Queen Mantis season 1 review — Motherhood, broken justice and the making of a reluctant legend

Queen Mantis arrives as more than another crime thriller. Across eight episodes, the series builds a fierce and unsettling portrait of what happens when a mother tries to protect her child in a world that refuses to help.

Queen Mantis begins with procedural intrigue and a string of new murders but grows into a story about survival, love twisted by pain and the way injustice breeds its own predators.

The finale set the internet buzzing with its cliffhanger, but the real power of the drama comes from the journey that leads there.

From the start, it asks what happens to victims abandoned by law and family. It answers with Yi-shin, a woman once powerless, now feared as The Mantis, and with Su-yeol, the son who builds his identity on rejecting her. Their relationship shapes every case, every hunt and every moral question the series raises.

The heart of Yi-shin’s motherhood

Yi-shin drives Queen Mantis far beyond simple thriller beats. She begins as an urban legend, a vigilante whispered about in fear, but the show slowly reveals the woman beneath the mask. Her childhood was stolen by an abusive father and a system that ignored every warning. Her mother died in fire, her pleas for help went unheard, and survival became a craft she had to learn alone.

Motherhood is the spine of her transformation. Yi-shin kills to clear paths she believes will keep her son safe. She loves Su-yeol with a ferocity that is also terrifying. The series does not turn that love into redemption. It keeps it messy and often destructive. Yet the emotion behind it is undeniable and makes the character unforgettable.

How broken justice creates vigilantes

Queen Mantis is as much about the system as it is about individuals. Police failure and societal silence form the soil where figures like Yi-shin grow. Each flashback and case reinforces how victims fall through cracks until they decide to act alone. The show asks what moral high ground remains when institutions abandon those they are meant to protect.

Su-yeol’s arc sits inside this question. He's a detective shaped by wanting to be the opposite of his mother, but his pursuit of justice is built on faith in structures that failed her. Season 1 of Queen Mantis dismantles that faith piece by piece. It does not excuse Yi-shin, but it forces both us and her son to see how a monster can be made, not born.

Performances and craft behind the impact

The power of Queen Mantis rests on more than story. Performances bring its emotional weight to life. The actress playing the current Yi-shin, Ko Hyun-jung, moves between simmering rage and raw collapse with precision.

The actor playing Su-yeol, Jang Dong-yoon, shifts from rigid certainty to vulnerable reckoning. Supporting roles, including Na-hee and Jung-yeon, ground the narrative and keep it sharp.

Direction and design build the show’s atmosphere. The camera stays close to faces and hands, letting pain register in small gestures. Firelight in the finale feels alive and threatening yet personal.

Sound design uses breath, footsteps and the faint scratch of pencil on prison paper to keep the human cost present even when plot mechanics speed forward. The production trusts its actors and its themes more than cheap shock.

A finale that shapes the next possible chapter of Queen Mantis

Season 1 of Queen Mantis ends with survival but no peace. Yi-shin lives, yet she is caged and stripped of her rights as a mother. Su-yeol saves her but remains marked by the truth he uncovered.

The murder of the section chief who once protected Yi-shin reopens everything the story has questioned about power and justice. Su-yeol and detective Na-hee come to her cell, looking for help against a killer the system cannot stop.

It's an ending that works as closure for the season’s emotional arc but also sets a powerful hook. A possible second season could explore Su-yeol forced to work beside the mother he once feared and Yi-shin deciding whether to hunt new predators or let the system fail again. The narrative has room to grow without undoing what this first chapter accomplished.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 scars carried like armor in a fight for survival.