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.
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
Made in Korea: Is It a True Story? The Real History Behind Season 1
Looking for more Korean thrillers with this much twist density?
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