Vincenzo Episode 03 Recap: Babel Draws Blood in the Rain
Vincenzo, Season 1, Episode 03 tvN / Netflix · Written by Park Jae-bum · 2021
Vincenzo buys Geumga Plaza time, but Babel answers with murder, legal pressure, and a question Yu-chan cannot stop asking.
By its third hour, Vincenzo stops treating Babel as a rich bully with hired muscle and starts treating it as a murder machine with a legal department. Bad pizza, tenant gossip, and Choi Myung-hee’s office dance routine still sit beside the bloodshed, because Seoul can look deeply absurd right before someone dies. But the RDU-90 case changes the air. By the final rain scene, Hong Yu-chan is no longer asking whether Babel can be beaten by law alone. He is asking whether the devil he needs has been sitting across from him in a tailored suit.
Vincenzo blocks demolition with an Italian party
After the party, Geumga Plaza survives because Vincenzo Cassano understands spectacle: invite the Italian ambassador, fill the courtyard with drinks and matching shirts, and no demolition crew can swing a hammer without creating an international incident.
Song Joong-ki’s Vincenzo does not sell the plan as heroism. That is the fun of him. He has an angle, he knows everyone knows he has an angle, and he still lets the tenants cheer because the result is real. Babel’s men arrive ready to break walls. Instead, they find the Italian ambassador, drinks, matching shirts, and tenants chanting for Geumga Plaza like a small-town football team that just won a playoff game.
Hong Cha-young sees through the romance of it immediately. She clocks the expensive tailoring, the performance, the money spent, the impossibly generous timing. Vincenzo tells her he fell in love with the place, and she refuses the fairy dust. That exchange matters because Cha-young is still Babel’s lawyer, still Wusang’s star, still trained to smell motive. She is not wrong to distrust him.
The tenants, though, start to soften.
That does not make them foolish. They know one party will not end the demolition threat. They also know a stranger just spent a fortune to protect their building when almost nobody with money ever spends it on them. The monk blessing his generosity, the chef bragging about drunken Italians praising his pizza, the dance teacher admiring Vincenzo in a way that absolutely does not stop at his face: all of it makes Geumga Plaza feel like a home, not only a hiding place for gold.
It is becoming a community Vincenzo may have to answer to.
That is the trap he did not plan.
RDU-90 becomes a body count, not a case file
The Babel Pharm case gets uglier the moment Yu-chan and Vincenzo dig into RDU-90. The drug’s active component, coisanic, is not a harmless pain reliever. It is addictive. Yu-chan understands the consequences fast: overdoses, desperate patients, young people getting access, and a future where Babel profits from dependency.
Vincenzo understands a different part of the same danger. He reads the drug business like a cartel problem because he has already lived around cartel logic. Lobbying, intimidation, legal delay, manufactured approval, bodies treated as test data. Babel’s business model is not reckless innovation. It is cruelty with paperwork.
Then Yu Min-chul’s colleague tells Yu-chan the truth.
Babel overdosed test subjects on purpose. Five people were pushed through repeated RDU-90 dosages so the company could learn how much the body could take. The researchers were threatened into silence. Families were used as leverage. Min-chul wants to testify, but he also wants a guarantee Yu-chan cannot honestly give.
That scene is important because Yu-chan does not lie to him. He promises support, not safety. It is the right answer ethically and the wrong answer tactically, because Babel is not worried about ethics. Yu-chan is fighting with court notices, witness testimony, and faith that the truth can still embarrass power into retreat.
Babel answers by burning fourteen researchers alive at a company villa.
The news calls it a gas explosion. Yu-chan calls it murder before anyone else in the room can hide inside official language. The deaths are not decoration for the plot. These were people with names, families, pressure, fear, and at least one colleague who finally decided to speak. Babel kills the room before the truth can walk into court.
That is when Yu-chan sees his real opponent. Not a company. Not a chairman. A system of men who can kill fourteen people, call it an accident, and expect paperwork to finish the cleanup.
Choi Myung-hee and Jang Joon-woo reveal Babel’s appetite
Kim Yeo-jin’s Choi Myung-hee is already frightening because she treats pressure like a party trick. She can dance in the office, laugh with senior lawyers at dinner, humiliate Cha-young in public, and then turn cold enough to make the whole room feel smaller. Nothing about her ruthlessness is stiff. She enjoys movement. She enjoys discomfort. She enjoys finding the exact nerve to press.
Her warning to Cha-young after the dinner performance is brutal because Cha-young gives as good as she gets. Myung-hee threatens to end her. Cha-young answers with a manicure insult. Their exchange has venom, but it also has professional recognition. Myung-hee sees Cha-young as a problem worth isolating, and before the night is over, she gets her removed from Babel work by framing her restraint around Yu-chan as disloyalty.
That is how Myung-hee operates. She does not need to scream. She finds the weak point and makes someone else call it procedure.
Jang Joon-woo’s cruelty is messier, and that makes it more dangerous. In front of Cha-young, Ok Taec-yeon’s Joon-woo is still the overeager intern with a crush, pushing fried chicken fantasies and pretending his panic is romantic concern. In private, he is the man on the phone ordering Geumga Plaza torn down anyway, then the man treating fourteen dead researchers as collateral damage from one “silly researcher.”
His lunch with Myung-hee and Han Seung-hyuk is a nasty little window into Babel. Joon-woo worries about the villa because he spent money designing it. He asks for generous compensation only after the bodies are gone and the optics need management. He likes the idea of owning Namdongbu Prosecutors’ Office as if public institutions are office furniture with better parking.
That last beat is funny because Han Seung-hyuk laughs too hard.
It is also sickening because Joon-woo means enough of it.
Vincenzo pressures Na Deok-jin and tries to leave Seoul clean
While Yu-chan fights through law, Vincenzo handles Na Deok-jin with a file, photographs, recordings, and the calm of a man who has never confused leverage with politeness. He wants demolition delayed for two months. He wants the right to tear down the building himself. Na laughs until Vincenzo lays out the bribes, the threats, the affair, and the professional ruin waiting behind one wrong move.
This is not a noble tactic. It is blackmail.
It is also effective.
That tension is the whole Vincenzo problem, and Yu-chan keeps rubbing against it. Vincenzo can stop a demolition faster than any injunction. He can scare Na into reversing orders while Babel’s crew is already rolling. He can protect the temple with heated pads and promise to cover the electric bill because he needs the monks’ floor, then accidentally look generous while doing it. He can beat teenage bullies into throwing away cigarettes and make it sound like a civic lesson.
He keeps doing useful things for selfish reasons.
The tenants feel that contradiction, even when they cannot name it. Vincenzo offers to move everyone into a nearby building, rent-free, so he can clear Geumga Plaza and reach the gold. The offer sounds too good because it is too good. The tenants debate trust, suspicion, enlightenment, and whether a handsome apprentice can be trusted because he is cute. Their comedy works because the stakes under it are real: for them, this is not an investment property. It is home.
Vincenzo wants to wrap up the building problem and leave.
Every scene makes that less believable.
Yu-chan brings Vincenzo to his mother
The hospital scene is quiet compared with Babel’s violence, but it hits harder because Yu-chan refuses to let Vincenzo hide from his own history.
Oh Gyeong-ja is dying. She is also Vincenzo’s mother, and Yu-chan knows it before Vincenzo admits anything. He pieces it together from the prison visit, from the old trial, from the kind of rage only family produces. When he tells Vincenzo to spend time with her while he still can, he does not soften the truth. He gives him a chance.
Vincenzo does not take it.
That refusal is not played as cool detachment. It is pain with its coat buttoned. The flashback to Gyeong-ja’s trial is ugly: a housekeeper accused after sexual harassment is erased by a defense that uses her abandoned child as character evidence. She begs her lawyer to speak. The law sits there and lets her be flattened.
No wonder Vincenzo has no sentimental faith in institutions.
But Yu-chan sees the wound and still chooses law, people, and stubborn public work. That makes his later argument with Cha-young hurt even more. She is furious that her Babel future is being damaged by her father’s case. He tells her the issue is right and wrong. She throws her mother’s death at him and accuses him of abandoning his own family while saving strangers.
Neither of them lands cleanly.
Cha-young’s anger has history behind it. Yu-chan’s mission has cost his daughter something. But the conversation also shows how Babel wins: it pushes families into choosing between survival and conscience, then punishes whichever side bleeds first.
What works
The sharp passages let comedy and menace share the same table without blending them into mush. The pizza apprentice subplot is absurd. Myung-hee’s “Awesome!” dancing is absurd. The tenants arguing over Vincenzo’s motives is absurd. Then Babel murders fourteen researchers and nobody gets to pretend the danger was only cartoonish.
Yu-chan is the emotional anchor. Yoo Jae-myung gives him warmth without making him naive. He knows Babel is dangerous. He knows he may lose. He stays anyway because someone has to be reckless enough to protect people who cannot buy protection.
The Vincenzo-Yu-chan dynamic also deepens fast. Yu-chan does not admire Vincenzo’s methods, but he understands the temptation. His Italian proverb lands because he is not asking for revenge as fantasy. He is staring at murdered researchers, a dying defendant, a frightened whistleblower, and a daughter trapped inside the enemy firm.
“It takes a devil to drive out another” is not a slogan here. It is a confession.
What stumbles
The Jang Joon-woo material is intentionally slippery, but the intern-crush scenes repeat the same note a little too often before the private villainy cuts through. His worry for Cha-young is useful because it lets him perform harmlessness, yet the fried chicken, baseball, car-tracking, and lunch-break bits all circle the same joke.
The tonal shift between tenant comedy and mass murder asks a lot. It lands because Vincenzo has already announced itself as pulp with teeth, but the move from office karaoke humiliation to fourteen dead researchers is still a hard turn. Yu-chan’s grief keeps the danger plain.
That plainness matters.
What this sets up for Episode 04
Yu Min-chul’s missed call puts a countdown on the ending. Babel knows he exists. Yu-chan knows he will testify. Vincenzo knows someone tried to reach the lawyer’s phone while Yu-chan was outside in the rain. The next move is no longer about delaying demolition or winning a hearing. It is about whether the witness can stay alive long enough to speak.
Cha-young has also been cornered professionally and emotionally. Wusang pulls Babel away from her. Myung-hee marks her as compromised. Yu-chan wounds her, then waits for her at his regular place anyway. She is still arguing from inside Babel’s house, but the floor is starting to crack under her.
And Vincenzo has heard the question that will chase him for the rest of this fight: man or monster?
The next answer will come in blood.
Rating: 8.7/10
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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.