Itaewon Class Episode 01 Recap: Park Sae-ro-yi Refuses to Kneel
Itaewon Class, Season 1, Episode 01 JTBC / Netflix · Written by Gwang-jin · 2020
A stubborn transfer student loses school, family, and mercy in the first step toward a 15-year revenge.
First, a future Jo Yi-seo (Kim Da-mi) tells a counselor that life feels repetitive, predictable, and exhausting. Her boss had one answer for that mood: if it feels like that much of a chore, die. It is a brutal joke, but it also points toward the kind of person she will one day follow.
Then Itaewon Class moves 15 years back, before DanBam, before Itaewon becomes a battlefield, before Park Sae-ro-yi (Park Seo-joon) has anything except a father, a family motto, and a temper he thinks is just a conscience.
Episode 01 is not the restaurant drama yet. It is the wound before the restaurant exists.
Sae-ro-yi begins as a high school senior with no friends, a police-university dream, and a strange calm that makes him look lonely to everyone except himself. He does not attend forced study hours because they are not required. He does not take chocolate from a girl who likes him because he does not like sweets. He does not bend toward social ease, even when bending would cost him nothing.
That can read as awkwardness. By the end of Episode 01, it reads as destiny with bad timing.
Sae-ro-yi meets Soo-ah at the orphanage
Oh Soo-ah (Kwon Nara) enters Sae-ro-yi’s life twice before she becomes anything close to a friend.
At the station, she shakes off a man asking for change, and Sae-ro-yi tells her to apologize because the man could have been hurt. Soo-ah hears moral vanity. She asks whether doing a good deed makes him feel like a good person. It is a harsh first impression. Still, Soo-ah is not introduced as cruelty in a pretty coat. She is a girl trained to mistrust help because help can feel like debt.
That is why the orphanage scenes matter. Sae-ro-yi’s father, Mr. Park, works at Jangga and has been connected to the orphanage that raised Soo-ah. Jangga is pulling sponsorship because nursing homes now bring better publicity, and Mr. Park hates it. He still tells himself it is business. He still keeps cooking for the kids. He still pays Soo-ah’s tuition.
Soo-ah sees all of that and hates how much she needs it.
When she tries to befriend Sae-ro-yi because he is Mr. Park’s son, he asks a simple question: why? She gives the honest answer. He does not like it. They are too blunt for each other, which is exactly why their early scenes work. Neither knows how to make kindness feel clean.
Sae-ro-yi’s father is the soft center of Episode 01. He worries that his son is socially inept, then laughs when the boy throws the family motto back at him: never compromise your principles. The line sounds almost cute at breakfast.
By nightfall, it will cost them everything.
Geun-won bullies Ho-jin on Sae-ro-yi’s first day
Jang Geun-won (Ahn Bo-hyun) wastes no time showing Sae-ro-yi the real rule at Gwangjin High.
On Sae-ro-yi’s first day, Geun-won humiliates Lee Ho-jin over milk, smearing him, photographing him, and treating his fear like entertainment. The teacher walks in and does nothing. The class watches and does nothing. Soo-ah warns Sae-ro-yi that Geun-won is Chairman Jang’s son, the future of Jangga, and therefore someone whose bad side can damage Sae-ro-yi’s father.
Sae-ro-yi asks the only question that matters to him: is that the reason everyone is letting it happen?
Then he punches Geun-won.
It is not a clever choice. It is not even a fully righteous one. Violence is still violence, and Mr. Park later says that clearly. But the punch lands because every adult in the room has already failed Ho-jin. The teacher has surrendered authority. The principal will soon bend. The students have learned the price of intervention. Geun-won calls himself the law because the room has already agreed.
Sae-ro-yi has no strategy. He only has the refusal.
That makes him thrilling and terrifying as a protagonist. He is morally clear, but he is also young enough to think clarity can survive contact with power without bleeding.
Chairman Jang asks Sae-ro-yi to kneel
Chairman Jang Dae-hee (Yoo Jae-myung) arrives with the calm of a man who expects rooms to rearrange themselves around him.
The school is ready to expel Sae-ro-yi. Geun-won is furious, entitled, and still more offended by the insult than the injury. Mr. Park apologizes because his job, his son’s future, and the family’s stability are suddenly in the hands of the man he works for.
Chairman Jang does not need the police involved. He does not even need a public punishment. He offers forgiveness with one private condition: Sae-ro-yi must kneel before Geun-won and apologize.
This is the scene that defines the whole revenge engine. Chairman Jang is not trying to repair harm. He is testing obedience. He wants the boy to learn hierarchy in its purest form: your truth matters less than my comfort, your future matters less than my son’s pride, and your father will watch you learn it.
Sae-ro-yi almost makes it worse by being so plain about it.
He admits he hit Geun-won. He says he deserves punishment for that. Then he refuses the apology because he does not feel sorry.
“I don’t feel sorry at all.”
That line could sound childish from another character. From Sae-ro-yi, it sounds like the first brick in a prison he will build around himself and call principle. He will take punishment. He will lose school. He will lose the police dream. But he will not kneel to a lie.
Mr. Park’s response is even more moving because it is not automatic. For a second, he looks like a father trapped between survival and pride. Then he calls his son amazing. Sae-ro-yi is doing what he thinks is right and accepting the cost. Mr. Park cannot ask him to betray the very lesson he taught him.
So he resigns.
The father-son drink afterward is the warmest scene in the hour and the cruelest in hindsight. Mr. Park teaches Sae-ro-yi how to pour, how to hold the bottle, how to turn his head while drinking. Sae-ro-yi says the drink tastes sweet. His father tells him that means he had an impressive day.
For a moment, expulsion becomes memory before it has even finished hurting.
Soo-ah runs beside Sae-ro-yi before the hit-and-run
The middle stretch after the expulsion could have gone flat, but Soo-ah keeps it alive because she is already choosing and resisting at the same time.
She is angry on Mr. Park’s behalf. She tells him that she finally understands where Sae-ro-yi got his nosiness. She also tells Sae-ro-yi directly that she cannot live like him or his father. She admired what he did to Geun-won, but she does not want the fallout. That honesty is important. Soo-ah is not pretending to be braver than she is.
Then she forgets her test ID before her university interview.
Sae-ro-yi sees her running and immediately becomes useful. He pushes her pace, helps her breathe, and stays beside her even while she snaps at him to mind his own business. The scene works because it gives their connection a physical shape. He does not rescue her with a speech. He runs with her until she can reach the door.
After the interview, they become friends in the most awkward possible way. Sae-ro-yi has understood something about her: she hates receiving help because it makes her feel small. Soo-ah pushes back with her own philosophy of sympathy as a distasteful emotion where people look down on others and comfort themselves.
She is defensive. She is sharp. She is also listening.
When she gives him her phone number, she warns him not to have a crush on her. He answers like Sae-ro-yi, which means he does not agree to a rule he may not keep. We never know what will happen in life, he tells her. Then he says she is cool enough and very pretty, and runs away before she can reclaim the number.
It is sweet, but not simple. Soo-ah likes his certainty. She also understands that certainty burns people standing nearby.
The hit-and-run arrives right after Sae-ro-yi’s happiest ordinary stretch. Mr. Park dreams aloud about opening his own pub. Sae-ro-yi thinks losing school and his father’s job did not change daily life that much. He has family, meals, neighborhood kids, and a future being renamed in real time.
Then Mr. Park does not come home.
The grief scenes do not overexplain themselves. Sae-ro-yi stares at the uniform he never had to buy. He cannot eat. He remembers what he received from his father only after the chance to repay it is gone.
When the detective mentions a suspect and a settlement, Sae-ro-yi hears the insult inside the legal language. Someone wants to measure his father’s life in money. Then Soo-ah recognizes the car in the evidence photos: a limited-edition vehicle with the plate 7777. Geun-won’s car.
Sae-ro-yi does not wait for the police.
At the hospital, he finds Geun-won and beats him with the grief of someone whose whole moral world has just been mocked. Geun-won apologizes only because he is afraid. That makes Sae-ro-yi angrier. The person owed the apology is dead.
“You have to go apologize to him.”
By the final scene, Sae-ro-yi is trying to kill the man who killed his father.
That is the tragedy of Episode 01. The same principle that made him refuse to kneel now drives him past justice into ruin. He was right about Geun-won. He was right about the cover-up. He was right to understand that Chairman Jang’s world protects its own.
Being right does not save him.
What works
- Sae-ro-yi’s moral code is clear without turning him into a saint. He is stubborn, socially clumsy, brave, and dangerously absolute.
- Mr. Park gives the first hour its heart. His warmth makes the revenge plot hurt before it becomes a long game.
- Soo-ah is introduced with real tension. Her gratitude, pride, shame, and ambition are already tangled, which keeps her from feeling like a simple first love.
- Chairman Jang is chilling because he never needs to shout. The kneeling demand tells us exactly how he sees people beneath him.
- The pub dream starts small and personal. Before DanBam has a name, it is just a father and son imagining a place of their own.
What stumbles
- The cold open with Yi-seo is intriguing, but it is distant from the main story in this hour. Viewers meeting the drama cold may not know what to do with her yet.
- Geun-won is intentionally vile, but his school scenes are broad. The bullying works as moral ignition; he will need more texture later to stay interesting across 16 episodes.
- The final hospital attack is emotionally earned, but the pacing from funeral grief to attempted murder is abrupt. The shock is the point, though the rush leaves little room for Sae-ro-yi to process the evidence beyond recognition and rage.
What this sets up for Episode 02
Sae-ro-yi has lost his school, his police dream, his father, and now his innocence about what power can bury. Episode 02 has to deal with the cost of that hospital attack, the cover-up around Geun-won’s crime, and the question Mr. Park left behind: how does Sae-ro-yi keep living by his beliefs when grief has already pushed those beliefs into violence?
The larger revenge story is still years away. DanBam is only a future possibility. Jo Yi-seo is still a strange voice from the opening frame. Ma Hyun-yi, Choi Seung-kwon, Kim To-ni, and the found family that will make Itaewon feel like home have not arrived yet.
For now, all Sae-ro-yi has is the lesson his father gave him, the enemy who took him away, and a promise forming too early to be healthy.
Rating: 8.1/10
More episodes from Itaewon Class — Slow-burn revenge built on a single Itaewon pub, episode by episode. Jump to any episode in the season:
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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.