Through the Darkness

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

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🔥 Crime Must-Watch

Through the Darkness

악의 마음을 읽는 자들 (Akeui Maeumeul Ilkneun Jadeul) · 2022 · South Korea

WriterSeol I Na

DirectorKim Jae Hong · Park Bo Ram

Episodes12 eps · ~70 min each

⏱️ Binge Time14h 0m

AiredJan 14 – Mar 12, 2022

GenreThriller · Mystery · Crime

Content Rating18+ · Violence & Profanity

Viki
Kocowa+
Viu

Criminal Profiling
Serial Killer
True Crime
1990s Korea
Psychological

One box. Everything you need to decide.

Six performances that carry this story — from the profiler on the edge to the killers he’s forced to understand.

Kim Nam-gil

Song Ha Yeong

Lead

Jin Sun-kyu

Kook Yeong Su

Lead

Kim So-jin

Yun Tae Gu

Lead

Ryeoun

Jeong Woo Joo

Lead

Kim Won-hae

Heo Gil Pyo

Supporting

Lee Dae-yeon

Baek Jun Sik

Supporting

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

EP 01

Those Who Read the Hearts of Evil

January 14, 2022

Seoul, 1991. A series of brutal, seemingly motiveless murders of women are being committed by a killer dubbed “Red Cap” — and the existing homicide unit has nothing. Detective Song Ha Yeong is recruited by Kook Yeong Su to form the police’s first-ever Criminal Behavioral Analysis team. Ha Yeong demonstrates an uncanny instinct for reading criminal behavior, but the episode makes clear from the start that this gift comes with a cost. The tone is set immediately: sober, methodical, and darkly serious.

EP 02

The First Profiler

January 15, 2022

Ha Yeong begins applying profiling techniques to the Red Cap case — piecing together the killer’s psychology from crime scene evidence in ways no one around him quite understands. The team faces institutional resistance from every direction. The concept of criminal profiling is essentially unheard of in Korean law enforcement, and the episode does careful work establishing why that matters: the absence of a framework doesn’t mean the absence of truth.

EP 03

Crossing Paths

January 21, 2022

Ha Yeong and Tae Gu cross paths under difficult circumstances as their investigative approaches collide over a new case — a young victim whose murder the profiling team and the homicide unit each want to own. The episode deepens the tension between traditional policing and behavioral analysis without making either side the villain. Kim Nam-gil is particularly strong in the quieter scenes, where Ha Yeong’s emotional intelligence and emotional exhaustion arrive in the same moment.

EP 04

What Must We Remember

January 22, 2022

A new case forces the team to confront what drives ordinary people toward acts of terrible violence. Ha Yeong and Tae Gu must collaborate despite everything that divides them — and in doing so, each begins to see something in the other they hadn’t expected. The episode also brings victims’ families into the foreground in a way the drama will keep doing: grief as the real subject, not just the crime.

EP 05

Looking Into the Minds of Evil

February 25, 2022

Ha Yeong conducts direct interviews with offenders and begins constructing behavioral profiles that catch the attention of senior police leadership — for the first time, the work is generating results visible enough to be defended. The team’s methods are slowly gaining credibility, though reluctantly. A prosecutor enters the picture, adding political complexity to an investigation that was already wearing Ha Yeong thin. (Note: Episodes 7 & 8 were delayed three weeks due to 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics coverage.)

EP 06

A Different Kind of Darkness

February 26, 2022

A new type of offender stretches the team’s profiling methods in unfamiliar directions as they work against the clock to prevent another victim. Tae Gu shows her first subtle signs of genuine openness toward Ha Yeong’s approach — not acceptance, but a crack in the wall. The episode’s most effective moments come not from the chase but from the quiet conversations between Ha Yeong and Yeong Su, two men who understand what the work is doing to them and show up anyway.

EP 07

Under the Lights

February 25, 2022

A case with broad public impact forces the Criminal Behavioral Analysis team into media scrutiny for the first time. Ha Yeong must hold himself together as disturbing details of crimes are broadcast on national news and the pressure from above intensifies. The team’s growing rapport is tested in ways that feel real rather than manufactured — and Kim Won-hae’s performance as Heo Gil Pyo quietly becomes one of the most reliable things in the drama.

EP 08

The Weight of It

February 26, 2022

The cumulative toll of absorbing criminal mindsets begins to erode Ha Yeong’s emotional stability in visible ways. Yeong Su and Woo Joo work to reach him, but there’s a point past which support can only go so far. A new serial case emerges that parallels the original Red Cap murders, ratcheting up the pressure at exactly the moment Ha Yeong can least afford it. This is the episode where the drama’s central thesis — that understanding evil costs something — stops being thematic and starts being literal.

EP 09

Becoming the Monster

March 5, 2022

Ha Yeong risks losing himself in the darkness of the minds he’s been studying. The title isn’t metaphorical — it’s the actual question the drama is now asking out loud. A disturbing case involving a victim and their grieving family gives him reason to hold on, but the episode makes no promises. Kim Nam-gil plays this with remarkable restraint, conveying psychological disintegration in the smallest possible gestures rather than the big, actable ones.

EP 10

When You Gaze Into the Abyss

March 6, 2022

The Nietzsche maxim is not quoted — it doesn’t need to be. This is the episode where Ha Yeong faces the most psychologically demanding case yet, while the team simultaneously tracks two separate killers across different jurisdictions. His humanity hangs in the balance in ways that feel genuinely precarious. The procedural mechanics remain present, but the drama has now tilted decisively into something more interior and more urgent.

EP 11

The Victims and Their Families

March 11, 2022

Ha Yeong finds his footing again — not through a breakthrough in the case, but through an unexpected encounter that reconnects him with why any of this matters. The episode shifts its gaze from the criminals to the ripple effects of violent crime on victims’ families and the communities left behind. A flashback to young Ha Yeong grounds the narrative emotionally in a way that earns the sentiment without reaching for it.

EP 12

The Cost of Clarity

March 12, 2022

The Gyeonggi Agency arrests the prime suspect in the Missing Women case, closing the serial killer arc that has run beneath the drama’s surface. Ha Yeong pulls back from the edge — his humanity restored not by a resolution to the darkness, but by the bonds forged with Yeong Su and Woo Joo over months of work that cost all of them something. Tae Gu’s arc completes with a full acceptance of criminal profiling as a legitimate tool — a shift that lands because the drama earned it slowly. The finale closes with quiet, hard-won resolution: not triumphant, not tragic, just honest.

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

The case closes — on paper. The finale opens with the Gyeonggi Agency arrest of the prime suspect in the Missing Women case, bringing the central serial investigation to its procedural conclusion. It is not a triumphant moment. There is no dramatic confrontation, no catharsis through violence. The arrest is bureaucratic, unglamorous, and deliberately understated — which is entirely the point. Through the Darkness has never been interested in the spectacle of catching monsters. It’s been interested in what chasing them does to the people who do it.

Ha Yeong at the edge — and the decision not to fall. The finale’s emotional climax is not the arrest. It’s the moment Ha Yeong faces what he’s become over the course of the investigation — a man who has spent so long inside criminal minds that the boundary between empathy and absorption has nearly dissolved. The drama shows this not through breakdown or crisis, but through stillness: Ha Yeong alone with what he knows, and the choice about whether to keep carrying it. Kim Nam-gil’s performance here is the finest in the series — communicating years of psychic weight in a way that asks nothing of the audience except attention.

Yeong Su and Woo Joo as the answer. What pulls Ha Yeong back is not a revelation or a victory. It’s the two people who have watched him disappear into this work and stayed anyway. Jin Sun-kyu’s Kook Yeong Su — warm, tenacious, stubbornly human — functions throughout the drama as the counterweight to Ha Yeong’s interior gravity, and the finale makes that explicit. The friendship between these two is the quiet emotional core of Through the Darkness, and it resolves here without sentiment, in exactly the register the drama has earned.

Tae Gu’s arc — skepticism fully dissolved. Captain Yun Tae Gu’s journey from open hostility to genuine respect for the profiling team is completed in the finale. It is one of the more satisfying character resolutions in the drama because it was never rushed: Tae Gu’s change happened incrementally, case by case, and the finale simply confirms what the audience has already seen building for several episodes. She becomes an advocate for exactly what she once dismissed — not because she was wrong about the methods, but because the methods proved themselves in the field, over time, in ways she couldn’t argue with.

What the drama is actually about. Through the Darkness ends not with justice — though justice of a kind is served — but with a meditation on cost. The real cases depicted here were solved by real people, including Kwon Il Yong, the criminal profiler whose memoir the drama adapts. The finale honors that by refusing easy resolution: Ha Yeong does not emerge whole, he emerges intact, which is different. The darkness he has absorbed doesn’t disappear. He simply chooses not to let it be the last word. These were the men and women who looked into the worst of what people do to each other — so that those who came after them wouldn’t have to look blind.