Episode 4 of Agent Kim Reactivated does something I genuinely wasn’t expecting this deep into the season: it stops the present-day chaos cold and drags us back to 1997, into the kind of backstory that makes you look at every character differently for the rest of the show. If you came into this episode wanting more car chases and gang warfare, don’t worry, you’ll get that too. But the real gut-punch here is watching how Mr. Kim became Mr. Kim in the first place, and honestly, it’s rough.
How Mr. Kim Became Agent 73: The Orphanage Flashback
We open in North Hamgyong Province, North Korea, at the Geumgang Orphanage. Major Ri Eung-ryeong of the DPRK shows up looking to recruit children into military service, and a young Park Yeong Gwang volunteers almost immediately. Other kids follow his lead, not really grasping what they’re signing up for.
What happens next is hard to watch. The children are forced to fight each other, and only two of them pass this brutal filter: Park Yeong Gwang and another boy we come to know as Kim, who will eventually grow into the Mr. Kim we’ve been following all season. The survivors get shipped off to training camps where the abuse doesn’t let up. They’re beaten until they literally forget their own names, stripped down to numbers instead of identities. This is where Number 66 and Number 73 are born, and 73, of course, is our Mr. Kim.
The training montage covers years, and by the time it’s done, 66 and 73 have become the camp’s top performers. Their first real mission sends them into South Korea for an attack in Gangwon. It goes sideways. Dynamite kills 66, and 73 survives, only to get branded a traitor and blamed for his own partner’s death. There’s a quiet, aching little detail dropped here too: a glimpse of 66’s childhood, before all this, showing that he had a younger brother named Gang Seong back home.
Back to the Present: The Bunker Standoff and a New Ally
The episode snaps back to the present, picking up right where things left off. Han-su and Mr. Kim are fighting 66, until the laundromat owner steps in and breaks it up. He’d clocked 66 lurking near the car park earlier, which is why he was ready to intervene.
The laundromat owner tells Mr. Kim to just surrender already. Mr. Kim isn’t having it. He needs time to find his daughter first. Han-su tags along to keep an eye on him, and that split-second distraction is exactly what 66 needs to make a move on the remaining agents.
Back in the bunker, Mr. Kim is patching up a bullet wound when Park Jin-cheol shows up to join the group. Jin-cheol is loud, a little chaotic, and honestly a fun jolt of energy in an episode this heavy. The three of them head to Hwasin Station to track down the homeless man who found Min-ji’s phone, with SMD agents breathing down their necks the entire way.
The Phone Lead and the Golden Teeth Gang
The homeless man finally gives up the details: a member of the Golden Teeth gang, a guy with a man bun, tossed Min-ji’s phone out of a white BMW into a trash can. That same BMW is shown heading toward Myeongpo Port right after, while a news report warns of a storm rolling in that night, which feels like it’s setting up something.
Mr. Kim’s crew keeps watching from the bunker and manages to ID the man with the man bun as Kim Sang-man. Meanwhile, over with the Golden Teeth gang, the group is on a break, trying to figure out how to break some news to their boss, Mr. Ju. One of the henchmen makes the mistake of asking why the boss wants revenge on Mr. Ju in the first place and even offers him a chunk of potato as a peace offering. The boss is clearly still traumatized by whatever happened between them, and he lashes out at the henchman on the spot.
Golden Teeth’s Origin Story: Where the Nickname Comes From
This is the episode’s second big flashback, and it explains a detail that’s been sitting there since we first met this character. Back in 2009, Golden Teeth, whose real name is Jung Dae, was part of a gang hired to attack protesters who were fighting against a redevelopment project. His own boss threw him off a rooftop, purely so the incident could be used as justification to get the building’s reconstruction approved.
Jung Dae survives the fall. Once he’s back on his feet, he kills the boss who threw him and takes over the gang himself. Before dying, though, the old boss reveals that the order to throw Jung Dae off that roof came from Mr. Ju. So Mr. Ju agrees to meet with him, and the meeting predictably turns into a full brawl between their respective crews.
It eventually narrows down to a one-on-one between Mr. Ju and Jung Dae, and Mr. Ju is absolutely merciless. He slices open Jung Dae’s jaw with a knife, then shoves whole hot potatoes into his mouth while Jung Dae begs for his life. That’s the moment his teeth get replaced with gold, and that’s where the nickname comes from. It’s a gnarly, visceral flashback, and it recontextualizes every scene with Golden Teeth we’ve watched so far.
Min-ji Is Alive, and the Port Chaos Begins
Back in the present, Golden Teeth’s crew moves Min-ji’s body to a cold storage unit at the port, only to be spotted by the site supervisor. At the exact same time, Mole Cricket blows up Mr. Kim and the group’s car. Mr. Kim clocks that the trace has completed successfully, and in a genuinely relieving twist, we see Min-ji climbing out of the sack she’d been stuffed into. She’s alive.
Mole Cricket lures the trio out into the open, and Han-su answers the call, taunting and going after him directly. Mr. Kim takes the opportunity to commandeer Mole Cricket’s car. Mole Cricket ends up diving into the water to escape, and Han-su jumps in right after him. Not long after, Jin-cheol climbs out of the car to deal with a fresh wave of SMD agents closing in.
Meanwhile, Min-ji is fighting to break free from the cold storage. Golden Teeth heads out to snap a photo of what he thinks is her body, then reaches out to Mr. Ju’s secretary, Mr. Nam, to negotiate a deal. Mr. Ju, for his part, is talking to Hye-ri about the whole mess, and she’s still trying to pin the blame on Min-ji. Mr. Ju then instructs Mr. Nam to stage the scene so it looks like Golden Teeth is the one who killed Min-ji.
Mr. Kim’s son arrives at the port and spots the white BMW. Inside the cold storage, Min-ji is barely holding onto consciousness, and Golden Teeth almost discovers her alive, but he gets pulled away by a call from Mr. Ju before he can. Mr. Kim, meanwhile, tracks down Golden Teeth’s henchmen and beats the information about Min-ji’s location out of them when they refuse to talk.
The episode ends with Golden Teeth demanding two billion won from Mr. Ju and naming a location for the exchange, while Min-ji is still fighting to claw her way out of the cold storage unit.
The Episode Review: A Devastating Look at What Makes These Characters Tick
If Episode 3 was about setting the chess pieces in motion, Episode 4 is about showing us why those pieces move the way they do. And it does that best through two parenting dynamics that couldn’t be more different if the show tried.
Mr. Ju and Hye-ri are, without question, the show’s most toxic parent-child pairing. Mr. Ju doesn’t just fail to correct his daughter’s behavior, he actively enables it, and you can see exactly how she turned out the way she did. It’s uncomfortable to watch precisely because it’s so recognizable. Then you’ve got Mr. Kim and Min-ji on the complete opposite end of the spectrum: distant, sure, maybe even a little emotionally stunted given everything Mr. Kim has been through, but genuinely loving underneath it all. The contrast isn’t subtle, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. The show wants you sitting there thinking about what kind of parent you’d rather have, or be.
But the orphanage flashback is really what’s going to stick with me. Watching how Mr. Kim’s entire identity was manufactured, quite literally beaten into him as a child until his real name stopped mattering, recontextualizes every cold, controlled moment we’ve seen from him all season. This isn’t a guy who’s naturally hardened. This is a guy who was made hard, piece by piece, starting when he was a kid who didn’t know any better than to volunteer. The training camp sequences are hard to sit through, and what makes them worse is that detail lingering in the back of your mind: stuff like this isn’t purely fictional. There’s a kernel of real history buried in there, and that gives the whole flashback a weight that a lot of spy dramas never bother earning.
Golden Teeth’s backstory, on the other hand, is the episode having a little fun with its own brutality. The rooftop betrayal, the revenge plot, that unforgettable potato-and-knife scene, it’s dark, but it’s also delivered with just enough style that it doesn’t feel like it’s competing for the same emotional register as Mr. Kim’s trauma. It’s the show letting its side characters be genuinely menacing without stealing focus from the main event.
Where Episode 4 really succeeds is in making you realize that nearly everyone in this story, Mr. Kim, Golden Teeth, even Hye-ri in her own twisted way, is a product of something that happened to them long before the show started. That’s a smarter foundation than most K-dramas in this genre bother laying down, and it’s why I’m more invested now than I was after the premiere.
Episode 3 | Eps Guides | Episode 5
