Gold Land opens with the first episode with Kim Hee-ju driving a van in the pouring rain with a casket in the back. The man calls her many times demanding the return of the vehicle but she does not answer. In silence, she hurls the phone out the window and drives on toward Jeongsan, clearly upset.
Then we are taken back two days earlier. Hee-ju wakes up in her apartment and her land lady asks her about her boyfriend Lee Do-kyung who hasn’t paid rent for 3 months. When the landlady leaves, Hee-ju attempts to contact Do-kyung and leaves a message for him to take care of himself before she leaves.
She walks into a café and her card is rejected. Her bank account is empty. Then, she becomes a security screening agent at Yongpo International Airport.
Hee-ju is alarmed to see a man appear to be looking for her during her shift and quickly hides in a cargo security room. She is invited to go to a club after work by her colleagues, but she doesn’t go. Then later her senior Yu-jin asks to talk to her in private and warns her about the man who is asking for her. Yu-jin is worried and offers to help but Hee-ju refuses to talk about her personal situation.
Meanwhile, Lee Do-kyung is being chased by loan sharks for his unpaid debts in Bangkok. If he does not pay back, he is threatened with death and organ harvesting. Do-kyung calls Hee-ju and tells her to get out of their apartment, urgently. She tries to ask some questions, but he hangs up.
Soon after, some gangsters come to Hee-ju’s apartment. She jumps off the balcony to escape and catches a bus. Do-kyung calls again, glad she’s OK. He admits he is still at risk from gambling-related debt, and asks her to help him smuggle a casket through airport security the next day. She agrees reluctantly, and takes the shift.
At the airport, Hee-ju turns off the alarm at security to get the casket through, saying it was metal decorations that set it off. Outside, Do-kyung and a man named Woo-gi load the coffin into a van.
Do-kyung, however, pulls a gun and dumps him off the road. Woo-gi’s gang reports to their boss Executive Park Ho-cheol, who begins to track Do-kyung’s movements.
Do-kyung then calls Ho-cheol directly, demanding repayment of his debt and asking for another 1 billion won. When the situation is sorted out, he says he will return the casket. Ho-cheol then asks Police Inspector Kim Jin-man to try and find him.
That night, Do-kyung asks Hee-ju to meet him at the abandoned greenhouse. He hands her a spare and tells her to wait in the van with the coffin, promising to come back with money so they can escape together. He also tells her to run away if he doesn’t come back.
Soon after he leaves, Ho-cheol’s men run Do-kyung over with a car on the highway. He is injured and barely conscious, but he calls Hee-ju, telling her to run away as fast as she can.
Woo-gi and the gang arrive at the greenhouse. They try to stop Hee-ju when she tries to drive away in the van. She gets away in traffic there’s a chase. During the chase, Ho-cheol actually jumps onto the van but falls off.
He calls Do-kyung on her phone and demands that she return the coffin. Hee-ju throws the spare phone away and Do-kyung’s orders replay in her head. She drives on.
Finally, she finds herself in an abandoned mining place connected to her childhood memory of losing her dog, Mongsil. Flashbacks of her looking for the dog with her brother, falling in a ditch.
For now, Hee-ju is hiding the van in the mine shaft. When she opens the casket she sees that it is full of gold bars of 10 kilograms each.
The episode ends with a future Hee-ju wondering what her life would have been if she never took the van full of gold.
EPISODE 1 RECAP
Gold Land serves up a taut thriller with a crime, debt and survival-based plot that moves quickly. The story is interesting, but the production is pretty simple, which may impact the overall impact against higher budget dramas.
The turn with Do-kyung is a shocker, but what happens to him is left up in the air. The introduction of Park Ho-cheol as a ruthless villain adds pressure to the story, although the depiction is occasionally hampered by the actor’s familiar variety show image, making it difficult to completely separate from his off-screen persona.
Despite limited early buzz, the drama piques curiosity with the mystery of the gold-filled casket and Hee-ju’s desperate choices. The premiere establishes conflict and suspense effectively, raising questions of loyalty, survival and betrayal as the story progresses.