The true-crime procedural Through the Darkness returns with part two of its first season after a brief hiatus for the Beijing Winter Olympics on South Korean broadcaster SBS’ schedule.
The program has reproduced some of South Korea’s most renowned crime cases from the early twenty-first century, based on Those Who Read Hearts of Evil, the memoir of Kwon Il-yong, the country’s first criminal profiler.
Song Ha-young (Kim Nam-gil), an introspective detective whose methods clashed with his coarser colleagues, and Gook Young-soo (Jin Seon-kyu), a captain at the National Police Agency (NPA) trying to persuade his superiors to introduce behavioral profiling in the Korean police force, were introduced to us when the show first aired.
Young-soo had gotten his profile unit, the Crime Behavior Analysis Team, and persuaded Ha-young to join it by episode three. The squad, which includes young statistician Jung Woo-joo (Ryeo Un), is forced to work in a dingy semi-basement office, similar to the cramped quarters that the nascent investigative units were forced to work in in American dramas like Mindhunter and The Wire.
Getting the go-ahead to start the squad and perform behavioral profiles of convicted murders is merely the first step for these new profilers, and they quickly run across further roadblocks.
The breadth of Ha-young and Young-efforts soo’s quickly overlaps with the cases of the Special Crime Squad at the NPA, which is unwilling to participate, given their investigation into high-profile violent crimes and their ambitions to utilise the info to detect future perpetrators.
The dog murderer, Gu Young-chun (Han Joon-woo), has evolved into a serial killer who preys on rich elderly residents in a series of gruesome house invasions. Young-chun is based on the infamous Yoo Young-chul, who was convicted of 20 murders and whose actions were the inspiration for the 2008 film The Chaser.
The show’s true-crime basis, however, has given it a more serious and grounded vibe when contrasted to the more gimmicky and oftentimes comical recent serial killer series like Mouse.
