Diksha Sundriyal
Twists and turns abound in Netflix’s ‘The Frog.’ It begins with the arrival of a suspicious guest in a house that Yeong-ha rents out. On the surface, it looks like a mother bringing her young son to a cozy place where they can spend a few days together. However, things get pretty sinister when Yeong-ha starts to wonder if the woman, Seong-a, has killed the kid. Parallel to this, we follow the story of Sang-jun, who welcomes a guest to his motel. The next day, however, he finds his motel swarming with cops because it turns out that the guest was a serial killer who created a bloodbath in his room and left a dead body for them to find.
With each step, things get even more convoluted, especially for Yeong-ha because Seong-a refuses to leave the house. In fact, she has every intention of getting the place for herself, and despite Yeong-ha’s many efforts, she doesn’t budge an inch. In the end, he is forced to find a way to rid himself of her permanently. SPOILERS AHEAD
Is Seong-a Dead?
Since her arrival, Seong-a proves to be a very unusual guest. She also gives off a weird vibe, and Yeong-ha doesn’t understand its true meaning until it’s too late. Following her first visit, it is clear to Yeong-ha that she killed the boy with her. While he has enough evidence to cause suspicion, he wonders if it would be enough to nab her. Moreover, he worries that her arrest might cause a furor, which would paint his place in a bad light, and he would never get another guest, just as it happened with Sang-ju’s Lakeview Motel.
Had he reported Seong-a then, things might not have turned out so bad for him. In fact, it is because he hides any trace of her crime that emboldens Seong-a to return to the house and claim it for herself. With each step Yeong-ha tries to take towards pushing Seong-a out of the house, things end up even worse, and it all gets worse when a series of unexpected confrontations happens at the house. When Yeong-ha’s friend and daughter are hurt, he gets help from Captain Yoon, and Seong-a is arrested. But due to her connections, she is let out before Yoon can find the body Seong-a wanted to bury in Yeong-ha’s house.
The body turns out to be of Kim Seon-tae, who, despite being besotted by her, finds out the truth after finding the evidence Yeong-ha had collected. With this, Yoon finds indisputable evidence that she can put Seong-a in prison for good. However, by that time, Seong-a is already out of prison, which makes Yeong-ha desperate to get to her before she flees the country, threatening to come back and haunt him and his family. At the same time, Seong-a’s husband, Ha Jae-sik, also shows up at the house, hoping to find the truth about what happened to his son.
With three people trying to get to her, Seong-a sees a window for escape. She manipulates Jae-sik into shooting Yeong-ha, claiming that the latter helped her kill his son. Yeong-ha accepts his mistake and apologizes to a heartbroken Jae-sik. When the Captain shows up at the house, Yeong-ha stands in between her and Jae-sik to let the latter finish the job, but when he discovers that the dead body has been found and Seong-a will go to prison for the rest of her life, Yeong-ha tries to stop the grieving father. In all of this, Jae-sik and the Captain also end up getting shot, and Seong-a finds her window of escape.
With the Captain incapacitated, Jae-sik runs after her and shoots her twice, once in the chest and once in the head, to ensure that she is dead for good. When she falls into the swimming pool, Yeong-ha goes in to make sure that she is indeed dead. The last time he tried to kill her in the pool, she came out without a scratch. He wants no doubt over the fact that she is indeed dead and will not return to cause more trouble for him and his family. Later, we see a dead body from the pool being carried away, which confirms that Seong-a is indeed dead, which is great news because had she gone to prison, she would have found a way to slither her way out of it and terrorize everyone all over again.
What Happens to Ha Jae-sik?
While Ha Jae-sick comes into the picture late in the show, he is an important part of the story. In fact, it all begins with the death of his son, Si-hyeon, who was never seen after he mysteriously disappeared from Yeong-ha’s house. It is clear from the beginning that Seong-a killed him by giving him a sedative and then smothering him to death. She is seen taking away the body in a briefcase, though it cannot be confirmed because the only evidence of it is the dash cam video, which she destroys. Still, the truth remains that the boy was killed, and Jae-sik never finds closure for his son’s death.
It turns out that the man was imprisoned because Seong-a falsely accused him of domestic violence. With him out of the picture, she had Si-hyeon all to herself and did what she wanted with him. She never liked the kid and wanted him out of the equation, so she killed him. When Jae-sik finally comes out of prison, he seeks vengeance on Seong-a, and there is no other house for him but to kill her.
What makes things more interesting is in the end, when he shows up at Yeong-ha’s place, Seong-a’s father is already fed up with her actions. In her laptop, he finds pictures that confirm that she killed Jae-sik’s son. Knowing his daughter, Mr. Yoo knows that he will forever be cleaning her mess, and eventually, he won’t be able to save her with all his resources. He can’t let the cops have her because it would tarnish his reputation. His best bet is to let her be killed by Jae-sik’s hands, which kill two birds with one stone.
Despite the hitches in the plan, Jae-sik gets his revenge by killing Seong-a. Because he does it in front of a police officer, he is sent to prison. However, if he goes to trial, it would mean digging up all of Seong-a’s misdeeds, which would not reflect well on her father. So, he provides his best lawyer to Jae-sik to ensure that the man walks free and his daughter’s crimes are never exposed in front of the whole world. With this, Jae-sik gets revenge for his son’s death and also walks scot-free, receiving a second chance at life and turning a new leaf.
What Happens to Yeong-ha?
The only reason why Yeong-ha didn’t tell anyone about his suspicions regarding Seong-a killing Si-hyeon is that he thought he could shrug the whole thing off and not be impacted by it. Later, he doesn’t go to the cops because he feels guilty for not going to them earlier and even burying the whole thing and letting Seong-a walk free, inflicting pain on god knows how many people. She threatens him that if he snitches on her, he, too, will go to prison. Initially, this keeps Yeong-ha from doing anything about it, but in the end, the whole truth comes out, and it turns out that the law is much more lenient for him.
After the altercation at his house, which ends with Seong-a’s death at the hands of Jae-sik, Yeong-ha’s worries disappear completely. His friend recovers from his injuries and is soon out and about. His daughter also recuperates, and even though it seemed that she might lose her unborn baby, things turned out fine for her. So, about a year later, Yeong-ha has his entire family and friends with him, including his grandchild, with whom he plays at the house that has been renovated back into a way that feels like home to Yeong-ha.
He is still plagued by the guilt regarding Si-hyeon. The fact that he keeps the boy’s toy with him, even after all this time, shows that he still blames himself for what happened. Not only could he not save the child, but he also kept justice from taking its course by hiding all evidence of the crime. Still, he has learned his lesson and is trying to move on by spending more time with his family and friends, as opposed to his self-imposed seclusion in the woods earlier.
He also learns his lesson and decides to take the house off the market and never rent it again. He bought it for his wife, and it is the only thing that he has left now. He wants to cherish it more now that he knows how easily it and everything else could slip away from him. Even when he gets a call to have the place rented, he refuses to give it away. In the end, we find him enjoying the sun from his house’s balcony while looking at the woods and wondering how the tranquility of the place was replaced by utter chaos because of one wrong person.
What Happens to Go-hi? Is He Caught?
While Seong-a causes mayhem for Yeong-ha and his family, there is another family that is destroyed due to the actions of a serial killer. Years ago, Ji Hyang-cheol committed a murder in the Lakeview Motel and destroyed Sang-jun’s family. His wife died by suicide, and his relationship with his son, Go-hi, deteriorated. It isn’t until much later that it is revealed that on the night of the murder, Go-hi intercepted Hyang-cheol on the staircase. He could have woken up his father, who was sleeping at the reception, and prevented what happened next. But scared as he was, he did exactly what the killer wanted: became invisible and never talked about what he saw that night.
The impact of that event reverberates in his life years later when he discovers that Hyang-cheol is going to have his autobiography published. Go-hi is enraged by the fact that even after inflicting so much death and pain, the killer is moving on with his life and accepting all the horrific things he did. Meanwhile, Go-hi is haunted by one thing he didn’t do that night, and his family is destroyed because of it. Since the law doesn’t give him the satisfaction of justice, Go-hi takes things into his own hands and kills Hyang-cheol. After this, Go-hi tries to kill himself because he feels he is done with life and doesn’t want to go to prison. He is saved by Yeong-ha, who then goes on to solve his problems in a similar manner.
What happens at Yeong-ha’s house has nothing to do with Go-hi, but with all that happens in Seong-a’s case, it doesn’t mean that the cops are not investigating Hyang-cheol’s death anymore. In fact, piecing everything together, Captain Yoon figures out exactly what happened at the hospital where Hyang-cheol was killed. She even links Yeong-ha to Go-hi, and all her suspicions are confirmed during her visit to the dilapidated Lakeview Motel, where she tells Go-hi in so many words that she knows what he did, but she will not arrest him for it. When asked why she is not taking him in, she says she doesn’t want the frog to pay for once.
The Captain, later Cheif, is aware of Go-hi’s connection with Lakeview and saw his family’s devastation unfold in front of her own eyes. She sympathizes with Go-hi, but she would have had him arrested had the whole debacle with Seong-a not happened. There, she once again saw how one bad person can cause terrifying ripples in the lives of innocent people and destroy them. She had seen Go-hi’s father becoming the frog, who wonders why he is being stoned. She sees the same happen with Yeong-ha. If she arrests Go-hi, she will be perpetuating the cycle, adding to the miseries of Sang-jun’s family. She has seen enough devastation by now, so she decides to turn a blind eye to what happened with Go-hi, especially considering that no innocent person was harmed in his endeavor and the one who died totally deserved it. Now, Go-hi deserves to move past this dark shadow in his life and begin anew.
Read More: Is Netflix’s The Frog a True Story?
