The immediate question begged by Joon-soo's apparent betrayal is whether it's sincere. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth episodes, we are given every reason to believe that Joon-soo is indeed working against his prior motives of justice. Well, sort of. While Do-chan is fighting the good fight, he has no respect for the rules. Nominally this isn't a big deal. But remember that Joon-soo's entire authority for going after Tae-woong in the first place is that Tae-woong doesn't play by the rules.
Of course a lot of this is borne of necessity. Honestly, I was a little disappointed that Joon-soo was able to solve the bribe problem so easily just by giving Tae-woong a lot of useful intelligence. We saw the cameras. Joon-soo apparently being in possession of a massive bribe is not something that can be easily explained away. And yet, the next time Joon-soo shows up at the office, the main topic of interest is just the curious personality change. Which really wasn't that much more radical than the last one, of course.
The split does give Ha-ra the opportunity to be more obviously useful. Now that Joon-soo isn't around to give legal advice to Do-chan, Ha-ra is the only one that can maintain any control over Do-chan's activites. Granted, Ha-ra does not have very much control. But I like her deductions. Ha-ra seems to be the only character who can actually figure stuff out. Do-chan's various schemes aren't really deductive in nature, they're just brute force.
Take the whole setpiece with the fancy egg. Do-chan is able to gain access to security information mainly just by looking for predictable holes. Even now Tae-woong is underestimating Do-chan, mostly because he assumes that Joon-soo's assistance is going to provide an immediate obvious benefit. Little does Tae-woong know that aside from showing off his fancy scar so far Joon-soo hasn't actually done much of anything.
I actually rather like the multi-factional approach at play here, how we've got corrupt politicians working against thugs working against noble con artists working against corrupt prosecutors working against noble prosecutors. The main issue "Switch - Change The World" has is that plot relevance and interesting characterization are not evenly distributed between the groups. Well, I guess I can hope that Joon-soo will figure out what happened with the egg heist and prove his worth.
Review by William Schwartz
"Switch - Change The World" is directed by Nam Tae-jin, written by Baek Woon-cheol and Kim Ryoo-hyun, and features Jang Geun-suk, Han Ye-ri, Jung Woong-in, and Jo Hee-bong
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