Beyond Evil · Season 1 · JTBC / Netflix
Beyond Evil Season 1
Beyond Evil Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 9.1/10. 16 episodes on JTBC / Netflix from 19 February 2021.
Updated
What BollyAI Thinks
Beyond Evil aired on JTBC from February 19 to April 10, 2021, and swept the 57th Baeksang Arts Awards with Best Drama, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for Shin Ha-kyun. The series places two officers - the demoted, eccentric Dong-sik and the elite Seoul transplant Joo-won - in a provincial town where a 20-year-old serial murder case reopens. Writer Kim Su-jin builds the thriller around mutual suspicion: each detective privately suspects the other is the killer. Critics praised the structural ambiguity and the way the show refused to resolve its moral questions cleanly. IMDb audience scores settled at 8.1. The show draws inspiration from the Hwaseong murders case without fictionality becoming exploitation. Shin Ha-kyun and Yeo Jin-goo sustain a two-lead tension rare in procedural drama.
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The Room
“A tightly written, multi-layered crime thriller that manages to engage both the heart and mind.”
Hallyuism“Shin Ha-kyun's performance as Dong Sik is a veritable tour de force of consummate acting.”
The Fangirl Verdict
Standout Episodes
The hours worth arguing about — premieres, finales, and the turning points. BollyAI reads the room episode by episode.
- E1Episode 18.5
The premiere drops Joo-won into Manyang and places him alongside the notorious Dong-sik, whose reputation as the local oddity the episode never overplays. The discovery of a skeleton in the first act signals what kind of thriller this will be: patient, provincial, menacing.
The moment: The first exchange between Dong-sik and Joo-won establishes the show's central unresolved question before either character has said anything that should raise it.
- E15Episode 159.3
Penultimate episode where the accumulated suspicion reaches its breaking point. Critical consensus identified this hour as the series' most dramatically pressurised, with Joo-won's moral framework finally failing under the weight of what Dong-sik represents.
The moment: Dong-sik speaks to Joo-won with a warmth that is either genuine or the show's most unsettling misdirection - the scene divides viewers to this day.
- E16Episode 169.0
The finale delivers a resolution that reviewers described as satisfying without being clean. The show's refusal to simplify its two leads pays off in a closing hour that circles back to the town, the case, and the costs both men paid.
The moment: Dong-sik's final address to Joo-won - fatherly, strange, quietly devastating.