Summary
Weak Hero gets Class 2 off to a restrained start. In Episode 1, Si-eun tries his best to stay out of trouble, creating effective tension, but it’s very much a table-setting premiere.
Let’s be frank — there wouldn’t be a second season of Weak Hero if Si-eun wasn’t going to eventually beat the brakes off every bully in his general vicinity. But Class 2 opens in Episode 1 by dragging this reality out for as long as possible. It creates a premiere that effectively builds tension by promising an inevitable smackdown and then delaying it for the duration of the episode, but the ending, while still pulling its punches, suggests we won’t have to wait long before things kick off good and proper.
Class 2 also seems almost entirely divorced from Class 1; new school, new students, new bullies. The legacy of the first season’s events does hang over Si-eun, and Park Ji-hoon’s damp-eyed expression suggests a lot of lingering trauma, but plot-wise, we’re in new(ish) territory. The mechanics are simple enough, though. The school is rife with bullies, someone is going to have to deal with them, and that someone is going to be Si-eun.
But he’s reluctant. Since the events of Season 1, he has become haunted and withdrawn. He can’t sleep, is taking pills, and undergoing therapy, but what happened to Su-ho — who remains in a coma as far as we can tell — has led him to ostracise himself. He just wants to be left alone. And thanks to a mysterious reputation, he’s mostly able to do that. Until he isn’t.
As ever, there’s a top dog in the school, and in this case, it’s Hyo-man. Hyo-man’s running a pretty wide-ranging phone theft operation, using his many victims, particularly a bespectacled kid named Jun-tae, to steal his classmates’ phones and deliver them to him. The haul is then taken to a Big Bad-type named Seong-je, who operates out of an arcade, is blatantly a psycho, and seems to have a Hyo-man equivalent in every local school. One suspects that once Hyo-man is dealt with, focus will shift to Seong-je.
Choi Min-yeong as Seo Juntae in Weak Hero Class 2 Cr. Darae Lee/Netflix © 2025
Hyo-man is also wary of Si-eun because of his reputation for having killed someone in his previous school, and his very obvious lack of fear whenever Hyo-man is around. This isn’t good for a school bully’s personal brand, so he instructs Jun-tae to ensure he pilfers Si-eun’s phone. This is very much the inciting incident of Weak Hero Class 2, Episode 1. Jun-tae takes the phone, Si-eun immediately intuits he has done so and calls him a coward, and the accusation takes deep enough root that Jun-tae has a change of heart, recovers all of the phones, and returns them to the students.
This act of rebellion sends Hyo-man into a frenzy, and he brutally beats Jun-tae in front of everyone. Until, of course, Si-eun intervenes. But there’s no action in this premiere aside from a very brief imagined sequence in which Si-eun stabs Hyo-man and his goons when he sees them roughing Jun-tae up. This premiere is all about establishing the new setting and characters and building up to that inevitable moment at the end when Si-eun has realized there are only so many haunting flashbacks he can endure before he kicks the whole thing into gear again.
There isn’t a great deal to pick up on yet. Hyo-man is in debt to Seong-je, which will only worsen his antics in the short term, but he’s clearly at the bottom of a ladder with many ascending rungs. Jun-tae’s background is nebulous, but he’s clearly a decent guy who sees a potential saviour in Si-eun. He’s inspired by Newton’s Third Law, which is about how every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Si-eun is, of course, that reaction. But I suspect he’s going to be exerting more than equal force in return.
RELATED:
