Vincenzo Episode 09 Recap: Babel Learns the Old Way Still Works
Vincenzo, Season 1, Episode 09 tvN / Netflix · Written by Park Jae-bum · 2021
Vincenzo and Cha-young force Babel into the open, but Han-seok answers with murder, fear, and one cruel private performance.
This is the point where the war stops feeling clever and starts feeling expensive.
Vincenzo Cassano (Song Joong-ki) and Hong Cha-young (Jeon Yeo-been) begin with a public accusation: Babel Group and the prosecution are working together. That should feel like a victory. Instead, it only confirms the thing Vincenzo says out loud later: evil recovers faster than good, and each recovery makes it stronger.
That line follows him all night. Babel is wounded, cornered, mocked, and exposed. Then Jang Han-seok (Ok Taec-yeon) reaches for older tools: bribery, blackmail, intimidation, murder, and fear aimed at children. Vincenzo has been treating Seoul like a board he can dominate with mafia discipline. Babel has its own code, and it is uglier because it has no pride.
Vincenzo looks for Babel’s real boss after the press ambush
Cha-young’s press move works exactly as intended. Babel’s bank support starts shaking. The public story is no longer just about one corrupt pharmaceutical company; now the prosecution is in the frame too. Babel’s clean corporate face has fingerprints all over it.
But Vincenzo is not satisfied.
He expected at least one larger truth to fall out of the chaos, and the missing piece is still Babel’s real boss. Jang Han-seo (Kwak Dong-yeon) is too visible, too twitchy, too easy to scare. Vincenzo and Cha-young start calling the hidden chairman “Babo,” half joke and half insult, because a monster is easier to hunt once he has a name.
The first useful thread is Jang Han-seok, the older brother who supposedly vanished into America as Henry Jang. He missed his own father’s funeral. He disappeared after art school. He left no clean public trail. On paper, that could mean indifference. In this drama, it means the absence is suspicious enough to glow.
The second thread is Dr. Gil Jong-moon, who has run to Prosecutor Jung In-kuk for protection. Gil knows about Babel and Haemun Medical. More important, he knows something about how Babel’s founder died. That detail pushes the mystery out of paperwork and into family blood. Han-seok is not just hiding behind a company. He is hiding behind a death that someone helped bury.
The third thread is Vincenzo’s own mother. Ms. Oh’s medical history reveals a lung cancer diagnosis in January 1993, then a recovery that sounds almost impossible. Five months after that diagnosis, she left her child at an orphanage. Vincenzo does not forgive her. He does not soften into instant filial tenderness. He asks the sharper question: did she abandon him because she believed she would die?
That is why his hospital anger lands so hard. When the doctor treats Ms. Oh’s pain and food intake as something politely manageable, Vincenzo explodes. He is too harsh, and he knows it too late, but the fury comes from a place he cannot admit. He has spent his adult life believing distance made him clean. Now his mother is in a hospital bed, in pain, and he is fighting a doctor over meals and medication because it is safer than saying he is scared.
Cha-young sees it. Ms. Oh feels it. Vincenzo walks out before anyone can name it.
Han-seok makes humiliation his management style
Han-seok’s villainy here is not loud because he is angry. It is loud because he wants other people to hear themselves become small.
At first, he talks about Vincenzo like an athlete talks about a rival. Every champion needs sparring partners. Vincenzo will go down because Han-seok is stronger. That would almost sound playful if he had not already built an empire out of dead patients, a dead father, and a puppet brother.
Then Dr. Gil calls him.
Gil wants 30 million dollars and a safe exit. He threatens to tell the prosecutor how Babel’s founder really died. Han-seok does not panic in a normal way. He negotiates, buys time, and stores the insult. The greed annoys him, but the bigger offense is being treated like someone who can be cornered.
So he spends the rest of the hour teaching people what happens when they forget who holds the knife.
The dinner with the bank presidents and prosecutors is already ugly before Han-seok arrives. Wusang needs money moving again. Choi Myung-hee (Kim Yeo-jin) swallows insult after insult while the men treat her like a saleswoman whose job is to pour drinks and keep powerful clients pleased. Han Seung-hyuk (Jo Han-chul) squirms beside her, trying to keep the arrangement alive.
Myung-hee’s greatness as an antagonist is right there in her face. She does not mistake humiliation for defeat. She absorbs it, files it, and keeps working. Later, when Seung-hyuk starts worrying that Han-seok has gone too far, Myung-hee gives him the real answer: they crossed to the dark side a long time ago. He is just noticing the temperature.
Han-seok’s private punishment of Chief Prosecutor Hwang is his nastiest set piece here. He has men dragged in, tied up, and terrified. He makes Hwang think a man has died in front of him. Then he threatens Hwang’s son, a child whose only crime is being useful leverage.
This is Han-seok’s particular cruelty. He does not simply hurt people. He searches for the place where their authority turns into begging. A chief prosecutor becomes a father pleading for his child. Wusang’s lawyers become witnesses who understand they are not partners but property. Han-seo becomes the younger brother ordered to increase security because he is the weak point.
Han-seok calls it going back to the old way. He means fear without polish.
Geumga Plaza stops being background noise
The Geumga Plaza tenants spend much of the night chasing gold, and the comedy is broad on purpose. Monks with dowsing rods. A tarot room. Sweet potatoes as law-office superstition. Vincenzo naming the pigeon Inzaghi like he has finally accepted that even his windowsill has joined the ensemble.
The gold hunt could feel like a distraction if the tenants were only comic relief. They are not.
When attackers break into Cha-young’s apartment, it is not Vincenzo who saves the moment first. The tenants do. Jang Yeon-jin turns out to have an “old school” violence in her. Mr. Lee moves like someone who has lifted more than boxes. The Plaza’s odd little community becomes physical protection, not just moral support.
That matters because Babel’s war has already reached the victims’ families. At the meal Cha-young and Nam Joo-sung (Yoon Byung-hee) share with them, the families describe Babel shareholders accusing them of using dead relatives and treating grief like a stock-price inconvenience. These are not abstract casualties. They are people eating pasta, planning a trip to Jindo Island, trying to find one small pocket of happiness after Babel took someone from them.
The tenants’ loyalty sits beside that grief.
They are ridiculous. They are nosy. They want the gold badly enough to form a committee and discuss equal shares like a neighborhood constitution. But when danger enters the Plaza, they move. Vincenzo may think of himself as the building’s hidden patriarch, but the Plaza has teeth of its own.
Even the monks refusing to leave Nanyak Temple changes shape. Vincenzo needs the temple moved to reach the gold. The monks stay because his example has given them courage to protect the Plaza. He tries to manipulate them with better meditation space. They respond with loyalty.
That is funnier than he deserves.
Cha-young spends the night in Vincenzo’s apartment
The attack on Cha-young is sloppy enough to reveal its purpose. It is not a clean assassination attempt. It is a warning meant to put her in the hospital and scare her off the board.
Han-seo ordered it as proof of loyalty. Han-seok hates him for the clumsiness, which tells us plenty about both brothers. Han-seo thinks violence is a gift he can offer. Han-seok treats bad violence as an embarrassment.
Cha-young survives the attack, then ends up in Vincenzo’s apartment because every other friend is unreachable, busy, or wisely avoiding this entire mess. The stayover comedy is very Vincenzo: ramyeon negotiations, ridiculous pajamas, scandal jokes, and a ceiling she immediately insults. It is silly, but it is not empty.
The apartment gives Cha-young space to ask the question she has been avoiding. What exactly has Vincenzo done? Not as a lawyer, not as a strategist, but as a mafia consigliere. She asks whether he has ever made someone pay the price with death.
He does not give her the comfort she wants.
When she says there is no way he is a killer, he answers with a question: “Would you still want to spend time with me if I were?”
That is a brutal thing to ask in a room where she has come for safety. It is also honest. Cha-young likes his competence, his deadpan menace, his loyalty to her father, and his ability to make Babel bleed. But there is a line between enjoying Vincenzo’s methods and living beside the man who learned them in Italy.
Her answer is not fear exactly. It is grief for the distance that would open if the truth were too dark. She says it would feel like he came from another world, or another era, like a gangster movie figure people are afraid to approach.
Vincenzo says he would be thrilled to live away from everyone.
Then he ruins the mood by blaming people who ask him for money.
That little joke saves the scene from becoming too solemn, but the wound stays open. Cha-young has seen the charming version of Vincenzo’s violence. Now she is close enough to ask about the real version.
What works
Every comic lane has a threat beside it. Inzaghi is funny until Vincenzo is alone and afraid in his own apartment. The tenants’ gold hunt is silly until the same people stop attackers from reaching Cha-young. The prosecutors’ humiliation plays with pulp exaggeration until Han-seok starts talking about a child.
Han-seok also becomes more specific here. He is not a generic rich psychopath. He wants worthy opponents because he is bored by easy obedience. He wants fear because respect alone does not satisfy him. He wants Babel’s drug production restarted even after the company has already killed people, because human damage only matters to him when it can be used.
Cha-young and Vincenzo’s apartment scene is the emotional standout. Their chemistry is not softened into romance yet. She can joke with him, trust him, need him, and still be unsure whether she can stand beside everything he has done. That tension belongs at midseason.
What stumbles
The gold material is funny, but the treasure subplot occasionally crowds the hour. The tenants’ pact is useful for the larger Geumga Plaza story, yet it lands between Babel murder logistics, Ms. Oh’s illness, Cha-young’s attack, and the victims’ families preparing for their trip.
Dr. Gil’s death arrives so quickly that the aftermath carries more weight than the dread. The shock still works because Babel has been building toward it all hour, but Gil’s blackmail thread could have used a little more room before it turned into a body.
Still, those are pacing issues, not broken pieces. The strongest scenes press exactly the right nerve.
What this sets up for Episode 10
Dr. Gil is dead, Prosecutor Jung has been pulled closer to Vincenzo and Cha-young’s side, and Babel has forced the banks back into line. RDU-90 is moving again. Han-seok is no longer content to let Han-seo play chairman while he watches from a distance.
The cruelest setup is the victims’ families. They leave behind a message saying they cannot bear their sadness and anger anymore, and that they are going to do something foolish. Cha-young’s request to keep Babel’s renewed funding quiet until after their trip now reads like a mercy that came too late.
Vincenzo’s answer is simple: if they cannot find the killer, they will make the killer come to them.
Episode 10 now has two revelations waiting. The war against Babel is becoming more openly murderous, and Vincenzo’s own code is moving closer to the surface. Seoul has seen his tricks. Now it is about to meet the man Italy made.
Rating: 9.0/10
More episodes from Vincenzo — The Italian-Korean mafia consigliere in Seoul, episode by episode. Jump to any episode in the season:
Where to go next
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.