“Taxi Driver” (모범택시): Season 2

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
May 3, 2023

☆☆☆☆
Kim Do-gi (played by Lee Je-hoon)
Kang Ha-na (played by Esom)
Jang Sung-chul (played by Kim Eui-sung)
Ahn Go-eun (played by Pyo Ye-jin)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

“Taxi Driver” is a thrilling series in the vein of “The Equalizer,” “Profiler” and “The Pretender.” Rainbow Taxi Service driver by day and justice seeker by (mostly) night, Do-gi (Lee Je-hoon) and his team are funded by Sung-chul (Kim Eui-sung), a philanthropist whose parents were murdered decades ago.

In the first season, Sung-chun says he wants to rehabilitate the serial killers and rapists whose legal punishment doesn’t fit the crimes they committed. So, they capture them, place them in a squalid underground facility not fit for human beings, and keep them there … until they die? In this second season, they mete out justice, but without the vigilante confinement.

The series is adept at tackling inspired by real-life cases like the Burning Sun scandal, where privileged male clubgoers were given access to women to drug, rape, and share videos of the assaults.

Shin Jae-ha (“Crash Course in Romance”) joins the cast as a new taxi driver who’s overly interested in Do-gi. Is he going to join the Rainbow Scooby Gang and help victims get revenge? Or is he someone who’s not what he seems? Hmmmmm.

The strongest episodes are the ones dealing with humanity, such as the child trafficking theme that runs throughout this season. Unmarried pregnant women are forced to give up their newborn babies for adoption-by-paper-only scams, where the children are used to get better housing, but aren’t actually placed with families who’ll take care of them. Child abandonment and adoption are also used to explain why one of the characters turned out the way that they did. But to the show’s credit, their behavior is neither condoned or excused.

Fans of this series (like me!) will be happy to hear that Season 3 has already been confirmed.

Airdates: Sixteen hour-long episodes aired on SBS from February 17 to April 15, 2023. You may check out my review of Season 1 here. (I watched both seasons on Viki.)

SPOILER ALERT: Shin Jae-ha’s On Ha-joon initially seems to be a welcome addition to the Rainbow Taxi Service. But we later find out that he is actually a wealthy criminal who has infiltrated Rainbow to bring down Do-gi and his team down. In a twist reminiscent of “Oldboy,” Ha-joon was convinced by a cult that he, too, had been abandoned by his parents. But in reality, he had been kidnapped and his parents never stopped looking for him. When Ha-joon realizes that the man he had killed was his biological father — who was hoping to find his son — he kills the cult leader and, in the process, himself.

© 2023 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved