Anjelle
This review may contain spoilers
I really wanted this to be good
Coming off of shows like Sweet Home and Happiness that did survivalist horror so well, I had expectations for this. They weren't that high and I wasn't expecting another Sweet Home out of a traditional zombie apocalypse story, but I was anticipating a fun, off-the-walls zombie flick that would keep me entertained for a few hours. And it did! At first. Let me explain.
The drama starts off great with some well-shot, high-action scenes and a lot of unabashed gore and really gets you into it. You don't really know much about the characters other than a few facts thrown at you, but hey, it's zombies, most of them won't survive anyway. So I got really into it at first. The mystery surrounding the source of the virus wasn't all that interesting and immediately felt like a half-baked origin story, but it was good enough for the B-horror I was expecting.
Problems stemmed when time started to pass. The initial mayhem was brilliant but after a certain point, when the characters start talking about being hungry and thirsty, issues arose. The characters explicitly explain to one another what would happen if they didn't eat or find water soon. Then, well. They don't find any. What would normally be an important plot point in other zombie shows becomes a moot point here. They drink some rainwater at some point, each takes a bite out of a candy bar and that's about it. They talk about being hungry but show no signs of getting weaker or being malnourished, and their only goal throughout the series is to get rescued, never to find food or water.
The show has a LOT of B-plots and side characters that never have any satisfying conclusions. They introduce a bunch of characters that you think will be fleshed out or explained later but never are. And there are a LOT of plot holes. For instance:
1. The pregnant student is shown heavily in the first episodes. Her identity isn't explained and we know nothing about her aside from her giving birth and tying herself up with ribbon (just ribbon, yet somehow she doesn't break free) to keep from hurting her baby after she turns. That's it. She was there to add drama and tension but she wasn't added with a plot or reason. Shock value, at most.
2. On Jo's father is keyed up to be the man who will save the day. In early episodes, On Jo talks about how her father promised to be there for her if anything happened to her, that he would save her, and throughout most of the series, he does everything in his power to see that through. Most of the scenes we get of his character are him making his way to her school, so naturally, we expect the reunion to be a big, key point in the series, right? They've built it up that way. But no. He dies about 7 minutes after reuniting with her. In fact, their reunion is used as the big cliffhanger for one of the episodes, only for him to be turned into a zombie at the very beginning of the next. It was one of the biggest letdowns of the series and leaves a sour taste in your mouth when you realize that his entire purpose was just to build up tension. To add insult to injury, his 'noble sacrifice' was unnecessary. After he threw the first flare, the zombies ran to it and cleared a path for everyone to escape safely. Throwing more and not escaping was pointless.
3. The bullied girl had no character arc. She is one of the few intelligent zombies we get throughout the drama and so I expected something big to happen with her, but she just wandered around on her bike after trying and failing miserably to burn down the school. Then when I saw she reached the quarantined zone, especially after she bit her schoolmate, I expected all hell to break loose there. Nope. She was subdued. The whole point of her was to show the military that asymptomatic infections were a thing so that they would abandon the main cast at the school. Great storytelling.
4. Cheong San's mother. They had her do a little rescue mission only for her to fail at every obstacle. Her entire role was to leave a vehicle for the policemen to use (they could have just had one there from someone else, there was no reason to use a character for that) and to get to the school so that her son could be sad that she was a zombie. That's it.
5. Gwi Nam as the main antagonist of the series worked for a little while, but he got old pretty quickly as he never did much of anything. He'd show up, attack, they would 'kill' him and he'd come back after healing only to find they'd moved. Not that big of a threat, really.
6. The police officers, especially Song Jae Ik, were a great addition to the cast. I thought. Jae Ik was there from the start, saw Byeong Chan, and had the task of finding the laptop, so I naturally thought he'd be one of the few adults in this that would actually help the kids. Nope. Not what happened. He saves the baby and another random little girl, sure, but the moment the military saves them, he just dips out of the story. You see his face once or twice after that and that's it. He had fewer scenes and yet a better role in Happiness.
7. There was literally no point to the streamer. At all. Why was he in the story? He did absolutely nothing. Not one thing. And then he disappeared with the police officers.
8. The girl (I don't remember her name) who used her handkerchief to infect another student. She escaped, hid away in a storage room, was having a change of heart and was going to bring supplies to the others (and hey, that would have helped with that one plothole, wouldn't it?) and then she's killed off randomly. I didn't like her and don't care that she died, but if they were going to do that, they could have just had her die right away in the halls.
9. When Gwi Nam bit Nam Ra, she became an intelligent zombie. Everyone else he bit became regular zombies. How does that make sense? The strain that's passed on should be the one that he has, so logically, everyone he bites should become an intelligent zombie. What, is the virus prejudiced?
10. When Byeon Chan turned, he didn't look like a normal zombie. It looked like he became an intelligent zombie. This is never addressed, and we never find out either way. Maybe they just did it that way for dramatic effect? Not a good move.
11. What was the point of the assemblywoman? Why was she in the story at all?
12. In the end we see Nam Ra seemingly well-adjusted after being out on her own for a few months. How? How is that possible? When we last saw her, her hunger was so bad that she tried to bite On Jo and left because she could no longer hold herself back. So how is it that she's perfectly fine around them now, and that her eye has healed? It doesn't explain anything about that. It just leaves it off trying to make us think she's a cool badass zombie-fighter now, but I'm just left with questions.
I know I'm missing some, but you get my point.
Most of the plot was jumping from one closed-off room with no resources to another. A few ideas they actually do have are foiled by what's going on in the outside world, like phone lines and the internet being cut off. It was fine at first, but the kids never got any smarter and never adjusted to the zombies, so that's all we ever got. To the very end, they had absolutely no control over the situation, which isn't what you want to see in a zombie series.
I have a lot of gripes with this drama, to the point that it negatively impacted my viewing experience. But like I said, it was fun at first. I do recommend at least watching the first half because some of it is a lot of fun, but don't expect anything more than a few good scenes and some light comedy in the first few episodes. After that, decide for yourself if you want to suffer through the mess that is the second half.
The drama starts off great with some well-shot, high-action scenes and a lot of unabashed gore and really gets you into it. You don't really know much about the characters other than a few facts thrown at you, but hey, it's zombies, most of them won't survive anyway. So I got really into it at first. The mystery surrounding the source of the virus wasn't all that interesting and immediately felt like a half-baked origin story, but it was good enough for the B-horror I was expecting.
Problems stemmed when time started to pass. The initial mayhem was brilliant but after a certain point, when the characters start talking about being hungry and thirsty, issues arose. The characters explicitly explain to one another what would happen if they didn't eat or find water soon. Then, well. They don't find any. What would normally be an important plot point in other zombie shows becomes a moot point here. They drink some rainwater at some point, each takes a bite out of a candy bar and that's about it. They talk about being hungry but show no signs of getting weaker or being malnourished, and their only goal throughout the series is to get rescued, never to find food or water.
The show has a LOT of B-plots and side characters that never have any satisfying conclusions. They introduce a bunch of characters that you think will be fleshed out or explained later but never are. And there are a LOT of plot holes. For instance:
1. The pregnant student is shown heavily in the first episodes. Her identity isn't explained and we know nothing about her aside from her giving birth and tying herself up with ribbon (just ribbon, yet somehow she doesn't break free) to keep from hurting her baby after she turns. That's it. She was there to add drama and tension but she wasn't added with a plot or reason. Shock value, at most.
2. On Jo's father is keyed up to be the man who will save the day. In early episodes, On Jo talks about how her father promised to be there for her if anything happened to her, that he would save her, and throughout most of the series, he does everything in his power to see that through. Most of the scenes we get of his character are him making his way to her school, so naturally, we expect the reunion to be a big, key point in the series, right? They've built it up that way. But no. He dies about 7 minutes after reuniting with her. In fact, their reunion is used as the big cliffhanger for one of the episodes, only for him to be turned into a zombie at the very beginning of the next. It was one of the biggest letdowns of the series and leaves a sour taste in your mouth when you realize that his entire purpose was just to build up tension. To add insult to injury, his 'noble sacrifice' was unnecessary. After he threw the first flare, the zombies ran to it and cleared a path for everyone to escape safely. Throwing more and not escaping was pointless.
3. The bullied girl had no character arc. She is one of the few intelligent zombies we get throughout the drama and so I expected something big to happen with her, but she just wandered around on her bike after trying and failing miserably to burn down the school. Then when I saw she reached the quarantined zone, especially after she bit her schoolmate, I expected all hell to break loose there. Nope. She was subdued. The whole point of her was to show the military that asymptomatic infections were a thing so that they would abandon the main cast at the school. Great storytelling.
4. Cheong San's mother. They had her do a little rescue mission only for her to fail at every obstacle. Her entire role was to leave a vehicle for the policemen to use (they could have just had one there from someone else, there was no reason to use a character for that) and to get to the school so that her son could be sad that she was a zombie. That's it.
5. Gwi Nam as the main antagonist of the series worked for a little while, but he got old pretty quickly as he never did much of anything. He'd show up, attack, they would 'kill' him and he'd come back after healing only to find they'd moved. Not that big of a threat, really.
6. The police officers, especially Song Jae Ik, were a great addition to the cast. I thought. Jae Ik was there from the start, saw Byeong Chan, and had the task of finding the laptop, so I naturally thought he'd be one of the few adults in this that would actually help the kids. Nope. Not what happened. He saves the baby and another random little girl, sure, but the moment the military saves them, he just dips out of the story. You see his face once or twice after that and that's it. He had fewer scenes and yet a better role in Happiness.
7. There was literally no point to the streamer. At all. Why was he in the story? He did absolutely nothing. Not one thing. And then he disappeared with the police officers.
8. The girl (I don't remember her name) who used her handkerchief to infect another student. She escaped, hid away in a storage room, was having a change of heart and was going to bring supplies to the others (and hey, that would have helped with that one plothole, wouldn't it?) and then she's killed off randomly. I didn't like her and don't care that she died, but if they were going to do that, they could have just had her die right away in the halls.
9. When Gwi Nam bit Nam Ra, she became an intelligent zombie. Everyone else he bit became regular zombies. How does that make sense? The strain that's passed on should be the one that he has, so logically, everyone he bites should become an intelligent zombie. What, is the virus prejudiced?
10. When Byeon Chan turned, he didn't look like a normal zombie. It looked like he became an intelligent zombie. This is never addressed, and we never find out either way. Maybe they just did it that way for dramatic effect? Not a good move.
11. What was the point of the assemblywoman? Why was she in the story at all?
12. In the end we see Nam Ra seemingly well-adjusted after being out on her own for a few months. How? How is that possible? When we last saw her, her hunger was so bad that she tried to bite On Jo and left because she could no longer hold herself back. So how is it that she's perfectly fine around them now, and that her eye has healed? It doesn't explain anything about that. It just leaves it off trying to make us think she's a cool badass zombie-fighter now, but I'm just left with questions.
I know I'm missing some, but you get my point.
Most of the plot was jumping from one closed-off room with no resources to another. A few ideas they actually do have are foiled by what's going on in the outside world, like phone lines and the internet being cut off. It was fine at first, but the kids never got any smarter and never adjusted to the zombies, so that's all we ever got. To the very end, they had absolutely no control over the situation, which isn't what you want to see in a zombie series.
I have a lot of gripes with this drama, to the point that it negatively impacted my viewing experience. But like I said, it was fun at first. I do recommend at least watching the first half because some of it is a lot of fun, but don't expect anything more than a few good scenes and some light comedy in the first few episodes. After that, decide for yourself if you want to suffer through the mess that is the second half.
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