The Escape of the Seven (Season 1)

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

CompletedMAKJANG REVENGE PICK

The Escape of the Seven (Season 1)

7인의 탈출 (7inui Talchul) · 2023 · South Korea

WriterKim Soon-ok

DirectorJoo Dong-min, Oh Joon-hyuk

Episodes17 eps · ~75 min each

Where to Watch✅ Netflix, Viki, Kocowa, OnDemandKorea, Prime Video

⏱️

Binge Time21h 15m

AiredSep 15 – Nov 17, 2023

GenreRevenge · Crime · Thriller

Content RatingTV-MA

SBSNetflixVikiViuKocowaOnDemandKoreaPrime Video

MakjangBetrayalManipulationHidden IdentityHigh Society

One box. Everything you need to decide.

Seven sinners, one mastermind, and a revenge plot built to outlast the truth it’s hiding.

Uhm Ki-joon

Matthew Lee

Lead

Hwang Jung-eum

Geum Ra-hee

Lead

Lee Joon

Min Do-hyuk

Supporting

Lee Yu-bi

Han Mo-ne

Supporting

Shin Eun-kyung

Cha Joo-ran

Supporting

Yoon Jong-hoon

Yang Jin-mo

Supporting

Jo Yoon-hee

Ko Myeong-ji

Supporting

Jo Jae-yun

Nam Cheol-woo

Supporting

Lee Duck-hwa

Bang Chil-sung

Supporting

Yoon Tae-young

Kang Ki-tak

Supporting

Jung Lael

Bang Da-mi

Supporting

Min Young-ki

Lee Hwi-so

Supporting

Spoiler-light recaps — enough to remember where you left off, nothing that ruins the ride.

EP 01

Da-Mi Leaves with Her Mother

Sep 15, 2023

Da-mi trades her adoptive family for a biological mother she’s never really known, and the show wastes no time souring the reunion — an incident with her wealthy grandfather exposes just how self-serving Geum Ra-hee’s motives actually are. The premiere sets its real subject in one clean move: this isn’t a story about finding family, it’s about what people are willing to do to control one.

EP 02

The Bobble Incident

Sep 16, 2023

A humiliating incident at her new school sends Da-mi collapsing, and the show frames it less as teen drama than as the first crack in a much larger conspiracy. Meanwhile Han Mo-ne’s rising idol career gets threatened by a rumor conveniently timed to implicate Da-mi instead — the first sign that everyone around her is more useful as a scapegoat than a person.

EP 03

Da-mi Leaves Ra-hee

Sep 22, 2023

Da-mi walks out on Ra-hee specifically to cut her off from the grandfather’s inheritance, a spiteful move that at least proves she understands the game being played around her. The ‘Scarlet Letter’ scandal — rumors of an affair with her own stepfather — forces her into a public fight for her name that she’s clearly losing.

EP 04

Da-mi Disappears

Sep 23, 2023

Da-mi vanishes mid-livestream after apparently being shot on camera, and her adoptive father Lee Hwi-so gets framed for a murder that may not have even happened. Chairman Bang’s vow to find the truth is the episode’s real hinge — everything that follows is his revenge machine starting up.

EP 05

The Jeju Island Party

Sep 29, 2023

A party on Jeju Island turns out to be less a celebration than a trap, engineered to pull all seven eventual targets into the same room at once. The show is confident enough in its premise to spend a full episode just getting the pieces into position.

EP 06

The Remaining Seven

Sep 30, 2023

Only seven walk off the island alive, and the threatening message waiting for all of them the moment they’re together does more narrative work than any confrontation could — it tells them, and us, that survival was never really the finish line.

EP 07

The Gathering of the Seven

Oct 13, 2023

Suspicion starts eating the group from the inside as Ra-hee tasks Yang Jin-mo with investigating Lee Hwi-so’s imprisonment, while Han Mo-ne’s guilt over Da-mi curdles her relationship with Ra-hee. Matthew Lee, watching all of it unfold, is clearly enjoying himself more than anyone with actual stakes should.

EP 08

Chairman Bang’s Demise

Oct 14, 2023

Another death lands on the pile specifically to bury the island incident deeper, and Matthew Lee starts using the seven as instruments to find whoever’s really orchestrating the cover-up. Letters exposing each survivor’s worst secret arrive like clockwork — chaos as a deliberate strategy, not an accident.

EP 09

Matthew’s Party with the Seven

Oct 20, 2023

Matthew Lee hosts the seven at his own home, which reads less like hospitality than inspection. Ji-a threatening Han Mo-ne with information about Sim Jun-seok is the episode’s real payload — the first thread connecting Matthew’s true identity to the buried past everyone’s been trying to outrun.

EP 10

The Seven Secrets

Oct 21, 2023

The seven find Ji-a’s body and realize the mysterious ‘K’ is behind it, which finally gives their paranoia a name to attach to. Matthew Lee deciding to expose each of their crimes publicly, one at a time, is the moment his revenge plan stops being implied and starts being executed.

EP 11

The Seven Pawns

Oct 27, 2023

Matthew Lee turns six of the seven into instruments against K and the Sungchan Group, and the show is blunt about the mechanics: these aren’t allies being recruited, they’re desperate people being used because they have no other options left.

EP 12

Matthew Suspects Ki-tak

Oct 28, 2023

Chairman Sim starts investigating Matthew Lee and Min Do-hyuk in earnest, while Matthew’s own suspicion toward Kang Ki-tak introduces the first real crack in his supposedly airtight network. Even a mastermind this precise can’t fully account for the people closest to him.

EP 13

The Revelations

Nov 3, 2023

Matthew Lee’s true colors start surfacing here, and the show lets the reveal land as recontextualization rather than shock — every calculated kindness earlier in the season reads differently in hindsight. Min Do-hyuk, meanwhile, has to reckon with believing Kang Ki-tak betrayed him, a mistake the show is careful not to let him off the hook for.

EP 14

The New Mission

Nov 4, 2023

A theft assignment — stealing paintings from the Sungchan Gallery — pushes the culprits further than they’ve gone before, and the episode uses the heist mechanics mostly as pressure-testing for how much loyalty Matthew Lee can actually extract from people who no longer have anything left to lose.

EP 15

The Intruder

Nov 10, 2023

Min Do-hyuk lands in real danger and gets pulled out by help from someone the show keeps deliberately unnamed, which shifts the entire power balance without fully explaining how. It’s a rare moment where the plot gives its characters something other than dread.

EP 16

Trust No One

Nov 11, 2023

Noh Paeng-hee hands Han Na off to Han Mo-ne while fleeing Matthew Lee, a small act of trust in a season that’s mostly punished people for extending it. Min Do-hyuk publicly exposing Matthew Lee as Shim Joon-seok — K himself — is the biggest structural turn of the season, and it lands exactly as messily as it should.

EP 17

The Last Escape

Nov 17, 2023

Chairman Sim goes public with the truth about Sim Jun-seok while Ra-hee scrambles for an alliance with Cha Ju-ran, and K tracking Min Do-hyuk’s hideout through Han Mo-ne sets the finale’s real trap. Do-hyuk and Chairman Sim’s confrontation with K plays out as chaotic rather than triumphant — the season’s closing argument is that revenge, even successful revenge, doesn’t clean anything up.

Full spoilers ahead — everything that happens in the finale and what it all means.

What actually happened Matthew Lee’s true identity comes out in the finale — he’s Shim Jun-seok, the boy secretly swapped in as a baby by Secretary Gu Kang-jae, while Min Do-hyuk is the actual biological heir of the Sungchan Group who grew up never knowing it. Cornered on the rooftop, Matthew rigs the building with explosives and offers the remaining six survivors a stark choice: escape with him by helicopter, or die in the blast. All six go with him. Lee Hwi-so hands Kang Ki-tak a flash drive containing evidence about the LUCA system and sacrifices himself in the fire; Ki-tak jumps from the building with Min Do-hyuk, saving him just before the explosion — though the world is left believing Do-hyuk died there too.

Why the baby swap changes everything Matthew’s entire revenge campaign stops being generic villainy the moment you learn he’s not avenging a stranger’s wrongs — he’s avenging his own stolen identity. He was born into wealth and quietly erased from it as an infant, which reframes every calculated cruelty this season as something closer to a grievance he genuinely believes is justified.

The six who chose Matthew None of the surviving six chooses to die on principle — they all climb into that helicopter, and the show doesn’t pretend that’s anything other than self-interest winning out over whatever loyalty or guilt they’d built up across seventeen episodes. It’s a bleak final note about exactly how far this group’s supposed unity actually extended.

Ki-tak’s quiet turn Kang Ki-tak choosing to save Do-hyuk instead of following Matthew is the one unambiguous act of loyalty in the entire finale, and it’s deliberately the least showy moment in an episode built around explosions and reveals. It’s also the thread Season 2 picks up first.

The KDW verdict Season 1 ends by making its villain sympathetic without making him right, and by leaving its actual hero presumed dead while his enemies fly off together. It’s a genuinely bold way to close a first season — no clean victory, no clear next move, just a stolen identity, a faked death, and a flash drive that’s clearly going to matter.