Dear X (2025) — Complete Review, Ending Explained & Season 2

Platform	TVING (streaming)
Episodes	12
Premiere	November 6 – December 4, 2025
Genre	Psychological Thriller
Source	Based on the webtoon Dear X
Cast	Kim You-jung, Kim Young-dae, Kim Do-hoon, Hwang In-yeop, Hong Jong-hyun
Rating	★★★★☆ — 8.0 / 10

Dear X announces itself in its very first scene: a child stands motionless at the top of a rain-soaked staircase while her mother bleeds and asks for help. The child does not move. The camera does not look away.

What follows across twelve episodes is the story of who that child becomes. Baek A-jin — played with cold, coiled precision by Kim You-jung — is a survivor, a manipulator, a performer, and the most unsettling female character in recent Korean drama. The show is being called a psychopath thriller. It is more accurately a drama about what a society produces when it systematically destroys the conditions for trust.

Full spoilers throughout.

Origin (Episodes 1–4)

A-jin’s childhood is established quickly and without sentiment. An alcoholic mother prone to violence. A father who eventually kills that mother and stages her death as a fall. A girl who grows up with no safe attachment — treated by every adult in her orbit as a tool, a burden, or an afterthought.

The series then moves to 2016, before A-jin’s rise as an actress. She is brilliant, beautiful, and operating an illegal loan-sharking scheme out of her school bag. Her rival, Shim Seong-hui (Kim Yi-kyeong), has a mother on the school parents’ association and uses that leverage against A-jin at every opportunity. Yoon Jun-seo (Kim Young-dae) is A-jin’s closest connection — they live together after A-jin’s father enters a relationship with Jun-seo’s scheming mother, Hwang Ji-seon (Kim You-mi).

The rules of A-jin’s world are established early. She reads social systems — schools, families, institutions — the way other people read books, locating structural vulnerabilities before anyone else has noticed them. When Seong-hui campaigns to destroy her, A-jin doesn’t respond with emotion. She builds a trap, times the reveal, and watches.

The Father’s Death (Episode 3) is the series’ first fully constructed crime. A-jin, working as a barista for Choe Jeong-ho (Kim Ji-hun) — a gentle former baseball player — engineers a scenario in which Jeong-ho, believing he’s protecting her from a stalker, strikes her father with a bat. A-jin administers the fatal blow herself. She stands afterward in a blood-spattered doorway in the rain, wearing a faint smile that the show does not explain or apologize for.

The institutional fallout of Episode 4 is equally instructive: a corrupt detective, a sports agency conspiracy, Jun-seo’s false confession, and ultimately the intervention of Longstar Entertainment, which disposes of the legal problem and signs A-jin. Nobody is clean. A-jin is simply the one who gets away.

The Industry (Episodes 5–8)

A-jin becomes a star. The entertainment industry, the series makes clear, is just another system with a power axis — and she has been locating those her whole life.

Her rivals within Longstar are Rena (Lee Yuleum), the established lead actress, and CEO Seo Mi-ri (Kim Ji-young), who runs the company like a chess game with human pieces. The idol-turned-actor Heo In-gang (Hwang In-yeop) begins as an obstacle and becomes something more complicated: a man who recognizes something of his own calculated ambition in A-jin and is drawn to her precisely because of it. The relationship is real for him. For her, it is operational. This asymmetry is the series’ most consistent source of genuine pathos.

Episode 8 is the pivot. In-gang’s grandmother discovers that A-jin’s closeness to her was staged. The narrative enters crisis. In-gang, confronted with what appears to be the total falseness of the past year, is found dead at his apartment. Seo Mi-ri, who had a complex, professionally transactional bond with him, is devastated. From this point on, she exists to destroy A-jin.

Power and Dissolution (Episodes 9–12)

Dropped by Longstar, blacklisted across the industry through Mi-ri’s influence, A-jin is simultaneously at the peak of her public profile — nominated for the Blue Dragon Film Award — and structurally cornered.

Moon Do-hyeok (Hong Jong-hyun) arrives like a rescue and reveals himself as a trap. He has been orchestrating events for some time: engineering Mi-ri’s downfall, removing obstacles around A-jin, researching her past with forensic thoroughness. A-jin marries him. She enters the marriage with open eyes and then, gradually, discovers she cannot locate the mechanism of control — because Do-hyeok built it before she arrived.

The house has a locked third-floor room. Her film scripts are rewritten to echo her father’s death. Her communications are monitored. The woman who has managed every relationship in her life as an instrument finds herself in a residence where the instruments are her.

Kim Jae-o (Kim Do-hoon), who has carried an uncomplicated devotion to A-jin across the entire series, stages a final act. He places himself in direct conflict with Do-hyeok’s operation to expose it. He does not survive this.

The Finale (Episode 12): Footage from Jae-o’s final operation gives A-jin sufficient leverage over Do-hyeok to neutralize him. The Blue Dragon ceremony proceeds. A-jin wins Best Actress. At the same ceremony, Jun-seo — who has spent weeks gathering testimony against A-jin — has arranged for a documentary exposé to air simultaneously on another channel. The documentary broadcasts footage of A-jin escaping from the wreckage after the crash.

Jun-seo does not survive.

A-jin’s body is not found at the scene.

The finale’s most structurally important move is a correction.

Jun-seo spent the back half of the series convinced A-jin had caused the grandmother’s death. She hadn’t. After the grandmother discovered that A-jin’s proximity was orchestrated, A-jin told her everything — the calculations, the intentions, all of it. The grandmother forgave her. Her death was an accident: she slipped while feeding stray cats and fell. The police confirm this.

Jun-seo — who had organized the documentary partly around this allegation — discovers the truth too late to stop what he has set in motion. The documentary airs. His complicity in broadcasting it without verification becomes the source of his final guilt. The car crash is his response to having betrayed both A-jin and the truth simultaneously.

Whether it is an act of love, punishment, despair, or all three is left unresolved. He says they should end everything together. She doesn’t contradict him. The car goes off the edge. She survives. He does not.

The cast of Dear X is too large by two or three characters, and the show knows it — several figures exist primarily as plot mechanics. But the center holds because of what the leads accomplish.

Kim You-jung carries the series on a performance that asks her to be two things at once: the warm, familiar actress Korean audiences have trusted for years, and a character who knows exactly how warmth functions as a tool and deploys it accordingly. What she does is show us a person constructing warmth from observation — technically perfect, perceptibly hollow, and occasionally, briefly, cracking open to reveal something that could have been different under different conditions. The sealing-back is what makes A-jin terrifying. Kim You-jung makes the sealing visible.

Kim Do-hoon as Jae-o is the show’s moral argument in human form. Jae-o asks nothing from A-jin. He accepts whatever role she assigns — investigator, fixer, decoy — without negotiation. His death isn’t framed as heroic sacrifice; it’s the logical completion of a devotion that A-jin has shaped into an instrument for so long that its final form is indistinguishable from his previous forms. It is the series’ most quietly devastating moment.

Kim Young-dae as Jun-seo is the tragic conscience, the person who has known A-jin longest and loved her anyway. His tragedy is not that he was deceived. It’s that he was right about her and chose her anyway, and built his identity around that choice — and then reached a point where he could no longer hold that.

Hwang In-yeop as In-gang, and Kim Ji-young as Mi-ri, are both more interesting than the supporting designation suggests. In-gang is the drama’s warmest figure in its middle section — someone with his own moral complications who has not, unlike everyone else, stopped orienting toward other people. Mi-ri is the industry embodied: a woman who has done what A-jin does but with more loyalty to her alliances, and who is destroyed partly because she built one attachment she couldn’t reduce to strategy.

Hong Jong-hyun as Do-hyeok is the show’s main structural problem. He arrives late, functions as a necessary device — the system that can contain A-jin — and doesn’t become a person. The locked room and institutionalized ex-wife are texture, not psychology.

The first eight episodes have a specific quality: patient, methodical, content to let each move accumulate weight before the next arrives. Episodes 9–12 shift tempo. The show starts moving faster than its own logic can support.

Moon Do-hyeok exists, primarily, to solve a structural problem the narrative has created for itself. A-jin has become so operationally capable that she needs an antagonist who plays by different rules — not manipulation but sheer institutional control, the kind that doesn’t need to be clever. The creative decision is understandable. It is also a shortcut. Do-hyeok never becomes a character because the show never allocates the time to make him one. He functions. He doesn’t live.

The more telling pattern: the show’s investment in the people around A-jin runs in direct proportion to their proximity to her. It is deeply and patiently interested in Jun-seo. Moderately invested in Jae-o. In-gang and Do-hyeok register primarily as functions — one the human cost of what A-jin does, the other the structural ceiling she cannot break through. This is less a failure of characterization than a camera that can only hold focus on one subject at a time. A-jin takes all of it.

What you’re left with is a show that’s better appraised as a complete whole than experienced week-to-week in its final stretch, and more rewarding to think about afterward than to watch in real time. These aren’t disqualifying qualities. They do explain the gap between what Dear X achieves and what it might have been.

★★★★☆ — 8.0 / 10. Kim You-jung makes it worth watching. The first eight episodes make it worth arguing about.

---

See also: [Control Is Not a Crime: On Dear X and the Picaresque of Survival]