The Frog Season 1 Recap: Netflix’s 2024 South Korean series “The Frog” weaves a dark tale of crime and consequence across two decades. Set in a small forested town near Seoul, the story revolves around Jeon Yeong-ha, an elderly man running a holiday rental where a mysterious guest seems to commit a heinous act.
Though it withholds the facts for later episodes, the eight-episode affair gets unduly convoluted and prolonged as it relates the story of two horrific crimes in two different decades and the effects these deeds have. An enigmatic guest appears to have committed a crime while staying in a stunning vacation rental owned by Jeon Yeong-ha, an elderly man at the centre of the story. albeit its ending is not as satisfactory, The Frog is an overall entertaining show to watch, albeit its plot might have been much more condensed.
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What is ‘The Frog’ About?
A few hours’ drive from Seoul, where Jeon Yeong-ha has been spending the majority of his time lately, lies the setting for The Frog, a little hamlet covered in forests. Upon learning of his wife’s terminal condition, Yeong-ha moved to the town and fulfilled her lifelong dream of owning a stunning home in a secluded, wooded location. The man ultimately lost her, at which point he made the decision to leave Seoul and live in the village full-time, renting out the villa next to his tiny home.
Ui-seon, his daughter, frequently begs him to visit her and her fiancé in Seoul, but he feels more at ease managing the rental property with Yong-chae, his best friend. However, Jeon is also not very committed to operating the company, and Yong-chae is the one who pushes him to promote the property online in an effort to draw in more visitors.
During this period, a young woman named Seong-a arrives at the property with Si-hyeon, a tiny toddler who is obviously her son. Yeong-ha does not mind that Seong-a stays, despite the fact that she is a little guarded and enigmatic. But when she leaves the house early the following morning, leaving behind obvious bloodstains and an odd bleach odour, and most importantly, without her kid accompanying her, he does notice something is off.
In order to tie this story into the main plot, The Frog also offers another incident from a motel in the same area, however it turns out to be an occurrence that occurred more than twenty years earlier. In the early 2000s, Gu Sang-jun and his wife Eun-gyeong operated the Lake View Motel, which they managed profitably.
One rainy evening, Sang-jun saw a car on the desolate road. He approached the driver, a well-mannered man, and made a big effort to be pleasant, even offering him a room at his hotel. Even though he charged the guest a small amount, he offered him the room with the nicest view because it was off-season and there was no demand at the establishment.
The visitor turned out to be Hyang-cheol, a serial killer who had even killed a young woman in that motel room. This flipped Sang-jun’s life completely upside down. The incident irreparably damages the Lake View Motel’s reputation, even though Hyang-cheol is apprehended by the police nearly instantly.
There is only one thing that both timelines have in common, despite the grave threat of crime and violence that hangs over them both: a police officer by the name of Yoon Bo-min. Bo-min, who had a talent for solving crimes from an early age, was first assigned to the Hosu police station in the early 2000s, just a few days before Hyang-cheol’s murder at the nearby town’s Lake View Motel.
She saw the motel fall apart and the murder’s terrible toll on Sang-jun and his family. When she returns to the same station in the present as a high-ranking officer, she gradually begins to notice that Yeong-ha and his enigmatic companion, Seong-a, are acting strangely.
Why does Yeong-ha not report his suspicions?
Without realising that the small child was not related to Seong-a, Yeong-ha and Yong-chae played with him for a considerable amount of time on the day Seong-a and Si-hyeon arrived. We barely get a sense that they are not mother and son in a short scene when Si-hyeon addresses the woman as “ma’am” and worriedly enquires as to whether his father will be joining them.
It is strange in and of itself that Yeong-ha’s visitors had left without warning when he wakes up the following morning and goes to examine the residence. Yeong-ha is even more shocked to discover that there is a strange bleach odour and that the toilet has been meticulously cleaned—something that guests never do at a rental apartment. Last but not least, there is an odd stain of blood on a particular record that Seong-a had checked out the night before, as if someone had handled it with bloody hands.
Yeong-ha discovers, upon further investigation, that Seong-a’s vehicle had been flawlessly recorded by the dashcam on his daughter’s automobile, which he had been driving temporarily. It is from this film that he obtains a significant piece of evidence. Seong-a was by herself as she left the vacation rental, and Si-hyeon was nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless, she had difficulty fitting an unusually big and heavy bag into the trunk of her vehicle.
Yeong-ha is puzzled by the idea of what his guest might have done in his residence, even though he does not tell anybody about it. He’s almost positive that Seong-a killed her own son and put his body inside the suitcase she was carrying after seeing that two towels were missing from his normal laundry load. Yeong-ha does not submit his concerns to the police, though, even though he has proof to support them and soon after meets inspector Bo-min.
Yeong-ha eventually begins to convince himself that he does not need to get involved in the situation as it is not negatively impacting his life, and he begins to control his thoughts in order to avoid any trouble. There’s a saying in Southeast Asia that says when mischievous schoolboys throw stones at frogs, the frogs only wonder why they were the object of such humiliation, without reacting or protesting. Yeong-ha is comparable to the frog in this proverb, which also serves as the inspiration for the title of the Netflix K-series.
At first, he tries to talk himself out of seeing the police, figuring he would visit the station the next day. But over the course of the following few days, he makes the decision to ignore the situation and cleans his home of any traces of it. Though Seong-a’s car approaching his house occasionally haunts him, the protagonist joyfully forgets about the incident as the seasons change.
In the end, though, his choice to ignore his concerns backfired and ruined his entire existence. After a year or so, Seong-a finally makes her way back to the property because she has come to the realisation that Yeong-ha is just like the proverbial frog—she can be easily tricked into carrying out her evil and twisted scheme.
Did Seong-A Kill Si-Hyeon?
At first, it appears that Seong-a killing Si-hyeon is the most heinous crime of all because it implies that she kills her own son. Seong-a is The Frog’s main enemy, yet she isn’t as evil as filicide because Si-hyeon isn’t her real son. There is a lot of room for assumption regarding Seong-a’s character since the series doesn’t go into great detail about her. The woman is actually the daughter of a very powerful and affluent industrialist in Seoul, who has the clout to get his daughter released from custody when she is taken into custody.
Seong-a most likely always enjoyed cruelty and violence, even as a small child, but her father never intervened, instead encouraging her to think that her behaviour will always be accepted because of their social standing. Her life took a further turn for the worst when she married Ha Jae-sik, a guy whose family is said to have treated her violently and hostilely.
Seong-a was already thinking and acting a little strangely, which made her a simple mark for mistreatment and humiliation in the home. But anything she had to deal with regarding Jae-sik was easily dwarfed by her violent tendency of settling problems and criminal intentions.
Seong-a steadfastly refused to take on the role of mother to Jae-sik’s kid, Si-hyeon, from his prior relationship. She began to think that Jae-sik didn’t genuinely love her and that she was just his son’s mother because they were married. She felt that Si-hyeon genuinely loathed her and wanted to eliminate her from his father’s life, which led her to eventually view him as the one major hurdle in her romantic life.
Seong-a’s already vicious and tormented mind became overtaken by these emotions, and she decided to kill her stepson. Her trip to Yeong-ha’s vacation property was merely meant to set up the ideal circumstances for the murder. The vinyl record has blood stains on it because on that fateful night, she drugged Si-hyeon, rendered him unconscious, and then strangled and maybe chopped up his body.
As usual, the woman went to her father for support, and he made sure that no one ever found out about her crime. Si-hyeon’s remains was provided to his family for the funeral when it was determined that he had passed away from an unspecified cause.
It seems possible that Seong-a had killed before as well, and her father had helped her avoid any legal issues, given her cool and collected demeanour shortly after the murder. After a year, she returns to Yeong-ha’s life with more confidence, demanding that he sell her his house or, at the very least, allow her to reside there without paying rent or signing a formal lease.
She pretends to be passionately interested in him, even going so far as to threaten to harm his kid. She then involves Kim Seon-tae, a police officer, in the situation. After revealing the truth to Seon-tae, Seong-a murders him as well and proceeds to ruthlessly and violently destroy anything that stands in her way.
What was the mystery behind Hyang-cheol’s murder?
After going on a murderous rampage, Hyang-cheol was apprehended. Rather of expressing regret or shame for his crimes, the guy boasted about his accomplishments in life. Some others believed that the life sentence issued to the psychopath was insufficient retribution for his actions. Hyang-cheol’s acts not only caused direct suffering to the victims and their families, but they also had devastating indirect effects on other people, particularly the owners of the Lake View Motel.
Even after the police investigation concluded, no tourists remained at the motel, and locals and those who followed the case dubbed it the “murder motel.” Sang-jun and Eun-gyeong were consequently compelled to go out of business, try to sell the motel, and hunt for other employment. However, they were covertly made fun of at every employment, as though harbouring a serial killer without knowing it was a serious crime they had committed. This destroyed their personal lives as well.
Due to his parents’ error, their little son Gi-ho was frequently teased at school after the couple split up, with Eun-gyeong also holding her husband accountable for that terrible night. Eun-gyeong eventually committed suicide in an attempt to end the pain and guilt she felt from the experience, even though she did eventually return to her family. After this, Sang-jun also became insane and needed to be admitted to a mental health hospital.
It had an even greater impact on Young Gi-ho, who used sleeping pills in an effort to end his life due to the additional humiliation he received from his classmates. He declined to stay in contact with Sang-jun after he grew up, most likely because he thought his father had not provided enough for the family at that point. Growing up as a social misfit, Gi-ho is enraged that Hyang-cheol, who had unintentionally wrecked his entire family, continues to attract media attention due to his psychotic nature.
Gi-ho, meanwhile, had never disclosed to anybody that he had witnessed Hyang-cheol bring a woman’s lifeless body into his motel room the night of the murder. In this way, Gi-ho behaved similarly to Yeong-ha and the frog from the preceding saying, but the shame and rage that had been repressed finally came to the surface.
Returning to the now-deserted motel, Gi-ho made plans to murder Hyang-cheol, and he enlisted the aid of Jung-do, Sang-jun’s closest friend, in this endeavour. Finally, Gi-ho carries out his carefully thought-out plot and murders the killer in retaliation for his parents’ suffering when Hyang-cheol is permitted to pay a special visit to the hospital to see his dying mother.
Yeong-ha discovers after the occurrence that Gi-ho was the murderer in the peculiar case, but he chooses not to inform the authorities of this—this time on purpose—because he believes the young man was justified in his actions.
How Did Seong-A Die?
In the climax of The Frog, Seong-a tricks Ui-seon into arriving at the vacation rental by pretending that her father, Yeong-ha, has been in an accident. She is then imprisoned inside a suitcase. Ui-seon is obviously kept alive by Seong-a in order to use her as a negotiating chip against Yeong-ha, as he is well aware that he will stop at nothing to protect his daughter.
Just as she had planned, Yeong-ha agrees to write off the house in Seong-a’s name, but Yoon Bo-min, a shrewd police officer, steps in to help him. Bo-min began to question Seong-a’s motives after witnessing her purchase oddly big jars of bleach and other materials meant to clean up murder scenes.
Aware that Seong-a was likely residing in Yeong-ha’s vacation rental illegally, she stood by the road to apprehend and interrogate the man. Thus, just before his last meeting with the murderer, Yeong-ha confided in Bo-min everything regarding his unruly visitor and his plans. The police locate Ui-seon and save his life.
Later, they discover Kim Seon-tae’s body, which may be utilised to apprehend and punish Seong-a. However, there is another twist in the story. After being released from prison, Ha Jae-sik, Seong-a’s husband, sought his own retribution after learning that she had killed his kid.
The Frog’s climax shows that Bo-min is unable to apprehend Seong-a because her resentful husband, Jae-sik, murders her and is subsequently taken into custody. Yeong-ha is ultimately successful in eliminating Seong-a from his life, despite the fact that her crimes are ultimately unpunished. Yeong-ha frequently spends time with his devoted family once Ui-seon and her spouse eventually move into the vacation rental.
After Bo-min heals from her wounds, she even finds Gi-ho and tells him that she too believes he killed Hyang-cheol, but she also chooses not to pursue legal action against him. Because they were the frogs who ultimately spoke out against injustice, Yeong-ha and Gi-ho wind up being friends at the very end because they each respect each other’s choices in life.
The several made-up scenes in which Yeong-ha kills Seong-a show that he intended to follow Gi-ho’s path of violence in certain respects. At the start of every episode, he and the other main characters are heard debating whether an injustice that goes unnoticed by witnesses qualifies as such.
Ultimately, Yeong-ha and Gi-ho come to the realisation that these injustices are crimes as well. However, Bo-min and Yeong-ha do choose to conceal Gi-ho’s wrongdoing, and they do so only as a result of the injustice that Gi-ho and his family initially endured at the hands of Hyang-cheol.
