Chicken Nugget (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Recap & Ending Explained: Does Min-ah Return to Life?

“Chicken Nugget” (Original title: Dakgangjeong) season 1 is a new Korean comedy mystery series streaming on Netflix. Based on Park Ji-dok’s book of the same name, this K-drama tells an absurd story – where a woman steps into a strange machine that turns her into a chicken nugget! The show follows her father and her admirer doing all they can to bring her back. It is written and directed by Lee Byeong Heon, and its cast includes Ryu Seung-ryong (“Moving”), Ahn Jae-hong (“Mask Girl”), and Kim Yoo-jung (“My Demon”) in the central roles. The show consists of ten 30-minute-long episodes.  

Spoilers ahead.

Chicken Nugget (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Recap:

What is ‘Chicken Nugget’ on Netflix about?

“Chicken Nugget” on Netflix has a hilarious premise where a woman miraculously turns into a chicken nugget after she enters a weird machine. Lee Byeong Heon developed this absurd concept into a 10-episode series that shows the woman’s father and her admirer do anything and everything to bring her back to life. Filled with many strange twists and turns, the show plays out like a mystery drama with several comedic bits. 

 Episode 1

Ko Baek-Joong (Ahn Jae-hong) is a doe-eyed, cheerful man, who works at the office of ‘More than Machines’. He wears vibrant colors –  a pink shirt, a blue sleeveless jumper, and yellow pants. Baek-Joong sports them regularly, as if they are a part of his dress code, although they are not. He loves singing so much that he sings across streets as if he is in a musical. On top of that, he has a crush on his boss, Choi Sun-man’s (Ryu Seung-Ryong) daughter, Choi Min-ah (Kim Yoo-jung). 

One day, Min-ah arrives at her father’s office with a box of chicken nuggets. Before eating them, she has a chat with Baek-Joong about their romantic desires. She sees the tall purple-colored box across the wall. Out of curiosity, she opens its door, walks in, and notices a button on the side. Min-ah clicks on that button and sees Baek-Joong holding a chicken nugget. She shouts – ‘chicken nugget,’ and then turns into one! It takes a few moments for Baek-joong to register and Sun-man to acknowledge what happened. 

What happens after Min-ah turns into a chicken nugget?

Baek-Joong and Sun-man try to find ways to reverse this transformation. They check for the box that the machine came in. By then, their colleague (Kim Nam Hee) started having his lunch. Baek-joong and Sun-man assume he ate all the chicken nuggets and start crying. The employee reveals he kept all of them inside the fridge. So, Baek-Joong and Sun-man take it out but cannot figure out which one of them is Min-ah. Baek-Joong decides to check the surveillance footage to see who dropped the box outside their store. In the video, they see the delivery man swearing at the camera. But his face is partially covered. So, Sun-man and Baek-Joong can’t know who he is. Suddenly, Baek-Joong recalls a way to find the answer. 

Episode 2 

Baek-Joong remembers that the delivery man is the same one who delivers chicken wings from a nearby shop. They reach his store but find it closed. A neighbor tells them that the owner got in an accident and died. She tells them a little more information about this delivery man. Later, they learn about the machine’s connection to award-winning scientist Professor Yoo (Yoo Seung Mok). In the past, this professor was grieving the loss of his dog. He conducted strange experiments on the same machine that transformed Min-ah into a chicken nugget.  

Baek-Joong and Sun-man decide to meet him. However, they can’t because Dr Yoo went missing a while ago. So, Sun-man emotionally manipulates a detective to give him the latest updates on Dr Yoo’s whereabouts. Through this research, he hopes to find the machine’s origins. Meanwhile, Baek-joong arrives at the chicken nugget store that Min-ah purchased a box from. He reveals that the store has a 200-year-old history. So, he hopes to meet the owner to find Min-ah. They tell the store manager about their concern. Instead of helping, she throws them out. During that accident, Sun-man loses grip on his chicken nugget box, leaving the nuggets flying all over the place. Sun-man and Baek-joong try to recover all the nuggets they can.

Episode 3 

When the box of chicken nuggets flies off, Sun-man and Baek-joon recover all the nuggets they find. Sun-man starts crying about his missing daughter, not knowing which nugget she is. Baek-joon’s ex-girlfriend, Hong Cha (Jung Ho-yeon), notices this. She learns that Sun-man’s daughter turned into a chicken nugget and offers her help to figure out which chicken nugget is Min-ah. Before they work out a solution, she and Baek-joon go on and on about how they met and how they fell in and out of love. Eventually, based on the tests of smell, texture, and toppings, she shows them which nugget is Min-ah. 

Baek-Joong and Sun-man spend loads of time theorizing where Min-ah might be. Eventually, Sun-man realizes that there is another machine similar to what they have in their store. While searching for it, he looks into the missing Professor Yoo. At Yoo’s house, he learns about his relative, who became a TV star, and about his nephew, who followed Yoo’s obsession with lab research. Meanwhile, Baek-Joong learns that the other machine might be sold out after Dr Yoo’s disappearance. So, Sun-man arrives at the scrapyard to look for it. By then, Baek-joong enters the machine in the store to check what can happen to him. After entering, he shouts, ‘Cha Eun-woo.’

Episode 4 

Baek-Joong enters the machine and shouts a name. But it doesn’t magically transform him into someone else. Afterward, he goes to a bookstore to find Dr. Yoo’s book on mechanics. Since the store manager is quite old, Baek-joong gets up on a ladder to get the book and accidentally falls on the ground. He wakes up in the middle of the night to learn that he is locked inside the store. The next morning, he leaves the store and returns to his office. Meanwhile, Sun-man spends an entire day in the scrapyard but doesn’t find the machine. So, he returns to his office.  

Later, they meet Dr Yoo’s research assistant, who was hired after Mr Kim had to leave that job. He shows them a picture on a crappy paper, which was supposedly 200 years old. Besides he also shares its brief historical record. Eventually, he also talks about Dr Yoo’s nephew, who also worked on this machine with Dr Yoo. While they have this conversation, someone steals the machine and the Min-ah / chicken nugget from their office. It turns out that the thief was Dr Yoo’s nephew, Yoo Tae-Man (Jung Seung Kil), who believed that he was just 25 years old.   

Episode 5

Tae-Man steals the machine and the chicken nugget from Sun Man’s store and returns to a desolate house. He keeps it next to another identical machine. Inadvertently, it brings Dr. Yoo back to life. We learn about Dr. Yoo’s history with Tae-Man. Since Tae-Man was a kid, Dr. Yoo was aware of his grasp of science. However, Tae-Man felt cuckolded by girls, while Tae Young (Park Jin Young) kept getting more famous. After his parents became unreliable, Tae-Man gravitated more toward learning from his uncle. They both became obsessed with the strange, transformative machine and added a tracking device in case they couldn’t find it. 

In the present, Sun-Man learns that the machine was misdelivered to them by a chicken nugget store manager. Back at the office, Tae-Man receives a call from Dr. Yoo, asking him to come meet at Tae-Man’s house. Tae-Man and Sun-Man meet Dr. Yoo and his nephew. Sun-Man takes out a gun to scare off the Yoos. Dr. Yoo offers to help Sun-Man. Suddenly, Tae-Man runs toward Sun-Man and behaves erratically. He starts using a spiritual mumbo-jumbo to stop Sun-Man from shooting them. Eventually, Tae-Man realizes that Sun-Man’s gun has no bullets in it.

Episode 6 

Baek-Joong and Sun-Man sit down to have a conversation with Dr. Yoo and Tae-Man and to learn about their histories with the strange machines. As the research assistant told Sun-Man, the machines are connected to a 200-year-old fable. After Dr. Yoo had gone missing, Tae-Man tried to find the machines by using the tracking device. He found one in the scrapyard and brought it to his house. Later, he overheard Baek-Joong and Sun-Man speak about a similar machine being left outside their ‘More than Machines’ store. So, he worked tirelessly to locate it.  

In the past, Dr. Yoo had found the machine in a pizza store. He entered the machine and saw a caterpillar on the side. Because of this, he turned into a caterpillar. For two years, he lived as a caterpillar in the apartment of Kim Bae-Dal, who lived a monotonous life and spent his days watching K-dramas. Being locked in his flat, Dr. Yoo has no option but to watch these shows with him. Soon after, Bae-Dal reads somewhere that the machine turns chicken into nuggets. He decided to experiment with a chicken. Accidentally, he turned Dr. Yoo into a zombie bird. So, he saw no other option but to leave his apartment, keeping the chicken locked inside. Later, he left the machine at the doorstep of Sun-Man’s store and eventually died in an accident.

Episode 7

Sun-Man and Baek-Joong request Dr. Yoo multiple times to bring Min-ah back to life. But Dr. Yoo refuses their pleas and instead poisons them and imprisons them. Dr. Yoo does not think it is immoral because that is the only way he can continue his research without government funding. While being locked up in Tae-Man’s warehouse, Baek-Joong opens up about his emotional struggles and how his father emotionally manipulated him to not pursue singing as a career, which was his dream.

Baek-Joong decided to rebel by wearing vibrant clothes. Still, it didn’t stop his father from being cruel to him. In the present, Sun-Man feels sorry for Baek-Joong. Together, they try to find ways to escape. Tae-Man gets a hint of their efforts, so he tortures them even more. While that happens, the chicken nugget store employees watch Baek-Joong’s viral video and start screaming. They recall that Baek-Joong visited their store with a man whose daughter turned into a chicken nugget.  

 Episode 8 

The eighth episode primarily follows a historical narrative from centuries ago. In 1801, the first year of King Sujo’s reign, the reigning queen strictly prohibited Catholicism. As a result, a local prodigy, Jeong Hyon-bong, had to learn the ways of a commoner. His past servants felt bad for him and kept helping him. One day, Hyong-bong noticed some strange, purple creatures appear in the woods with two machines – the same machine Dr Yoo was working on. One of these creatures entered a machine and suddenly turned into a human. Hyon-bong drew this strange incident on a piece of paper. But no one believed that it could happen. 

Soon after, Hyong-bong kidnapped a local, influential man and transformed himself into this person. Then, he turned the man into a stone. Right after, he left his devoted servants to get beaten up. He started living this other person’s life and enjoying the riches. Eventually, he got killed in the woods after his encounter with four people, i.e., the present-day employees of the chicken nugget store. In the present, these four people discover Tae-Man’s warehouse. Inside, Dr Yoo introduces Tae-Man to his robot dog and lets it attack Tae-Man. Moments after, Dr. Yoo gets attacked himself by his other creation. Then, the four people enter this warehouse to speak with Dr. Yoo. 

Episode 9 

The four people reveal that the two machines are theirs. They say that their race made these machines and that they are not entirely humans. Their leader – Baek-Jung (Kim Tae Hoon), says that he can make the machine work and offers his help. Somehow, it turns all of them against each other and results in an incredibly weird brawl. Sun-Man and Baek-Joong fight with the hope of bringing Min-ah back to life. Baek-Jung’s gang uses their magical powers to outwit others. But Sun-Man manages to win by Interstellar logic – ‘love transcends space and time’! In this case, it is his love for his daughter.  

Eventually, Baek Jung proposes to take Min-ah (the chicken nugget) to their world, transform her back to life, and then return. He reveals that one day on their planet is 50 years on Earth. Sun Man gets emotional. Suddenly, Dr Yoo plans to fight against these aliens. But Tae Man hits him from the back. Eventually, Sun Man accepts Baek Jung’s proposal, hoping it will resolve their issues. 

Episode 10

About 50 years after Baek-Jung’s departure from Earth, Baek-Joong became an accomplished singer. Turns out, his viral YouTube video made him an overnight sensation. Even at the age of 78, he manages to be young at heart and fill up several stadiums with his fans. One day, he looks outside his window at his fans. One of them resembles Min-ah. So, he immediately runs down the stairs to find her. Turns out, it is not Min-ah but someone, who looks like her. She holds a chicken nugget box and offers it to him. He takes a nugget and gets emotional about Min-ah’s memories. 

Chicken Nugget (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Ending Explained:

Does Min-ah return to life?  

While Baek-Joong becomes a popular singer, Tae-Man becomes a popular businessman and sells the hope of agelessness/eternal youth. It fulfills his goal of always looking younger than his biological age and of being famous. On the other hand, Sun-Man hands over his business to his other employee and starts living in the woods. One day, a purple alien appears in Baek-Joong’s house and offers an exciting opportunity. He can return 50 years in time to bring Min-ah back to life. Baek Joong accepts it. At the end of Netflix’s “Chicken Nugget,” Min Ha returns to life – after Baek Joong decides to return to the day she got transformed into a chicken nugget – even if it means he has to sacrifice his dream of a singing career.

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Chicken Nugget (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Trailer

Chicken Nugget (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Show Links: IMDb Wikipedia
Chicken Nugget (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Show Cast: Ryu Seung-ryong, Ahn Jae-hong, Kim Yoo-jung, Kim Nam Hee, Jung Ho Yeon