*spoilers* the switch and the real killer

actually i dont think jaehoon being hit as a child had any impact on his brain at all bc we see him after that he's walking around just fine with no sign of injuries. plus if he had any sort of brain damage as a child he wouldn't even be called in for questioning, he'd be considered a victim right? the police would go to him and they wouldn't use a lie detector test. in fact, using a lie detector test on a child alone shows how much he'd unnerved the detectives so to rule him out they did the test. why would an injured child make the police uneasy.

also about what they could possibly be doing from here on 

A. making it a brain transplant.

• while a partial brain transplant is possible today a complete brain transplant isn't and it seems too much of a stretch for even the drama. and partial brain transplants don't result in any memory or IQ exchange or whatever they remain the same as they used to be before.
• to support the brain transplant theory we mainly have two points only. one, his feelings for hongju and two, that han seojun was in yohan's room before the surgery. everything else could simply be bareum mixing things up in confusion.
• anyway, making it a brain transplant would make the plot so shitty this isnt a 1980s sci-fi film.

B. it exposed bareum's true face, since losing his memories made him forget why he used to act in the first place.

• ok for one i wanna say that if this hadn't happened, bareum would have never been caught or even suspected. which means, if i'm right about him and yohan, yohan's death wasn't a complete waste, it's bc of him that bareum will ultimately be caught.
• the scene where bareum reacts strongly to the smell of the food? that's how ik for sure this has nothing to do with yohan. this show tends to be heavy in foreshadowing, and if they were gonna go down this route, they would have shown us before hand that yohan reacted strongly to smell too (which as a trained surgeon, is kind of unlikely).
• i think bareum just truly believes everything he's been told about himself right now. he's been told he's a good, kind person and he wholeheartedly believes that. he's told he saves injured animals, so he does it (which is why that memory of him throwing the mouse at the snake horrified him, bc he thinks he would have never done that. that's why he thinks it was yohan's memory, not his). he's told he was dumb, so it baffles even him that he's suddenly become smart, but its only momentarily bc he also trusts his own intelligence. still, in the scene where he tells moochi something was moved, when moochi brushes it off, even he resigns to himself unsure, thou he's certain it moved.
• again the thing about the smell. when he goes to the doctor to ask him about this, he asks if brain surgery could heighten your sense of smell or change your palate. bc he was told he liked it and so he thinks it must be the truth.

there's smth funny going on with his aunt too, isnt it? like when bareum asked her about the bird and she changed the topic. it's also strange that there's pictures of his adulthood and infancy but none of the time in between? his aunt has an album apparently, but without it even bareum's concluded that the childhood memory is yohan's.

was really baffled with the surgery thing they pulled but they made it so it made sense so i'll write my theories now regarding that.

if it isnt obvious i still think its bareum and not yohan, mainly bc there were too many loopholes with the yohan being the killer theory. this brain surgery thing they're using to drag the story and convolute it, and honestly if they carry this out well it's going to be brilliant.

anyway about the brain surgery.

• complete brain transplants are impossible so i'm glad they didn't go there and considering the world build up, a partial frontal lobe transplant does actually make sense. 
• now frontal lobes. its true that it makes up our personalities, determine how we interact with others,  is responsible for emotional expression, memories and even problem solving and judgement. but again, even in their world, this was the first transplant, and they have no actual knowledge of how it would affect the recipient, and anything here would be left up to our own theories (that's why they're still monitoring bareum).
• still memories are a stretch. its a partial transplant only so if its affected anything, it'd be his emotions not his memories those are still all his own. to support this, we had that scene with hongju. like usually, when he meets someone, or is faced with a situation from his past memories he gets flashbacks (his own memories), but when he sees hongju he doesn't recall anything just feels a sting (possibly from yohan's feelings for her). even he later wonders if yohan really cared about her since psychopaths are known to not, and in that moment i think he was questioning if these feelings were yohan's or his own.

about the head hunter:

• psychopaths are shown to not care about anything else except themselves and things/ppl they consider their own. children but not lovers or friends or family. we've been shown before how possessive han seojun was regarding his offsprings. he killed his previous lover bc she aborted it. so does it make sense now that han seojun would kill his own son who might have still had a chance to recover for the dude his son was trying to kill?
• his possession over bareum. its not apparent yet, since we don't know everything for now, but it's there, subtly, in his speech, in his behaviour towards bareum. 
  1. his honesty with him (mostly). when bareum asks him for help during investigations, he tells him the truth. we're even shown parallels to this scene. when moochi and the other detective (forgot his name) visited him, no matter how much they yelled or begged he said nothing. he hadn't killed her even but he pretended he didn't remember, it was fun for him to watch them behave like that. but before when bareum asked? it didn't take half the pleading for him to tell him the truth. bc he wanted to help bareum.
  2. his disappointment in not being recognized (i've mentioned this before).
  3. the chief secretory. even she found it strange that after saying all that, han seojun finally agreed to doing the operation, in a situation where he seemingly got no profit from it? i think he'd planned on operating from the beginning, but only fooled around to see if she'd actually accept his request then when he was rejected he acted like he wouldn't to see her beg (he obv enjoys seeing ppl plead to him helplessly). 
  4. this could also be bc he wanted fame (like daniel lee, he mentions that). but this reason clashes with the fact that he doens't really care at all about his achievement being disclosed or not. and it's such a huge one, he's so prideful, why would he be okay with that?
  5. his games with bareum. in which he mixes up truth and lies. he knows yohan isn't his son, but plays along with bareum's delusions. when he tells bareum he hoped he didn't turn out like yohan, he said he meant it and he truly did. but bareum interpreted it differently. (he accepts his concern, bc bareum's smart. he can tell han seojun seems to care about him.)
• the reason behind his games are clear.
  • he doesn't know what the brain surgery could do to a human. (in fact, whether the thing he said about the mice was true or not is still. he could have said it simply to mess with bareum, but the girl mentions it too, so maybe its true.)  since he doesn't know what could happen, and he can't directly observe bareum, he doesn't know how much yohan's brain affected him and he doesn't want yohan's brain to affect him. 
  • when he first met bareum again, he sees that his eyes have 'changed' and he's disappointed. he's also disappointed that bareum doesn't recognize him. this must be his motive, it's what incited him to lie to bareum, that's why he's playing along with the yohan being his son and the murderer thing (which he knows is false). 
  • he doesn't say anything at first, bc he thinks its temporary. that bareum will return back to normal once he gets his memories back. but then bareum visits him Again, and this time he confesses to recalling violent memories but pins it on yohan. han seojun can tell it's what he truly believes, and from this he probably also understood the extent of the changes the transplant caused, so he lied to him telling him that yeah that's it, that's yohan.
  • he's a doctor, he knows that after transplants, recipients start believing they carry a piece of the donor in them, or that they're slowly becoming the donor. they're in prison and he can't freely talk to bareum, it could get him caught. so instead he plays along with his beliefs, stokes his fears. that way bareum will go back to 'normal' sooner, then he can tell him the truth without exposing him.

writing a separate one about bareum now, this is long enough hdsjkfks

Yea I see what u mean, it could still be both, but we have to wait. The other thing confusing is the changing hand of the killer when bong yi fought him and yea also the mint scent. 

I'm also one that believes that JBR has always been the killer.  It will be fun to watch how he comes to realize that now that his good side is clashing with his nasty self.  

I agree with everything jjonghaos  wrote about Yohan.  A real psychopath would have done something to take revenge on the bullies. Screaming victims and attempting suicide is not something that a young psychopath would have done. For example, the young boy with the two siblings got bitten up by his step-father. He got a good beating at that.  However, after that, he attempted to take his revenge. 

Yohan repels the idea to have offsprings. But the Headhunter clearly wanted one. And JBR is not against marriage either, since he is willing to marry BY. 

Yohan reflects deeply. Yohan is troubled by his family connection. He feels scared. I always felt that 

There is a parallelism between Yohan and JBR. It's when they both look for the girls to be hugged and reassured. JBR has never done that until the "brain transplant" (I'm still deeply hurt that the writer took that route in the story ahah).  Now that JBR has a drop of honest humanity in his body, he has looked for BY to be hugged, because he feels scared.

It would be so funny to keep watching how the story unfolds. 

Many complain because the story is too convoluted.  I mean...didn't they watch episode 1? Of course, this was not going to be easy watching.  But the story is progressing at such a nice speed. Details are unfolding slowly. Ends are tightened even if it takes 8 episodes to do it. For example, I was quite interested to know why the Headhunter (ep1)made a face when reading the newspaper mentioning the remaining of a kid found somewhere in Korea. Finally, I discovered this in ep 9 and 10. 

The story is good! 

Interesting theory. I have a feeling Yohan's dad wasn't really the killer, so he knows his dad was framed and now the same killer is back and framing him. If Bareum is the killer, then it wouldn't make sense how he fought with the 'killer' in the grandma scene. But, it could be that Yohan went after the grandma knowing the killer would target her next so he hopes to catch the killer in the act, while Bareum was there and fought Yohan then killed the grandma, perfectly framing Yohan as the killer.

regarding the last two eps:

1. bareum and his 'aunt'.
   • i think it was pretty obvious she isn't his real aunt. she showed up out of nowhere and acts strangely around him, like she's trying to make him believe he's someone he isn't.
   • first, the favorite food thing. there's two ways to go about this - one that she randomly made it up on spot saying it was bareum's favorite, maybe just simply, maybe to see the extent to which he's willing to believe her lies. two (leaning towards this one bc no one would take up that job without research), she knew it was supposed to be his favorite food and when he acted up liked that, it must have scared her to find out how far he's been lying about himself.
   • isn't it strange thou? that even the doctor who operated on him doesn't know the extent to which this surgery would change him but this woman seems increasingly terrified of bareum? the neurosurgeon said that it wasn't supposed to affect him, han seojun said he didn't want yohan to take over him implying he himself wasn't sure if this was possible in humans, but she's somehow terrified of bareum. like why would she be, he was supposed to be a good person before the surgery, and the doctors say it shouldn't change him too much. she obviously knows smth the others don't about bareum.
2. daniel lee.
   • another weirdo. honestly when i first saw him i really wondered why the writers dropped him here out of nowhere. i had a theory then, and its starting to make sense now so i'll go over it. this is gonna be kinda long so i'll split it into daniel and yohan then daniel and bareum.
3. daniel lee and yohan.
   • i knew yohan couldn't have killed him bc its very unlikely that yohan was a killer at all, but i don't think bareum killed him either bc the pattern was different so it actually makes sense he's alive and his murder was staged.
   • now idk how they're going to make the staged murder make sense, since you know, the body was identified right? but it'd been in water for long and was bloated so it was identified by dna and obv that must have been forged (he himself was a big researcher so it might not too much of a stretch for someone in forensics to switch the reports).
   • that night yohan and him met. personally i think that was the night yohan found out his 'step-brother' was a psychopath. here's how i think things went. the killings started before they met, so yohan must have been receiving those pictures and possibly threats too (which is why he doesn't take them to the cops). then he gets a call from daniel lee saying he wants to meet where he gets the report.
   • when yohan finds out about his mother's birth son, he finally understands why he's been receiving those photos. he knows with a conviction then that his step brother's the killer, bc no other serial killer would be this obsessed with him.
   • now the amusement park night might have not been the first night they met (i could be wrong but who meets strangers in places like that, esp daniel lee, like he was going to meet han seojun's son he isn't insane). that night, they must have been there on purpose to carry out the plan they'd already made. to stage a murder, what better place would they find than a closed amusement park.
   • why they stage daniel lee's death?
     1. to save him. they both must have feared that eventually maybe the killer would target daniel lee (the killer had a clear attachment to han seojun so maybe as revenge or smth for his father). then later after yohan's death daniel lee comes out of his shell to play this game with bareum, bc if he doesn't do anything now yohan's death would be in vain.
     2. to frame bareum. pretty sloppy framing imo, but still most of the detectives seemed to believe it was the killer. don't think it's likely thou bc yohan carried the report with him (which he must have burned instead of handing to the police for his mother).
     3. maybe they were playing a game with him. to draw him out so they could catch him themselves. like with all those pictures yohan had, he knew that he could have been very easily framed. but framing him for daniel lee's murder was like publicly framing him, and maybe that's why bareum killed his friend in retaliation, which screwed up yohan's plans bc no normal person would be able to keep going after that. it was a warning clearly. 'mess with me, and i'll take out everyone you love' caging yohan in again, which might also be why he destroyed the report.

 jjonghaos:

that's funny on so many different levels, like for one, neurons are permanent cells, they don't multiple so what encroaching? and two, he's saying exactly what bareum been fearing while every other doctor tells him the opposite. like he's catering to his fears, feeding it.

This is very well spotted. Daniel Lee is the craziest of all. 

The aunt must have been a stable figure in JBR's life for a  least a good decade. She knows something and she is also acting weird.  

What I'm more interested to discover is how JBR will react when he will realise that "the boy" he didn't save when he was young, was in fact, Oh Bong Yi.