The end of the first season of Hellbound ends on a surprising note. What should we understand from this final twist? Be careful, spoilers.
Be careful, spoilers. It is advisable to have seen the first season of Hellbound before continuing to read this article.
After the living dead in Last Train to Busan, Sang-Ho Yeon scrutinizes demons and faith in his Hellbound series, available on Netflix. This adaptation of the webtoon of the same name that he co-wrote is the unmissable new sensation on the platform.
Its starting point? A supernatural phenomenon that causes creatures to appear on Earth to kill certain human beings. Some of them who think that it is a divine manifestation to punish them for their sins and send them to hell group together worship, such as The New Truth or The Arrow Point.
In the first three episodes, we follow Jin Kyeong-hoon (Yang Ik-joon), a police officer investigating these supernatural events, and Jeonh Jin-soo (Yoo Ah-in), the charismatic cult leader of The New Truth. In the last three episodes, set five years later, it is now Bae Young-jae (Park Jung-min), a television producer, who fights against demons to prevent death to his baby who received a prophecy of damnation.
Jung Jaegu / Netflix
If the population realizes and ends up blindly following the cults and fearful of prophecies and the coming of demons, the final moments of the first season of Hellbound totally folds the cards and raises many questions.
Between messiah and return from hell
The damnation that Bae Young-jae’s baby received proves that human beings are cursed randomly and not because they have committed sins as claimed in The New Truth. Bae Young-jae and his wife’s fight to save their infant will turn everything upside down and their sacrifice will undermine the cult’s guidelines.
From the attack of the demons, only the baby survives while he was doomed and it was his parents, who risked nothing, who were decimated and sent to hell. This baby is the only survivor of a demon strike and people are going to see this child as a messiah and turn against The New Truth, which is made up only of evil and power hungry people.
People are aware of the lies of the deacons in worship, who claimed that original sin did not exist in their doctrine, which could have explained the damnation of the baby. Can this infant be the salvation of humans and the beginning of a new era?
Jung Jaegu / Netflix
Only a potential season 2, not yet officially ordered by Netflix, could answer this question. If Sang-Ho Yeon gets the green light for new episodes, he’ll also need to explain how and why Park Jeong-ja (Kim Shin-rok), the first woman whose death was filmed by The New Truth, is returned from hell.
In the last seconds of the last episode of season 1 of Hellbound, we see her come back breathlessly to the very place where she died, a place that has become sacred and a tourist attraction for followers of the cult. What did she experience during those years in the underworld? Will the other damned come back too?
And how will the population react to the returns of the damned and the miracle of the surviving baby? If Hellbound continues, she will surely descend even further into darkness and conspiracies since the series appears to be darker than the webtoon it is adapted from.
