W-Two Worlds Apart

episode 1



In a live telecast of the 2004 Athens Olympics, announcers herald a new dark horse from South Korea, who's about to come out of nowhere and potentially win a gold medal in pistol-shooting. The seventeen-year-old shooter is competing in his very first international competition, and the sportscasters introduce him as KANG CHUL (Lee Jong-seok). [His name literally means "steel."]

He leads the first eight rounds and makes a critical mistake in the ninth, leaving him in second place before his final shot. As he steadies his nerves and prepares for the last round, we zoom into the TV screen as it flickers, and it's like we go through it and come out on the other side, in the richly colored arena.

Kang Chul takes his time making the final shot, and with only a second to spare, he fires. His coach (and father) is breathless as they wait for the results... and it's a bulls-eye!

Kang Chul picks Dad up and whirls him around in a victory cheer. Dad cries like a baby and Kang Chul mugs for the cameras as they announce his gold medal win.

The TV screen flickers again and shoots ahead to the 2006 World Cup, which Kang Chul's family-Mom, Dad, little brother and sister-watch in their living room. The shelves are lined with Kang Chul's trophies, and when they hear the front door open, Mom calls out, "Chulie, is that you?"

But when she gets to the door, she looks up in terror. Dad hears a thud and goes looking for Mom, and finds her lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Dad looks just as terrified when the intruder, a dark figure in black gloves and black boots, points what looks like Kang Chul's sports pistol right at him.

The shooter mercilessly guns down Dad, then the little brother, and the little sister, all four of them shot right in the center of the forehead like a twisted bulls-eye.

They miss the winning goal of the game, and the cheering crowd on the television is a stark contrast to the bloody scene. The TV flickers again, and we fast-forward two days, as a news anchor announces the arrest of the prime suspect in a brutal domestic shooting: Olympic gold medalist Kang Chul. What?

Chul looks terrified as he's hauled into the police station amidst a sea of reporters, and the news anchor continues to narrate the facts of the investigation as we see the points unfold: The shooter dumped the murder weapon in an alley near the house, and it was later found by the police and confirmed to be Chul's Olympic sports pistol. Naturally, the only DNA evidence on it was Chul's own, and the blood of his four family members.

Newscasters speculate on possible motives for beloved athlete Kang Chul to murder his own family, and they say that when Chul quit shooting right after the Olympics and went into computer science, there was some strife between him and Dad over it. Still, they say, it's no grounds for murder.

Lead prosecutor HAN CHUL-HO interrogates Chul and says there are two witnesses placing him at the scene, and reminds him of a drunken outburst the week before, when Chul had complained to his friends about Dad's meddling, and said he wished Dad weren't around.

Chul looks like a terrified little boy and shakes his head, but Prosecutor Han shoves Chul's head to the table and accuses him of losing it and shooting down his family just to be free of them. He growls that Chul is a coward for killing them and being too afraid to kill himself.

Prosecutor Han calls Chul human scum and says it's his job to keep society clean. Yikes. Chul seems to realize what deep shit he's in and buries his head into the table as a tear escapes.

When we see Chul next, he's in prison and an ajusshi visits to tell him that Prosecutor Han is an ambitious man, looking to make a name for himself on a famous case. Ajusshi says sympathetically that they couldn't put it off any longer, and had to hold the funeral for his family. Augh, without him?