The Tyrant – K-drama Episode 1 Recap & Review

Delivery Accident – Episode 1 Recap

The recap of The Tyrant Episode 1 begins with the NIS enlisting Head One Japan to raid Dr. Jonas’ lab for an unauthorized serum program. Jonas’ team tries to erase everything but they leave behind one last sample which falls in the hands of the NIS. Jonas’ people alert Director Choi who decides to deal with it as he meets his spymaster.

Unfortunately, all of her spies have been beheaded for working with Choi. He still refuses to shut it down and she gives him one last piece of intel – the port entry and the blueprint of a Swedish portable vault carrying the sample. She also reveals that it can only be cracked by Mr. Chae’s daughter who has Dissociative Identity Disorder with her alter ego being her twin brother.

They hear a commotion and it cuts to Tom, the mercenary from The Witch Part 2 killing the spymaster’s guards. He enters to find that Choi has escaped.

Next, we see Chae’s daughter, Ja-gyeong talking to her “brother.” She is at her father’s funeral and we see a flashback to her retrieving his chopped body after a safecracking job goes wrong.

Choi wastes no time as he enlists the thug Yeon Mo-yong to steal the vault and hire Ja-gyeong to crack it. Ja-gyeong’s “brother” is not interested as Mo-yong has made a name as a mole but she accepts the job as they have a history. With her father wanting to retire and open a pub in Southeast Asia, Mo-yong also promises to pay her enough to do just that.

Onto the heist, Mo-yong’s men and Ja-gyeong kill the NIS agents and take the vault. However, the second part of Mo-yong’s job is to cover up his tracks and he throws Ja-gyeong off a dam. Fortunately for her, she survives albeit with a couple of injuries. But that’s not all as she has the sample which she snuck out before handing the vault to Mo-yong.

Nearby, a loanshark and his henchman are about to kill a woman after she has paid off her debt. Ja-gyeong interrupts by brutally killing the men. The scared woman runs off but Ja-gyeong doesn’t pay her much heed.

Meanwhile, the NIS is furious that they have lost the sample and are worried about how someone called Paul will take the news. The chairman tells Director Sa to set up a meeting with Choi in hopes of negotiating a trade.   

At that moment, Choi is busy covering up his tracks as he tells the middleman to kill Mo-yong and his men once he obtains the vault and leaves. It is also revealed that Choi and Mo-yong know each other and the director is the one who got Mo-yong stuck running a restaurant on the city outskirts. Once the middleman leaves, Mo-yong predicts his move and kills Choi’s moles as he prepares to go off-grid.

Elsewhere, Choi meets with one of the professors of the program and updates him on the developments. He claims that Jonas and his men are unharmed and promises to get the professor to a safe house.

In the Philippines, a similar serum project is ongoing but they have little success as their serum needs to be administered to the brain while Choi’s serum is a virus that can be transmitted by skin or mucus. The director is none other than Paul who believes that the South Koreans are playing with something they can’t control as he watches the raided lab’s CCTV footage which shows a South Korean test subject rejecting the serum and exploding.

We see that Paul is flanked by Tom and is interrogating the spymaster’s men. Paul orders Tom to behead them and plans on heading to South Korea to clean up Choi’s mess. And that is the end of The Tyrant Episode 1 recap.

The Episode Review

Well, one thing is for certain is that this Disney+ K-drama is set in the same universe as The Witch with that Tom cameo. Well, does that mean we may get a glimpse of Kim Da-mi or Lee Jong-suk? Does this also mean that the sample is similar to the one which was used on the superhuman test subjects in the movies?

Anyway, back to the show, The Tyrant Episode 1 gets off to an intriguing start as we see betrayals over betrayals. It shows us most of the key players and their motivations including Ja-gyeong and her alter ego. 

However, we do have a gripe with that god-awful lighting and severe contrasting colour grading. It is just too dark! Why do today’s films and TVs love to grade it as if lights don’t exist anymore? We can barely see who is doing what. And it is always the important action scenes that take place in such dark scenes.

It makes it difficult to follow and immerse oneself in the plot. We are too busy trying to understand their actions to enjoy the story. Sure, the K-drama is trying to go with the show-not-tell tactic for exposition, but when there are so many elements including the random info-dumping, it is time-consuming to piece them together.

It takes our attention away from the big picture. But we are still hopeful that the show can find its groove now that it has set up the foundation in the first episode. Onto the next one!