty. And by the time they return Yang-chun to his cell, Jang-sun’s minions have broken in and slit the other hostage’s wrists. Fortunately, they somehow missed the book he’d hidden under his pillow, with a diagram in the back depicted the exact spot where he buried the files.

It takes a while for hacker Tae-geum to run transcripts of the cassette tapes, but once she does, she sends Dong-joo copies of Jang-sun’s plans — and a very different DNA report to the one Il-do saw. Dong-joo isn’t Soon-ho’s son; he’s Il-do’s. And Jang-sun knew all along. In the recordings, Jang-sun reveled in the delicious tragedy of Il-do unknowingly killing his own son alongside the woman he always loved and the man he was jealous of for no reason. Now, Jang-sun procures a gun for Il-do and watches gleefully as Il-do and Dong-joo agree to meet in a remote location. Only after Il-do shoots Dong-joo does Jang-sun tell Il-do that Dong-joo is biologically his. And Dong-joo? He smiles up at Il-do and taunts, “Keep shooting, Father.”

That, of course, is where the episode ends, but there’s still the matter of Sun-woo and his mother. Personally, I still think they’d be better off running that bakery, but apparently they disagree. The plan for Chairman Cha to marry Sun-woo’s mother and legally adopt Sun-woo proceeds. Dong-joo has enough leverage on most of the family to twist their arms so they’ll support the marriage, leaving only Deok-hee and Tae-yoon to protest. Poor Tae-yoon knows his vote holds zero weight anyway, and no one even bats an eye in his direction — he may be a male heir, but his surname isn’t Cha, so by the chairman’s standards he doesn’t count.

Sun-woo is either oblivious to the tension or willfully ignoring it. He soaks in everything anyone is willing to teach him about running Daesan and happily embraces his new family members. Up to now, Jang-sun has been secretly meeting with Sun-woo’s mother, and when the wedding day arrives, we finally see what Jang-sun is up to. He’s not trying to stop the marriage — just to ingratiate himself with those holding the most power.

Chairman Cha suffers another bout of memory loss right before the ceremony, suddenly convinced he’s about to marry a complete stranger. Jang-sun swoops in and pulls Sun-woo into the car with him to jog Chairman Cha’s memory. Just like that, Chairman Cha remembers he’s getting married for his son’s sake, and Jang-sun gets to look like a hero to everyone — especially Sun-woo. For once, I’m impressed. Jang-sun should stick to charming his way into power and leave the murder plots to Il-do.

I can’t help thinking that what Buried Hearts suffers from the most is a misplaced focus. All the time spent on *tense confrontations* between Dong-joo and Jang-sun/Il-do and murder attempts that don’t work could have been put to better use following Dong-joo and his little team as they work in the background to uncover a massive corruption ring involving the richest, most powerful people in the country. Even the birth secret could have been more compelling if we’d gotten to know more about Il-do and Soon-ho’s activist friend group prior to this.

With that said, though, I’m still enjoying watching this show, if only because it’s wildly entertaining to see what it’s going to throw at us next. How many more failed murders and Kopiko PPL segments can it squeeze in? What else is in those Dandelion files? How long before Tae-yoon overhears all the family secrets, and will he embrace Dong-joo as his half-brother or decide their father had the right idea after all? And will we ever find out why Won-bae was on the run from the cops before Dong-joo washed up on that beach?