That South Korea is a source of success on streaming platforms is not news. The series and movies that come from this country always have a drama and an important twist in the plots that seduce the entire universe. “The Squid Game” is probably the epitome of that constancy. But at this moment, a new show is consuming like hot cakes although without making much noise: “The Glory”.
“The Glory” tells the story of Lala Moon Dong-eun (Song Hye-Kyo), who was the victim of terrible physical and mental abuse in her school years and as an adult decides to take revenge, following the old adage of “an eye for an eye.” But contrary to the traditional sequence of productions based on the Revenge subgenre, this character takes things easy. This has a profound effect on the viewer, who looks forward to hearing how the former tormentors will suffer.
In its first season, which consists of eight episodes, Netflix users will be seduced by a script that knows how to play its cards. Although it can be overly dramatic, if you’re used to K-dramas, you’ll quickly find the juice to come from the series. That being said, in the next few lines we are going to analyze some plot points and find meaning in the final scene that left many of the fans with a question mark in their heads. of course they come spoilers.
The series is directed by Ahn Gil-ho (“Watcher”, “Stranger”, “Happiness”), a very successful filmmaker on television and written by Kim Eun-sook (“Tae-yang-eui hoo-ye”), a A woman who knows how to reach the public very well. Then, the two tell us a story of revenge that has been going on for 20 years.
Although it is not said, we understand that the protagonist is over 30 years old, like her former schoolmates. Time is not a trivial issue, because only if we take into account that each step that Dong-eun took in her life (working in small-time workshops, getting her degree, saving) is designed to achieve a final triumph, is that we can understand the planning of his vendetta.
Basically she studied every member of the group that abused her. Her time allowed her to find details that would help her undermine the abusers’ trust, not only among themselves, but also among others who had entered her life, such as husbands, children, and family members.
Who are the targets of Dong-eun’s revenge?
Let’s start with the most obvious: Park Yeon-jin (Ji-Yeon Lim); They are Myeong-oh (Kim Gun-woo), Lee Sa-Ra (Kim Hieora), Choi Hye-jeong (Joo-Young Cha), and Jeon Jae-joon (Sung-Hoon Park). Of course there are others, but let’s focus on the gang, responsible for leaving Moon Dong-eun many scars, physical and emotional.
yeon-jin I was the leader of the group at school. They all did what she said. She always found a student whom she entrusted with school responsibilities, such as cleaning the institution’s bathroom. And then her wickedness grew, to the point of using hair dryers on the skin of her victims. As we see in the series, she fulfills her dream of marrying a millionaire. She is a mother who is not present in her daughter’s daily life and she works as a weather presenter on television, without having any talent. She remains in the position because the millionaire husband invests a lot of money in advertising for the channel.
Myeong-oh He is Yeon-jin’s bully or right-hand man during school days. He did everything his millionaire friends asked him for in exchange for money. This didn’t change as he grew up, as he was Jae-joon’s driver and errand boy. He is the most insecure and therefore vulnerable of the entire group.
hye jeong He comes from a working family. Her parents run a dry cleaners, where she gets clothes to show off a status that she doesn’t have. For this reason, they tell her at a certain moment that if Dong-eun had not existed, she would have been the victim of bullying. She was a flight attendant and pretends to be rich on social media. As she recounts her life using her phone, Dong-eun finds a very easy way to find out the secrets of her and her whole group by stealing her phone.
sara She is the one who becomes an artist, whose works are sold in part due to the influence of her mother, who lets her daughter’s addictions pass while she continues painting and attending the presentations of the works. That addiction will be very favorable to the protagonist later on. At the same time, Sara has inherited from her mother a strange devotion to religion.
jae-joon He is the owner of the golf course. When he is a teenager it is mentioned that he will inherit it. He is Myeong-oh’s boss, Yeon-jin’s lover and also has a sexual relationship with Choi Hye-jeong, although the latter is regularly humiliated. With the advancement of the chapters, it is known that he is the real father of Yeon-jin’s daughter, Ha Ye-Sol.
As we warned, there are other victims, such as Dong-eun’s own mother, teachers and police authorities. However, this will be material for another post, once she releases the second season.
How does Dong-eun get her teaching job?
Dong-eun rents an apartment across the street from Yeon-jin’s house. The reason is not just to keep an eye on her. She believes that she can find something important in her enemy’s trash and indeed she is. He finds a will from Kim Shin-tae, Yeon Jin’s father-in-law. In it, Cho Su-hyeon (Yeon-jin’s husband) would not be the only beneficiary. She is spoken of in the brief by another man, who would also receive the part of her, Jo Soo-Hyeon. The latter turned out to be the lover of Kim Shin tae, the highest authority of Semyeong Elementary.
Thus, Dong-eun blackmails Shin tae with that document to allow him to teach at the institution and thus give free rein to part of his elaborate plan. On the one hand, as a teacher, she is close to the daughter of her greatest rival, Yeon-jin. And on the other, she gets Ha Ye-Sol’s two parents, the biological one and the foster one, to confront each other. Obviously all this hurts the until then millionaire mother.
ending explained
There are too many points to analyze in this season one finale. And surely we will expand this note as we continue to draw more conclusions. But for now, let’s clear up the things that are more difficult to understand. The first: Did Myeong-oh, Yeon-jin’s bully and right-hand man at school, die? The immediate answer is: it seems so and that the executor was his former leader. Why? Let’s review what happened.
Dong-eun convinced Myeong-oh to become his evidence collector (girl Ha Ye-Sol’s hair) so that the truth about the paternity will come out. With this situation, the bully believed that he could get a lot of money and leave his companions forever. That’s why he bought a ticket to Russia that he never used. The only thing we see of this guy before he disappears from the series is his bloody face and… green high heels coming out of the crime scene.
It is very likely that Myeong-oh wanted to blackmail Yeon-jin, asking for money so as not to reveal who the real father of the little girl is, and her former schoolmate decided to kill him, with the help of corrupt policemen and other thugs on his payroll. . For this to make more sense, we must remember Yeon-jin’s words at the end of the first season when she discovers the wall full of photos, on which are all the protagonist’s revenge targets: “I should have killed her.”
The next question is: why doesn’t surgeon Yeo-jeong, when he visits the morgue, find So-he’s body? In case you don’t remember, So-he was the first fatality of the punishments that the group gave at school. It is believed that he committed suicide to avoid facing more pain, but the family did not believe in this possibility and therefore did not remove the body, waiting for some type of investigation.
What this scene seems to indicate is that Yeon-jin, with his money and contacts, got the family to remove the body and accept the version of suicide. We have a clue about it. When Myeong-oh was doing research for Deng-un, he asked to see the young woman’s body and was told that he couldn’t because he wasn’t related. He was also told that the family of the deceased owed a very large amount for keeping the body in this place, without closing the case. So, with the water around his neck, Yeon-jin is trying to solve all wrongs at the point of money and committing more crimes.
Then the most important revelation of the last few chapters is Yeo-jeong’s past. Deng-un’s suitor suffered great trauma when he lost his father, who was stabbed to death. The murderer, a psychopath, also sent letters to the aspiring doctor to disturb him. And indeed he did. That’s why Yeo-jeong was in psychological therapy.
In this context, when Deng-un tells Yeo-jeong his plans, the lover decides to help her. She understands all the suffering of the abused because he has also been a victim of her. She somehow feels that she can carry out the revenge that she failed to carry out against her father’s executioner. Plus, he’s too smitten with his mysterious friend to object. At least until now.
Finally, we come to the scene where Yeon-jin and her husband, Cho Su-hyeon, happen to be in Deng-un’s apartment. She has few tricks left and he trusts her less and less, because at this point he already knows that he is not Ha Ye-Sol’s father. As if that were not enough, she herself has told him that the best thing she can do is “not open Pandora’s box.” In reference to the fact that she indeed has a very dark past. The question then is, what will he decide?
Cho Su-hyeon is a born player of Go, the traditional Japanese game, which is basically all about strategy. So at no time have we seen him make irrational decisions, not even when he is mocked by Jae-joon, Ha Ye-Sol’s biological father.
In conclusion. The most important thing to keep in mind at the end of this season is that Deng-un’s main target is Yeon-jin. As he told him insistently, he wants to isolate her. May she lose absolutely everything: her daughter, her husband and her wealth. But also, that she pays for her crimes. The logical thing would be for Cho Su-hyeon to face his wife. However, we can only discover that in the following season.
“The Glory”: explained end of the South Korean series that is succeeding on Netflix