Breaking Down the Epic Finale of K-Drama ‘Sweet Home’

Sweet Home, the first Korean drama to enter Netflix’s Top Ten in the US, has just wrapped its third and final season on the streamer. Adapted from a webtoon written by Kim Carnby and illustrated by Hwang Young-cha, the story follows the residents of the Green Home apartment complex after the outbreak of the monstrous apocalypse. The ongoing disaster sees ordinary humans transforming into diverse creatures, with each person’s monstrosity informed by their deepest desires. While not inherently evil, these monsters are often dangerous to each other and to surviving humans, leading a dystopian existence in this new world order.

When Sweet Home Premiered on Netflix in December 2020, it struck a chord with viewers experiencing the rapid transition of real-life society due to an infectious outbreak. However, when Season 2 took place three years later in December 2023, many fans were disappointed by the expansion of the series’ world, which took the focus away from many of the original characters. In July 2024, Sweet Home came to an end with an eight-episode final season. Despite the disappointments of the previous season, there is much in Season 3 that justifies the series’ continuation. Let’s explain why this drama is worth finishing…

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Cha Hyun-su, Sang-won and the other special infected

Cha Hyun-su (My demonSong Kang) is Sweet Homecentral protagonist. At the beginning of the series, he is a severely depressed orphaned teenager whose plans for suicide are thwarted by the outbreak of the apocalypse. Instead, he tries to help the other residents of Casa Verde survive. Interestingly, Hyun-su almost immediately begins to transform into a monster. However, he is the only one who is able to fight the process.

At the end of Season 1, Hyun-su established his identity as a “Special Infected,” the Korean military government’s term for the rare people who have some control over their monstrosity. For Cha Hyun-su, this mainly means that he can whip out a huge, bladed wing when the situation calls for it. As we learned in Season 2, he is also capable of turning monsters back into their human forms, as he does with fellow Green House firefighter Seo Yi-kyung (Lee Si-young) after his daughter turns her into a monster. to save her from dying – but more on that later.

The other significant group of Special Infected emerge as the series’ main antagonists in Season 2. We meet a psychopathic, jumping Special Infected who calls himself Jung Ui-myeong (Kim Sung-cheol) at the end of Season 1. over the body of Green Home’s bandit with a heart of gold, Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook), inhabiting it for much of the rest of the show. We eventually discover that he is the monstrous version of Sang-won, Yi-kyung’s scientist fiancé and one of the first people to research the monstrosization process.

Originally a nice guy, Sang-won goes crazy after volunteering as an infected guinea pig for co-worker Dr. Lim (Oh Jung-se). In his grief, he develops the ability to enter the bodies of others and take control. As we learned in Season 3, Dr. Lim uses vials of Sang-won’s blood to transform a small group of other test subjects into Special Infected. When Sang-won breaks into the Bamseom research center, they become her minions.

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The monster girl named Yi-su

Sang-won is obsessed with finding a powerful body to inhabit. This leads him to monstrose his daughter Yi-su (Kim Si-a) when she is still a fetus inside her mother, Yi-kyung. When Yi-kyung gives birth to Yi-su in season 2, her baby is part human, part monster. This leads to much of the interpersonal drama in Season 2, as Yi-kyung struggles to accept her daughter for who and what she is. Yi-kyung initially leaves her baby to be raised by Hyun-su, meaning that Hyun-su and Yi-su have a special connection.

What is Yi-su, exactly? Something special. She ages very quickly and reaches the size of a teenager at the end of Season 2. Yi-su has the ability to turn humans into monsters with just her touch, which is what she does to her mother in Season 2. Mortally injured in a fire, Yi-su turns her into a monster, and Hyun-su returns her to her mortal form. Yi-kyung eventually dies at the hands of her ex-fiance, Sang-won, as she tries to protect Yi-su from falling into his clutches.

Although Yi-kyung and Yi-su had a complicated relationship, Yi-su, who is still learning, is devastated when she loses her mother for the second and probably last time, finally understanding what death means.

What are Neohumans?

If that wasn’t enough to follow the creatures’ story, the third season of Sweet Home introduces a third type of “monster”: neo-humans. Neohumans are the final evolution of the monstrous process. When a monster is killed, it is pulled into a shell-like cocoon called a “heart.” Neohumans are reborn as shiny new versions of their original humans, with a superhuman ability to learn and regenerate if they are killed. Although they have all the memories of their human past, they are reborn without any of the associated emotions. This is not treated as inherently negative, with the implication that these neo-humans can learn to feel again.

We learn about neohumans from Lee Eun-hyuk (Lee Do-hyun), an important character in season 1. He lived in Green Home, where he lived with his younger sister, teenage ballerina Lee Eun-yu (Go Min-si). The Lee brothers have a complicated and often hostile relationship, but they ultimately love each other.

Although Eun-hyuk apparently dies at the end of Season 1 when the Green Home building is demolished, Eun-yu never gives up hope that he is alive somewhere as a monster. When Eun-yu finally sees Eun-hyuk again in season 3, he rejects any attempts at closeness. Despite secretly carrying a photo of the Lee family, Eun-hyeok is slow to feel, still learning the ways of her neo-human self. Eun-hyeok’s apparent ambivalence devastates Eun-yu and triggers the monstrosization process. In her hallucinations, she returns to the memory of Green Home with her brother before his transition into a neo-human. Her greatest desire is to feel safe and loved, like she did with her older brother.

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Sang-won’s final death

Hyun-su and Eun-hyeok often clashed in Season 1, but they reached a tentative alliance in Season 3 to go after Sang-won. Hyun-su wants to protect the remaining human survivors, who have hidden in a destroyed stadium under the protection of the Crow Platoon military. And Eun-hyeok understandably sees Sang-won’s murderous and power-hungry tendencies as a threat to the future of neohumans.

Meanwhile, Sang-won has made progress in his plans to take control of his daughter’s powerful body. Initially failing, Dr. Lim told him that the key to jumping bodies is pain; Sang-won must be in such severe agony that he looks for a new shell. He makes the stadium residents build a huge bonfire. First, he throws Dr. Lim at him, furious that Lim is hoarding one last vial of Sang-won’s blood. So he gets into it himself. The resulting pain allows him to take control of Yi-su’s body.

When Hyun-su and Eun-hyeok arrive at the stadium, things get complicated. Eun-hyeok is fully ready to continue with the plan to eliminate Sang-won at any cost, but Hyun-su is desperate to keep Yi-su safe. Yi-su has other ideas, however. She is able to temporarily regain control of Sang-won by allowing herself to be speared by Eun-hyeok, which forces her father out of her body. She dies in Hyun-su’s arms, telling him that she wants to be with her mother. (Although we later see a brief shot of her coming back to life.)

Hyun-su is devastated. Before the start of the series, he lost his parents and sister in a car accident. The resulting pain has fueled much of his behavior throughout the series, as he works desperately to keep as many of his family members safe from the same fate. He will find and kill Sang-won.

However, it is not Hyun-su or Eun-hyeok who finally commits the deed. With Yi-su out of the picture, Sang-won desperately jumps into bodies. He ends up back in Sang-wook’s body. This is perhaps the most confusing aspect of the ending, given that Sang-wook seemed to have disappeared a long time ago – both in body and in spirit. Perhaps he was reborn as a neo-human. Perhaps his monstrous body was strong enough to regenerate. Most likely, the Sweet Home the writing team found it more emotionally satisfying to have Sang-won, a reluctant hero to the people of Green Home in Season 1, return one last time to save the day, and ignored plot logic to do so.

How is it Sweet Home End of season 3?

Those who hope for a happy ending Sweet Home Mostly I understood. Despite all the bloodshed, there appears to be hope for the survivors – humans, monsters and neo-humans alike. With Sang-won officially defeated, Hyun-su and the surviving members of Crow Platoon evacuate the survivors. In search of a new and safe home, the rebel band comes across a group of neo-humans. As we learn from Hyun-su’s narration, the two groups learn to live together. The assimilated community means that surviving humans do not have to live in fear of their likely eventual monstrosity. Even after they turn, they will still have a home.

In the final scene of the series, we see Hyun-su and Eun-hyeok meeting on a rooftop, where they also see Eun-yu. Eun-yu appears to be neo-human, like her brother. The scene is a callback to a moment from the show’s first episode. In that scene, Hyun-su is thinking about descending from the roof of the Green Home building to his death. Before he can, he notices Eun-yu practicing ballet. Watching Eun-yu dance on the roof reminds him of some of the joys of living. The two characters spend the rest of the series figuratively dancing around each other romantically.

Although we never see Eun-yu and Hyun-su together, the show ends with Hyun-su and Eun-hyeok smiling at Eun-yu as they walk across a Seoul rooftop, listening to music through headphones. “As this endless hour continues,” Hyun-su tells us in voiceover, “we all need a place to wait and a place to come home to. So while we wait, we decided to call this place Sweet Home.” Hyun-su finally found some peace.