Vincenzo Episode 01 Recap: A Mafia Lawyer Lands in Geumga Plaza
Vincenzo, Season 1, Episode 01 tvN / Netflix · Written by Park Jae-bum · 2021
A cold-blooded consigliere comes home for buried gold and finds Seoul already full of gangsters in better suits.
Vincenzo Cassano does not arrive in Korea looking for redemption.
He arrives with a month on the clock, a dead mafia boss behind him, and 1.5 tons of gold waiting under an old building in Geumga-dong. That is the smart joke sitting under the whole premiere: the Italian mafia lawyer thinks Korea will be the place where he cleans up one last job and disappears to Malta. Instead, Seoul greets him with drugged water, a ruined designer suit, crooked pharmaceutical lawyers, loan-shark muscle, and tenants who may be stranger than any mob family he has known.
Episode 01 works because it lets the absurdity bite. The comedy is broad, but the rot is real. Babel Pharm has patients dead from clinical trials. Hong Yu-chan is fighting a case that money has already started strangling. Geumga Plaza looks ridiculous until the men with contracts and threats arrive.
Then Song Joong-ki’s Vincenzo stops playing tourist.
Vincenzo burns a vineyard and leaves Italy behind
The premiere starts in Rome with Vincenzo doing what he does best: offering mercy that already sounds like a warning.
Fabio Cassano is dead. Emilio, the man who killed Fabio’s friend and took over a vineyard union, refuses the Cassano family’s final offer. He insults Vincenzo’s Korean identity, mistakes restraint for weakness, and learns too late that Vincenzo did not come to negotiate forever.
The punishment is operatic and ugly. Crop dusters fly over the vineyard. Fire follows. Emilio’s business burns while Vincenzo walks away in a black suit, untouched and almost bored.
That first set piece gives Vincenzo his rulebook before Korea gets anywhere near him. He does not posture. He gives one chance. If that chance gets thrown back at him, he answers with ruin. The violence is not random, either. He flinches at Paolo’s willingness to harm women and children, and he says Fabio trusted him because Paolo was careless. Vincenzo lives inside a criminal world, but he still believes in lines.
Paolo does not deserve loyalty, so Vincenzo leaves him with a final lesson too. He spares Paolo out of respect for Fabio, blows up the car instead of the man, and warns him not to look again.
“I didn’t kill you out of respect for Fabio.”
It is cold, theatrical, and cleanly informative. Vincenzo is not a good man. He is a professional with rules, and that is going to matter once he meets men who pretend to be legitimate while acting worse than mobsters.
Hong Cha-young wins dirty while Hong Yu-chan keeps losing clean
Seoul brings in a different kind of violence first: legal violence.
Hong Cha-young (Jeon Yeo-been) enters with cake, cash, and a threat wrapped in workplace cheer. A Babel Pharm clinical-trial participant wants to tell the truth about RDU-90. Cha-young turns the room into a private intimidation session, talks about monster lawsuits, and makes it clear that Babel can grind his life down if he keeps speaking.
Then she goes to court and helps bury the truth faster.
Hong Yu-chan (Yoo Jae-myung) argues for the victims. He points to pulmonary edema, arrhythmia, low blood pressure, and signs of overdose. He says Babel coerced a witness into changing his statement. Cha-young counters with a fresh perjury report, and the court pauses the case for a week. That delay is not neutral. It is time bought by power.
The father-daughter fight after court is sharp because both of them know exactly where to cut. Yu-chan is disgusted that his daughter works for the people he fights. Cha-young calls him pigheaded and tries to dress surrender as concern for his health. For a second, she almost sounds like a daughter again.
Yu-chan sees the performance.
He tells her to take acting classes and stop ruining people’s lives.
That line lands because Cha-young is funny, magnetic, and awful in the same breath. The premiere does not soften her too fast. She is not a misunderstood crusader yet. She is a brilliant lawyer who knows Babel’s money is filthy and takes the bonus anyway. Her speed, vanity, and appetite make her fun to watch, but the dead patients keep the scene from becoming cute.
Yu-chan, meanwhile, is introduced as the one person in the room who still insists that law should protect the weak. He loses the hearing. He annoys his daughter. He sends her a fake disownment document with multilingual father-ban clauses because he is also petty and hilarious.
But he does not sell people out.
Geumga Plaza hides gold, monks, and a future family
Vincenzo’s return to Korea is supposed to be simple. He needs Geumga Plaza demolished so he can retrieve the gold hidden beneath it. Five years earlier, he advised a Chinese client to buy an old Korean building through Cho Yeong-un, create real shops as cover, and seal the gold behind biometric security.
Now the client is dead, the monks of Nanyak Temple are sitting above the safe room, and Babel E&C wants the building for its own redevelopment scheme.
This is where the premiere starts having real fun with Vincenzo’s dignity.
At the airport, a fake chauffeur drugs him and robs him. The immaculate consigliere wakes up in public, furious, dirty, and stripped of his money and watch. He gets to Geumga Plaza anyway, only to discover cold water, glow-in-the-dark stickers, a pigeon problem, and a building full of tenants who immediately puncture his menace.
The tenants are introduced as jokes, but not disposable ones. The laundromat owner mocks his expensive suit, shrinks it into a cropped disaster, and refuses to be impressed by Milan. Toto, the Italian restaurant owner, claims Uffizi as if it were a neighborhood in Milan until Vincenzo quietly exposes him. The dance teacher performs silent drama in the hallway. The snack-bar mother practically spars with her son over a grammar test. The monks speak gently while sitting on a fortune they do not know exists.
Vincenzo wants them out. The tenants want protection. Yu-chan sees through him immediately.
“I represent people, and you represent money,” Yu-chan tells him.
That is the premiere’s bluntest moral challenge to Vincenzo. He can burn vineyards, threaten mafia heirs, and sneer at bad pasta. In Geumga Plaza, none of that makes him righteous. He is still a man trying to remove people from their homes so he can claim buried wealth.
The genius of the plaza setup is that everyone is right to distrust him.
They just have not met Babel at full volume yet.
Babel steals the building and Vincenzo drops Park Seok-do from the roof
Babel’s move is not elegant.
Cho signs away Geumga Plaza after men threaten his wife and daughter. Park Seok-do arrives with Ant Company muscle, sales notices, compensation talk, and the smugness of a man used to watching fear do the paperwork for him. The tenants understand the betrayal before Vincenzo does. Their anger turns on him because, from their view, he is the smooth foreign lawyer who promised them contracts and then vanished into the machinery.
Cha-young arrives at the plaza mid-fight, still technically Babel-adjacent but angry enough to insult Park’s men as bargain-bin gangster extras. Yu-chan tries to protect the tenants and gets shoved aside. The tenants shout, panic, and flinch. Park’s people block the bathroom like small-time tyrants because humiliation is part of the job.
Then Vincenzo walks in wearing the shrunken suit.
It should be ridiculous. It is ridiculous. The jacket looks like the laundromat personally attacked him. But the second Park insults him, Vincenzo stops being the overdressed outsider everyone has been mocking and becomes the man from the vineyard again.
One hand twist. One scream. One gangster on the edge of the roof.
The rooftop threat is vicious. Vincenzo tells Park the building is not tall enough to kill him, only to break a few bones. If his face hits first, Vincenzo recommends a closed coffin. It is funny because Park deserves the terror and because Vincenzo delivers it with office-meeting calm. It is also a warning flare. This man is not Yu-chan. He will not fight Babel by asking the court to behave.
When he says the building belongs to him, he means the gold. The tenants hear a protector. Yu-chan hears an ulterior motive. Cha-young sees something she cannot file neatly under Wusang’s usual categories.
Everyone is right, which is why the ending has charge.
What works
The premiere gives Vincenzo a clean contradiction from the start. He is dangerous enough to terrify mobsters, vain enough to mourn a suit, disciplined enough to spare Paolo, and selfish enough to want a building emptied for gold. That mix keeps him from becoming a simple revenge fantasy.
The Italy material also matters. Vincenzo’s mafia past is not decoration for a cool entrance. It explains why Babel will not know how to read him. Babel’s people use law, money, and hired fists. Vincenzo recognizes all three as languages he already speaks.
Cha-young is just as strong a premiere piece. Jeon Yeo-been gives her sharp edges without asking for forgiveness too early. Cha-young can threaten a witness, roast her junior Jang Joon-woo (Ok Taec-yeon) over a tie, fight with her father like a furious teenager, and still make you want her back in the next scene.
Yu-chan gives the hour its conscience without becoming bland. He is righteous, but he is also stubborn, theatrical, and mean in a way only a disappointed father can be. His bond with Oh Gyeong-ja at Hanju Prison adds another quiet thread: he has been visiting her for five years, and she refuses a retrial because peace feels safer than hope.
The plaza comedy is broad, but it has purpose. These people are not just obstacles between Vincenzo and gold. They are the first people who force him to live at human scale again.
What stumbles
The airport robbery sequence runs long enough that the gag nearly swallows the character beat. Vincenzo getting drugged by local scammers is funny, and it usefully humiliates him, but the robbers’ banter keeps circling the same joke after the point is clear.
Some of the plaza introductions also come in loud. The mime bit, the snack-bar fight, the laundromat insult rhythm, Toto’s fake Italy flex, and the temple reveal all arrive in a tight cluster. The overload is part of the intended chaos, but it can feel like the premiere is throwing every tenant at the wall before asking us to remember names.
The Babel Pharm case is more compelling than the redevelopment plot at first, mostly because the patient deaths carry immediate weight. The building fight catches up once Park Seok-do brings violence to the plaza, but the pharmaceutical thread has the sharper moral urgency in Episode 01.
What this sets up for Episode 02
Vincenzo now has two problems instead of one. He still needs the gold under Nanyak Temple, but Babel has taken the building through intimidation. That means his selfish goal and the tenants’ survival have briefly aligned, even if nobody should mistake that for trust.
Yu-chan will keep watching him. Cha-young has seen enough to be curious. Babel has no idea what kind of man just dropped its proxy from a rooftop.
The bigger question is whether Vincenzo can fight Babel without becoming another predator circling Geumga Plaza. He says the building belongs to him. The tenants need someone to prove it belongs to them.
Episode 02 has a clean fuse: legal corruption has met mafia discipline, and the plaza is standing between them.
Rating: 8.3/10
More episodes from Vincenzo — The Italian-Korean mafia consigliere in Seoul, episode by episode. Jump to any episode in the season:
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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.