Vincenzo Episode 10 Recap: Geumga Plaza Joins the War
Vincenzo, Season 1, Episode 10 tvN / Netflix · Written by Park Jae-bum · 2021
Babel kills the victims’ families, Vincenzo drops the lawyer act, and Geumga Plaza finally chooses a side.
By this point, the line between lawsuit and gang war has already burned away.
The four family members who helped torch Babel’s warehouse are dead. The police want the deaths logged as suicide. Wusang has money moving through corrupt hands. Babel wants Geumga Plaza demolished before anyone can breathe.
So Song Joong-ki’s Vincenzo stops asking Seoul’s institutions to behave like institutions. He has spent the season pretending the law is still a useful costume. Here, he takes it off.
Vincenzo and Cha-young force the police to reopen the deaths
The first half runs on grief, and it is ugly grief because it has nowhere respectable to go.
Hong Cha-young walks into the police station with the obvious question: why would four people who had just sent a happy trip photo all decide to die together? The detective’s answer is pure institutional rot. They were unstable. The trial hurt them. People are unpredictable. Anything except murder, because murder would require work, warrants, and a spine.
Cha-young does not accept it. She wants autopsies. She wants the cause of death. She wants the case treated like four people with names were taken from the world, not like paperwork that can be folded until it fits Babel’s needs.
Vincenzo watches her hit the wall, then says the quiet part aloud: if the police told them to handle it themselves, they will.
That is the turn.
He does not frame revenge as justice. He says his life has been kill or be killed, that in his world villains fight villains, and that innocents are not supposed to be touched. The victims’ families were outside that world. Babel dragged them in anyway.
That matters because Vincenzo is not suddenly becoming darker. He is becoming more honest about the code he already had. Park Joo-hyung the Korean lawyer may be a performance, but Vincenzo Cassano has rules, and Babel has broken one he cannot let pass.
Cha-young meets him there faster than expected. When he says he may have to break their promise that no one gets killed, she does not make a speech about morality. She says promises need to be broken sometimes.
It is not romance in the soft sense. It is partnership under pressure. She is angry, guilty, and awake.
The rooftop shakedown of the detectives gives that anger a farcical bite. Vincenzo catches the payoff, scatters the cash, and threatens to push the corrupt officers over the edge unless they hand over the case files. Then Cha-young arrives in limited-edition shoes and asks for her turn.
That is pure Vincenzo: grief, dirty money, attempted intimidation, and a footwear punchline in the same breath. The joke works because the dead are never treated like props. The laughter comes from watching cowards learn fear, not from softening what happened to the victims.
Han-seok explains why hiding makes him feel like a god
Jang Han-seok’s cruelty is specific here. He is not only killing to protect Babel. He enjoys the feeling of remaining invisible while other people bleed, panic, and clean up after him.
That comes out twice.
First, he pushes Jang Han-seo to keep the Geumga Plaza demolition moving even while Babel is under scrutiny. When Han Seung-hyuk hesitates, Han-seok reaches for the prosecution and for a demolition crew tied to a redevelopment where twelve people died. He even wonders how many will die this time.
He says it like weather.
Then he tells Choi Myung-hee why he stays hidden. One reason is practical: he does not want jail. One reason is childish: he likes the game. The third is the real confession. Being unseen lets him feel like a god.
That line tells us why he is so dangerous. Han-seok is not only rich, violent, or protected. He is addicted to the gap between command and consequence. Other people perform fear in front of him. Other people become public faces, legal shields, disposable workers, fake chairmen, dead witnesses. He gets to sit behind them and enjoy the distance.
Ok Taec-yeon’s Han-seok works well when the boyish surface drops for one clean second and the appetite underneath shows. He can smile through a line about purpose and pain because he believes people are toys until they prove dangerous.
Choi Myung-hee sees that appetite clearly, and Kim Yeo-jin’s Myung-hee keeps matching it instead of flinching. She is not a henchwoman who got lost. She likes work that feels like mountain climbing: one missed handhold and death below. Her loyalty is transactional, but her taste for risk is real.
That is why the villain side feels alive. Seung-hyuk sweats. Han-seo trembles. Myung-hee sharpens. Han-seok smiles because everyone else is doing the sweating for him.
Geumga Plaza joins Vincenzo’s plan
The tenants could have stayed as a noisy chorus around Vincenzo’s gold problem. Instead, they become something better: a ridiculous, sincere, deeply useful neighborhood militia.
Their first meeting is fear. Babel has killed seven people in one night if you count Director Gil, Prosecutor Seo, and the four in the van. The tenants understand that a company willing to murder bereaved families will not blink at laundromat owners, monks, dancers, cooks, or shopkeepers blocking a tower site.
They are scared. They are also offended.
That difference matters. Fear makes them ask Vincenzo for protection. Offense makes them offer skills. Someone can do computers. Someone has a loud voice. Someone can swear. Someone is strong. The monks insist that their true spirit is action. Nobody is impressive in the way Vincenzo is impressive, but everyone has something.
The Kkabalrieo TV plan is a smart use of them. Vincenzo and Cha-young cannot beat Babel through a press machine already prepared to bury the truth, so they do something uglier and more effective: ridicule. They mock Babel, Wusang, Myung-hee, Seung-hyuk, and Han-seo in public until everyone on the villain side starts yelling at screens.
Vincenzo in the Inzaghi mask is a wild image to use at this point in the plot. Four innocent people are dead. The murder evidence is fresh. Babel is planning more violence. And the answer, for one stretch, is a masked livestream with tenants cheering from behind the setup.
That could collapse into nonsense. It does not, because the target is precise. Vincenzo says villains can handle being hated but cannot stand ridicule. He is right. Han-seok can absorb accusation. Han-seo cannot absorb being called empty-headed on stream. Myung-hee can order murders covered up, but she almost combusts over a dance joke.
The tenants also get a second, much more physical test when the Twin Swords Gang comes to threaten Geumga Plaza. Park Seok-do’s crew folds immediately once they recognize the gang. The tenants panic too. Then Mr. Tak steps forward with the scissors he swore would only cut fabric.
He does not become a superhero. He becomes a man who has had enough.
That is the tenant material working cleanly. The comedy does not make them fake. It gives them room to be brave without sanding off their weirdness.
The Cassano name reaches Babel before the chairman reveal does
The Italy thread finally hits Seoul in a direct way when Luca calls Vincenzo. Someone Korean has been asking about him. That warning sits quietly for a while, then pays off when Han-seok receives the photos and the explanation.
Babel learns that Vincenzo Cassano is not a stylish foreign-educated lawyer with a scary hobby. He is a feared consigliere tied to the Cassano Family. The C he leaves behind is not decorative branding. It is a warning.
Han-seok needed that information. The audience did too.
Until now, Babel has treated Vincenzo as an unusually annoying opponent with unusual methods. Now the mismatch is plain. Han-seok has been playing god from behind a corporate wall. Vincenzo has lived in a world where threats arrive as bodies, not memos. He understands proximity. He understands warning. He understands how to make fear personal.
That does not make him clean. The underpass ambush is brutal. Vincenzo lures the killers to the place where they abducted the victims’ families, fights them alone, and starts asking for the real chairman’s name. He is not trying to build a case. He is trying to extract a truth.
Cha-young arrives after calling him again and again, terrified because he chose danger without her. Her anger lands because she is right. He calls it protection. She calls it partnership being ignored.
When she says they should face danger as partners, the line cuts through all the makgeolli warmth from earlier. She has already accepted the revenge. What she refuses is being placed outside it for her own good.
Then Vincenzo says he knows who Babel’s real chairman is.
That is the cliffhanger the whole middle stretch has been earning: not a vague clue, not another masked threat, but the moment the invisible man starts running out of invisibility.
What works
As a midseason entry, this run hits hard because every register feeds the same fight.
The murder investigation is grim without becoming flat. The rooftop police intimidation is funny without pretending corruption is cute. The Kkabalrieo TV sequence gives the tenants room to be absurd while still moving the strategy forward. The underpass fight brings Vincenzo’s mafia past into the present instead of leaving it as flavor.
Cha-young has a sharp run here. Jeon Yeo-been’s Cha-young does not become Vincenzo’s conscience or his passenger. She mourns, schemes, threatens, comforts, and then gets furious when he tries to make a solo sacrifice. She is not asking him to be gentle. She is asking him to stop deciding alone.
Myung-hee also keeps getting sharper. Her fear of Han-seok is real, but fear does not make her passive. She chooses the climb, and that choice makes her scarier than a lawyer who simply follows orders.
What stumbles
The gold subplot briefly feels like it wandered in from another room. The travel-agency bit and the temple complaint are funny enough on their own, but beside the murdered families and imminent demolition, the gold material has less bite than usual.
Joon-woo pulling Cha-young away with a fake Wusang tip also plays a little broad because the audience already knows too much about him. The manipulation is useful, and the car ride creates good tension, but Cha-young falling for the bait needs the urgency around Vincenzo to cover the convenience.
Still, those are small dents. The revenge plot is moving hard.
What this sets up for Episode 11
Vincenzo knows the real chairman. Han-seok knows the Cassano name. Cha-young knows Vincenzo will still try to keep her out of danger unless she fights him on it. Geumga Plaza knows Babel’s next move is not theoretical anymore.
That leaves Episode 11 with several live wires: the chairman reveal, the killers’ link to Babel, the demolition threat, Luca’s warning, and the tenants’ new role as more than people waiting to be rescued.
The richer setup is emotional, though. Vincenzo has built his life around control. Cha-young is telling him that partnership means surrendering some of it.
For a man who can terrify cops, lawyers, gangsters, and Babel’s hired killers, that may be the harder fight.
Rating: 9.1/10
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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.