Netflix’s mystery-thriller ‘The Glory’ follows Moon Dong-Eun, a woman in her thirties, concocting a decade-plus plan to exact her revenge on the bullies that made her life hell during school days.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Moon Dong-Eun is a victim of psychopathic bullies who lack any sort of discernible signs of empathy or sympathy. They’re so cruel in their bullying that they didn’t even have any pity to spare.
Moon Don-Eun turns to the police but the wealthy parents of the bullies get them out without the case ever touching the report-filing stage.
The homeroom teacher Mr Kim is another bully who sides with the bully brats and beats up Dong-Eun when she later tries to leave the school because of the bullying.
Buying her money-loving degenerate mom, Mr Kim and the principal get her cause of leaving changed to “maladjustment”, so that the files of the wealthy kids remain spotless.
She also comes close to suicide but can’t go through with it. Homeless and ruined, she slowly but surely rebuilds herself, getting a laborious job and self-sustaining herself while also completing her education and graduating.
She goes on to receive competent degrees and becomes a teacher. It’s 2022, and Dong-Eun, now 35, is ready to set in motion her revenge on all those monsters that bullied her to no end.
All these years, she has been plotting her grand revenge plan which she finally begins executing. The biggest villain of her life is Park Yeon-Jin, who was also the sort of leader of the bully group back in the day.
While she goes on to bask in her inherited wealth and marries a wealthy man, gets a job as a reporter because of her husband’s money and connections (while she can’t even write her own piece-to-cameras), and also has an eight-year-old girl Ye-Sol.
Other bullies include Jeon Jae-Jun, Son Myeong-O, Lee Sa-Ra, and Choi Hye-Jeong. Dong-Eun enlists the investigative skills of a working-class married woman with an abusive husband.
Hyeon-Nam wants her husband killed, and so she strikes a deal wherein she’d help Dong-Eun with whatever she wishes to achieve as long as she kills her husband for her.
The first target of Dong-Eun’s revenge is Mr Kim, whose true identity she exposes to his son, who later disposes of his father himself since his past crimes will tank his reputation and plummet the chances of him having a successful career.
Then she moves on to the group and she starts making them suffer one by one. She turns them against each other and humiliates them to their faces. In the meantime, she gets help from a kind-hearted doctor named Joo Yeo-Jeong, who falls for her.
Myeong-O, who works acts as a useful idiot for Dong-Eun, strikes a barter deal of sorts that involves both of them sharing with each other a significant amount of dirt and evidence against the rest of the group members (since Myeong-O, like Hye-Jeong, is not as well-off like the three other wealthy brats).
Later on, Myeong-O is revealed to have been killed by someone as other members deal with the revenge quest that Dong-Eun has embarked on.
As new revelations are made and people are threatened, the dangers increase and Dong-Eun braces for the next stage of her plan. ‘The Glory’ season 1 ends with her enemies preparing to square up as well.
‘The Glory’ season 1 ending explained in detail:
Who killed Mr Kim?
Mr Kim Jong-Mun dies at the hands of his own son, Soo-Han, who’s just cleared his School Inspector exams.
With only an interview left before he achieves his goal, Soo-Han doesn’t want his father’s horrible actions in the past to surface and ruin it all for him.
Dong-Eun had previously met Soo-Han and familiarised herself with him, and later, she reveals what his father did to her and warns him that she’ll post it all on an online forum.
To prevent that from happening, Soo-Han takes it upon himself, to dispose of his dad by using his asthma and allergy to Lillies against him.
Jong-Mun tries to plead and beg but Soo-Han can’t risk his getting his reputation marred and since he has a son of his own too now, he wants only good for his family.
Jong-Mun eventually falls on the floor due to an asthmatic attack and Soo-Han kicks away his inhaler, leading to his father passing away and marking ‘The Glory’ season 1’s first death under Dong-Eun’s revenge plan.
Who killed Myeong-O?
Myeong-O’s death is never really shown explicitly in ‘The Glory’ season 1. However, there are a couple of tidbits that do end up being shown, with none of them confirming his killer with full certainty.
Myeong-O, after learning that Yeon-Jin had pushed Yoon So-Hee off the terrace during the school days, takes great delight in the great leverage he has against her now. He can exploit this leverage to get whatever ransom he wishes to demand.
He’s shown to switch up his lifestyle tremendously after learning of Yeon-Jin’s culpability, instantly ditching his job under Jae-Jun, and buying a one-way ticket to Vladivostok.
However, it’s later revealed that he never made it to Vladivostok and soon, he stops responding to the calls and texts of the rest of the group. They all try to re-establish communication but he doesn’t respond.
However, before his disappearance, he’s shown to have invited Hye-Jeong, Sa-Ra, and Yeon-Jin to meet personally. It’s after this invitation (that seemingly skips on Jae-Jun), that he disappears.
Meanwhile, it’s revealed that he was actually beat to brutally by someone, following which he seemingly fell to his death. The perpetrator is not clearly shown but there are some hints that point to suspicions towards several characters.
A woman’s legs are shown to be fleeing the scene where Myeong-O lies dead, all bloodied up. This woman’s face is never shown but her heels are revealed, and they are the same green heels with shiny stones studded at their front like the ones Yeon-Jin has in her collection.
However, Hye-Jeong also has one of the same pair of heels in her collection. Meanwhile, Lee Sa-Ra is shown to be painting a similar green heel on a big canvas, obsessively after Myeong-O disappears.
In addition to these three, another likely suspect is Yeon-Jin’s mother, who previously tries to take over the handling Dong-Eun’s problem by herself.
Lastly, Dong-Eun herself can be the perpetrator behind Myeong-O’s death but nothing concrete can be said about the character’s murder. Season 1 of ‘The Glory’ ends with Yeo-Jeong’s murder retaining the ambiguity till the time the credits roll.
What happens to Joo Yeo-Jeong?
Joo Yeo-Jeong is a kind-hearted doctor who strives to be caring and passionate. He’s one of the few people who Dong-Eun can trust to be actually humane, unlike most of the monsters she’s come across in her life.
He’s also Dong-Eun’s love interest, and while she initially rejects his advances citing she wants not a lover but an executioner on her side, she ends up sharing her story of abuse and bullying with him later on.
Later on in ‘The Glory’ season 1, she also shows him her scars, something she doesn’t even share with Hyeon-Nam, her most trusted accomplice and investigator. Joo Yeo-Jeong is a jolly character at a cursory glance.
He’s the son of the director of the hospital he works, and it’s also pointed out by Dong-Eun, who understandably detests people who lead lavish lives due to nothing but inheritance.
However, Yeo-Jeong hides grim secrets and a messed-up psyche behind the harmless facade. Even the many sessions with his therapist end up being no help.
His bane is the serial killer Kang Yeong-Seon who was once a patient under the care of Yeo-Jeong’s father. However, he ended up killing his father in cold blood and got sent to prison.
From the prison, Yeong-Seon would continue to write letters to Yeo-Jeong, with the latter’s mother not knowing a thing about it until very late.
These letters would be the same, wherein the serial killer would describe his murder of Yeo-Jeong’s father in detail and then claim it was done under a misguided moment of rage and mental instability.
Yeo-Jeong’s mind, which was already under duress from the trauma, would go on to get inflicted by these letters and he’d become incapable of escaping this psychic hell.
As it’s eventually revealed in ‘The Glory’ season 1, Yeo-Jeong has developed murderous tendencies of his own. While he hasn’t acted on said tendencies yet, he does often fantasize about slitting and slashing away at the serial killer that murdered his father.
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