There must be so much pressure on creative people to keep on churning out content without plots, world-building, or character development, just to keep people glued to their screens. Though the 8-hour long series, “The Glory,” Part 1 is about a woman seeking revenge, we don’t see any just desserts being meted out. The injustices suffered by Dong Eun were extremely provocative, ones that incited enough anger in the audience. But after our protagonist sets out on her path of vengeance, we don’t know what she does except make her presence known to all of her perpetrators. Seriously, one episode of the backstory followed by seven episodes of just this? There is a lot of anticipation followed by nothing. It looks like we will see the actual revenge take place in “The Glory,” Part 2, which is coming out in March, but if that was the plan, shouldn’t Part 1 have been a little more thrilling?
Spoilers Ahead
It reminds us how in “Game of Thrones,” the characters kept saying that “Winter is Coming” for seven seasons, and all it took for it to come and go was one single episode. The comparison may be a little far-fetched, but the ending of both shows turned out to be a disappointment- albeit of different magnitudes. Forgive our tone, but we are not exactly feeling charitable after spending eight hours watching nothing happen. But coming back to the point of this article, since nothing really happened here, we are going to guess what will happen in the upcoming “The Glory” Part 2. What exactly is Dong Eun going to do to take her revenge?
As Dong Eun says to Yu Jeong, she doesn’t have any dignity left after the kind of bullying she suffered at school. While we do not want to repeat in words everything she goes through, we understand what she means when she says that. She wasn’t just subjected to thoughtless violence but also deliberate indignities, all for the singular reason that the perpetrators could get away with it. But more than what her peers did, it was probably the disappointment of knowing that nobody would stand with her that turned her into a hollow shell of a human being whose sole purpose in life became her revenge. She was let down by her teachers, the police, and even her own parents. The one adult who had tried to help her was unable to do so in the face of Yeon Jin’s mother’s influence. Dong Eun literally had nobody to turn to. It is possible that even with such a deadbeat mother, she might have made something of her dreams, but the incessant bullying and the apathy of the authorities caused her to lose faith in the world to such an extent that she didn’t see anything wrong in dedicating her life to the destruction of others. She wasn’t struggling to come out of it. She had decided that she wouldn’t, and instead, she used it to fuel a purpose for her life. Everything she did after dropping out of school was in pursuit of this. She worked hard in the factory, went to college, became a teacher, and took multiple shifts tutoring others, sacrificing sleep, health, and hunger, all so that one day she could take revenge. She says as much that she is living to punish them. What Dong Eun wants to do is turn the tables in such a way that it is her that the others fear. She wants them all to be as helpless as she once was, with nowhere to go. The wounds she planned to inflict on them weren’t just physical. She wanted to destroy them from the inside, the way they had done to her.
Myeong-O is already dead, as she has deduced. We don’t know what revenge she might have taken from him since he already lived a wretched life with no independence or dignity of his own. Maybe death was what she would have planned if it had not reached him by itself before. As for the rest of them, Dong Eun’s plan has to be to take away from them what they hold dearest. Before she says goodbye to them all as a 17-year-old, she recounts all their dreams to them. Those will be her targets. Sa Ra always wanted to be an artist, so we believe that Dong Eun will put a plan in place to discredit her work. She might try to bring her drug problems to light. In a conservative society like Korea, this is not something easily forgiven, as the question of the artist’s influence on the youth always plays a role in consideration of things. Not to mention that Sara is deeply tied to the church. Wouldn’t Dong Eun want to make it seem like God had turned away from Sa Ra? As for Hye Jeong, she is precariously close to her own ruin. She has quit her job and is about to get married to her boyfriend. All Dong Eun needs to do is reveal the truth, and Hye Jeong will be left destitute. But we believe that she is going to do more than that. After all, it was Hye Jeong who had gotten the others access to the gym, which was Dong Eun’s place of torment.
We believe that Hye Jeong will continue to be a pawn in Dong Eun’s game until the point where she can turn to nobody for help, and then she will play her card against her. But Sa Ra and Hye Jeong are still the easier people to deal with. The real challenges are Jae Jun and Yeon Jin. Jae Jun was not only violent towards Dong Eun, but he sexually harassed her as well. His dream had always been to be “filthy rich.” His second weakness is the daughter he has recently discovered he has. Those are the cards Dong Eun is likely to play, along with his insecurity about his colorblindness. Dong Eun will definitely use his weaknesses against him. He wants custody of Ye Sol, and Dong Eun has promised to help him with that. In that process, we wouldn’t be surprised if she finds a way to leave him penniless and expose his color blindness to the world. There won’t be a greater humiliation for Jae Jun. However, we don’t believe that she will ever harm Ye Sol, but she might threaten to, and that will provoke Yeon Jin. We saw in the first episode of “The Glory” Part 1 that Dong Eun has finally let her scars show and is ready to attack Yeon Jin. That will certainly come at a point when Yeon Jin is left without her husband and her child. She loves them the most in the world, and their loss would affect her like nothing else. Losing her husband would also mean losing her job, and once Ye Sol finds out about her mother’s actions, she will lose all love and respect for her. Taking away Yeon Jin’s family means shattering her dream and her entire life, and Dong Eun has figured that out. She has tediously set the pieces in place through these eight episodes. We just have to see how she starts playing them when “The Glory” Part 2 comes out in March.
See More: ‘The Glory’ Ending, Explained: Why Did Yeo-Jeong Seek Revenge? What To Expect In Part 2?
