Trigger Warning: Thoughts on Trigger

Zafnah Unaisah ’26

I recently watched my first drama of the year, and I can’t stop thinking about it. By the time the final episode ended, my thoughts were a complete mess. I followed my usual post-show routine, seeking for some form of clarity—endlessly scroll through Reddit threads, watch reaction videos, and spam repost melancholic edits—but somehow, I became more confused than before. Typically, I tend to agree with the general consensus online, yet the criticisms floating this time around did not quite correspond to my experience of the show. For the record, I’ve been a serial drama watcher for six years now, so I’d like to think I have a decent idea of what makes this one compelling. Also, fair warning: this article contains spoilers!

The drama Trigger (premiered on July 25, 2025) imagines South Korea, a country long known for its public safety and strict gun control, becoming increasingly unstable as illegal firearms from overseas begin to flood the nation. There is one shooting after another, often carried out by characters pushed to their limits: whether that’s a stressed, anxious student studying for the police exam, or a mother who lost her son to labor exploitation. A society once defined by its security becomes unrecognizable. The antagonist Moon Baek orchestrates this entire fiasco to see the demise of the country that once abandoned him—but oversimplifying his motivations would be a disservice.

Yet much of the criticism surrounding Trigger dismisses its characterization as lackluster and reduces its portrayal of gun violence in Korea to shallow revenge fantasies. The issue isn’t that the drama is flawless—it isn’t—but many critics seem to miss what the series is actually trying to confront. Trigger engages with elements that are often uncomfortable to talk about, particularly human desperation and the impulses that follow. While Baek endured an awful childhood and a lifelong exposure to violence, his decision to flood Korea with firearms is not just a personal vendetta. He ultimately exposes that when people are cornered and stripped of options, a gun becomes their refuge, a last grasp of agency in their life. Baek forces a society built on the fragility of safety to face the people it has long chosen to discard. When someone perceived as weak has a trigger at the tip of their fingers, they are finally seen as an equal, or even above those who dismissed them. It is only under the threat of violence that their intrinsic human value is acknowledged at all. And at the heart of Baek’s actions lies the concept of human will. He does not force anyone’s hand nor does he manipulate their choices. He simply hands them the gun and leaves the decision of pulling the trigger entirely to them.

Nonetheless, the ending is not a definitive resolution—which can be dissatisfying to the audience I acknowledge—so much as it is bittersweet. The chaos of gun violence without regulation ensues and there is a quiet acknowledgement that South Korea may never return to the safety it once knew. Yet the show makes it clear that violence is a matter of choice through characters like the cop Lee Do and the nurse Park So Hyeon who refuse to pull the trigger.

Now let me offer my two cents as to why I don’t believe this is a wack ending. I watched Trigger as someone who, for all her life, has lived in the U.S., a place where gun violence is not a distant hypothetical as it is for South Korea. Lockdown drills, safety protocols, and constant news alerts about school shootings are not once-in-a-lifetime events that we spiral over simply because they happen so often and in so many places. Gun violence has become integrated into the daily lives of Americans as something we’ve grown to prepare for whether we want to or not. Even with regulations in place that vary state by state, there is never a guarantee that a gun will be used in self-defense instead of harm, and that uncertainty is part of what we’ve learned to live with.

And this unresolved conflict of introducing guns to a country with strict gun control is precisely why the ending of Trigger makes sense. The show doesn’t pretend that everything can go back to the way it was because it can’t. Once a society’s sense of safety cracks, it becomes utopian to think it could ever fully return to the same state with so many variables and consequences at play.

Sure there are some unrealistic elements—like the antagonist magically getting a perfect blue-eye transplant that gives him 20/20 vision—but beyond that, the show forces viewers to sit with uncomfortable truths about desperation, agency, and the systems that push people to pull the trigger in the first place. It’s messy and unsettling—but maybe that’s exactly the point.