ENA ‘Honor: Their Court’ broadcast screen capture

On ENA ‘Honor: Their Court,’ Lee Na-young foreshadowed a bold counterattack despite all-out pressure from Seo Hyun-woo. As a result, the ratings recorded 3.1% nationwide and 3.0% in the Seoul metropolitan area. (Provided by Nielsen Korea, based on paid households)

In episode 5 of the ENA MondayTuesday drama ‘Honor: Their Court’ (hereafter ‘Honor’), aired on the 16th, the full story of a 20-year-old secret involving the trio of L&J (Listen & Join) lawyers, the ‘Korea University Law School male student disappearance case,’ was revealed.

Yoon Ra-yeong (Lee Na-young) suffered dating violence from her then-boyfriend Park Ju-hwan for smiling at another man, and when Kang Shin-jae (Jung Eun-chae) and Hwang Hyun-jin (Lee Chung-ah) tried to save her, Park Ju-hwan injured his head and plunged into a lake. He then lost his memory due to aftereffects of a cerebral hemorrhage, changed his name to Park Je-yeol (Seo Hyun-woo), and emerged as a sitting prosecutor.

However, Park Je-yeol, seeming to have regained his memory, asserted that he was not the perpetrator and revealed a desire for revenge toward Yoon Ra-yeong. With a sneer that he had not wanted to meet a friend as a suspect, he brought up a reinvestigation of the case.

Believing that the reason Park Je-yeol had burst back after 20 years and was attacking by leveraging the past was not unrelated to the clandestine prostitution app ‘Connect-In,’ the L&J trio re-investigated the victims. They found a common thread: minor sexual-crime victim Jo Yu-jeong (Park Se-hyun) and drug offender Lee Seon-hwa (Baek Ji-hye) had both received deferred prosecution decisions from Park Je-yeol.

When they added the fact that Lee Seon-hwa had handed Han Min-seo (Jeon So-young) over to ‘Connect-In,’ the puzzle finally fit. Convinced that Park Je-yeol had supplied female suspects to a sex-trade cartel by dangling his charging authority as bait, Kang Shin-jae met him and subtly tossed out bait. Only then did Park Je-yeol reveal that he had regained his memory and had secured DNA evidence, threatening, “Back off from Connect-In.”

An unexpected crisis also struck. Even after it was exposed that Kwon Jung-hyun (Lee Hae-young), the number two at Haeil, was a ‘Connect-In’ user, he stripped Kang Shin-jae of her position and took office as the new head of L&J. Hwang Hyun-jin likewise faced a setback when Park Je-yeol directly assigned the reinvestigation of the 20-year-old case to her husband, Gu Seon-gyu (Choi Young-jun).

Nevertheless, Yoon Ra-yeong resolved to dig into Connect-In to the very end, as it was tied to her past trauma. Sensing that the husband whom National Forensic Service medical examiner Hong Yeon-hee (Baek Eun-hye) had called ‘hell’ was in fact Park Je-yeol, Yoon sought her out and confronted her head-on, pressing for the reason she had approached her intentionally.

However, already gaslit by Park Je-yeol, Hong Yeon-hee shot back, “It was you, right? The one who tried to kill my husband.” Yoon Ra-yeong, who had seemed ready to admit it was a mistake, countered with a twist: “I should have just killed him then.” At the same time, anticipation surged over how she might use Hong Yeon-hee as a counterattack card going forward.

Episode 6 of ‘Honor: Their Court’ airs today (the 17th) at 10 p.m. on ENA and will be available on KT Genie TV and Coupang Play.