What happened to Jung-hwan after Reply 1988 ended?
Reply 1988 spent most of its run building Kim Jung-hwan up as the boy who'd marry Deok-sun, then handed her to Taek. Ten years later the show threw a reunion, and Jung-hwan spent it with his TV parents again.
In the show, Jung-hwan (Ryu Jun-yeol) becomes an Air Force pilot and loses Deok-sun (Hyeri) to his best friend Choi Taek (Park Bo-gum). tvN aired the finale on January 16, 2016, and it drew 18.8% nationwide, a cable record at the time, per Nielsen figures on Wikipedia. What it didn't give Jung-hwan was an ending of his own. The Korea Times' Kwon Ji-youn wrote the next day that the writers "forgot to give Jung-hwan a proper ending."
Off screen, the story kept going. Ryu went from a rookie that director Shin Won-ho had found in independent film to a star, and in December 2025 he came back for the show's 10th anniversary reunion.
How Jung-hwan's story ends
His last stretch of episodes moves fast:
- The career: He gets into the Korea Air Force Academy and graduates as a second lieutenant and pilot, a path the Korea Times describes as fulfilling his sickly older brother Jung-bong's dream.
- The confession: In episode 18, at a gathering of the five friends, he finally tells Deok-sun he loves her and offers her his academy graduation ring. Then he says he was joking.
- The husband: Deok-sun marries Taek. Jung-hwan drops from lead to supporting character within a few episodes, as Kwon put it, and is never given a romance of his own.
That episode 18 joke is the last real move Jung-hwan makes toward Deok-sun. The show spent 17 episodes making his feelings the most visible thing on the street, and then it let him take them back in one line.
Why fans still argue about it
The suspicion that the ending moved started before it aired. On January 9, 2016, a week before the finale, an industry source told reporters that Deok-sun's husband "has been determined" and that "the problem at hand is how the plot will unfold." One viewer told the Korea Times she believed the writers had changed the ending abruptly because of spoilers circulating online.
Hyeri has a different account. She said she learned during the second half of the shoot that Taek was the husband, when she asked the director why Deok-sun couldn't sleep after a canceled date with him. His answer was, "Because Taek is the husband."
"Duk Sun did not know Taek liked her."
— Hyeri, on Deok-sun's choice, via Soompi, January 2016
My read: Jung-hwan was too obvious to win. The whole Reply format runs on the guessing game over the heroine's husband, and a guessing game can't end on the boy everyone had already guessed. The writers built the obvious answer and then denied it, which kept the mystery alive and left one character holding a ring he called a joke.
Ten years later
Shin Won-ho and writer Lee Woo-jung took 15 cast members to Gangwon Province in October 2025 for a reunion trip, which tvN aired as a three-episode special starting December 19, 2025. Ryu missed the group trip because of a filming schedule, reportedly the Netflix thriller The Rat, but tvN said he adjusted his schedule to take part in portions of the shoot, per PhilSTAR Life.
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He spent his segment with his on-screen family, Ra Mi-ran, Kim Sung-kyun and Ahn Jae-hong. According to Tenasia, the family greeted him with "You said you couldn't come," and Ra Mi-ran picked up exactly where the show left off.
"You should call more often. Other people's sons call more."
— Ra Mi-ran, his on-screen mother, at the 10th anniversary reunion
A broadcast official confirmed that Ryu and Hyeri, who dated for six years after the show and split in 2023, were not filmed together. Ryu told the family he had to leave right after the opening shoot and said he was sad he couldn't stay longer.
Jung-hwan lost Deok-sun by waiting too long to say it. In 2025, his actor arrived after everyone else and left before the trip was over.