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Three central characters from Made in Korea Season 2 against a dark blue political-thriller background

Made in Korea Season 2: What You Need to Know Before You Watch

September 8, 2026September 8, 2026 by KwaveInsider, posted in K-Drama & Film

Baek Kitae has reached the top. Jang Geonyoung is back. But to understand what Season 2 is really setting up, you need to know one date, two powerful institutions — and the military strongman waiting in Korea’s future.

Watch the Made in Korea Season 2 trailer without any knowledge of modern Korean history and it looks fairly simple. Baek Kitae has grown more powerful. Jang Geonyoung is back. Baek Kihyun has become a military officer with real authority. The three of them are aiming at each other again.

Then you recognize one date in the trailer, and the whole thing changes.

October 26, 1979. The day of the most consequential political assassination in modern Korean history. The president from Season 1 is killed by the director of the KCIA, and the country falls into a political vacuum. Season 2 drops Baek Kitae right into the middle of it.

To follow Season 2 properly, read these two first:

Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained — Before Season 2

Made in Korea: Is It a True Story? The Real History Behind Season 1

The short version: Baek Kitae was a KCIA officer running a drug operation on the side, and prosecutor Jang Geonyoung spent Season 1 chasing him. By the finale, Kitae had been promoted and Geonyoung had been framed as a corrupt prosecutor and destroyed. Baek Kihyun is Kitae’s younger brother, a military officer who — unlike his brother — tries to hold onto his principles.

What the Trailer Tells Us

In Season 1, Baek Kitae rose to branch chief of the KCIA’s Busan office. Nine years later in Season 2, he’s a deputy director of the agency, and by the end of the trailer he’s been named acting director.

Jang Geonyoung returns too, but not as a prosecutor. This time he joins the Joint Investigation Headquarters as a special advisor — which means he’s inside the Defense Security Command. Baek Kihyun is a lieutenant colonel there as well. On the surface, Geonyoung and Kihyun are now on the same side.

A new character appears: Hwang Daesik, the commander of the Defense Security Command. In the trailer, Baek Kitae says he’ll eliminate the man himself. In actual history, the Defense Security Command was led by Chun Doo-hwan, who would seize control of the military less than two months later and eventually become president — so Kitae probably doesn’t get to eliminate him.

Signs of the brothers turning on each other run throughout. In one shot, a figure who looks like Kihyun from behind is interrogating Cheon Seok-jung — the younger brother taking apart his older brother’s protection. In another, Kihyun is interrogating Kitae directly.

Even this much makes the structure clear. Season 1 was Baek Kitae versus Jang Geonyoung. Season 2 layers on the KCIA versus the military, Baek Kitae versus both Geonyoung and his own brother, and a dying power against a rising one.

What Was the KCIA?

International viewers need this part explained.

By name, the KCIA looks like an intelligence agency along the lines of the American CIA. In practice it was far stronger. It investigated domestic political and security cases directly, not just intelligence on North Korea, and it could coordinate the intelligence activities of other government bodies. Under Park Chung Hee’s government, it was notorious for surveilling, arresting, and torturing his political opponents.

In the Korea of that era, the KCIA wasn’t simply an intelligence service. It was one of the strongest pillars holding up a dictatorship. That’s exactly why, in Season 1, Baek Kitae could bug a prosecutor’s office and threaten to turn the man’s sister into a North Korean spy.

October 26 — The Day a KCIA Director Shot the President

On October 26, 1979, KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu shot and killed President Park Chung Hee. The presidential security chief, who was in the room, died there too.

Park had ruled Korea since the 1961 military coup and held power as president for nearly eighteen years. The core institution propping up that government was the KCIA. And in the end, the man who killed him was the KCIA’s own director.

This is what makes Season 2 work. Baek Kitae has spent his whole life climbing toward greater power, and he finally arrives near the summit of the KCIA. At that exact moment, the institution he climbed starts to collapse. He reaches the top of the mountain just as the mountain begins to shake.

The Position He Inherits Isn’t a Promotion

One thing needs saying here. Baek Kitae becoming acting director of the KCIA looks like success on the surface. It’s the opposite.

The man who killed the president was the KCIA’s director. So would any government trust the person who inherits that chair? Belonging to the same agency is enough to make him a suspect. Kitae arrives at the position he wanted his entire life, and the position is already a bomb.

In one sense the answer looks predetermined. But I doubt this show intends to end things that easily.

The Security Command and the Joint Investigation Headquarters

Season 2’s second power center enters here. The Defense Security Command was a military intelligence agency handling intelligence and security within the Korean armed forces. A president who had taken power in a coup was intensely interested in monitoring and controlling the military, and the Security Command was the core of that effort. After the president’s assassination, a Joint Investigation Headquarters was formed to investigate the case. This is the body Jang Geonyoung joins.

The relationship between the two is what matters. The Joint Investigation Headquarters was created under Martial Law Command after the assassination. But its chief was Chun Doo-hwan, who was also commander of the Defense Security Command. That gave the Security Command extraordinary influence over the investigation. Joining it meant standing with the Security Command.

And the organization was nothing like what its name suggests. “Investigation headquarters” sounds like a team of detectives. In reality it could direct the military, the police, the prosecution, and the KCIA. More importantly, because the body that created it was a military organization, it could mobilize actual troops when it wanted to. An organization holding both investigative authority and military force was running the investigation into a presidential assassination.

Which is what makes Geonyoung’s new position meaningful. He has attached himself to a rising power in order to strike at a dying one. It’s the same choice he made in Season 1, when he allied with the chief presidential secretary to bring down Baek Kitae. The difference is that the power he’s chosen this time is stronger and more brutal.

Is Hwang Daesik Supposed to Be Chun Doo-hwan?

This is what makes the character interesting. There’s no official statement that Hwang Daesik is Chun Doo-hwan. But the details overlap too heavily. 1979. Commander of the Defense Security Command. Military power expanding rapidly after October 26. A new faction in conflict with the KCIA. No Korean viewer is going to struggle to make the connection.

There’s a film called 12.12: The Day, about the coup that followed. It renamed Chun Doo-hwan as Chun Doo-gwang — close enough that the name alone tells you who it is. Made in Korea gives its character a completely different name. Hwang Daesik.

That difference says something about the show’s approach. Made in Korea isn’t trying to recreate history. It’s putting entirely fictional characters inside real events so it can move them freely. Season 1 worked the same way. The Yodogo hijacking was real. Baek Kitae was never on that plane.

In Season 2, October 26 happens as it happened. But Baek Kitae and Hwang Daesik are inside it. So the question isn’t “will Park Chung Hee die?” We already know the answer. The real question is what the show will invent for Baek Kitae to have done inside that history.

The Weight of the Name Chun Doo-hwan

International readers may not know this name. Koreans need no introduction to it.

Less than two months after Park Chung Hee’s death, on December 12, 1979, Chun Doo-hwan launched a military mutiny and seized control of the armed forces. He expanded that power and became president in 1980. In the process, the new military leadership put down citizens in Gwangju who were demanding democracy, and many of them died.

There’s a comparison that has circulated in Korea for a long time. A house is robbed, and the man who arrives to investigate the robbery strips the house of everything and installs himself as its owner. It describes what happened when the October 26 investigation became the pretext for taking the Joint Investigation Headquarters, and then the country.

Koreans hold a divided assessment of Park Chung Hee, weighing his accomplishments against his abuses. On Chun Doo-hwan, most have settled on something simpler: he should never have happened. That difference is what gives Season 2 its weight.

The end of Park’s dictatorship did not mean democracy arrived. Another military dictatorship was already at the door.

Korean Viewers Already Know How It Ends

This is the biggest gap between international and Korean audiences.

The characters don’t know their future. Baek Kitae is climbing toward the top. Jang Geonyoung is trying to destroy him. Baek Kihyun is deciding which side to stand on. Hwang Daesik is reaching for new power.

Korean viewers know more than any of them. After October 26, the balance of power shifted sharply. The Joint Investigation Headquarters, led by Security Command chief Chun Doo-hwan, effectively took control of the country’s intelligence and investigative apparatus. The KCIA was later reorganized and renamed the Agency for National Security Planning in 1981. Historically, the Security Command wins.

So what to watch for in Season 2 isn’t who wins. It’s whether the show follows history. Does the Security Command prevail as it did in reality, or does Jang Geonyoung? Stray too far from the record and Korean viewers may turn on it. How the show holds that balance will decide whether this season works.

Baek Kitae Is Still Talking About Patriotism

One thing hasn’t changed in nine years.

In Season 1, he called it patriotism to manufacture meth in Korea and sell it to Japan. Japanese people get addicted, foreign currency comes into Korea, therefore it serves the country. In the Season 2 trailer, he says it again: “I was being patriotic.”

The Baek Kitae of 1970 used patriotism to justify drugs. The Baek Kitae of 1979 says the same thing from the center of state power. Only the scale has changed.

The Real Question of Season 2

Baek Kitae won Season 1 because he understood how power moved better than Jang Geonyoung did. Geonyoung believed in the law. Kitae found the people who move the law.

But in 1979, the people who moved the law start collapsing themselves. The president dies. The KCIA’s power wavers. A new military faction emerges.

So Season 2’s question changes. When even the people who move power disappear, who does Baek Kitae choose next? That’s probably the most interesting fight this season has to offer.

Video: Made in Korea Season 2 Official Trailer / Source: Disney+ (YouTube)

Basic Info

Director: Woo Min-ho
Writers: Park Eun-gyo, Park Joon-suk
Cast: Hyun Bin, Jung Woo-sung, Woo Do-hwan, Jang Hye-jin, Heo Jung-do
Episodes: 6
Release: September 9, 2026, with two episodes weekly through September 23, on Disney+ and Hulu

Before you watch Season 2, catch up on the story and the history behind it.

Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained

The ensemble cast of Made in Korea Season 1 framed by fire, crowds, and a dark city street — Illustration: Made in Korea Season 1 / KwaveInsider

Made in Korea: Is It a True Story? The Real History Behind Season 1

Five Made in Korea characters surrounded by cigarette smoke and archival images of 1970s Seoul — Illustration: The Real History Behind Made in Korea Season 1 / KwaveInsider

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Made in Korea: Is It a True Story? The Real History Behind Season 1

September 8, 2026September 8, 2026 by KwaveInsider, posted in K-Drama & Film

The characters are fictional. The fear isn’t. From the KCIA and Korea’s meth trade with Japan to the strange light and darkness of the 1970s, here’s what Made in Korea is really drawing from.

Watching Made in Korea as a Korean is a slightly strange experience. Neither Baek Kitae nor Jang Geonyoung existed. But the world they move through is not unfamiliar at all.

The KCIA, the Blue House, the presidential security office, the Red Army Faction, methamphetamine, high-end kisaeng houses, the private secrets of powerful men. Even the hijacking that opens episode one is taken from a real event.

So watching this purely as a crime noir means missing something. Baek Kitae is fiction. The era that let a man like Baek Kitae operate was not.

Haven’t caught up on the plot yet? Start here: Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained

The Hijacking in Episode One Really Happened

On March 31, 1970, Japan Airlines Flight 351, flying from Tokyo to Fukuoka, was hijacked by nine members of the Communist League’s Red Army Faction. It’s known as the Yodogo hijacking, after the aircraft’s nickname. The hijackers demanded to be flown to North Korea, and the plane did in fact land at Gimpo Airport in Seoul.

The South Korean government went so far as to disguise Gimpo Airport as Pyongyang to deceive the hijackers. In the end the passengers were released, and the hijackers went on to North Korea.

Made in Korea drops a fictional character, Baek Kitae, into this real event. The hijacking is history. Everything Baek Kitae does inside it, moving as the businessman Matsuda, is invention.

Korea in 1970 — Getting Brighter, and Getting Darker

The drama only ever shows the president’s photograph. His name is never spoken, but Korean viewers know exactly who he is. Park Chung Hee, the man they called Gakha, His Excellency.

After taking power in a 1961 military coup, he made anti-communism the central justification for how the state was run, and through the 1970s he concentrated power further. The Anti-Communist Law, created just after the coup, was used broadly enough to suppress criticism of the government and the press along with it.

One of that government’s most powerful instruments was the KCIA. It was not simply an agency collecting intelligence on North Korea. It gathered domestic and foreign intelligence, held direct investigative authority over national security cases, and could coordinate the intelligence and investigative work of other state bodies, including the military and the prosecution. Crucially, KCIA investigations did not fall under prosecutorial supervision.

Which is why the scenes where Baek Kitae threatens a prosecutor and drags his family in to manufacture an espionage case aren’t as absurd as they look. This was genuinely an era when state power suppressed people through detention and torture outside legal process, and through fabricated spy cases.

North Korea Was Building the Same Thing

For international readers, there’s an interesting comparison to be made here. During the same period, North Korea also ran a powerful internal surveillance apparatus, justified as protecting the state from external enemies.

In 1973, Kim Il Sung split the national security functions out of the existing security apparatus and created the State Political Security Department, a separate secret police organization. It handled internal surveillance and regime security, and reported directly to the supreme leader.

The South spoke of anti-communism. The North spoke of defending the system. The ideologies were opposites, but in one respect they mirrored each other strangely well: both grew agencies that watched and suppressed their own citizens, justified by the need to guard against an enemy outside. On the 1970s Korean peninsula, an intelligence agency wasn’t just an intelligence agency. It was fear itself.

And in the Same Era, the Economy Was Growing Like a Miracle

This is exactly why Koreans don’t feel one simple thing about the 1970s. For some people, the Park Chung Hee era means dictatorship, torture, press control, and human rights abuses. For others, it’s the decade when a poor country started building factories, growing exports, and developing at astonishing speed.

The Park government built the foundation for conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai through export-driven policy and state-directed finance and industrial planning. At the same time, it suppressed the labor movement hard and looked the other way on brutal working conditions. Economic growth and authoritarianism existed simultaneously.

How you assess this era remains one of the significant dividing lines in how Korean society looks at its own past. One side says Korea grew because that strong state existed. The other says economic growth cannot justify dictatorship and abuse. Both are looking at a real part of the 1970s.

What makes Made in Korea interesting is that it points the camera at the darker half.

Why the Light in This Drama Is So Strange

This is less a historical fact than the thing I felt most strongly watching it.

Made in Korea uses lighting to an extreme. The bright places are very bright, and the dark places are impossibly dark. Hwang Gukpyeong’s office is the clearest example. The scene where Kitae waits hidden in darkness and shoots him is almost too symbolic.

It’s hard to read this as period noir styling alone. Korea at the time was growing fast. Highways were being built, factories were going up, money was starting to move. On the surface, a country getting brighter. But no one knew what was happening where that light didn’t reach.

In KCIA basements, people were being beaten. In back rooms, politicians passed money to each other. In the dark corners of society, drugs were being manufactured. And even a prosecutor could be turned into a North Korean spy if someone decided to make it so. A country where the bright places are very bright and no one can see what happens in the dark. That’s what I think this drama’s imagery is showing us about the 1970s.

Woo Min-ho Didn’t Pick This Era by Accident

This territory is familiar ground for director Woo Min-ho. He made Inside Men, The Man Standing Next, and Harbin. He’s returned again and again to power, politics, and what happens to people inside them. He’s said himself that with Made in Korea he wanted to ask what power fundamentally is, and why people change when they get it.

Which is why there’s no clear hero here. Jang Geonyoung does stand on the more righteous side. But even he attaches himself to the chief presidential secretary in order to bring Kitae down. In the final scene, when he drinks the liquor poured into that man’s shoe, we’re being shown that he too has become someone who attached himself to power.

It starts looking like a villain against an honest prosecutor. It gradually becomes a question of which power you align with. I think that captures the era well. It isn’t that justice didn’t exist. It’s that justice alone couldn’t accomplish anything. That’s why Jang Geonyoung loses in Season 1.

Korean-Made Meth Really Was Sold to Japan

This is the part of the drama that looks most far-fetched, and it’s actually close to the historical record.

In the early 1970s, Japan tightened enforcement against methamphetamine production and trafficking. Manufacturers operating in Japan crossed over to Korea and passed on their techniques there. Meth made in Korea was then smuggled back into Japan. When production became difficult in the tightly regulated country, the manufacturing base simply moved next door to the looser one.

The numbers make the scale clear. According to Japan’s 1987 police white paper, Korean-made product accounted for 87.4 percent of seizures of one kilogram or more of stimulants in Japan in 1982. By 1984, that figure had collapsed to 5.2 percent as joint Korea-Japan investigations reduced the smuggling itself.

So the drama’s basic structure — manufacture in Korea, hand it to the Japanese yakuza, sell it in Japan — isn’t invented. But there’s an important difference. The idea that the KCIA systematically manufactured drugs and exported them to Japan is the drama’s fiction. Baek Kitae is fiction. What the show did was take a criminal market that genuinely existed and connect it to the KCIA.

“Selling Drugs to Japan Is Patriotism” — Someone Actually Said This

Kitae makes a strange argument in the drama. Make meth in Korea, sell it to Japan, foreign currency comes in and Japanese people get hooked — therefore, patriotism.

It’s absurd, but it isn’t invented. Someone really said it.

Lee Hwang-soon was Korea’s biggest meth manufacturer in the 1970s, and the line he left behind was this: “I’ll destroy Japan with philopon.”

Lee based his operation in Busan, manufacturing meth and moving it to Japan. Arrested in 1972 for gold smuggling, he was released on a medical suspension of sentence and vanished — and during that period he found a chemist and learned how to manufacture meth. He wasn’t caught again until 1980.

The film built on this man is The Drug King, where Song Kang-ho’s character also talks about drugs as an export and calls it patriotism. And here’s the interesting part: The Drug King is also a Woo Min-ho film. That explains a great deal about why the drug storyline in Made in Korea feels so familiar.

Only twenty-five years had passed since the end of Japanese colonial rule, and the government was pushing exports and foreign currency like a national mission. Feelings about Japan, and the language of earning foreign currency. Kitae attaches both to his own crimes.

Every time the word patriotism comes up in this drama, it makes me a little uncomfortable. Samuel Johnson’s famous line from the eighteenth century applies here: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It isn’t that patriotism itself is bad. It’s closer to a warning that patriotism can be the last thing a scoundrel reaches for to justify what he’s done.

It fits Baek Kitae exactly. For him, patriotism isn’t a conviction. It’s the language he uses to justify his appetite.

So What Exactly Is “Made in Korea” Here?

The drugs are made in Korea. But it’s hard to read the title as meaning only that. Baek Kitae is also made in Korea.

What produced him wasn’t only his own appetite. There was a KCIA that stood above the prosecution, a political establishment that needed money, a country hungry for exports and foreign currency, and an era in which using that power could take you higher. Baek Kitae is the man who adapted to that system fastest.

Jang Geonyoung, by contrast, believed the law would work. By the end of Season 1, the difference between them fits in one sentence. Geonyoung believed in the law. Kitae found the people who move the law. That’s why the villain wins.

But I don’t think this drama is simply saying that 1970s Korea was terrible. There was enormous economic growth in this era, and the energy that turned Korean society into what it is now detonated during this period too. At the same time, behind all of it, the state was detaining and torturing people, and political power and the intelligence agency stood above the law.

An era when light and darkness were both at their strongest. Woo Min-ho shows us both of them through the image itself. And Korean viewers all know what’s coming. In 1979, the president in this drama is killed, and another villain appears. That’s what makes this drama so uncomfortable to watch. The people of this country would have to wait a long time yet before justice came back.

Video: Made in Korea Season 2 Official Trailer / Source: Disney+ (YouTube)

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, catch up on the story and what the trailer is setting up.

Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained

Made in Korea Season 2: What You Need to Know Before You Watch

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Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained — Before Season 2

September 7, 2026September 8, 2026 by KwaveInsider, posted in K-Drama & Film

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

Video: Made in Korea Season 2 Official Trailer / Source: Disney+ (YouTube)