Queen Mantis Ending Explained: Occasionally, a K-drama emerges that takes a known genre and reworks it into something more sinister, sardonic, and more disturbing than anticipated. (사마귀: 살인자의 외출) It’s just such a show. Equipped with a compelling cast led by Go Hyun-jung as the mysterious Jung Yi-shin, Jang Dong-yoon as Jung Yi-shin’s tormented son Cha Soo-yeol, Sung-ha as veteran detective Choi Jung-ho, Lee El as Kim Na-hee, Kim Bo-ra as Lee Jung-yeon and others.
With a firm directorial touch from Byun Young-joo, it produced a psychological thriller that hardly ever held back. From its spooky ambience to its knotted probing of trauma, self, and justice, the series managed to engage viewers from the very start and never relinquished its grip until the last, blazing frames.
Korean Drama Queen Mantis Recap
The kdrama Queen Mantis opens with a grotesque death mimic crimes from the era of notorious serial killer Jung Yi-shin, also dubbed the “Mantis.” Once notorious for assaulting violent men who abused women and children, Yi-shin has spent years in jail and lived in good comfort ever since she confessed to having committed them. When a copycat killer arrives, detectives have nowhere to go but to consult Yi-shin, but Yi-shin insists on just a single condition: she’ll communicate only through her undisciplined son, Cha Soo-yeol.
Soo-yeol, an aspiring police officer attempting to escape his mother’s bloody past, is vehemently reluctant. But with each increasing number of corpses, he gets drawn into the investigation. Their awkward partnership commences with Soo-yeol struggling with revulsion over his mother’s history and with an unhealthy interest in her macabre foresight of the murders. Yi-shin’s manipulation, dark magnetism, and uncanny ability to get beneath Soo-yeol’s skin create depth of psychological tension in the investigation.
And as the police investigation unfolds—from Seo Gu-won and his depraved imaginings to the volatile Min-jae—these men prove not to be the actual mastermind of the new murders. The actual puppet master lurks closer to home than anyone realises. Soo-yeol’s professional life comes undone as his wife, Jung-yeon, is put in danger, and Na-hee becomes ever more distrustful of his split allegiances. Meanwhile, Yi-shin presses her son to face the reality of their history: his battering dad, his mom’s first homicide, and the cycle of violence through the generations that defined them both.
Kdrama Queen Mantis Ending Explained
Who Was the Real Copycat Killer, and How Was She Connected to Jung Yi-shin?
The actual copycat killer is discovered to be Seo A-ra (played by Han Dong-hee), Jung-yeon’s understated friend. Throughout the show, A-ra stays back in the shadows, encouraging but somehow invested in Soo-yeol’s domestic life. Queen Mantis Episode 7 provides the big surprise as A-ra has been committing the murders the entire time and has been masking the obsessive behaviour with an upbeat exterior.
A-ra’s twisted admiration for Yi-shin goes beyond mere inspiration. She idolised the Mantis as a righteous avenger and longed to be acknowledged as her “daughter.” Her fixation drives her to replicate Yi-shin’s methods, manipulating evidence and targeting victims to mimic her idol’s legacy. By entangling herself with Jung-yeon, she positions herself close to Soo-yeol and, by extension, Yi-shin—an echo of her desire to be part of their fractured family.
Her kidnapping stretches out over the final two episodes, during which time she kidnaps Jung-yeon and comes face-to-face with Yi-shin in person. In place of the approval she so cravingly wants, however, A-ra receives only Yi-shin’s horror. Yi-shin ends up stabbing A-ra, disavowing A-ra as an attempted copycat and an adopted daughter. A-ra’s delusions break down during those minutes, revealing that she never was an inheritor of the Mantis’s dark code—only a malformed shadow of it.
How Did Jung Yi-shin Become a Killer AKA The Mantis?
Yi-shin’s fall into being the Mantis has a root of intense child abuse. The Queen Mantis final episode reveals the revelation that Yi-shin was raised in the Jusin Church, which was headed by her dad, Hyun-nam, a person who abused Yi-shin and her mom both physically and mentally. Unfortunately, it is found out that Yi-shin killed her very own mom in such a destructive environment, solidifying the trajectory of violence throughout her life.
Her first adult homicide was when she murdered Soo-yeol’s abusive, drunkard dad, who terrorised their family nightly. To Yi-shin, these were not crimes but a ghastly kind of vengeance—avenging beatings of women and children. She embarked on this “mission” with full strength over time, refusing to clarify her murders as something more than vengeance, even while the world deemed her a monster.
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These revelations in Queen Mantis Episode 8 put everything into perspective: Yi-shin’s murders were not haphazard but the results of a lifetime of abuse, perverted in a twisted way of moral outrage. This grey area of predator or victim is what constitutes her character. She’s a vigilante to some, a serial killer to others. She’s these things to Soo-yeol—the mother who bore him and the monster who traumatised him.
What Happened to Jung Yi-shin in the End?
Yi-shin’s second arc is a tragic intertwining of destruction and reluctant redemption. Having spurned A-ra and confronted with her history, she comes back to confront her dad, Hyun-nam. Having professed redemption, she finds out he continued to abuse young girls, vindicating the fact that he’s learned nothing. Regardless of Soo-yeol’s urging to move on, Yi-shin kills him and sets the church on fire—a symbolic act of eliminating the source of traumatisation.
When the house breaks out in flames, Soo-yeol rescues her from the flames, saving her from certain death. But Yi-shin realises she’ll never go back to her son’s world. She tells him to forget about her and live his own life, thanking Jung-ho for raising him to the man he is. Yi-shin vanishes; what becomes of her is never known, but far from ill, she has brought a semblance of justice to the man who had been abusing her, even without ever finding peace with her son completely.
Did Soo-yeol Break Free from His Mother’s Shadow?
The emotional core of Queen Mantis Korean drama, is Soo-yeol’s story. He’s conflicted in the first episode between rejecting his mother and being drawn into her reality. His anger with regard to crimes committed by her grapples with the lingering wish to have her approval, and most of his growth is with regard to resolving the issue of whether or not he’s “like” her.
In the climax, Soo-yeol shows independence through consistently opting for mercy over violence. He rescues his wife and unborn child, stops Yi-shin from blindly committing slaughter, and ends up pulling her out of the engulfed church instead of leaving her there. These are all externally manifested reflections of the reality that while he doesn’t escape the scars of the way in which he was raised, he is greater than those scars.
The final shot of him and Na-hee, still tormented but resolute, suggests Soo-yeol has discovered an exit of his own. He may never shake Yi-shin’s shadow, but he does not live in a fantasy about it either. He just carries it with him and goes on as a person of his own right.
What Does the Ending of Queen Mantis Signify? Will There Be a Season 2?
The end of Queen Mantis is full of finality and ambiguity as well as both. In a sense, the tale of the copycat murderer is finished—A-ra is dead, defeated in monomania, and the short-term danger to the Soo-yeol and Jung-yeon family is gone. Yi-shin’s confrontation with her dad also brings closure to an abuse cycle through generations, giving symbolic justice to years of abuse. Yet the last frames open the door to more.
Two years hence, Yi-shin is still going strong and alive when Soo-yeol and Na-hee find Jung-ho’s lifeless body in the woods, with further conspiracy to follow. Jung-ho’s demise indicates there’s something more to the world they presume they knew full of secrets, corruption, and unresolved business.
This ambiguity provides a strong argument why there just may be a Queen Mantis Season 2, wherein Yi-shin’s shadow may continue to hang over Soo-yeol, wherein Soo-yeol’s moral greyness continues to evolve, and threats abound anew. Whether Yi-shin is an enemy, an ally, or somewhere in between remains the big unknown going forward.
