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‘Flex X Cop 2’ Opens Higher Than Season 1
SBS’s Friday-Saturday drama “Flex X Cop 2” premiered on August 7 with a nationwide rating of 6.1 percent, up 0.3 percentage points from Season 1’s opening episode at 5.8 percent. The Seoul metropolitan area rating came in at 6.0 percent, with a peak of 6.9 percent, while the 20-49 demographic rating peaked at 2.1 percent. With Season 2 drawing a larger audience than the original series’ debut, the numbers confirm real interest in the follow-up season.
The show did not come out ahead in its head-to-head timeslot matchup, however. MBC’s “Married Woman Killer,” airing at the same time, posted a 8.3 percent rating, leaving “Flex X Cop 2” short of the top spot among weekend miniseries. The nationwide gap between the two shows stood at 2.2 percentage points. “Flex X Cop 2” improved on its own predecessor but opened at a disadvantage against its competitor — a result worth reading as two separate stories: the premiere number itself, and where it landed in the same-timeslot ranking.
A Detective Who Chased Cases Becomes the Target of Terror
Ahn Bo-hyun returns as Jin Yi-soo, the wealthy detective who puts both his fortune and his investigative skills to use. Jung Eun-chae plays Ju Hye-ra, a former counterterrorism ace who volunteered to lead Gangha Police Station’s Violent Crimes Team 1. Ju Hye-ra is also the so-called “devil instructor” who trained Jin Yi-soo. Their relationship blends tension carried over from his training days with their current investigation into the terror attacks, giving Jin Yi-soo a complicated dynamic with a woman who once put him through brutal training and now, as the team leader, must track down the person targeting him alongside him.
The season’s central shift lies in Jin Yi-soo’s position. The detective who chased cases in Season 1 becomes, in Season 2, the target of a serial terror campaign carried out by an unidentified figure. With the detective who is supposed to catch the culprit now also having to protect his own life, the investigation’s purpose and his personal crisis become one and the same. Because Jin Yi-soo is no longer gathering clues from outside the case but has become both the attacker’s target and a party to the investigation, predicting the culprit’s next move is now directly tied to his own survival.
In the first episode, Jin Yi-soo receives an anonymous message reading, “I have a gift for you,” while filming a documentary. He follows the message to the department store it points to and finds a homemade bomb waiting for him there. In the chaos, he ends up accidentally pressing the detonator himself, embarrassing himself in front of the film crew, though the bomb is narrowly defused. A second explosion later strikes the launch event for his whiskey brand. The culprit sends a message reading “ROUND2,” revealing that the two incidents were not a coincidence but a targeted, sequential attack against Jin Yi-soo.
Brother Jin Seung-ju Under Suspicion, Episode Ends With a Car Bomb
As Jin Yi-soo retraces who might hold a grudge against him, he begins to suspect his incarcerated brother, Jin Seung-ju. With Kwak Si-yang’s Jin Seung-ju placed under suspicion, the terror plot opens up the possibility of ties not just to Jin Yi-soo’s current investigation but to his own family. Having someone close to him become a suspect creates a different kind of tension than the usual hunt for an outside culprit. Still, the first episode leaves the question open, offering suspicion without confirming whether Jin Seung-ju was actually involved.
The episode closes with a time bomb discovered inside the car Ju Hye-ra was driving. Jin Yi-soo takes the wheel himself and speeds toward the Han River yacht marina. Following the homemade bomb at the department store and the explosion at the whiskey event, the Violent Crimes Team 1 leader moving alongside Jin Yi-soo is now placed in direct danger as well. The site of the attacks also shifts, from a department store and an event venue to a moving vehicle. As both the location of the bombs and the people under threat expand within a single episode, the show makes clear that the serial terror plot will be the driving story for the season.
The premiere’s 6.1 percent marks a higher starting point than Season 1, but it wasn’t enough to catch a same-timeslot competitor that posted 8.3 percent. Going forward, the show’s competitiveness will likely depend less on repeating explosive set pieces and more on why Jin Yi-soo became a target, where Jin Seung-ju really stands, and how Ju Hye-ra and Jin Yi-soo trace the connections between the attacks. The first episode’s string of bombs established the scale of the threat; what comes next has to give that threat a consistent reason.
Source: Mediafine, August 8, 2026.
