Hunter with a Scalpel- Episodes 1-2

Blood, Secrets, and a Red Thread

The drama wastes no time pulling us into its eerie world. We open on a lonely little girl sitting on a rocky beach, a doll in one hand, picking at a fresh wound on the other. A white truck waits nearby. It’s quiet, unsettling... until you realize this moment will haunt the rest of the episode.

Then, whiplash. We’re in a neon-soaked club where a young woman brutally murders a man in plain sight. The music cuts, chaos erupts and moments later, the same scene is swarming with cops. One of them, forensic pathologist Seo Se-hyun, coolly breaks down the killer’s mindset; gleeful, maybe high, maybe a sociopath. Twist: she’s not the killer. She’s just imagining herself as one.

Se-hyun moves through the club like a human lie detector, studying each suspect’s reaction to the murder weapon until she silently singles out the real culprit. No theatrics, just razor-sharp observation.

Meanwhile, Detective Jung Jung-hyun has his own mess. He’s on a stakeout for a stalker, but his partner is more interested in complaining about a kid trying to steal chocolate from a convenience store. The distraction costs them, Jung-hyun spots the stalker, gives chase, but loses him. They’re chewed out by their boss, and Jung-hyun ends up giving the chocolate thief a ride home, where his younger brother answers the door.

Back in the lab, Se-hyun works on the club victim with her usual surgical precision, keeping colleagues at arm’s length. Across town, we meet Mr. Choi, a laundromat owner who watches a TV interview praising her skills. Se-hyun’s personal life is just as clinical, she feeds a stray cat on her way home until a shop owner complains about the mess. Se-hyun’s icy glare is enough to end the argument.

But something darker stirs. We see anonymous hands placing maggots on a dead body.

Morning brings a grim discovery, Jung-hyun’s team finds a corpse wrapped in plastic in the middle of a field. The decay is so bad, he reaches out to Se-hyun for help. The victim, Lee Yeon-ju, 23, is missing all internal organs except her stomach. Maggots crawl where one of her eyes should be. There’s a syringe mark, a broken neck… and most chilling of all, a red thread inside her body.

That thread snaps something in Se-hyun’s mind, sudden flashes of the girl on the beach, the white truck, the soft whistle that lured her inside.

The hunt has begun.

Shadows, Lies, and a Blood-Stained Suitcase

Episode 2 opens quietly… but there’s tension brewing under every word. Detective Chang-jin is lounging at Mr. Choi’s laundry shop, gossiping with the locals about the gruesome Lee Yeon-ju case. The details spill easily, Yeon-ju had filed a stalking report before her murder, and forensic pathologist Seo Se-hyun wants to see the crime scene. Mr. Choi’s face lights up at the news, a little too much.

Elsewhere at the National Forensic Service Institute, Director Kim Myung-kwan gives Dr. Yang Joon-kyung a not-so-subtle order: make the Nam Seung-hyeop case go away as a drug story and repackage it as an assault. Dr. Oh Min-ho will try to get Se-hyun to play along.

The crime scene visit is tense. Se-hyun, Min-ho, and Detective Jung-hyun pick over the field where Yeon-ju’s body was dumped. Se-hyun notes how staged it all feels, like the killer wanted an audience. Her eyes sweep the surroundings until she spots a potential goldmine: a CCTV camera that could have caught the killer’s vehicle.

On the bus back to Seoul, an uninvited listener climbs aboard, a man whose face remains hidden. He leans in, catching every word between Se-hyun and Min-ho. Min-ho tries to nudge Se-hyun into signing off on a questionable autopsy report for the Nam case. She shuts him down without hesitation. Moments later, her phone rings, reporter Kim Hyung-soo is trying to get through.

Se-hyun’s personal life surfaces briefly when she visits her mother in the hospital, gently wiping her down while the woman stares blankly, lost in her own world. The call from Kim comes again, and this time she answers. Across town, Min-ho’s evening takes a fatal turn. The mysterious bus passenger attacks him, injects something into his neck, and snaps it without hesitation.

News of Min-ho’s murder explodes, and the press slams the police for failing to protect Yeon-ju from her stalker. The fallout hits hard, Jung-hyun’s team accuses him of leaking to the media and even assaulting his own people.

Still, Jung-hyun presses forward, calling Se-hyun for any leads. She insists there’s nothing… until she spots subtle brush marks, the kind used to scrub something clean. Joon-kyung confirms another clue: a rare mushroom found on the body. Se-hyun recalls working on poorly preserved cadavers in college that grew similar fungi, requiring rigorous brushing to remove. But in a flicker of memory, it’s clear she didn’t learn that in school.

Back at the station, Jung-hyun suggests combing through CCTV footage of van drivers. His team promptly clocks out, leaving him to drown in the work. Meanwhile, Se-hyun’s trail of evidence keeps circling back to someone from her past, someone she insists is dead.

The episode ends with a chilling image: a little girl dragging a suitcase down the street. Blood seeps from the edges, leaving a crimson trail.

DramaZen's Opinion

Wow!!!!

If this is how Hunter with a Scalpel kicks off, I’m strapping in for the whole ride.

Episodes 1 and 2 are a perfect blend of crime thriller grit and psychological mind games. From the eerie beach flashbacks to the shock of Min-ho’s sudden death, the show wastes zero time pulling you in and making you suspicious of everyone.

Seo Se-hyun is easily my new favorite drama anti-heroine: cold, brilliant, and a little terrifying. Jung-hyun, on the other hand, is the classic “good cop stuck with bad luck,” and I’m already rooting for him to survive both the killers and his useless colleagues.

The pacing is razor-sharp: every scene has a clue, every conversation hides something, and the red thread mystery is already crawling under my skin. By the time we got to that blood-dripping suitcase in Episode 2, I was yelling at my screen.

If the rest of the season keeps this level of tension and twisted storytelling, we’re in for one hell of a ride.