This article contains mild spoilers. After a brief break, following its first six episodes, for the Beijing Winter Olympics on South Korean broadcaster SBS’ schedule, true-crime procedural Through the Darkness is back with part two of its first season. Based on Those Who Read Hearts of Evil , the memoir of Kwon Il-yong, South Korea’s first criminal profiler, the show has recreated some of the country’s most notorious criminal cases from the early 21st century. When the show began, we were introduced to Song Ha-young (Kim Nam-gil), an introspective detective whose methods clashed with his coarser colleagues, and Gook Young-soo (Jin Seon-kyu), a captain at the National Police Agency (NPA) trying to convince his superiors to introduce behavioural profiling in the Korean police force. By episode three, Young-soo had succeeded in getting his profile unit, the Crime Behaviour Analysis Team, and convincing Ha-young to join it. The team, which also welcomes young statistician Jung Woo-joo (Ryeo Un), is forced to make do with a dank semi-basement office, not unlike the spaces first forced on the fledgling investigative units in the American shows Mindhunters and The Wire . Naturally, getting the green light to form the unit and conduct behavioural profiles of incarcerated killers is only the first step for these new profilers, and the new team soon encounters more obstructions. Through the Darkness: K-drama fans get their very own Mindhunter Given their research into high-profile violent crimes and their hopes to use the intel to identify future criminals, the scope of Ha-young and Young-soo’s activities soon intersects with the cases of the Special Crime Squad at the NPA, which is disinclined to collaborate. The first contemporary case the Analysis Team becomes involved in concerns the discovery of the body of a young girl. Ha-young is soon at loggerheads with the Special Crime Squad’s tough detective Yoon Tae-goo (Kim So-jin), but after a mutual breakthrough involving a fridge that may have been used by the killer, the teams enter into a cautious alliance. After teasing a new killer who gets his hands on Young-soo’s badge and bludgeons a dog beside a moonlit river, the show jumps ahead three years to 2003 in episode five. Gu Young-chun (Han Joon-woo), the dog killer, has developed into a serial killer who targets wealthy senior citizens in a series of grisly home invasions. Young-chun is modelled after the notorious Yoo Young-chul (also known as The Raincoat Killer), who was convicted of murdering 20 people and whose crimes inspired the 2008 film The Chaser . While the two teams try to catch Young-chun, alarm bells ring about a spate of crimes in which women are attacked by a knife-wielding man. The victims survive, but Ha-young is convinced the criminal is about to level up and become a murderous terror. When Ha-young is proved right about the man, some people at NPA refuse to accept that there are two killers on the loose and claim the crimes are being committed by the same person, despite the very different modus operandi in evidence. This second killer, played by Kim Joong-hee, is modelled after the real-life killer Jeong Nam-gyu, who also featured briefly in last year’s series Taxi Driver as the man who killed the mother of Lee Je-hoon’s lead character. Over the course of these investigations, the alliance between the Special Crime Squad and the Analysis Team is tested by the arrival of the repellent Kim Bong-sik (Seo Dong-gab), a tangle of toxic masculinity who takes a leading role in the Special Crime Squad. He threatens, and feels threatened by, everyone and works to undermine colleagues and opponents alike, while also illicitly lining his own pockets. 8 new Korean drama series to look out for in March 2022 Bong-sik is seemingly introduced in the hope of becoming a character we love to hate, but he’s so odious, petty and useless that he feels off among these teams of professionals, existing to be a point of mutual loathing for others. Through the Darkness , as its title suggests, has been guiding us on a morbidly fascinating journey through Korea’s true-crime low points of the early 2000s. While emphasis was put on the behavioural aspect of the crimes early on, the show hasn’t delved as far into the psychological underpinnings of these killers as some viewers may have hoped. However, compared to the more gimmicky and occasionally hysterical modern serial killer shows like Mouse , the show’s true-crime aspect has given it a more serious and grounded feel. Through the Darkness is streaming on Viu.