Itaewon Class Episode 10 Recap: Chairman Jang Sacrifices His Son
Itaewon Class, Season 1, Episode 10 JTBC / Netflix · Written by Gwang-jin · 2020
Yi-seo turns one drunken confession into a corporate war, and Sae-ro-yi learns that revenge can still taste bitter.
Park Sae-ro-yi (Park Seo-joon) has spent half his life waiting for Jang Geun-won to answer for the night that killed his father.
Now, he gets that opening.
But a clean revenge fantasy has never been the appeal of Itaewon Class. Geun-won can confess. Yi-seo can upload the recording. Detective Oh can turn himself in. Kang Min-jung can force a shareholder vote. Sae-ro-yi can walk into Jangga as a shareholder and thank Geun-won for making the impossible look possible.
None of that means the victory will arrive in the shape he wants.
This is the midseason snap the revenge plot has been building toward, but the real damage comes from how many people have to betray, confess, or get left behind for Sae-ro-yi to move one step closer to Chairman Jang Dae-hee.
Yi-seo records Geun-won’s confession in Itaewon
At the start, Jo Yi-seo (Kim Da-mi) does exactly what makes her such a dangerous ally.
She sees Geun-won drunk, angry, and too pleased with his own immunity. So she lets him talk. She lets him say the part the Jang family buried ten years ago: he hit Sae-ro-yi’s father with a car, someone else went to jail, and the law only disciplines people without power.
Yi-seo is not gentle about it. She is not morally pure about it either. Her move is personal, tactical, and a little terrifying. She admits the thing driving her is jealousy: Sae-ro-yi’s head is full of Jangga, and she wants those men gone from his life.
“I’m going to crush you all.”
That line could sound childish from anyone else. From Yi-seo, it lands like a weather report.
Geun-won attacks her for the phone, and the encounter turns ugly fast. He has always treated people as props in his own rage, but seeing him hit Yi-seo puts Sae-ro-yi in the exact trap Chairman Jang built for him years ago. Geun-won wants the punch. He wants Sae-ro-yi to lose control, go back to prison, and prove that nothing has changed.
Sae-ro-yi does not swing.
That restraint is not calm. His whole body looks like it is fighting him. When he asks Yi-seo what happened to her face, the pain is immediate. But he stays on his feet, and that matters. The old wound is still open. The man who made it is standing right there. Sae-ro-yi still chooses the future over the release.
Yi-seo’s reaction is almost harder to sit with. She tells him the beating does not hurt because she saw him worry for her. That is Yi-seo unguarded and unhealthy. Love, for her, is proof gathered under pressure. If Sae-ro-yi’s anger confirms she matters, she can call the bruise worthwhile.
That is not romance as comfort.
It is devotion with teeth.
Kang Min-jung turns the scandal into a boardroom attack
Once the recording goes public, the story leaves the alley and enters Jangga’s bloodstream.
The news frames the assault as part of a larger abuse-of-power pattern. Jangga stock drops. Chairman Jang (Yoo Jae-myung) slaps Geun-won, then immediately begins measuring the damage in percentages. That tells us exactly where his love ends and his company begins.
Kang Min-jung sees the same opening from the other side.
She has been waiting for a real chance to challenge Chairman Jang, but the risk is clear. Yi-seo lays it out cleanly: the recording alone has weak legal force, Detective Oh must confess, and Min-jung must learn whether Chairman Jang will protect Geun-won, stay silent, or abandon him.
If he protects his son, the shareholders can be turned against him.
If he abandons his son, the attack dies.
That is the cruel hinge of the whole plan. Sae-ro-yi thinks Chairman Jang will never abandon Geun-won because he has already chosen him as successor despite knowing what he is. Yi-seo thinks he will. Her read is colder, and she is right.
Before that reveal lands, Detective Oh supplies the quiet moral counterweight. He tells his daughter Hye-won what he did for the Jangs years ago, then decides to turn himself in. Hye-won is devastated, but Sae-ro-yi refuses to make a child carry adult guilt. He tells her that everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone takes responsibility.
That moment keeps the revenge plot human.
Detective Oh is guilty. He also has a daughter who loves him. Sae-ro-yi has every reason to hate him, but he still helps Hye-won understand her father without excusing the lie. That is the difference between Sae-ro-yi and Chairman Jang. Sae-ro-yi wants accountability. Chairman Jang wants control.
Sae-ro-yi tells Geun-soo the truth at DanBam
DanBam is usually where the group becomes warmer than the world around it.
DanBam feels tense.
Jang Geun-soo (Kim Dong-hee) walks into a conversation about removing his father from Jangga, and Sae-ro-yi does not soften the truth for him. Chairman Jang is his enemy. Making him pay and surpassing him are Sae-ro-yi’s goals. To do that, he will do anything.
It is a harsh thing to say to a young man who chose DanBam because it felt like the opposite of his family.
It is also honest.
Sae-ro-yi cannot keep Geun-soo close by pretending the Jang name does not matter. Geun-soo knew the story and stayed anyway, but hearing the plan spoken in front of everyone changes the air in the room. His friendship with Sae-ro-yi was never outside the revenge plot. It was always living beside it.
This is where Soo-ah’s role gets sharper too. Oh Soo-ah (Kwon Nara) tells Geun-won that she advised Chairman Jang to dismiss him. It is not a confession of goodness. It is another example of her living inside Jangga’s rules while still feeling the cost of them.
Soo-ah matters beyond the romance angle. She is trapped between what she knows is rotten and the institution that pays her, feeds her ambition, and tells her survival looks like obedience. When she later checks on Geun-soo, she understands the shame of loving someone who has done terrible things.
Geun-soo says he cannot imagine his father breaking down.
Soo-ah answers simply: whatever people say, he is still his dad.
That line does not forgive Chairman Jang. It makes Geun-soo’s pain legible. In an episode full of public strategy, this small exchange gives the Jang family fallout a private ache.
Chairman Jang saves himself by sending Geun-won to prison
For a moment, Chairman Jang appears to choose family.
He tells Soo-ah he built Jangga so his family would never starve. He talks about dead siblings, rotten food, and a childhood marked by hunger. He rejects the idea of abandoning his son with real anger.
Then he hugs Geun-won.
That is the trap. Geun-won receives the warmth he has wanted from his father for years, and he does not understand it is goodbye. Chairman Jang sends him toward the prosecutor’s office, holds the press conference early, and turns his son into the offering that saves the company.
The speech is pure Chairman Jang: paternal grief arranged as public performance. He admits Geun-won’s guilt, claims he only learned the truth recently, and frames the surrender as a father’s painful duty. Geun-won watches from the car, realizes he has been delivered, and still backs the lie when reporters surround him.
“It’s all my fault.”
That sentence gets Chairman Jang exactly what he wants. The dismissal proposal fails. Min-jung is exposed and exiled to the Pajin office. Soo-ah is kept close because Chairman Jang knows she was planted, and because keeping her is another way of proving he can absorb betrayal without losing power.
Sae-ro-yi loses the vote.
But he does not lose the whole fight.
Geun-won receives seven years in prison. Chairman Jang loses the son he claimed to protect. Kang Min-jung loses her faction, but she gives Sae-ro-yi something more useful than an apology: the truth about his father’s stolen work. The spicy pork sauce that made Jangga famous came from Park Sung-yeol, not Chairman Jang.
That reveal cuts deep because it widens the theft. Jangga did not only take Sae-ro-yi’s father from him. It built part of its legend on his father’s labor, then pushed him out and let his death be covered up.
No wonder the final visit to the grave is so quiet.
Sae-ro-yi tells his father he has good people around him now. He asks him to rest. Then the memory of his father’s food returns, and the taste is still bitter.
Justice arrived for Geun-won.
Peace did not.
What works
This is strong because a revenge milestone feels messy instead of cleansing. Geun-won’s prison sentence should be cathartic, but Sae-ro-yi cannot celebrate while Chairman Jang remains untouched.
Yi-seo is the engine here. Her loyalty is scary, useful, and emotionally exposed all at once. Her love for Sae-ro-yi comes with study: she maps the shape of his pain, finds the people feeding it, and starts removing them.
The Jangga power play is also strong because every choice has a personal cost. Min-jung is ambitious, but she is not foolish. Soo-ah is complicit, but not numb. Geun-soo is innocent of his father’s crimes, but not free from their consequences. Even Geun-won, awful as he is, gets one devastating second of understanding when the hug turns into betrayal.
What stumbles
The legal and shareholder mechanics move quickly. Detective Oh’s confession, the evidence question, the proposal, the press conference, the vote, and the sentencing all arrive in a compressed rush. The emotional line is clear, but the procedural pieces sometimes feel like they are sprinting to catch up.
There is also less room for Ma Hyun-yi and Kim To-ni than the DanBam ensemble deserves. Hyun-yi’s steady presence in the kitchen still matters, especially after the staff learns the full Jangga history, but this chapter belongs to the corporate war. The pub family reacts more than it changes.
What this sets up for Episode 11
Geun-won is in prison, but Chairman Jang has openly accepted Sae-ro-yi as his enemy. That changes the scale of the fight.
Kang Min-jung has passed the baton. Soo-ah has been sent away but not severed. Geun-soo has heard the truth in the room where he wanted to belong. Yi-seo’s feelings are getting harder to contain, and the preview points straight at the confession she has been circling for weeks.
Crucially, Sae-ro-yi now knows Jangga’s signature story began with his father.
That gives the revenge a new wound and a new weapon.
Rating: 8.8/10
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.