Through the Darkness · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 14 January 2022
S1E1 Episode 1
THE MOMENT Song Ha-young's first walk through a crime scene - the camera following his gaze as he reconstructs motive from evidence most officers are already bagging for court.
The premiere establishes the procedural in its most stripped-down form - a detective who believes in reading crime scenes the way a psychologist reads a patient, at a time when Korean law enforcement considers that approach frivolous. The period detail and Kim Nam-gil's physical restraint make an immediate case for the show's seriousness.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Through the Darkness Season 1 Episode 1 aired January 14, 2022 on SBS as the series premiere. Kim Nam-gil won the SBS Daesang for his performance across the season; IMDb audiences scored 8.0; MyDramaList audiences rated it 8.7 from 13,558 users. ZAPZEE called it a crime drama that 'breaks away from the conventional format and sheds light on those who look into the cases.' The premiere's stripped-down procedural approach is its formal statement: Song Ha-young's first crime scene walk is shot with the same patient attention the profiler brings to his own methodology - the camera following his gaze as he reconstructs motive from evidence most of his colleagues are already filing as material for prosecutors. The period setting (1980s-90s Korea) establishes that the team is building an entirely new investigative vocabulary with no institutional support. Kim Nam-gil communicates the character's particular mix of certainty and isolation in the first episode without a word of biography to support it.