Plenty of handsome men. Almost no good ones. Revisiting the six episodes where Baek Kitae and Jang Geonyoung fought over money, power, and justice. Full spoilers.
Made in Korea lines up some of the most recognizable leading men in Korean film and television. Hyun Bin, Jung Woo-sung, Park Yong-woo, Jung Sung-il. The screen looks great. The people they’re playing don’t.
The KCIA, the prosecutor’s office, the presidential office, gangsters, Japanese yakuza — nearly everyone here crosses a line for money or power. Even the ones talking about justice will threaten and deal when they need to.
At the center are Baek Kitae (also written Baek Ki-tae) and Jang Geonyoung (also written Jang Geon-young). One uses a state agency to build his own business and climb higher. The other chases him to the end. Across six episodes, they fight with their heads and their fists, and eventually drag in family, organizations, and politics too.
Season 2 arrives September 9. Before it does, here’s exactly what happened in Season 1.
It Starts With a Hijacking
1970. A Japanese businessman named Matsuda boards a flight to Fukuoka. His briefcase holds drugs meant for the Ikeda yakuza organization. Then the plane is hijacked by a radical Japanese leftist group demanding to be flown to North Korea.
Matsuda stays strangely calm through all of it. He gets some passengers released and uses a young passenger to smuggle information out. The South Korean government uses that information to divert the plane to Korea. In the end, Matsuda subdues the hijackers himself. It’s far too practiced for an ordinary businessman.
The moment he walks back into the KCIA’s Busan branch, we learn who he actually is. His workplace is full of torture and beatings, blood spattering in every direction. His real name is Baek Kitae, a section chief at the Busan branch of the KCIA.
The KCIA was created in 1961, shortly after the military coup that brought Park Chung Hee’s faction to power. Officially it was an intelligence and counterespionage agency, but it became notorious for surveillance, torture, and the fabrication of espionage cases against political opponents and ordinary citizens.
The problem is that Baek Kitae is a KCIA officer and a partner in the yakuza drug trade at the same time. He works for the state and uses the state’s power for his own business.
Jang Geonyoung Finds Baek Kitae
Jang Geonyoung, a prosecutor in the Busan District Prosecutor’s Office, is tracking the methamphetamine spreading through the city. He’s the opposite of Kitae by temperament. He keeps getting passed over for promotion but doesn’t read his superiors’ faces, and once a case smells wrong, he holds on no matter who’s on the other end.
What he’s chasing is Busan’s biggest drug organization, run by a boss named Jo. Jo trades meth with the Japanese yakuza and has his hands in every lucrative business in the city. In a photo Geonyoung has obtained, Jo is bowing deferentially — to Baek Kitae.
Why is a KCIA section chief standing with a drug organization? Geonyoung starts digging, and a sting operation lands him Kang, the organization’s second-in-command.
Kitae doesn’t sit still either. He walks into Geonyoung’s office himself, goes through his files, and plants a listening device. Then he identifies himself as KCIA and warns Geonyoung to drop the case. Geonyoung doesn’t stop, and Kang gives up the details of an upcoming deal.
Geonyoung moves to raid the hotel where Jo is meeting the yakuza — but the KCIA gets there first. His operation is neutralized, and both Jo and Kang end up in KCIA hands. Jo is eliminated. Kang is kept alive. The reason is simple. Kitae is taking the drug business for himself.
Baek Kitae Goes Into the Drug Business Himself
From here, Kitae stops being an intelligence officer skimming money from the shadows. He becomes an operator. He has Kang rebuild the organization, finds a pharmacist, and starts manufacturing. The lab is disguised as a pig farm so the smell of production is buried under the smell of livestock.
His partner in Japan is Ikeda Yuji, a Korean-Japanese man and a key figure in the Ikeda organization. Kitae proposes taking over the business Jo used to run. He doesn’t think of it as a crime. Made in Korea, sold in Japan, foreign currency coming home — he frames it as patriotism. His sister eventually ends up managing the money.
Around this time, Bae Geumji (also written Bae Geum-ji) enters the story. She’s the madam of an upscale kisaeng house frequented by the political and business elite, and she knows the private entanglements of the men around the president. The rumor alone that she keeps a notebook listing who she’s slept with is enough to make powerful men nervous — and the biggest leverage of all is what she knows about who fathered her son.
She recognizes Kitae’s ambition immediately. There’s no future under Hwang Gukpyeong (also written Hwang Guk-pyeong), she tells him; if he wants to go higher, she’ll help.
Kitae chooses power instead. Geumji knows about his deal with Ikeda Yuji, and when she tells him the notebook never existed at all, she becomes someone he can no longer leave alive. Kitae moves on her with KCIA agents and kills her himself.
Jang Geonyoung Sees How Deep It Goes
Geonyoung doesn’t stop investigating either. He traces who took over the drug business after Jo disappeared, and lands on Baek Kitae. The two meet head-on.
Kitae says he joined the KCIA out of patriotism. Geonyoung laughs at him. Is flooding Japan with Korean-made meth patriotism too?
So Kitae brings up Geonyoung’s family. He mentions the guitar club Geonyoung’s sister attends, and intelligence linking it to North Korea. The KCIA of this era manufactured spies out of nothing whenever it wanted, which makes this an enormous threat. Geonyoung doesn’t back down — he asks whether the KCIA investigating and threatening a prosecutor’s family counts as patriotism. From this point their fight stops being an investigation. It becomes a war between two men who know each other’s weak points.
Baek Kitae Removes His Own Boss
As the drug operation grows, Busan branch chief Hwang Gukpyeong catches on. Hwang is a corrupt man himself. He’d been taking money from Jo’s organization and passing it up to the presidential security chief, the man who effectively controls the KCIA from beside the president. And he’d been skimming a substantial amount for himself along the way.
With a gun pointed at him, Kitae grovels and makes an offer: a large payment every month, in exchange for not being blocked. At the same time, he’s reaching past Hwang toward the far greater power above him — the presidential security chief himself.
Hwang realizes how dangerous Kitae has become and moves to eliminate him. He orders Section Chief Pyo, Kitae’s colleague, to kill him on the boat back from the deal with Ikeda Yuji in Japan. But Kitae is a step ahead. He never gets off the boat. Pyo disembarks alone, hands Hwang the money, and reports that Kitae is dead.
Hwang heads to the temple where he keeps his slush fund hidden. Waiting for him in the dark, beside the safe, is Kitae. He shoots Hwang without hesitation.
Geonyoung follows him all the way there. He finds Hwang’s body and is certain Baek Kitae is the killer — but he has no evidence. Kitae takes the money and burns the temple down.
The Fight Moves Up to the Blue House
With Hwang dead, Geonyoung arrests Section Chief Pyo. He even has photographs of the drug deal in Japan. It looks like he can finally take Baek Kitae down. Then the investigation is blocked from above. Behind Kitae stands the presidential security chief — and behind him, the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence and the Korean equivalent of the White House.
Kitae hands over the money taken from Hwang, along with Bae Geumji’s notebook — her son had been the security chief’s child. Then he makes a bigger offer: he will raise 70 billion won for the presidential election. The drug business is no longer personal profit. It’s political funding. To Kitae, the state isn’t something to protect. It’s his largest business partner.
On the other side of the security chief is the chief presidential secretary. The two men hold each other in check, and Geonyoung starts using their rivalry. He’s realized that no prosecutor takes down Baek Kitae alone.
The War Reaches Their Families
Kitae has a weakness too. His family. His younger brother Baek Kihyun (also written Baek Ki-hyun) graduated at the top of his class from the Korea Military Academy — an elite officer who, unlike his brother, tries to hold onto his principles. When an incident puts his military career at risk, Geonyoung approaches him. For Kitae, this is crossing a line.
So Kitae abducts Geonyoung. He drags Geonyoung’s sister into KCIA custody too, and constructs a story in which she managed funds for an organization tied to North Korea. The fabricated evidence and false statements are already prepared. This was routine work for the KCIA in the 1970s.
Geonyoung wavers for the first time. He can take it himself, but watching his sister be destroyed is another matter. The prosecutor’s office and the chief presidential secretary eventually intervene, and both of them are released.
By now, both men understand the same thing. This ends only when one of them is completely destroyed.
Jang Geonyoung Prepares His Last Counterattack
Geonyoung changes his approach. He allies with the chief presidential secretary, the security chief’s rival, and tries to pry Kitae and the security chief apart. Section Chief Pyo appears to turn on Kitae as well. Geonyoung tells Pyo there is likely a recording of Kitae handing money to the security chief.
Kang, who had been in hiding, is caught again. He confesses that Baek Kitae started the drug operation. Kitae’s sister is arrested. Prosecutors raid the KCIA’s Busan branch itself. And when Baek Kitae returns from overseas, he’s arrested too. Everything is breaking Geonyoung’s way.
Who Actually Wins?
All of it was Kitae’s plan. He had turned Geonyoung’s own right-hand investigator. He knew every move Geonyoung would make.
Pyo behaved as though he’d crossed to Geonyoung’s side, but in the end he does the math again. He gets hold of the recording and listens to it — and that’s what decides everything. What’s on the tape isn’t the security chief. It’s evidence against the chief presidential secretary. Pyo delivers it to the security chief.
Kang never becomes Geonyoung’s witness either. He takes drugs hidden in the interrogation room by the turned investigator and dies. The same investigator tucks a forged suicide note into the dying man’s pocket, claiming Geonyoung took money to protect the drug organization. A large sum of foreign currency turns up in Geonyoung’s safe. All of it is manufactured — but in that era, what mattered wasn’t the truth. It was who could manufacture evidence.
The Villain, and the Era, Win
Compromised by the security chief, the chief presidential secretary orders the prosecution to discard Geonyoung. The next day, Jang Geonyoung is reported as a corrupt prosecutor who shielded a drug organization. The man who spent everything trying to catch Baek Kitae becomes the criminal instead. He laughs, hollowed out, as he’s led away in front of reporters.
Kitae walks out of every trap. The lab keeps running, drugs keep moving to the Ikeda organization, and the money keeps flowing up to the security chief. And Kitae rises into the very position Hwang Gukpyeong once held. The section chief takes the chair of the boss he murdered. Sitting at that desk with a cigar, he looks a great deal like the security chief.
What Baek Kitae wanted is clear by now. Not money. The power money can buy.
The Season 1 Ending — The Villain Won
Taken on its own, Season 1’s ending is unambiguous. Baek Kitae won. Jang Geonyoung uncovered nearly all of his crimes and proved none of them, and was manufactured into a corrupt prosecutor instead. Kitae killed people, made drugs, fabricated evidence, and played the power struggle between the KCIA and the Blue House. And he got promoted.
Here’s the cruel part. Kitae didn’t survive because he got lucky. He simply understood how this era worked far better than Geonyoung did. Geonyoung believed in the law. Kitae found the people who move the law. So the first fight goes to Baek Kitae.
But Jang Geonyoung isn’t finished. And there’s one more reason this story doesn’t end here. The early 1970s, where Season 1 takes place, was not this country’s last dark chapter.
Korean viewers already know what comes after the president in this story. Another military strongman is waiting in the next chapter of history — and he would prove even more brutal. A true happy ending is hard to imagine here. South Korea still had two more presidents with military backgrounds to go before civilian government finally arrived.
Who to Remember Before Season 2
Baek Kitae — Season 1’s winner. Uses KCIA power to grow a drug operation and ends up in his dead boss’s chair.
Jang Geonyoung — Season 1’s loser. Comes close to catching Kitae, then falls to fabricated evidence and is branded a corrupt prosecutor.
The presidential security chief — Kitae’s most powerful backer. Holds the real power around the president, and needs Kitae’s money.
The chief presidential secretary — The security chief’s rival, and the man Geonyoung allied with to take down Kitae and his backer.
Ikeda Yuji — Kitae’s Japanese partner, looking to grow the drug business well beyond Korea and Japan.
Baek Kihyun — Kitae’s younger brother. Sees the state and the military differently than his brother does, and witnesses Kitae’s drug deal firsthand in Vietnam.
By the end of Season 1, Jang Geonyoung and Baek Kitae have already gone after each other’s families. There isn’t much left between them. On September 9, that fight starts again.
The harder part is here. Why the KCIA could drag away a prosecutor at will, why selling Korean-made meth to Japan gets called “patriotism,” and what Made in Korea actually took from the real history of 1970s Korea:
Made in Korea: Is It a True Story? The Real History Behind Season 1
Basic Info
Director: Woo Min-ho
Writers: Park Eun-gyo, Park Joon-suk
Cast: Hyun Bin, Jung Woo-sung, Woo Do-hwan, Park Yong-woo, Cho Yeo-jeong
Episodes: 6
Release: December 24, 2025 – January 14, 2026, on Disney+ and Hulu
Season 2: September 9, 2026, with two episodes weekly through September 23
Before you watch Season 2, the real history behind the drama.
Made in Korea: Is It a True Story? The Real History Behind Season 1
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