The Tyrant is aggressively complex for a show with a relatively simple story, and the ending of its brief four-episode first season contains almost all of the payoff. Episode 4 is stuffed with action and revelations and is much too dark to see anything very clearly. So, allow us to break it all down for you.
Since there aren’t very many episodes and they all move at a pretty breakneck pace, lots of the characters and concepts introduced in the first chapter don’t pay off until the last one, so just be aware that everything’s a little jumbled and weird. But we’ll do what we can, obviously.
The Basics
First thing’s first, here are the particulars. The titular Tyrant is a bioweapon that various world governments – though particularly the U.S. and South Korea – want to get their hands on for the usual reasons. Choe is the guy who wants to keep the Tyrant in Korea, and his employees work to that end. Mo-yong is one of them, and another is Lim, who is essentially a hitman instructed to clean up all evidence of the affair in as violent a manner as possible.
The ostensible protagonist is Ja-gyeong, a young woman with dissociative identity disorder – her alternate personality is her twin brother – which finally comes to matter in the finale, but more on that in a minute. The U.S. chief representative is a guy named Paul, rather comically.
By the time we reach Episode 4 of The Tyrant, Ja-gyeong is very angry about various things, and Paul has Choe dead to rights. That’s where we’ll pick things up.
Ja-gyeong and Lim Team Up And Ja-gyeong Gets “Infected”
The Tyrant | Image via Hulu/Disney+
Ja-gyeong and Lim start the episode trying to kill one another until they’re united under the same banner when the latter gets a message instructing him that Mo-yong has surfaced. Killing Mo-yong and Paul takes priority, so Ja-gyeong and Lim can resume their own fight to the death later. Needs must.
During a fight with the Alligator, the Tyrant vial gets broken and the black tendrils snake up into Ja-gyeong. Finally, her dissociative identity disorder comes to matter, since her split personality seems to cause the bioweapon to interact with her in a unique way. She isn’t a mindless killing machine and retains autonomy. In fact, she – or her brother, I guess – pitches an idea to Lim to continue going after Paul and Mo-yong.
In this, at least, they’re successful. They make it to the safe house where Paul is holding Choe and get into it. Lim ends up killing Paul, and Ja-gyeong gets her revenge on Mo-yong. But there’s more to come.
Choe and Lim’s Fates Ensure The Secrecy of The Tyrant
It is important that neither Choe nor Lim survive, since they both know too much about the Tyrant. With them out of the way, the secret is contained.
This happens immediately after the above events. Ja-gyeong has been fully consumed by the Tyrant virus, though it hasn’t taken control of her, as it usually does when it reaches the brain. Instead – again, because of the DID – it has manifested as a kind of third internal personality, a bit like Venom. Even bright light, the Tyrant’s only real weakness, is largely ineffective against Ja-gyeong.
Choe wants Ja-gyeong to get gone so she isn’t captured by the NIS. When Director Sa arrives with a bunch of goons, Choe smartly deduces that they’re actually working for Head One, and Lim takes a bunch of them down before receiving several bullet holes for his trouble and jumping out of a window into the river.
Choe recognizes he is the only living person who can reveal where Tyrant is, and Sa’s threats of torture seem pretty convincing, so Choe commits suicide to protect the secret.
Ja-gyeong’s Connection To The Witch
The Tyrant ends, surprisingly, with a 15-years-earlier epilogue that depicts a young, bloody Ja-gyeong arriving on the doorstep of her “father”, Mr. Chae. He cleans her up, feeds her, and takes her in. What does this mean?
It is likely that Ja-gyeong was one of the escaped test subjects in The Witch, which is a more explicit connection than the mercenary crossover. It would also explain some questionable plot elements from earlier, such as Ja-gyeong’s improbable survival of seemingly fatal events, and would partially explain why she has such a unique relationship with the Tyrant, though I do suspect that’s primarily attributable to the DID.
With this and many questions left unanswered, the ending of The Tyrant could be seen as a frustrating one, especially given the show’s limited series designation makes Season 2 unlikely. But Park Hoon-jung has already crossed mediums to tell a side story in the universe already established by the films, so there’s every chance that we could see a continuation of some kind in a different form.
