'Teach You A Lesson' K-Drama Full Recap (Episodes 1-10): Does Hwa-Jin Get His Revenge?

After watching the first couple episodes of Teach You A Lesson, I was convinced this was the work of some teacher who wanted to see their fantasies acted out on the screen. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was based on a Webtoon that is controversial for how extreme the writer’s political views are, even by Korean standards. We do see a little bit of it in the show’s advocacy for corporal punishment, and how it paints a female false accuser, but some of the more extreme storylines from the Webtoon don’t seem to feature, thank god. As it is, a lot of the time, the show doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with what it’s preaching, and the existence of this organization that sits above the law is painted as a good thing. Yes, there’s a bunch of monsters in Korean schools, and yes, they’re not necessarily being effectively dealt with, but this show doesn’t show us a solution, it shows us a power fantasy. For now, though, let’s get into this recap of what went down in Netflix’s Teach You A Lesson and meet up to compare notes later.

Spoiler Alert

1. The Daehan High School Bullying Case

The series kicks off its first episode with a textbook case of bullying, with two outcasts, Dae-Seok and Gyeong-Min, being targeted by a bully named Jun-Hyeong and his minions. Gyeong-Min is the OG outcast, getting let off the hook a little when Dae-Seok becomes the new one, after Jun-Hyeong does a ceremony where a mop is placed on the boy’s head. When Dae-Seok ends up jumping off the roof after the intense bullying, Gyeong-Min’s first instinct is to smile, because he assumes Jun-Hyeong and the others will be arrested, and he will finally be able to breathe freely. But they come back, since they’re minors who can’t be prosecuted, and Gyeong-Min’s on the receiving end of their bullying once again until, one day, Jun-Hyeong gets kicked around by a mysterious man in a black suit. This is Na Hwa-Jin, an investigator with the newly established Educational Rights Protection Bureau, set up under the Ministry of Education by Minister Gang-Seok. The EPRB have been given unlimited powers to address the various behavioral crises that Korean schools have been dealing with, and that includes the right to beat kids up, apparently. Jun-Hyeong happens to be the child of a National Assembly member, and when the kid is humiliated and made to scrub bathrooms, the father goes and threatens Gang-Seok. The minister responds by promptly releasing the intel on the man’s dirty laundry to the press, ruining his career, even though they’re both members of the same party. Jun-Hyeong is humiliated and made to face the consequences of his actions, now that his father can’t protect him, and Gyeong-Min learns that it’s okay to trust some adults, in the explosive finish to the EPRB’s first-ever case.

2. The Guun High Tech High School Gangster Kids Case

The EPRB’s next case is a trickier one, at the Guun High Tech High School, the most dangerous school for teachers in the country. This place looks like a genuine warzone, with busted-up windows and graffiti all over the place, and vandal hooligans riding around on motorcycles. This is going to be a tough one for Hwa-Jin to take on alone, so he sends Deputy Director Bong Geun-Dae undercover as a student. Immediately, Geun-Dae is bullied, but he bonds with another student victim of bullying named Hyeong-Ju. Hyeong-Ju even ends up inviting Geun-Dae to his home for ramen, which is when the kid’s mum shows up. Geun-Dae is touched by the affection the two show each other, despite their clear financial problems. 

Geun-Dae later reveals that all the kids engage in fights constantly, trying to get “scouted” by a gang, like their idol, Gwon-Hyeok, was. He’s still a student at the school, though he rarely ever shows up, but he’s earning millions without even a high school education. In the middle of this, Hwa-Jin shows up to be their new disciplinarian, luring them all into the gym and then beating dozens of them up and forcing a strict routine on them to make sure they all pass. When some of the kids refuse to do their vocational classes, he takes them on a joyride in the car whose brakes they were supposed to replace, leaving them thinking they’re literally going to die. After this, the kids call Gwon-Hyeok to the school for help, but it turns out this was the plan all along, and Hwa-Jin beats him up too, forcing him to start attending classes. 

When Gwon-Hyeok’s gang members then show up, Hwa-Jin beats them all up too, intimidating all the punk kids and making them promise to listen to their teachers, saving the day. He forces them to have their tattoos removed, and the EPRB issues a statement that social media will be monitored in the future to prevent gang recruitment of students, and student gangsters will be tried in court as adults going forward. We also get to learn a little about Hwa-Jin at this point, and how he had a fiancee, Gang-Seok’s daughter, Ga-Yun, who was killed by a student. This happened two years ago, and it’s what motivated the two men to push the EPRB project. Also, Hwa-Jin has a classified history in Korea’s special forces.

3. The Soyeon Girls’ High School Social Media Abuse Case

At Soyeon Girls’ High School, Ye-Ri is a popular influencer who gives her teacher, Ms. Jung a hard time. She’s posted a video where Ms. Jung cut some chewing gum out of a student’s hair, except it’s edited to make it look like she’s abusing the girl. Mr. Ko, her homeroom teacher, volunteers to talk to the student about it, but Ye-Ri reacts by making a video where she accuses him of putting his hand under her skirt. The backlash is immediate, and under the stress of the harassment from all her fans, he takes his life. When Ms. Jung tries to talk to Ye-Ri and get her to take back what she said about him, the girl paints her as someone who dismisses sexual harassment, making her fans dogpile her, too. When the EPRB shows up, Hwa-Jin can’t use his usually punchy-fighty one-size-fits-all solution, so he brings in Han-Rim, his colleague from the military, a terrifying woman who intimidates everyone around her (especially Geun-Dae) but has immense respect for Hwa-Jin.

Ye-Ri can no longer get away with using her phone to stream in class, and any time she acts up, Han-Rim is quick to assign punishment by making the girls do strenuous physical exercises. Ye-Ri soon puts up more incendiary content against the teachers, but that’s just punished with more exercise. The girls start to question Ye-Ri’s story about Mr. Ko at this point, and she gets mad. Things turn around after Hwa-Jin shares his fiancee’s story with Ms. Jung, and it strengthens her resolve. The next time Ye-Ri refuses to follow her instructions, she starts striking her in the palm with a rod, old-school style, and Han-Rim cheers her on. By the time Ye-Ri decides to make another post about it, Geun-Dae has hacked her profile and, after deleting all her videos, uploaded the extended cut of the video where she made the accusations against Mr. Ko. She can be seen laughing in anticipation and pretending to cry, making it clear she faked it all.

Next thing we know, Ye-Ri goes to Ms. Jung’s flat, and she grabs a knife and starts attacking her. Even though the teacher saves Ye-Ri from falling off the balcony, she keeps trying to stab her. Ultimately, Hwa-Jin shows up to protect Ms. Jung, and catches her as she’s falling off the balcony, cushioning her fall with his body. Han-Rim shows up too, and Geun-Dae has to practically hold her back from murdering the kid. At the end of the day, Ms. Jung and Hwa-Jin are safe, and Ye-Ri goes to prison. Unfortunately, at the end, we see the minister’s political opponent, Gi-Tae, discovering the truth about his daughter, Ga-Yun, and saying to the press that the EPRB is motivated by revenge, not justice. We also see a flashback where Hwa-Jin tried to run over Gyu-Cheol, the student who murdered Ga-Yun, before the minister stopped him.

4. The Chukmyeong Foreign Language High School Teacher Harassment Case

The Chukmyeong Foreign Language High School case is a bit of a reversal, as this time, though a student named Hyeon-Ung punched a celebrity teacher named Cheon Sang-Yeol, he’s not the real “bully.” We find out over the course of the episode that Hyeon-Ung is the most talented student of the institution, and walked out of Cheon’s advanced lessons because they were too easy, humiliating him. Geun-Dae does some investigating and discovers a private tutoring institution called Noavis, which all of Cheon’s top students attend, but the guy who runs the place starts intimidating him when he asks one too many questions. Ultimately, it comes out that Cheon reported Hyeon-Ung’s parents’ restaurant for operating without a license and shut it down, and also scared off any tutors who would consider teaching him, making life slowly more and more difficult for him and trying to get him to give up.

It’s revealed that this is because he’s had a few specific students he’s been trying to promote, among them a girl named Su-Jeong, even though she isn’t particularly bright. He’s been working with Su-Jeong’s mom to have Hyeon-Ung sidelined so her daughter could crack the top 10. On top of that, he’s been funnelling students through Noavis and getting rich off the commission. All this was in exchange for him being gifted the superintendent position. Somehow, Cheon ends up pulling a few strings and gets the EPRB staff arrested (Geun-Dae gets pardoned because he’s just an innocent dude, and Hwa-Jin knew exactly how things would turn out) on the basis of reports that they used excessive force against students and abused their authority. He ends up giving Su-Jeong’s mother a copy of the solved multiple-choice exam paper ahead of the exam and calling it a day. However, on the day of the exam, it’s revealed Geun-Dae switched the papers out, and Su-Jeong got literally zero marks. Cheon and Su-Jeong are called out over the school’s PA system, and he is humiliated. At the hearing, the minister reveals that a number of powerful people were working with Cheon, and he outs them all, winning their case and saying it’s not just students the EPRB investigates, but teachers and everyone else who is perverting the education system. 

5. The Hyeongjun Elementary School Psycho-Mom Case

Episode 5 of Teach You A Lesson opens with an elementary school teacher writing a suicide note and trying to hang herself, except Han-Rim comes into the room and tells her it’s time for her mental health evaluation test, which she takes with a bunch of other elementary school teachers. Her name is Ji-Seon, and she scores so low that she ends up being suspended, and Hwa-Jin comes in as the new temporary homeroom teacher. It was Ji-Seon’s own mother who had reported the case to the EPRB after reading the young woman’s diary. Ji-Seon’s been under immense pressure because of the mother of a child called U-Jin, who’s been making constant demands of her and accusing her of abusing her son. Despite all this, Ji-Seon has helped U-Jin come out of his shell and be more social. However, when U-Jin pushes a boy over during a play session, U-Jin’s mother blames the other kid and Ji-Seon instead of just apologising, causing things to escalate into a “violence” committee hearing, which U-Jin loses. Naturally, the mother blames Ji-Seon, and the harassment escalates, with her even coming to her house and threatening to send her husband after her. The guy does eventually show up in her classroom and threatens her before pulling U-Jin out, nearly slapping the kid in front of the other kids, making them all cry. The final straw comes when the mother files a child abuse complaint against Ji-Seon.

So, Hwa-Jin takes over, and he decides to give the mother a taste of her own medicine. She starts receiving calls 24 hours a day about the most minute details of how to treat U-Jin, to the point she gets frustrated and tells him to talk to her husband instead. So that’s what Hwa-Jin does, going straight to U-Jin’s dad’s workplace and grovelling in front of him, finally provoking him to violence in front of his colleagues (dude’s pants were taken off in public, of course, he’d react). Finally, Hwa-Jin ends up filing an abuse complaint against the parents, also drawing attention to their treatment of Ji-Seon, which stretched to stalking her, harassing her, and even threatening her with physical violence. The mother starts to crumble under the social judgment she’s subjected to, and then Hwa-Jin finally shows her how well U-Jin responds to Ji-Seon. He feels loved with her, in a way his own mother can’t make him feel, and this finally makes her realize the extent of her wrongdoing. Might’ve been one of the better episodes of the show for sure.

6. The Hyeonjin Middle School Drug Gang Case

The episode opens with a bunch of kids vandalizing cars and going on a joyride, before Han-Rim manages to put a stop to it. At the police station, the kids are smug, because they know they’re minors and they’ll get away with it. Concerningly, the girl who’s with them seems woozy, and the boys just say she’s had too much to drink, but Han-Rim doesn’t buy it. Since they’re 14, they get let off with no charges, but then the EPRB reports to their school the next day. However, nobody says anything in the private interviews. Han-Rim notices the girl from yesterday, Yun-Jin, isn’t anywhere to be found, and ultimately tracks her down to a locker that she’d been chained inside of. Turns out, she wasn’t drunk the day before, Ji-Ung and his cronies had hooked her on drugs by selling them to her as “weight-loss pills,” before making her work for him selling drugs. When she tried to stop, he had her beat up, and when she reported him, nothing happened, but he retaliated by locking her up. Even when all this is revealed to their faces, they just taunt Hwa-Jin about how he’s powerless to stop them.

That’s just proof that they haven’t been following the news, because next thing they know, they’ve been thrown into a van, and they’re taken to “Korea’s only juvenile detention center.” Once they’re there, they have their heads shaved, their cavities searched, and their belongings confiscated.  They’re set loose among a bunch of older convicts. When they get tired of their chores and end up beating one of the convicts, it turns out to be Su-Gyeom, a former victim of bullying who murdered all his bullies, and Ji-Ung starts fearing for his life. After a close shave with a shiv, Hwa-Jin finally lets the kids meet their parents, but they’re still unrepentant. When, in the middle of Yun-Jin’s testimony, Ji-Ung tries to kill her, Hwa-Jin beats him up, and the minister rules that they’re to be sent to prison until they’re 18. At the end, it’s revealed that Su-Gyeom was working with Hwa-Jin all along because he doesn’t want anyone else to turn out the way he did. At the end of the episode, one of the prisoners tries to stab Ji-Ung, but someone gets in the way of the blow, and it turns out to be Gyu-Cheol, the student who murdered Ga-Yun.

7. The Nakwon High School Gambling Case

A man shows up at the EPRB office, begging for them to look at the evidence he’s collected. His son, Jae-Yun, was addicted to a gambling app, ending up 85 million won in debt. Though his dad cleared the debt the first time, Jae-Yun kept succumbing to temptation, to the point that a thug showed up at his dad’s office and beat him up for the money. Jae-Yun also seems to have run out of money. To Hwa-Jin, this looks like a situation that calls for undercover student Geun-Dae again, and after a student named Seong-Bin introduces him to a gambling app, he’s hooked, the same as every other student in the school. He stays up till 4 AM playing the “game” and ends up spending a million won. Seong-Bin decides to offer him a loan from a contact of his, but it’s 1 million won at 3% daily interest, compounding, meaning it’s impossible to pay back. Geun-Dae’s put Han-Rim’s number down as his mother, but when the call comes, she says she’s not paying.

Anticipating retaliation, Han-Rim is put on lookout, but she gets distracted by some tteokbokki, and Geun-Dae ends up being abducted. Han-Rim feels terribly guilty about this afterwards, but they have no idea where to find him. Geun-Dae ends up being taken to essentially a call centre run by the gangster running the gambling app. Here, all the debtors have to stay up all night sending out spam texts, getting people to use the app, and it’s also where Jae-Yun’s been all along; he never ran away. Geun-Dae ends up volunteering to help out when their Cambodian server crashes, on the condition that they stop beating Jae-Yun. Though Geun-Dae fixes it, he also edits the site slightly so one of the banners starts flashing in Morse code, signalling to Han-Rim where he’s being held. Han-Rim shows up, asks the thugs where Geun-Dae is (she calls him cute and small-eyed and a bunch of other things, she’s clearly got a crush on him), and then beats everyone up. They all get arrested, and Seong-Bin gets in trouble too, for being a “recruiter” for the thugs, though he claims they threatened his parents. Ultimately, Hwa-Jin says the real victims are their parents (even though Jae-Yun was literally kidnapped and held hostage). 

8. The Seungyeon High School Doping Case

The 8th episode of Teach You A Lesson starts with a kid taking a test at Seungyeon High School, in one of the advanced prep classes. He’s got scratch marks all over his arms and, in the middle of the test, he starts bleeding from his nose, forcing him to go to the infirmary. This is Hyeon-Min, and he’s clearly going through a lot. His mother still shows up and forces him to finish the test, though. After Ji-Ung’s drug gang was busted earlier, the EPRB made urine tests mandatory across schools, and they’re just about to do one here, despite the mothers’ protests. When the results come back, all the students have ADHD medicine in their system (basically Adderall), but Hyeon-Min in particular also has heart medication at almost a lethal level, prompting the EPRB to rush to him and keep his mother from giving him more.

After Hyeon-Min is separated from his mother, he tells them about the pressure she put on him to go to SNU and become a med student. She started consulting with the mother of Da-Hui, who had a bunch of connections that could help her get Hyeon-Min ahead. But eventually, this mentor figure gave Hyeon-Min’s mum the Adderall, and it did have a noticeable effect on his grades. At this point, she’d already taken the door off his room and regimented his life and his meals to a freakish level, so this brought her some hope. Eventually, from digging through parent forums online, she found out about the heart medication and actively looked for it, but after a while, it had an addictive effect on Hyeon-Min. His mother ignored it, since his grades were still improving.

In light of this, Hwa-Jin keeps the mother locked up in the house and following the same regiment as she made her son follow. When she manages to pass a CSAT test, he’ll let her see her son, but she fails over and over again, and starts to feel imprisoned, just like Hyeon-Min did. Meanwhile, Geun-Dae helps Hyeon-Min try to figure out what he actually wants to do with his life, and he decides he’ll take a year off and not give the CSAT right away. When his mother finally meets him again, this revelation is too much for her to take, and she starts breaking down, even though you’d expect her to feel more empathetic by now. Still, he stands up for himself. In the press conference at the end, the minister talks about all the various pills that have been making the circles over the past few years, and Hwa-Jin recognizes the butterfly pills from some sketches he saw in Ga-Yun’s journal from before she died.

9. The Jinwon High School Indirect Bullying Case

In the meanwhile, Gi-Tae’s caught on to the story about Gyu-Cheol being stabbed in prison, and he blames it on the EPRB to get the kid out and back to school. Pretty soon after, he comes directly to the EPRB to report a case of bullying, and though Han-Min wants to get rid of the kid, the minister tells her to hear him out. Turns out, it’s a pretty credible case of a kid named Seong-Gu, who the other kids, especially Chi-Ho, take advantage of. They use his phone for wi-fi, they buy food and other things using his card, they exploit his contacts to scam people out of money, and just generally make his life miserable. But still, they’re the closest thing Seong-Gu has to friends, so he puts up with it. But also, we see Gyu-Cheol recovering drugs he’d hidden at the school the first time around, and they’re the same butterfly-shaped ones from Ga-Yun’s sketch.

However, when Chi-Ho figures out Seong-Gu is talking to the EPRB, he gets ahead of him and files a complaint for defamation, forcing him to attend a hearing, where his fancy lawyer mops the floor with Seong-Gu and makes it seem like he was at fault because he accused Chi-Ho of bullying to ruin his social life. Finally, Geun-Dae gets Han-Rim to dress up as a schoolgirl and replace Seong-Gu as the human wi-fi, but she uses the opportunity to hack their phones and give Chi-Ho a taste of his own medicine. When he gets mad at her the next day, she stages it to look like an assault, and at the hearing, she turns up in a wheelchair for added drama. Eventually, it’s revealed Han-Rim’s an EPRB investigator, but Chi-Ho’s established as a bully, and Seong-Gu has his life back. In the ending of the episode, Chi-Ho goes to meet Gyu-Cheol on the roof of the school, and it’s revealed that Gyu-Cheol was playing both sides, as he also recommended the lawyer and the complaint strategy to Chi-Ho, even though he was the one who reported him in the first place. Ultimately, after recording Chi-Ho’s rant against the EPRB, Gyu-Cheol pushes him off the roof, killing him (evil remains and the bad ones never learn, eh?).

10. Hwa-Jin’s Revenge

Hwa-Jin knows now that Gyu-Cheol is not even slightly repentant, and that he murdered Ga-Yun simply because he wanted to. He used to be a delinquent who never went to school, preferring to deal drugs with his friends, but that changed when Ga-Yun started dragging him to class all the way from his home. This had the unintended side-effect of making him realize the untapped market that was the school. In a way, he became the prototype for Ji-Ung, but when Ga-Yun found out, she told him to turn himself in, so he just stabbed her instead, figuring he’d get out of prison in 2 years and be ready to start dealing again. This narrative certainly makes it look like Ga-Yun overstepped and shouldn’t have interfered in something she didn’t know enough about. The way she follows the boy around and forces him to return to school could’ve also looked problematic from the outside. Now that Chi-Ho’s out of the picture, he sets up a drug network dealing drugs out of sneaker boxes, even recruiting Seong-Gu to be his “runner.” When Seong-Gu figures out what’s happening, he tries to call Hwa-Jin and tip him off, but the others catch on and threaten him.

Also, Gyu-Cheol has given the recording of Chi-Ho’s last words to Gi-Tae, Minister Gang-Seok’s political opponent, and though Gi-Tae’s horrified that the boys started murdering again, he uses the recording to score political points and reduce the EPRB’s public approval. After Hwa-Jin punches Gyu-Cheol at the start of the episode, the minister ends up suspending all active EPRB investigators, which makes Gyu-Cheol’s job a lot easier. His drug empire explodes across multiple schools, even coming to Ms. Jung’s attention at Soyeon Girls’ High School. After catching wind of what’s going on, the minister makes a video asking teachers across Seoul to help the team combat the student drug trade, and a whole host of them turn up and give them the pills they’ve confiscated. With this, the minister hosts yet another press conference and reinstates the EPRB to active duty.

When the investigators get to the school, it’s booby-trapped, and Han-Rim ends up getting hit with some powder that makes her high. Geun-Dae has to step in and protect her, while Hwa-Jin chases after Gyu-Cheol. Finally, when he has Gyu-Cheol cornered, one of his minions steps around the corner holding Seong-Gu at knifepoint, distracting Hwa-Jin enough for Gyu-Cheol to stab him with a screwdriver. But this isn’t enough to kill him, and drawing from his well of determination, he delivers a beatdown to Gyu-Cheol, though he spares him before he can kill him (I thought he was definitely going to punch the wall). As he’s passed out on the floor bleeding out, he sees a vision of his dead fiancee, and it makes him smile, but Han-Rim shows up to pick him up off the floor, and he seems to be alright.

In the ending of Teach You A Lesson, Gyu-Cheol is arrested, everyone celebrates, and then we get to see Gi-Tae arrested as well, since he knew about the murder of Chi-Ho and did nothing to report it, instead using it to his benefit. While he’s being taken in, Minister Gang-Seok comes, getting charged at by Gi-Tae, so he trips him and also punches him vindictively. At Ga-Yun’s hilltop gravesite, we also see the obvious feelings Han-Rim and Geun-Dae share for each other, along with a flashback to when Geun-Dae kissed her when she was high just to calm her down. They’ll definitely be getting together soon. Also, we’re teased at the end about another case featuring a basketball star who hazes all his fellow teammates. Geun-Dae and Han-Rim show up dressed like Hwa-Jin, but they both get beaten up, leading Hwa-Jin to show up to finish the job.

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