Buried Hearts: Episodes 9-10 » Dramabeans Korean drama recaps

KDramaHQ AdminMarch 24, 2025

Buried Hearts: Episodes 9-10

by mistyisles

This week is all about secrets. Nearly everybody has one (at least), some leverage them for profit, and a select few are secrets themselves. But the thing about secrets is that they tend to find a way out into the open sooner or later — and that can cause all kinds of trouble for pretty much everyone.

EPISODES 9-10

Last week, we left off with Il-do finding that the head mercenary has beaten him to the task of attacking Dong-joo. This week, we back up to see that that’s not quite how it went down. When Il-do arrives at the hospital, his own son, HEO TAE-YOON (Yoon Sang-hyun), is sitting at Dong-joo’s bedside, wondering out loud why Il-do only pretended to call an ambulance. If the EMTs had been dispatched immediately, instead of a few minutes later when Tae-yoon called to check on their progress, Dong-joo might be in better shape.

Stricken, Il-do hides in the bathroom until Tae-yoon leaves. He briefly contemplates suicide, but ultimately vows to take control of Daesan for both his own sake and Tae-yoon’s. Then he returns and finds Dong-joo fighting for his life. After watching for a few supercharged moments, Il-do intervenes… on Dong-joo’s behalf. He even hides in Dong-joo’s bed so the doctors won’t notice anything amiss while Dong-joo ~~tortures~~ questions the mercenary in the bathroom.

That’s one crisis averted, but Jang-sun has ordered two murders tonight: Dong-joo and Eun-nam. Fortunately, though, preventing one provides the key to stopping the other. Eun-nam lures her assassin into the open and simply holds out her phone — on the other end of the line, Dong-joo makes the head mercenary order his man to stand down. Then Eun-nam waits inside until Dong-joo arrives, and he takes out the man hiding in the back of her car.

Jang-sun gets the news directly from Dong-joo himself, who savors letting Jang-sun slowly realize just how many of his men Dong-joo has neutralized in one fell swoop. In response, Jang-sun plans to kill Eun-nam as soon as she gets home. But Eun-nam, one step ahead, brings Hee-chul with her as a buffer. And that’s not all — not only has Dong-joo collected all of the cell phones, he’s also won the favor of Jang-sun’s Elder. Oh, and he’s in Jang-sun’s house. Jang-sun sits and stews while the Elder explains that Dong-joo will be handling their finances (e.g., that slush fund) from now on, so Jang-sun had better play nice. Once the conversation ends, Dong-joo adds that this is only a temporary ceasefire — he’s still plotting his revenge.

All this makes for quite the eventful night. But elsewhere, Chairman Cha has had an eventful night of his own. While talking on the phone, he wanders barefoot out of the yard and down the street. By the time he hangs up, he has no idea where he is or how to get home. Eventually, he settles onto a bench at the bus stop, and that’s where Sun-woo finds him.

Although Sun-woo doesn’t know Chairman Cha is his father, he does recognize the odd little man who likes to sit in the bakery and watch him work. So he offers him a pair of shoes and a ride home, unaware that he’s about to spend the next few hours or so driving in circles while Chairman Cha gleefully shouts “Turn right!” over and over. Sun-woo has to threaten to drop him off at the police station for Chairman Cha to finally direct him to the right house, at which point Sun-woo shakes his head in disbelief. He’d planned to come here anyway, to drop off some cookies for Dong-joo, whom he hasn’t seen since the yacht incident.

Chairman Cha’s family are relieved to have him back home safe, but stunned speechless when he introduces Sun-woo as his son and wants to bring him inside. Those who know it’s not just the dementia talking glower while Sun-woo brushes it off (he’s such a good kid and honestly deserves to stay far, far away from this mess of a family).

Regardless, though, Eun-nam’s mother, CHA DEOK-HEE (Kim Jung-nan), isn’t taking any chances of Sun-woo getting Tae-yoon’s inheritance. She marches over to the bakery the very next day to threaten Sun-woo’s mother. If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll keep Sun-woo out of the Dae-san orbit, no matter what people like Dong-joo try to tell her.

Right on cue, Dong-joo arrives just as Deok-hee leaves. He’s back to normal — memories and all — and tells Sun-woo’s mother that they need to bring Sun-woo back into the fold as well, before it’s too late. And the best way to do that? For her to step into the role of Chairman Cha’s wife. She hesitates, but agrees to let Dong-joo tell Sun-woo the truth. We don’t see the conversation, just the aftermath as Sun-woo struggles to process what he’s just learned.

Naturally, Dong-joo returning in full force means another confrontation between him and Il-do. Dong-joo denies knowingly saving the man who tried to shoot him, but a flashback tells us he did remember the shooting at the moment he jumped into the water. He hesitated, but chose to save Il-do and use him for revenge.

And so the curtain on Dong-joo’s plans is finally pulled back for us. All this time, he, Won-bae, and hacker MYUNG TAE-GEUM (Gong Ji-ho) have been gathering intel on Jang-sun and the Elder. While a few setbacks were unplanned — namely Agnes’s death and the cinnamon — Dong-joo has successfully predicted most of his enemies’ movements and maneuvered them to his liking. Personally, I’d have liked to see more of this throughout, but better late than never.

In the process, he’s learned about the “Dandelion” team: a top-secret national security unit that surveilled the rich and powerful and kept records of their corruption. Their files on Jang-sun will give Dong-joo plenty of information to carry out his revenge. The Dandelion team have long since been disbanded, but we’ve actually already met some of them — they’re the mercenary group Jang-sun hired to get rid of Dong-joo. They claim not to know where the files are now, so Dong-joo sows discord between them and leaves them in a cell to think it over.

Somehow, alongside all of that, Dong-joo also finds time to uncover his own birth secret. Turns out, he and Agnes didn’t share the same birth father (they didn’t have the same mother, either, but Dong-joo already knew that part). He’s even more startled to recognize the polaroid in the pocket of his childhood clothes — the same photo that Il-do had on his phone — and to realize he’s the child in the photo. But most startling of all? When he shows the photo to Eun-nam, and she eagerly identifies the man holding little Dong-joo as her birth father.

Based on the information he has, I can’t fault Dong-joo for jumping straight to oh no, I’ve committed incest, but I’ll be surprised if that’s actually the case. The woman little Dong-joo called “mom” in the flashback wasn’t Deok-hee for one thing, and the hints other people involved in the photo have dropped imply that there’s a lot more to the story we still have yet to see. But what is clear is that Dong-joo was born into some aspect of the Daesan family circle.

I don’t really have strong feelings about the future of Dong-joo and Eun-nam’s relationship either way (I’m much more concerned about Sun-woo’s wellbeing than anything else at this point), but I was pleasantly surprised by Hee-chul’s apparent change of heart. His father seems to be one of the few halfway decent people in this family tree, so maybe there’s hope for Hee-chul to also escape the toxicity once he and Eun-nam divorce. Assuming they go through with it, of course, because I have a feeling it won’t be nearly as easy as it sounds — especially with Jang-sun still scheming to get his money, with or without control of that slush fund.