Dear X is a South Korean melo-thriller with 12 episodes that ran on TVING from November 6 to December 4, 2025. Kim Yoo-jung stars as Baek Ah-jin, a top actress caught in the center of it all. Kim Young-dae plays Yoon Jun-seo, and Kim Do-hoon takes on the role of Kim Jae-oh.
The show is based on Vanziun’s popular Naver Webtoon, and Lee Eung-bok directs, working alongside Park So-hyun.
By the time you get to the finale, Dear X has made it clear what you are watching. It’s a rise-and-fall tragedy, all centered on an anti-hero who refuses to play nice just to make you like her. The last episodes hit hard with three big moments: Jae-oh dies, Jun-seo betrays Ah-jin with an exposé that drops right in the middle of her awards night, and then there’s that car crash, off a cliff, leaving Ah-jin alive and Jun-seo either dead or barely hanging on.
Disclaimer: The article contains the writer’s personal opinions; reader discretion is advised.
Dear X: What the finale confirms, and why it feels like a mismatch
On the factual side, the ending of Dear X makes its point. The last act swings back to Moon Do-hyeok, a rich, domineering husband character, as Ah-jin becomes more and more entangled to the point where the people she cares most about become collateral. Jae-oh walks into death to reveal Do-hyeok, and the series presents it as a sacrifice, made even more unsettling by Ah-jin being aware of what is happening and still welcoming it.
Then Jun-seo, who had spent the story tied to Ah-jin since childhood, is involved in the takedown: the expose aired the same night she won a major award, and the public unmasking is complete. The “end” isn’t her repentance. It’s her survival. When Jun-seo drives them off the cliff, Ah-jin crawls out and leaves Jun-seo, choosing herself again.
Then why do so many viewers leave feeling that the Dear X finale is technically sound, but emotionally unsound? In my case, it is because the show takes most of its run time to deliver a promise, and then redeems it in another currency.
The promise is precision. Early Dear X is constructed like a character study with teeth: Ah-jin is depicted as calculating, socially fluent, and ruthlessly consistent. You may hate her decisions, but you can follow the logic behind them: the trauma as weapons of control, intimacy as leverage, and love as property.
The summary of the series by TIME (childhood violence, early career tragedy, adult downfall) shows the deliberate way the show raises her moral stakes as she acquires power. That was the happy ending I needed: not the happy ending, not the redemptive ending, but the ending that seems like the logical outcome of the very Ah-jin the show taught us to think of.
Rather, the ending we were provided with relies on two decisions which (in my opinion) undermined that promise.
First, the ending asks us to believe that Ah-jin does something that TIME describes as an “uncharacteristically unconsidered move” when she marries Do-hyeok. This is important since when your protagonist is a player of strategic moves, then the climax of the story cannot be based on her losing it in a flash. You may write a disaster to a wonderful manipulator with all your heart, but it must be written with the same blade she has been sharpening throughout the season. When the plot requires that she be less sharp so that the endgame can occur, it may seem as though the writers are pushing her, not that she is pushing the story.
Second, Dear X end brings about consequences, big, dramatic, memorable, but they come with a whiff of narrative convenience. The death of Jae-oh is devastating at the time, but it also serves as a kind of switch that turns the story to its final lane. The last gesture of Jun-seo and his driving off the cliff should be considered as the final act of their toxic relationship, but the emotional math is hastened. When you are about to culminate something that big, then the audience must be able to sense it in their bones, not merely to know it in their brains.
The frustrating thing here is that the show is evidently capable of doing the part with the bones. Performance and atmosphere have been identified as the strengths of the Dear X on several occasions.
This is where the ending we deserved turns into a question of alignment, not just what happens in the end. I don’t need Ah-jin to be wrapped up in a moral package. If Dear X tried to give her a neat punishment, it would go against everything it has been saying. What I wanted was an ending that really nails down who she is, a final, chilling confirmation, without the story suddenly making her dumber or tossing in a last-minute twist just to force things to fit.
Edited by Sahiba Tahleel