His personal quirks, which includes wearing sunglasses at all times, a ramshackle lawyer’s office, and an intense fondness for black bean noodles, at first come across as affectations, a way to make him stand out as a maverick.

It’s to the show’s credit that we eventually discover that there is method in the One Dollar Lawyer’s madness, so to speak. As the show takes an extended midseason trip into the past, we learn all about Ji-hoon’s history as a prosecutor and, most importantly, what became of his personal connections, and how this informed his persona as the One Dollar Lawyer.

Five years before the events of the show, Ji-hoon was in his prime as a prosecutor, working alongside Na Hye-jin (Gong Min-jung) and Seo Min-hyuk (Choi Dae-hoon).

Even then he stood out for his cocksure behaviour and his tendency to buck convention. But he was a lot more dry and self-serious, wore mirthless black suits and his hair lacked the wavy volume we’ve become accustomed to.

One of his cases saw him go head-to-head with smarmy CEO Choi Ki-tae (Yoon Na-moo). Among this corporate tycoon’s evil acts was compelling a subordinate to kill himself to cover his own dirty tracks. Ji-hoon intercepts the underling just before he makes use of the noose he’s tied for himself, calling forward to the future clients he will save from self-harm.

The case also leads Ji-hoon to a slush fund and, as he works up the ladder, he stumbles upon something shocking and personally upsetting. His very own father, the assemblyman Kim Yoon-sub (Nam Myung-ryul), who is undergoing confirmation trials to become South Korea’s prime minister, is on the take.

Ji-hoon sets aside his personal connections and decides to forge ahead with the investigation. Cornered, his father decides to jump off the roof of the Prosecutor’s Office.

During this case Ji-hoon also first meets Lee Joo-young (Lee Chung-ah), Ki-tae’s counsel, who works at the Baek Law Firm – which is run by the grandfather of Ji-hoon’s present-day legal partner Baek Ma-ri (Kim Ji-eun).

Though on opposite sides of the fence, Joo-young struggles with her obligation to represent a crook and secretly hopes that Ji-hoon will win the case.

Following the death of his father, Ji-hoon slowly opens his eyes to the kindness and affection of Joo-young, who has since left Baek and set up a One Dollar Lawyer practice in the cheap neighbourhood office we already recognise. Ji-hoon soon proposes to her.

Fate strikes another cruel blow when Joo-young accidentally picks up the wrong file on her way out of the Baek Law Firm for the last time. The document has sensitive information pertaining to the slush fund and the shadow figure who was above Ji-hoon’s father. Ji-hoon finds her stabbed in a subway carriage before she had a chance to share the information.

Ji-hoon’s intense grief leads him to resign as a prosecutor and pick up where Joo-young left off at her nascent One Dollar Lawyer practice. In a touching revelation, he also starts to wear sunglasses to mask his perpetual tears.

As for the black bean noodles, those are in memory of his father. His mother used to bring him black bean noodles whenever his father was busy as a child, which was often. He was able to share the dish with his father just once – right before he died.

Black bean noodles, a cheap meal popular with children and adults alike, has a lot of nostalgic value in Korea, and often crops up in local media.

One Dollar Lawyer’s use of the dish calls to mind the cult black comedy Castaway on the Moon, about a suicidal salaryman who winds up a castaway on an island in the middle of Seoul’s Han River and who also craves black bean noodles to connect to his past.

This similarity is confirmed in the show’s very last scene, when Ji-hoon travels to the same island seen in that film to visit a debt-laden man who has washed up there after attempting suicide off a bridge.

This closing moment also serves as a neat callback to our introduction to this idiosyncratic lawyer all the way back in episode one, when he saved another suicidal debtor atop a bridge.

Though Ji-hoon is a saint to penniless clients, the show occasionally gives the impression that poor people need the rich to help them.

Ji-hoon and Ma-ri have access to vast family wealth – at one point Ji-hoon buys a painting for 2 billion won as a piece of evidence, and more than once they come to the rescue of their penurious and credulous office manager, Sa Mu-jang (Park Jin-woo).

That minor quibble aside, One Dollar Lawyer is a neatly plotted and engaging ride lined with an effectively emotional backstory which adds depth to its main character.

One Dollar Lawyer is streaming on Disney+.