Shin’s Project Season 1: The Moment Han Suk-kyu Realizes Min Sung-wook Knows the Truth About His Son

Shin's Project started as a low-key drama about a former crisis negotiator flipping chicken and cooling down neighborhood beefs. Now it has quietly turned into a revenge thriller with a money trail, a fake mental hospital plot, and one very personal manhunt for the truth about a dead son.

Where Shin started vs. where he is now

Han Suk-kyu plays Shin Jae-yi, once the guy you called when hostages were on the line. These days he runs a fried-chicken joint and keeps the peace on his block. But everything he does is still haunted by what happened 15 years ago: his son, Joon, died during a hostage negotiation that Shin himself led. He could not save him, and he has been living with that failure ever since.

Back then, the main suspect was Yoon Dong-hee (Min Sung-wook). Dong-hee was caught and placed in a psychiatric hospital. That should have been the end of it. It was not. Shin later figures out Dong-hee has been faking his condition and even slipped out of the facility. With Detective Choi Cheol in his corner, Shin follows the breadcrumbs to the hospital director, Lee Heo-joon, who turns out to be the guy pulling strings behind the scenes. Very TV-drama, yes, but the show sells it.

The money trail that changes everything

Episode 8 is where the investigation stops being a hunch and turns into a spreadsheet. Shin digs up financials that connect Dong-hee to a pattern of dead people and suspicious deposits. None of the transfers point directly to Joon's case, which is maddening, but the pattern is impossible to ignore.

• Three large deposits land around the deaths of people who crossed paths with Shin's investigations.
• On the days those people died, big amounts were also wired overseas.
• Dong-hee sits in the middle of that web, which makes him feel less like a patsy and more like a keyholder.

Convinced the answers run through Dong-hee, Shin flips the script. He uses himself as bait to flush him out. Dong-hee shows up to finish the job, but Shin is faster; he gets him tied up instead. The chicken-shop peacemaker drops the nice-guy mask, and the show steps into a colder, more violent world of corrupt deals and buried secrets.

So what actually happened to Joon?

The only thing that is clear is what we already know: 15 years ago, Joon died during a hostage standoff that his father led. Everything else is back under the microscope. With Dong-hee in the room and Lee Heo-joon in the background, the series is now pointing at a larger setup. The deposits suggest multiple deaths were part of a system, not random tragedies. There is even the unsettling possibility that the original hostage crisis was staged, or at least manipulated, to cover something bigger.

What the finale is setting up

We are headed for a face-to-face that should finally crack open what Dong-hee knows about Joon's death. Expect answers about the offshore transfers, who ordered what, and how far the cover-up goes. More than that, the show looks ready to strip Shin down to the bone: not Shin the legendary negotiator, but Shin the father who has carried the same loss for 15 years and is done being polite about it. Some threads will tie off; do not be shocked if a new arc pops up right as the door closes.

Shin's Project Season 1 Episode 12 drops October 28, 2025 on Viu. If you have theories about the deposits or think the original hostage crisis was a setup, I want to hear them.