There's No Such Thing As Nice Guys <//3 (by dramabeans)

EPISODE 5

We start the episode with a flashback of Maru before the trip to Japan as he remembers Jae-hee’s desperate plea for him to ask for money instead of revenge. (Icwutudidthar, Vitamin Water.)

Min-young wasn’t in Maru’s bar as a coincidence, since he tells Maru about an animal documentary he watched, where a jackal had taken hold of a coyote’s tail, causing the coyote to go to the edge of a cliff.

He speaks from the viewpoint of the coyote, who told the jackal that they would both fall off the cliff and die together if he didn’t let go of his tail. Min-young claims he never saw the end, but keeps wondering what their fate was.

“If the jackal were sensible, he would have let go of the tail he was biting, and if the jackal were stupid, they would have died together by falling off the cliff. What do you think that jackal chose?” Min-young asks, cleverly using that analogy to equate Maru as the jackal and Jae-hee as the coyote.

Back in the car, Maru thinks over Jae-hee’s threat that she won’t forgive anyone who stands in her way. These words cause him to make the dramatic U-turn Of Decision.

And then we see the end of his talk with Min-young, where Maru answers his question by saying that the jackal was probably more reckless than he’d think.

Min-young wonders if the jackal would be scared to die when faced with the edge of the cliff. Wouldn’t he have changed his mind?

Maru: “No, probably not. It probably would’ve said to the coyote, ‘It’s a relief that we can go together. Thanks to you, I won’t be lonely as I go.’”

Ohhh crap. He’s crazy.

After the opening sequence, we see Maru arriving at the Aomori Resort only seconds after Jae-hee ushers the American company inside. He asks the concierge where Eun-ki is in Japanese.

Still in a flashback of the night before Eun-ki’s rude awakening, Maru arrives at Eun-ki’s secluded house to find her Barbie still on the swing. “It’s been a while,” he tells the doll with a smile.

On Eun-ki’s door, he finds a warning written in Hangul, Japanese, and English: “Don’t disturb me. Never ever knock.” Ha.

So he doesn’t, and just sits outside and waits while Eun-ki crunches numbers inside. Turns out he was watching her the whole time Eun-ki was outside, and tried to get her attention once she was asleep, only to hear her murmur, “The calculations aren’t right.”

Maru takes the opportunity to let himself inside, and flips through Eun-ki’s notes. It seems like she has a habit of scribbling a person’s name when they’re troubling her, but instead of the Kang Maru she scribbled at the dinner table, now it’s Han Jae-hee.

He remembers overhearing Eun-ki and Jae-hee’s earlier conversation, especially the bit where Jae-hee told her, “You can’t beat me.” Since helping Eun-ki will harm Jae-hee, Maru sits down and sets to finishing Eun-ki’s work. The goal? Find roughly thirty-five million dollars from anywhere they can, in order to avoid selling the resort.

Jae-gil apparently sleeps in a tent outside Maru’s house, and gets a wakeup call from him in the middle of the night, asking for his expertise to help him make sense of Eun-ki’s financial statements.

After a tiny tantrum, Jae-gil uses his business management skills to help his friend.

Maru ends up working the whole night, papering the walls with post-it notes of all the little amounts they can collect to add up toward the big sum. One of the companies, Club X, piques his interest as he remembers one of his female clients telling him to put his money (probably meaning stocks) into the company since it was growing fast, despite having filed for bankruptcy two years ago.