How do you take revenge? It’s best served cold, obviously, or so I’m told, but how much payback is enough? This is a question that Taxi Driver episode 2 seems to answer, at least as far as the Rainbow Taxi Service is concerned. Getting one up on their clients isn’t enough. The destruction has to be thorough and all-encompassing.
It seemed like the first episode might have ended Maria’s story, more or less, but this follow-up proves different as, with the introductions complete, the Rainbow team set about utterly dismantling Park Joo-Chan and Jo Jong-Geun.
Taxi Driver episode 2 opens up in the past, though, as we return once again in flashback to Do-Ki’s initial encounter with Sung-Cheol, as the latter gives his pitch. As it turns out, his own parents were brutally murdered, and he never forgot the pain of the loss or the desire for revenge. He obviously sees some of himself in Do-Ki.
But it’s a relatable emotion, really. Most people have had to endure something that they’d like to see someone else pay for. Maria, especially, is well within her rights to want to even the score. But Rainbow Taxi cares less about getting even than they do taking the lead. And there are plenty of people who need to be punished.
One of them is Maria’s social worker, Jong-Sok. In the previous episode, it wasn’t clear if she was in on the scheme or if she had unknowingly delivered Maria into a nightmare. Taxi Driver season 1, episode 2 makes it clear that she was complicit; Park Joo-Chan and Jo Jong-Geun’s entire jeotgal operation is dependent on exploiting the disabled with help from Jong-Sok, and she starts to make a tidy profit on Maria’s death thanks to squirreling her money into life insurance firms. She’s taken out of the picture fairly easily by Sung-Cheol and deserves the fate she gets, similar as it is to what Maria endured.
Meanwhile, Do-Ki infiltrates the jeotgal business by posing as a buyer, arranging shipments and sales, and then personally ensuring they don’t go ahead just to torment them. He wears a hockey mask and uses a voice distorter to whoop Jong-Geun at the meeting point, posing as a bandit, and then smugly returns to the office the next day to lecture them about missing deadlines. He also takes Chief Kim Hyung-Wook out of commission by flipping his car with that battering ram teased in the premiere. Nobody is safe.
Do-Ki even remains a step ahead when Jong-Geun and Joo-Chan try to up the levels. The former attends the next meeting with a team of goons but Do-Ki dispatches them all easily. Inventively interrogating Jong-Geun with a baseball pitching machine, Do-Ki, having now revealed himself, sets up Joo-Chan and confronts him at the warehouse, where another fight ensues.
Needless to say, Joo-Chan does not get the better of this exchange. Giving Joo-Chan a taste of what Maria went through, he eventually ousts the man and legally puts his company in the control of the disabled workers upon whose backs he built it – including Maria. In the epilogue, she is reunited with her friends from the orphanage.
But there is more to discuss in Taxi Driver episode 2. For one thing, there is plenty of tension between Sung-Chul and Chairman Baek (Cha Ji-Yeon), an obvious sadist who is currently holding Do-Chul in a private prison.
She also offers Do-Ki a job as one of her personal enforcers here, but he plays the silent type, which only makes her covet him more (her words). Thus far she is being presented as a kind of dark counterpart to Sung-Chul – she’s after the same thing, but for starkly different reasons. There’s sure to be more to this as the season progresses.
And then there’s Ha-Na, still investigating Do-Chul’s disappearance and putting two and two together at a rate that obviously imperils the Rainbow Taxi Service. Despite Sung-Chul deliberately feeding her misinformation about deluxe taxi drivers, she nonetheless ends up face to face with Do-Ki when her investigations take her to the legitimate taxi firm that Rainbow uses as a cover. Do-Ki gives nothing away, but it’s still early days yet, and quite what the show has planned for these two is anyone’s guess.
