Red Swan Episode 5 Review: Kdrama is Either Wild or Tame, There is No Middle Ground

In Red Swan episode 4, we saw Wan-soo coming face-to-face with the fact that Mi-ran has forcefully admitted her mother to a psychiatric facility where she is unconscious and almost comatose. The situation takes her unawares as, in the midst of trying to fight for New Foundation’s freedom, she neglected to think about the consequences of crossing her influential mother-in-law. Will she be able to protect her family and keep her foundation under her control?

Red Swan Episode 5 Recap

After getting a rather anger-inducing flashback to when Chun-hee left Wan-soo to fend for herself after loan sharks came to their house looking for her, we come back to the present when an elderly Chun-hee, unable to recognise her daughter, tells Wan-soo to call her daughter so that she can apologise to her. After apologising to her for the last time, Chun-hee passes away, leaving Wan-soo to be left heartbroken and distraught.

At home, however, Mi-ran is unsympathetic to Wan-soo’s plight and forces her to attend a meeting instead of taking time to grieve her mother’s death. However, after sitting with her family, who are completely unaware of her heartbreak, she fetches her mother’s ashes and leaves with Do-yoon’s help. She goes to her home from when she was a young girl that no one knows about to find some peace and grieve properly and shares her heartbreak with Do-yoon.

Meanwhile, throughout the episode, we see someone tailing Wan-soo and taking pictures of her.

After Wan-soo finishes everything surrounding her mother’s funeral, Mi-ran looks over the pictures that the mysterious man was taking, including the ones where Wan-soo is hugging and crying with Do-yoon. When Wan-soo arrives back home later, Yong-kook fires Do-yoon, ending a rather dramatic night. However, Wan-soo decides to visit Do-yoon later that night, and he straight asks her to be his woman and questions why she keeps hurting herself. She, in turn, asks him to be his man and stand by his side, further asking him to show her proof that someone from her family is connected to all the deaths around them.

Elsewhere, Mi-ran tells Yong-kook that the only way for Wan-soo to leave the family alone and not destroy their reputation is for her to die and she promises to kill her just as she got rid of Ko Jin-hee. Meanwhile, Do-yoon tells Wan-soo about everything that he knows about the Chairman’s death and she continues to prod him to learn more before making any rash decisions.

That night, he heads out to a gambling den to get more information – however, his plan seems to be something else. After showing his face to the CCTV cameras, he is asked to leave and the footage lands on Kyeong-ju’s phone, shocking him. Meanwhile, Wan-soo gets an idea to fudge the deal between Cosmo Cosmetics and China and rushes out to hold a meeting and Do-yoon confronts Kyeong-ju about his whereabouts in Manila. He is disappointed, however, to learn that he was running a money laundering scam for the Vice Chairman. However, even after learning the “truth” about Du-o’s death, Do-yoon remains unconvinced and promises to get to the bottom of the mess.

That night, he tells Wan-soo everything and she asks him to look into Mr Han, the manager of the slush funds, as well. However, in bed, Wan-soo is unable to forget about her interactions with Do-yoon.

The next day, the house is in uproar after she appears in advertisements that are released on the day of Cosmo Cosmentics’ new product release. Ji-yeon and Yong-min are thoroughly angered with the development but it seems like Wan-soo doesn’t care about anything and fears no one. As she comes back from a charity function later that day, Do-yoon finds a flock of deadly drones following them in hopes of killing Wan-soo and tries his best to dodge them.

Red Swan Episode 5 Review

Red Swan‘s new episodes are either flat and borderline annoying or absolutely out of this world insane. The more I watch the show, the more I feel like it doesn’t know how to find a middle ground. Episode 5 is the latter, with a ton of stuff happening all together and hardly any romance between our favourite protagonists. The mystery surrounding Du-o’s death is getting more and more insane and I never thought that they would bring it down to him dying mid-sex – wild stuff. I feel like Kim Ha-neul needs to be better with the expressions since it’d be great to see her genuinely angry or sad, anything other than a flat face.