Cover One of the biggest K-drama plot holes? Seo Dal-mi choosing Nam Do-san over Han Ji-pyeong in ‘Start-Up’ (Photo: IMDB)
One of the biggest K-drama plot holes? Seo Dal-mi choosing Nam Do-san over Han Ji-pyeong in ‘Start-Up’ (Photo: IMDB)
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These K-drama plot holes raise some very obvious questions about the stories we couldn’t stop watching
The Hallyu system has trained us to tolerate a remarkable amount of nonsense. People survive falls and gunshots that should require several months in traction. Billionaire teenagers run companies before they’ve finished high school. Parallel universes are separated by magical bamboo forests. And why does nobody ever seem to have their phone when the plot really needs them to?
Usually, we happily go along with it. That’s part of the fun.
But every so often, a drama introduces a problem so enormous that you stop thinking about the romance, revenge plot or elaborate corporate conspiracy and start wondering why nobody has asked the most obvious question. These aren’t necessarily continuity errors, either. Some are genuine holes in a show’s internal logic; others are spectacularly convenient decisions that become difficult to ignore once you think about them for more than a minute.
The best K-drama plot holes are less about nitpicking and more about watching a carefully constructed story suddenly wobble under one very simple question: “Wait. Why didn’t they just…?”
In case you missed it: 12 K-dramas that nailed their final episodes
Here are K-dramas that gave us exactly that feeling. Spoilers ahead!
‘Memories of the Alhambra’ (2018-2019)
Above When an augmented-reality game starts killing people, perhaps “keep playing” should not be the preferred troubleshooting method
The premise of Memories of the Alhambra is already gloriously unhinged. Yoo Jin-woo (Hyun Bin), the CEO of an investment company, travels to Granada after receiving a mysterious call about an augmented-reality game. What begins as an experimental piece of technology slowly starts bleeding into reality, with players being attacked by game characters and people who die in the game suffering real-world consequences.
However, once everyone realises the game has gone catastrophically wrong, the response is essentially: “Let’s keep playing and see what happens.”
The drama establishes that the game has been corrupted by a bug created after a real-world stabbing is interpreted as part of the game’s programming. The resulting glitch allows the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds to collapse. The story then builds towards a quest involving the Key to Heaven, Emma and a game reset intended to eliminate the bugs.
It is all very dramatic. But it also raises an extremely practical question: where is the emergency shutdown procedure?
This isn’t a normal game experiencing a graphics error. The characters know that the system is producing lethal consequences. They know the game’s logic has become corrupted. Yet the solution is largely to continue interacting with the broken system until someone can complete an increasingly dangerous quest.
Even fans of the drama noticed that its game mechanics could become difficult to reconcile, particularly around who counted as a bug, what happened when the game reset and why certain characters remained trapped or disappeared. The finale’s mechanics have generated years of viewer debate for precisely that reason.
The real plot hole, then, may not be “why didn’t they unplug the server?” The show gives us enough complicated mythology around the game that such a simple solution isn’t necessarily established as possible.
It’s something funnier: why does a company with an experimental game that can apparently kill its users have no recognisable crisis protocol whatsoever? Did it cut back on its IT department?
‘The King: Eternal Monarch’ (2020)
Above Two parallel Koreas are connected by a magical portal, and somehow the security arrangements remain surprisingly casual
There are plenty of things to keep track of in The King: Eternal Monarch: two Koreas, identical people living completely different lives, a magical flute, time travel, murder, treason and Lee Min-ho looking exceptionally good on horseback.
The portal is arguably the least complicated part.
The drama establishes two parallel worlds: the Kingdom of Corea and the Republic of Korea. Emperor Lee Gon (Lee Min-ho) discovers a portal connecting them, while his traitorous uncle Lee Lim (Lee Jung-jin) has already been using the same mechanism to move between worlds. The portal is opened through the Manpasikjeok, a mythical bamboo flute that has been split into two halves.
So, now what?
How is Lee Lim able to spend decades moving between two parallel countries without anyone treating the portal as a catastrophic security vulnerability?
To be fair, the portal isn’t simply an open door that anyone can stroll through. The flute, its divided halves and the rules governing when and how the gateway can be used are central to the show’s mythology. The drama also establishes restrictions on certain kinds of travel.
Still, Lee Lim manages to cross between worlds repeatedly, establish relationships with counterparts, manipulate people on both sides, and build an entire criminal operation around the portal's existence.
Once he starts recruiting people from one world and moving them into the other, the implications become enormous.
Imagine discovering that your country has a secret gateway to a parallel universe containing an almost identical population. Would the first response really be to leave the location unattended in a bamboo forest and hope the villain doesn’t abuse it?
The problem is not that the show has a magical portal. We signed up for that.
It’s that the most strategically important border crossing in two universes somehow has fewer safeguards than a side entrance at a provincial train station.
See more: Alternative history: 12 K-dramas that asked ‘what if...’
‘Start-Up’ (2020)
Above One honest conversation could have saved several people months of emotional devastation—and eliminated most of the love triangle
Few K-drama premises depend as heavily on a lie as Start-Up.
Years before Seo Dal-mi (Bae Suzy) enters the start-up world, she exchanges letters with a boy named Nam Do-san. The letters become an important source of comfort during a difficult period in her childhood. The catch is that the real author is Han Ji-pyeong (Kim Seon-ho), who wrote them at the request of Dal-mi’s grandmother and used the name of an actual mathematical prodigy he found in the newspaper.
Years later, Ji-pyeong tracks down the real Nam Do-san (Nam Joo-hyuk) and persuades him to impersonate the person Dal-mi remembers from those letters. Do-san agrees, and the deception becomes the foundation for the central romance.
There is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Ji-pyeong initially doesn’t tell Dal-mi. The grandmother wants to protect her feelings, and the situation becomes increasingly complicated once Do-san enters her life.
But then the lie keeps going. And going. And going.
Do-san struggles with whether to tell Dal-mi the truth, but the deception continues. Dal-mi eventually begins piecing together the evidence herself, confronting Ji-pyeong about who actually wrote the letters. And this is where the whole thing becomes wonderfully maddening because the central question isn’t even: “Why did Ji-pyeong lie?”
It’s: “Why did everybody who knew the truth decide that continuing the lie was easier than having one extremely uncomfortable conversation?”
The answer, obviously, is that there would be no Start-Up without the deception.
Yet that is precisely what makes it such a textbook example of K-drama plot holes: the story requires multiple intelligent adults and young entrepreneurs to maintain a situation that could have been resolved with approximately five minutes of honesty.
The letters are emotionally important enough to drive the entire romantic story. Yet the actual truth behind them becomes something everyone is strangely determined not to discuss.
Certainly, Start-Up is nothing but a lesson in proper communication.
‘Vagabond’ (2019)
Above A catastrophic plane crash becomes the starting point for a massive conspiracy, but the investigation occasionally seems to operate on “trust me” settings
Vagabond begins with a tragedy that should be impossible to ignore: a commercial passenger aircraft crashes in Morocco, killing over 200 people on board, including the young nephew of stuntman Cha Dal-gun (Lee Seung-gi).
Then Dal-gun discovers something that changes everything. Apparently, the crash was not an accident, and the co-pilot secretly survived.
What follows is a sprawling conspiracy involving intelligence agencies, government officials, defence contractors, arms deals and people who apparently have an extraordinary amount of money to spend making sure the truth stays buried.
It’s a terrific premise.
It also requires the investigation into the crash to become remarkably porous.
The more Dal-gun investigates, the more evidence he encounters suggesting that the official version of events is wrong. The show repeatedly pivots on information that should have enormous consequences for an aviation investigation, yet somehow remains just out of reach of the people who ought to be looking for it.
This is where Vagabond becomes less a plot hole and more a narrative that desperately needs seasoned intelligence agents to be one step behind Cha Dal-gun.
The problem isn’t that a sophisticated conspiracy could never manipulate an investigation. That’s the premise. The problem is how often the story needs critical information to remain undiscovered until the exact moment our hero stumbles upon it.
A commercial aircraft disaster would normally generate an enormous evidentiary trail: physical wreckage, flight data recorders, maintenance logs, passenger manifests, telecommunications and multiple international aviation bodies with an interest in determining what happened. Vagabond asks us to accept that an international cabal can suppress enough of that machinery to keep the truth hidden while simultaneously leaving just enough clues for a lone stuntman to unravel the entire plot.
And that produces the question at the heart of the entire series:
If the conspiracy is powerful enough to compromise the highest levels of state intelligence, why is it so consistently incompetent at controlling basic evidence?
The answer is, of course, that Cha Dal-gun needs something to investigate.
Which is fair.
It just means the world’s most determined stuntman occasionally appears to be the only person doing forensic follow-up on an international aviation disaster.
‘The Penthouse’ (2020-2021)
Above After enough fake-outs, murders and surprise returns, you would think Hera Palace residents might start verifying the bodies
If The Penthouse: War in Life has taught us anything, it is that death is more of a scheduling inconvenience than a permanent condition.
The first season alone gives us murder, attempted murder, framing, secret identities and enough dramatic reversals to make a conventional crime investigation look positively minimalist. In the season finale, Joo Dan-tae appears to murder Shim Soo-ryeon (Lee Ji-ah), leaving Oh Yoon-hee (Eugene) implicated in the crime. The second season later reveals that the woman he killed was Na Ae-gyo, who had switched identities with Soo-ryeon.
Except that The Penthouse is not finished with Soo-ryeon.
Her return in the second season was preceded by intense fan speculation that she might not actually have died. The cast later clarified one particularly elaborate fan theory about her final scene: viewers had tried to read her lips and concluded that she told Yoon-hee to claim responsibility for her murder. The actors explained that her actual final words were simply “Run away.”
The joke, however, goes beyond that particular misunderstanding.
By the time The Penthouse reaches its later seasons, the audience has been conditioned to treat every death announcement with suspicion. Characters disappear, return, fake their deaths, assume other identities and turn up alive after apparently definitive endings. Still, the characters themselves continue to react to each apparent death as though this is the first time anybody has encountered the concept of a suspiciously convenient corpse.
This is not a complaint about realism. Realism left Hera Palace several explosions ago.
It is a question of institutional memory. After the third or fourth apparently dead person turns out to be alive, wouldn’t somebody start checking? A pulse. A CCTV camera. A dental record. Literally anything. Do people not have death certificates?
Instead, every new death arrives with the same devastating soundtrack, shocked faces and solemn declarations—until the next twist comes along and reveals that, actually, nobody should have been quite so sure.
At a certain point, the biggest plot hole in The Penthouse isn’t the survival rate. It’s that none of these people ever learn from experience.
See more: Death is optional: 10 K-drama characters who came back to life
Sasha Lim Uy Mariposa is a lifestyle journalist who is known for her food writing. Based in Manila and currently a marketing content specialist, she still dabbles in entertainment, beauty and dining coverage. She was the former managing editor of Esquire Philippines and was the food editor at SPOT.ph. She also edited several best-selling books about food.
She now writes for the different Tatler Asia markets as a contributing writer for T-Labs.
