We are one month early on the creepiness that October brings with the premiere of the K-Drama “Queen Mantis”. With Hannibal Lecter vibes throughout, you will feel the menacing yet clean nature of this serial killer show with each frame.
Your recaps for episodes 1 and 2 of “Queen Mantis” are below.
Queen Mantis Episode 1 Recap
The drama wastes no time throwing us into the deep end with a brutal murder by a riverbank. One of the detectives even throws up. Detective Kim Na Hee (Lee El) is examining what’s left of the victim and tells his superintendent that the person has injection marks and their tongue was severed and stuffed into a part of his body where the sun don’t shine. It’s a sickeningly familiar calling card to serial killer “Mantis” that immediately sends chills down Police Superintendent Choi Joong Ho’s spine.
The notorious “Mantis” serial killer operated back in 2001-2002 during part of the World Cup games held in Korea. The original Mantis targeted five victims, all abusers of women and children, earning her the nickname from how female praying mantises devour the male’s head after mating. You could also see it as cutting the heads off of society’s predators.
Meanwhile, in prison, the original Mantis Jung Yi Shin (Go Hyun Jung) is living her life in what could be described as luxury solitary confinement. She is enjoying a relatively large room with an espresso machine, music, and art supplies. These weren’t just random perks; she negotiated every single comfort in exchange for her confession years ago.
When news of the copycat murders reaches her, she calmly writes a letter to the officer she knows best, Joong Ho, offering her services. But Yi Shin isn’t about to make this easy – she’s got conditions.
First, she’ll only work through her estranged son. Second, she wants out of prison, while helping them, she’s not solving crimes from behind bars.
After a month of getting nowhere, the police swallow their pride and decide they need her help. They just need to convince her son to do it.
Here’s where things get really interesting. Yi Shin’s son Cha Soo Yeol (Jang Dong Yoon) has grown up to become a narcotics detective, and he’s carrying some serious baggage. We see a little bit about how deep his trauma runs when he encounters a drug-addicted mother who nearly throws her own child off a rooftop. Soo Yeol shoots her in the leg, protecting the child and not killing the mother.
Soo Yeol wants nothing to do with his mother’s offer. He reluctantly agrees after Joong Ho handcuffs him to a car so he will listen to him, telling him, “Turning your back on someone you can save is no different from killing them.” That lands. Joong Ho was also the one who encouraged Soo Yeol to become a cop in the first place, to save lives instead of taking them.
So here we are, 23 years later, and mother and son are finally face-to-face again when Yi Shin gets moved to a secure upscale home outside the prison.
If you thought this meeting would be emotional in a typical family drama way, think again. Yi Shin immediately proves why she’s such a terrifying opponent. Soo Yeol tried to be smart by removing his wedding ring to protect his wife, Lee Jung Yeon (Kim Bora), but Yi Shin spots the ring tan line instantly, asking, “You got married, do you have a baby?”
Yoo Seol does not want to talk about his family to her. She really gets under his skin by describing her killing method in gruesome detail and that she chose that method to relish the sensation of killing the person. When Soo Yeol recoils in disgust, she reminisces about his C-section birth, how the anesthesia wore off, and she felt every excruciating second. Even so, she loves the smell of blood because that is how he came into the world. This woman is chilling to the bone. So creepy! Her smile and everything is unnerving.
Soo Yeol is dropped into the homicide team as their new leader, which is unexpected because everyone thought Na Hee would get the promotion. She had been working the case so hard she literally collapsed from exhaustion. But instead, this guy gets nepo babied in from narcotics? She is not happy about that.
To Na Hee’s credit, she handles it with incredible grace, though you can tell the whole team is bristling when Soo Yeol starts bluntly pointing out flaws in their investigation. No one can outwardly complain, though, because Seo Yeol clearly knows what he is doing.
When Yi Shin finally gets to visit the crime scene, she’s like a kid in a gruesome candy store. She’s gleeful as she points out how perfectly the copycat imitated every detail, right down to positioning a mirror so the victim could watch himself die. Soo Yeol had noticed the exact same thing earlier.
However, Yi Shin realizes the killer didn’t use newspaper reports as a reference, because the one newspaper that published a crime scene photo accidentally flipped the image during printing. The copycat got their details from official court records or police files.
Queen Mantis Episode 2 Recap
The investigation leads them to Seo Gu Wan (Lee Tae Gu), and this guy is a piece of work. He’s got schizophrenia, worships Yi Shin like she’s some kind of murder guru, and his house is basically a shrine to the Mantis case. There are detailed background checks on every member of the investigation team and stacks of letters supposedly from Yi Shin – except he wrote them all himself.
Gu Wan’s story is tragic, abandoned by his birth mother, he grew up resenting his half-brother for having the life he thought should have been his. So he gets rid of the brother and takes over his family, holding them hostage while playing house as the replacement father. It is very disturbing, and I, for one, am very happy when the detectives find him and bring him in.
To find the husband, Yeo Seol agrees to arrange a face-to-face meeting between Gu Wan and Yi Shin, thinking he’ll confess to his idol.
Yi Shin takes one look at this guy and immediately knows he’s not the real copycat. She starts pressing him for details, working him up into a stammering mess, making it painfully obvious he’s just a wannabe.
When Gu Wan gets frustrated and starts threatening to expose Yi Shin’s relationship as Soo Yeol’s mom and even mentioning Seo Yeol’s wife, Yi Shin springs into serial killer action, slamming his face against the bars and choking him out with his necktie. He only survives because the detectives pull her off and revive him.
Gu Wan makes a break for it to escape, but when he is cornered, he tries to shoot himself in the head, surviving only barely.
While all this chaos is happening, Soo Yeol puts together the pieces from Gu Wan’s earlier rambling to his mother. He had said something about the original father being “probably dead” and everything being “returned to their original place.”
He traces Gu Wan’s history back to the hospital where he was abandoned as a baby and finds the missing brother, Kim Tae Seok, trapped in an operating washing machine in the laundry facility. Soo Yeol performs CPR, trying desperately to revive him.
We cut back to Yi Shin in her cell. She opens up the ceiling and pulls leaves out of her mouth and puts them in the ceiling. Whatever Yi Shin is planning, helping with the investigation is clearly just one part of a much bigger scheme.
This drama is setting up so many intriguing questions, like what the heck is going on with those mouth leaves?! It is clear that after just two episodes, “Queen Mantis” has established itself as a sophisticated thriller that’s not afraid to get its hands dirty while exploring the complex psychology of its characters. It is creepy though! Be prepared to be spooked.
