The First Responders (Season 1)

Start here — the basics before the first scene.

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The First Responders (Season 1)

소방서 옆 경찰서 (Sobangseo Yeop Gyeongchalseo) · 2022 · South Korea

WriterMin Ji-eun

DirectorShin Kyung-soo

Episodes12 eps · ~66 min each

Where to Watch✅ Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV+

⏱️

Binge Time13h 12m

AiredNov 12 – Dec 30, 2022

GenreAction · Thriller · Drama

Content RatingTV-MA

SBSHuluDisney+Apple TV+

CrimeEmergency ResponseDetectiveFirefighterTeamworkInvestigation

One glance, one verdict — everything you need is right here.

Three leads, three agencies, zero agreement on who gets to be in charge.

Kim Rae-won

Jin Ho-gae

Lead

Son Ho-jun

Bong Do-jin

Lead

Gong Seung-yeon

Song Seol

Supporting

Son Ji-yoon

Yun Hong

Supporting

Kang Ki-doong

Bae Man-ho

Supporting

Seo Hyun-chul

Nam Sang-deok

Supporting

Just enough per episode to remember where things stood.

EP 01

Three Agencies, One Crime Scene

Nov 12, 2022

Detective Jin Ho-gae’s first day at his new precinct ends with a kidnapping — and the fire crew from next door showing up at the same apartment building. The forced collaboration that follows is chaotic, territorial, and faster than either agency would have managed alone. The episode matters because it earns the premise without making it feel convenient: these three professionals do not get along, but the case gets solved anyway, and that gap between friction and function is exactly where the whole show lives.

EP 02

Not Every Emergency Is a Crime

Nov 12, 2022

Between major cases, Ho-gae works a death-by-pesticide that the team approaches as a possible suicide. The episode matters because it slows the pace just enough to show that first responders don’t get to choose which call is the dramatic one — most of what they see is quieter and harder than a kidnapping, and the team has to learn how to read situations where the crime and the tragedy are the same thing.

EP 03

The House Remembers

Nov 19, 2022

Ho-gae moves into a rental house and discovers that the previous tenant disappeared after a suspicious fire — and was almost certainly murdered. The case matters because it collapses the distance between Ho-gae’s professional and personal space. The detective who pursues every case relentlessly now has one sleeping in the walls of his own home, and that proximity shifts how he investigates — less procedure, more urgency.

EP 04

The Victim Who Can’t Speak

Nov 19, 2022

A car accident victim loses her pulse mid-transport, and what starts as an emergency medical call becomes a child abuse investigation. The episode matters because it makes Song Seol’s role central for the first time — her read of the situation unlocks the truth, and it proves that the person with the stethoscope sometimes sees what the detective entirely misses. The case also forces Ho-gae to slow down long enough to actually listen to someone else.

EP 05

Mass Casualty Risk

Nov 26, 2022

Ho-gae goes undercover in a gang and realizes they’re carrying explosives — the sting operation starts falling apart in real time. This is the episode where the show commits fully to action-thriller mode, and Kim Rae-won makes the undercover tension physical: every conversation Ho-gae has inside the gang reads like he’s calculating how many exits are in the room and whether the odds still make sense.

EP 06

Code Red

Nov 26, 2022

An unidentified body at a fire scene, an unlikely suspect, and Ho-gae framed for arson and murder and placed under arrest. The episode inverts the entire premise: the detective who has been hunting criminals is now the one being processed by the system he serves. Do-jin has to fight the fire while Ho-gae fights the case against him, and neither gets to pause for the other’s crisis.

EP 07

Code Blue

Dec 3, 2022

Ho-gae escapes from the hospital, identifies the real culprit as Ma Tae-hwa, and starts building the case to clear his name from the outside. The team helps — not because it’s easy or safe, but because they’ve already invested too much in each other to walk away. This is where the partnership stops being transactional and becomes something closer to loyalty — the kind that holds even when the badge is gone.

EP 08

The Evidence That Holds

Dec 3, 2022

Ho-gae wakes up after a near-death experience and immediately goes back to building the case against Ma Tae-hwa — this time with solid enough proof to produce a confession. The arc that started with Ho-gae framed and imprisoned closes here, but the show doesn’t linger on the victory. He just goes back to work, which says more about who he is than any speech would.

EP 09

Code Pink

Dec 10, 2022

A teenage girl’s suicide attempt, a newborn’s body at a separate crime scene, and the discovery that the two are connected through the same mother. The episode hits the hardest emotional register the show has reached so far — not action-thriller dark, but the quieter, sadder kind of darkness where every answer the team finds just makes the situation worse.

EP 10

Code Amber

Dec 10, 2022

The team discovers that a strange hospital patient is Kim Hyun-seo — a girl who went missing seven years ago. Before they can process what they’ve found, she’s kidnapped again from inside the hospital. The episode matters because it reopens a case that was invisible for nearly a decade, and it makes the team feel the specific weight of a life that was already lost once and cannot be allowed to disappear again.

EP 11

The Cost of Saving Someone

Dec 17, 2022

Ho-gae rescues Hyun-seo, gets framed a second time through his own father’s interference, clears himself again — and then resigns from the police force out of guilt. The resignation is not despair. It’s a man who finally admitted that the badge was protecting the system more than the people inside it, and who stopped pretending those two things were the same.

EP 12

The Arson That Changes Everything

Dec 30, 2022

A series of fires has Do-jin convinced there’s a serial arsonist at work. He finds Ho-gae — no longer a detective, now just a person — and the two of them start investigating anyway. Season 1 ends here, mid-case, unresolved. The ending proves what the season has been building toward: the partnership was never about the badge. They’re doing this because they can’t not.

Spoilers from here on — what actually happened, and why it lands.

What the Season 1 finale actually does The First Responders Season 1 does not close — it accelerates. Ho-gae, who resigned from the police force in episode eleven after rescuing Kim Hyun-seo and being framed by his own father, finds himself pulled back into the field not by reinstatement but by Do-jin arriving with evidence of a serial arsonist. The Hyun-seo arc is resolved — she is saved, Kyung-joon is caught, Ma Tae-hwa confessed in episode eight — but the show refuses to let that resolution feel like an ending. A new threat is already burning, and Ho-gae and Do-jin walk toward it together with no institutional cover and no plan except each other.

What Ho-gae’s resignation actually means The most important thing about Ho-gae’s resignation is that it’s not the drama questioning whether he can be redeemed — he was never the villain. It’s the show acknowledging that the systems we work inside don’t always deserve our complete loyalty, and a man who has dedicated every cell to catching criminals finally admitted that distinction. When Do-jin finds him in the finale, Ho-gae hasn’t become someone different. He’s just removed the frame that was constraining him — and the serial arson case becomes the first investigation he can run entirely on his own terms.

The partnership at the end of Season 1 What twelve episodes actually built is a case for why inter-agency collaboration is not a procedural gimmick — it is a genuine tactical advantage. Do-jin reads fire. Song Seol reads bodies. Ho-gae reads people. None of them can do what all three can do together, and the serial arson cliffhanger makes that explicit: Do-jin can see what’s happening to the buildings, but he needs Ho-gae to figure out who’s setting them and why. The finale’s last image — the two of them looking at the evidence together — is a full season’s worth of accumulated trust compressed into a single shot.

The cliffhanger question The unresolved serial arson thread retroactively changes what Season 1 feels like — it stops being a self-contained story and becomes the setup for something larger. Viewers who want a completed arc will find that the Hyun-seo case provides enough resolution to feel earned, but the show is clearly written with the assumption that you follow Ho-gae and Do-jin into Season 2. If that structural choice frustrates you, it is worth knowing before you start.

The KDW verdict The First Responders Season 1 is one of those action thrillers that delivers precisely what it promises — and does it with enough craft to still feel surprising. Kim Rae-won is in full-commitment mode across all twelve episodes: no coasting, no filler performance, no moment where Ho-gae feels like anything less than a man who takes every case personally because he cannot do it any other way. Son Ho-jun earns his co-lead status by making Do-jin the emotional ballast that Ho-gae keeps crashing into. And the structure of the season — building trust case by case, then stripping the professional framework away in episode eleven and watching the characters keep going anyway — is more carefully engineered than most K-dramas in this genre will attempt. Season 2 is waiting.