Stream It Or Skip It: ‘D.P.’ Season 2 on Netflix, Where A Young Military Policeman Encounters A Culture of Bullying In The Korean Army

In the South Korean series D.P. (Netflix), short for “Deserter Pursuit,” members of a special unit within the Korean army’s military police division are tasked with chasing down and apprehending individuals who flee their mandatory military service. AWOL personnel can have various reasons for being so. But D.P. is an exploration of the most glaring cause, which is the extreme hazing and bullying it depicts as running rampant within army ranks. D.P, created by Han Jun-hee and Kim Bo-tong, was adapted from Kim’s webtoon D.P. Dog’s Day.  

D.P. – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Private Ahn Joon-ho (Jung Hae-in) is remembering the events of last season, when Jo Suk-bong (Cho Hyun-chul), a deserter and his friend, put a gun to his head after taking a hostage. “Stay alive and take responsibility” were Jo’s last words to Joon-ho. 

The Gist: In D.P.’s telling, the culture within the ROK Army is completely toxic. At the barracks level, individual soldiers are relentlessly hazed and bullied by their comrades, called out for any perceived flaw, ostracized, and forced to serve or do the work of anyone stronger than them. As the country’s military code reads, “Every male citizen of the Republic of Korea shall faithfully perform mandatory military service.” But to do that is often a harrowing journey. Some don’t survive it. Others flee. And that’s where Joon-ho and his friend Corporal Han Ho-yeol (Koo Kyo-hwan) come in. As members of the Deserter Pursuit unit, they leave the base in street clothes to try and track down AWOL soldiers however they can. Joon-ho is quiet and dedicated. But in his mind, he’s counting down the days to his own discharge.

That damaged culture doesn’t stop with the grunts. At the official inquiry into Jo Suk-bong’s suicide, D.P. Sergeant Park Beom-gu (Kim Sung-kyun) is pressured by an officer who outranks him to acknowledge a different version of what went down. “We need to cover it up, OK? If you don’t sign the statement, this goes to court, our division will be done for, and we will both be screwed.” The higher-ups want Park’s suicide to be written up as an episode of mental illness, when everybody knows he was relentlessly bullied by members of his unit, to the point that he completely broke down. 

For Joon-ho, it’s enough to do the work of tracking down deserters and keep his nose clean, even though he too is constantly provoked. He refuses to fight back, though, further alienating him from the others. With Ho-yeol on extended medical leave, Joon-ho is given a new partner, a seemingly meek private who turns out to have a father who pulled some strings to get him into the D.P. unit because it sounded like a gravy assignment. But then a soldier in an infantry battalion reaches his own breaking point. He saw it drive his friend Beom-gu to suicide. Now, subjected to constant torture over his weight by members of his unit, he opens fire, and the mass shooting puts Sergeant Park’s inquiry hearing on hold. Park taps Joon-ho to locate the escaped shooter, but to do that, he’ll need to first spring Ho-yeol from the military hospital. He needs his old partner back.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In the romantic drama Crash Landing on You, a wealthy South Korean woman is aided by a North Korean army officer after she mistakenly crosses the border with her paraglider. And in the South Korean series Search, which premiered in 2020, an elite unit tracks murders, disappearances, and the presence of a mysterious creature causing havoc in the DMZ.

Our Take: At the center of D.P. is a resigned performance from Jung Hae-in as Private Ahn Joo-ho, a man of few words who nevertheless informs us about the broken systems inside the Republic of Korea’s military ranks. And the frustrating thing to learn is that it’s mostly a can’t win for losing situation. Joon-ho, who often seems to be the only one who’s actually doing any work in his unit, is nevertheless the butt of jokes and a target for hazing. Forced to fix a boiler he already repaired, Joon-ho heads to the physical plant with his tools, only to be jabbered at hatefully by a group of soldiers gathered there for a smoke break. How dare his intrusion. And later, when another corporal is ridiculed for pursuing Suk-bong and supposedly making his unit look bad because of it, the bullies who drove him away in the first place make themselves the persecuted. “Why are you acting like a victim? You bullied him.” But all he gets for standing up is more grief and kicks to the groin. 

D.P. is, in other words, can be quite the sour watch. But it’s revealing too, in how it illuminates the entrenched culture of a conscripted military that won’t face accountability, actively ignores these endemic issues, and is riven with corruption in its higher ranks of command. As Joon-ho and Ho-yeol find themselves pursuing the mass shooter, they’re also at the vanguard of exposing that culture to society at large. Whether that does anything to clean it up remains to be seen here in season two.

Sex and Skin: None. But there are numerous scenes that depict suicide as well as mental and physical abuse. 

Parting Shot: Han Ho-yeol hears about the mass shooting on the army base while convalescing in the hospital where he’s been for months. Staring at the news report on the television in his ward, Ho-yeol recalls questioning Private Kim in the wake of Cho Suk-bong’s desertion. Ho-yeol knows it’s time for him to get back in the deserter pursuit game.

Sleeper Star: Kim Sung-kyun plays Sergeant Park Beom-gu with a likeable coarseness. His nature puts him at odds with the army’s command structure, but offers allyship and a little bit of mentoring for the young privates and corporals in the D.P. unit, and injects some levity into this often dour series. 

Most Pilot-y Line: “I should at least do something.” It’s a line that runs through both seasons of D.P., representing what makes individuals driven to their breaking point by bullying snap and cause harm, either to themselves or fellow servicemembers. To them, it becomes a last, desperate means of breaking the army’s toxic culture.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Jung Hae-in and Kim Sung-kyun are bright spots in D.P., a military drama that calls out some truly ugly behaviors that have become commonplace in the Korean army. We’ll be rooting for their characters to try and make a difference, but they’re up against some serious and powerful odds. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges