Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Somebody’ follows the story of a girl named Kim Sum who falls in love with a serial killer named Seong Yun-o. He uses the app created by Sum to lure women and then brutally kill them. The show focuses on the events that lead to them getting entangled in each other’s mess. As they develop feelings for one another, things become even more complicated, and by the end, both of them face some very difficult decisions. Here, we take a look at the events of the final episode and deduce the meaning of the ending. SPOILERS AHEAD
Somebody Plot Synopsis
Kim Sum has always found it a little difficult to understand people. The sentiment has been reciprocated, which is why she never found someone with whom she could truly connect. She feels that her shy nature often holds her back from talking to others, which is why she can’t connect with them. To remedy this, she creates an app called Someone. With the help of the AI chatbot, she hopes to find a soulmate for herself. In the meantime, as the app becomes a success, she and her partner, Samantha, cash in on it.
While the app gives a happy ending to many couples, there is a man who uses it to kill women. Seong Yun-o picks up girls and murders them, creating several accounts on the app to keep his identity a secret. Picking up on his pattern, Kim Sum finds him but ends up connecting with him. This leads to a love affair that gets more treacherous when it is revealed that Seong Yun-o almost killed Sum’s best friend, Gi-eun.
Somebody Ending: Why Does Kim Sum Kill Seong Yun-o?
All Kim Sum ever wanted was to find someone who could understand her. Because she had difficulty undressing emotions, she often had to fake her way out of them. But when she meets Yun-o, he accepts her for who he is. He doesn’t take a step back when she tells him about her dark thoughts, and her lack of emotions doesn’t worry him either. In the same vein, Sum doesn’t care what Yun-o has done or is accused of by others. Despite knowing that he is the one misusing her app, she gives him a chance.
Over time, Sum and Yun-o bond with each other so intimately that Sum is not ready to give him up even when she discovers that it was he who left his best friend for dead. While Gi-eun and Mok-won try to make Yun-o pay for what he did, Sum stands her ground and doesn’t help her friends even when she could easily turn the tide in their favor. The extent of her loyalty convinces Yun-o that the two of them can have a future together, and he starts building a place for them. This is where he calls her to meet in the last episode. But he doesn’t realize that by now, a lot has changed.
Despite knowing that Yun-o is a serial killer, Sum is not ready to give him up because he is the only person she has ever felt connected to, and she fears that she may never find someone like him again. When Gi-eun and Mok-won were looking for him, they were doing it on unofficial grounds and didn’t really have anything to connect him to his grander crimes. But then, when the dead body of the woman from Princess Snacks is found, the cops have an actual crime with evidence to connect to Yun-o. This is when Gi-eun reveals everything to the other cops and formulates a plan to arrest Yun-o.
Back at Spectrum, we discover that Samantha has been trying to get rid of Yun-o too. His trail of bodies doesn’t bode well for the app, and she also doesn’t like the budding relationship between him and Sum. So, using the hacker Fingers, she gives Gi-eun the information she needs from Yun-o’s account, paving the path for his downfall. In addition to this, she also creates deep fake videos of Yun-o’s victims and haunts him with them. This leads Yun-o to break down, and he confesses to Sum.
Before his confession, Sum had the factor of deniability. Because they never talked about his crimes, they were never as real to her. But now, when he actually says it out loud, something changes. Sum already knew that the walls are closing in on Yun-o, and his confession makes it clear to her that he will not be able to stay free for too long. He has lost his edge and sooner rather than later, he is going to get caught.
Sum knows that Yun-o is going to meet his end, so she decides that instead of someone else, it should be her who ends his story. It’s like the cat in the first episode. She knew that it was terribly injured and no one was coming to help it. So, instead of watching it suffer, Sum decides to put it out of its misery and kills it. She does the same with Yun-o. Spectrum knows his location, and Gi-eun has the whole police force with her. There is no hope left for Yun-o, so Sum puts him out of his misery.
Is Kim Sum a psychopath?
While it is clear that Yun-o is a psychopath, there are certain things about Sum that make us wonder if she falls into the same category. We know that Sum has Asperger’s which makes it a bit difficult for her to understand emotions. When she was little, her mother used drawings to show her what each emotion looked like. But even as a child, Sum got hooked on the color of fear. She almost choked her mother just to see if her face would turn purple with fear. She didn’t consider how it made her mother feel.
Over the years, Sum gets better acquainted with the emotions and learns to mimic and emote them under the right circumstances. Still, she has a taste for violence, which only comes out when she kills one of the men who try to rape her after she is invited on a false date by Agape, who was actually Yun-o. While Sum confesses that killing the man made her feel euphoric, she also becomes conscious of her own feelings.
Sum knows that it is not good to feel better after killing someone. While she doesn’t fully understand the emotion, she recognizes the need to cleanse herself of this feeling. The more time she spends with Yun-o, the more she feels drawn to this darkness. This is why she turns to Mok-won to help her expel this darkness from her. And this is what proves that Sum is not really a psychopath.
Every single one of us is capable of doing bad things, but most of us listen to the voice of our conscience. It is the simple fact that no matter how many dark thoughts we have, we never act on them which proves the condition of a person’s psyche. Sum falls under the category of normal people. There are three times when she wields a blade and kills a living thing. The first time, it is the injured cat. While it comes out as a bit creepy, it is not a completely amoral act. In fact, normal people often euthanize animals. This makes Sum’s act no different than anyone else’s.
The second time Sum kills someone is when she is threatened. Though it is caused due to the misunderstanding created by Yun-o, Sum genuinely believes that the group of men is trying to rape her. She kills the man in self-defense, which, again, is something that any normal person would have done. Even though she says it made her feel good, she doesn’t intentionally kill someone else after it. This means that she is in full control of her urges, quite unlike a psychopath.
The last time Sum kills someone, things are radically less white and black, and this is where it is important to remember that she doesn’t see the world the same way most people do. While people, in general, draw a line at humans when it comes to mercy killing, Sum doesn’t share that sentiment. In the end, for her, Yun-o is no different than the helpless cat, which is why it makes sense for her to kill him. If she could have helped it, if there was any hope for him, she would have allowed him to run away. She had tried to protect him all this while. But, in the end, it was clear that there was no way for Yun-o to redeem himself. So, just like the cat, she killed him too. It is this intention that separates her from the likes of Yun-o and proves that Sum is many things, but being a psychopath is not one of them.
Read More: Is Somebody a Real Dating App? Is Seong Yun-o based on a Real Serial Killer?
