If you were in fandom spaces during Sherlock, you know that people went crazy for the deductions, for how they were delivered by Sherlock on the show. Who is a terrible person to most of the people around him! The surface admiration fans feel is for the way he works and not what he does for his friends (we’re talking normal human reciprocity and not lifesaving sorts of things).

So little of romance is devoted to the opposite - women who are good at tough, unsympathetic jobs and are unapologetic about it. If you were ever a woman in law enforcement, litigation or any other job coded to be aggressive or dominant, you’d find no shortage of gatekeeping men telling you how to do your job right, and there is no pleasing anyone in this.

How to speak, how to lower your pitch, what to wear, what NOT to wear, what sort of concessions you should give to the boys in club if you want to be in the club, what sort NOT to give so you don’t look like a chump. Maybe it’s better now than it used to be. Maybe some spaces are better than others. But the outcome was the same - you never win, and someone always shifts the goalposts when you’re done. You’re too sexy, you’re not sexy enough, your voice is annoying, you’re mousy, you’re loud, you’re fancy, you’re too articulate, you’re no fun, you’re a little too much and God forbid you get angry, because no one likes an angry woman.

We don’t see this sort of criticism on the show, because Cha Eun-gyeong is successful, but it’s never far from the minds of small men, be it her boss or the lawyer her husband seeks out. And we don’t have to see more of it - her husband, who by all rights should be proud of her achievements and hard-earned reputation, weaponises her work as the reason she is no longer a mother or a woman in his eyes. Who needs to hear from a shitty colleague when the call’s coming from inside the house? He hates her success, he hates that he owes his own success to her in part at least. It’s no surprise that his girlfriend is not a fellow doctor or someone from an allied or parallel position to him - she is in an admin position subordinate to Eun-gyeong. I don’t say this to denigrate admin positions, but to point out the predictability of men like him, whose anger at not being the centre of a woman’s universe is never far from the surface.

But then there’s Jung Woo-jin, who admires Atty Cha because of all the traits that make her a good lawyer. He points out to Han Yuri that she started out doing a tough job in a time few women took it on, that she took risks and was courageous in her representation of her clients. He admires her and yes, he loves her all the more for it.

If you’re asking me why it matters what a man feels about Atty Cha’s job, frankly I don’t think it does! She’s the fulcrum of her own universe. She’s never needed anyone’s approval to do what she felt was right. But I think it bears pointing out that this is a lonely job. Clients need to be handled and protected, opposing counsel are to be suspected, and judges are to be feared. There’s at least three fronts of conflict, and here is Cha Eun-gyeong, handling it all with infinite grace. And it’s great that she can do it all, but it’d also be great if the narrative could be different, for once; if she could have friends, even lovers, potentially, who love her for all of who she is, and not just the pieces of her that are useful. It’s a fantasy, yes, but a type so specific and so underserved that it had to have been written by a woman in corporate, if not a woman in litigation.

Cha Eun-gyeong is a very good lawyer, a woman who at partner level is still working her ass off to stay at the top, and Jung Woo-jin sees that; he sees HER, and the things that make her a good lawyer are indivisible from her as a person, because they are for Cha Eun-gyeong. Which is why his admiration for her is also indivisible from his love, and it’s also why he thinks nothing of it and Han Yuri catches on immediately. Because he can’t see it, but everyone else can.

But beyond that, for me it’s the moment he bodily puts himself between the CEO (yet another man waiting for her to fail) and Cha Eun-gyeong. I think it’s easy to convey admiration privately, because you don’t lose capital from that. It’s another thing to stand up for a colleague publicly. To your CEO no less, and in front of all your other colleagues, at a time of great personal crisis for Cha Eun-gyeong. (To your CEO who is also your father, no less!). It’s telling that this unassuming man who tends to smooth ruffled feathers does not appeal to his father-boss’s ego or supplicate to secure a temporary detente; what he makes is a threat that the words being uttered are defamatory, a polite suggestion that there will be consequences for careless words, and his father absolutely picks up on it. He may pay a price for it yet, going by the conversation he has later with his father.