All of Us Are Dead S1E3
The character-focused stuff finally comes into its own in this episode, which is a big part of what makes it the strongest of the three so far. I'd probably go so far as to call it one of my favorite hours' worth of horror media period...were it not for this one incredibly bad, utterly baffling wall-banger of a gaffe that the plot unfortunately ends up hinging on. It's still good, still the best episode so far, but this one plot point had me fuming.
The episode begins with lost friend group member (and object of On-Jo's affections) Su-hyeok managing to regroup with the others. A dramatic and heartwarming reunion, and one of the closest things that the series has had so far to a heroic action sequence. After being separated from the others during the hall chase, Su-hyeok managed to escape the zombies by climbing out a window and sidling along the outside of the building. While there, he sees the group including On-jo, Cheong-san, introverted class president Nam-ra, and some others climbing between two lower floors to escape more zombies and unite with a surviving teacher. Cheong-san was the last of the kids to take the climb, and got grabbed as he brought up the rear, so there's a zombie hanging off of his leg that he can't manage to kick off. The athletic Su-hyeok needs to climb over to the others, drop down to their level, and help his best friend detach the zombie without falling or getting either of them bitten.
Calling this an "action scene" feels wrong, because of the unglamorous cinematography, lack of music, and realistically hot-and-cold pacing as they try to remove the thrashing attacker while also just sort of hanging there being perplexed. It feels a little too real - and also a little too realistically like two teenagers trying to help each other out of a mundane danger - to be categorized thus. But looking at the sequence of events, they kind of speak for themselves.
The faux-hostile bit of male bonding that Su-hyeuk and Cheong-san do as the others help them inside afterward is a heartwarming little tension release, too.
As a reminder, teenaged hormones have been straining this friend group. Cheong-san's long repressed crush on On-jo, On-jo's more recent and more obvious unrequited crush on Su-hyeuk, and Su-hyeuk's own unrequited crush on someone outside of the group has been making them resentful and mistrustful of one another to varying degrees. It seemed like it was just going to get worse when Su-hyeuk was presumed dead, and refreshingly crush-free stabilizing element I-sak turned. So, seeing Cheong-san and Su-hyeuk interact like this, after unthinkingly risking their lives to save one another, is refreshing and relieving. The kids still remember what's actually important.
The teacher that they just climbed down to, Sun-hwa, is an interesting point of comparison to the other adults we've met in this show.
As an early witness to the outbreak, she was one of the staff members pushing hardest for the ridiculous principle to stop turning the cops and emergency services' return calls away. She was also the one who saw the patient zero escape from Byeong-chan's lab and was instrumental in getting the former hospitalized and the latter arrested. We now see her doing an admirable job in trying to keep the kids calm and safe, even at great personal risk (more on that at the end). But, on the other hand, despite her good nature, Sun-hwa is also part of the problem. She put up only a brief argument against her lunatic boss before meekly falling into line and letting him doom them all. In this episode, we see her once again ultimately prioritize decorum and propriety over doing what she knows she should do, again with harmful results for everyone. Her character arc is almost certainly going to be a positive one, but she has a lot of self-examination to do over the course of it.
Anyway, as the group takes a moment to catch its breath and get its bearings, a new source of conflict appears in the form of...I don't feel like looking back through the subs to catch her name right now, and I remember that it sounded like Nyan, so that's what I'm going to call her.
Nyan is from a wealthy family, and that's pretty much all she has going for her, as her relentless snobbery and egotism push everyone (including fellow rich girl Nam-ra) away from her in a vicious cycle. She's been kind of a pain in the ass in the previous episodes, but she escalates now on account of all the attention Cheong-san and his friends are getting (Cheong is the one who climbed the rope last and almost died for it, and using that thing to climb down in the first place was also his idea). In particular, she has it in for a boy named Gyeong-su who's been playing support in Cheong-san and Su-hyeuk's heroics. Gyeong-su's family was evicted from the gentrifying neighborhood that Nyan's family move into, but they still cut through it all the time, which Nyan despises. Him being more popular than her on top of that is just insult added to injury. While everyone is on edge due to zombie horror, Nyan has the most unhealthy coping mechanism of the lot, just becoming over-the-top in her contempt and jealousy for Gyeong-su.
It starts when Nyan - apropos of almost nothing - calls Gyeong-su a classist slur. Provoking him enough to actually shove her. Prompting the teacher to both-sides them both into being nice and not demeaning themselves with their equally bad behavior. When the rest of the group doesn't turn against Gyeong-su for daring to lay hand on her (they're a little too grateful to him for being so helpful with the recent escape, and also Nyan was already getting on everyone's nerves by then), she starts sulking about how mean everyone is to her. When some members of the group, including Gyeong-su and the two other male leads, get roughed up a bit while fending off another attack on their new saferoom, Nyan sees an opportunity and plots some deranged revenge that only a disturbed teenager could have ever thought was a good idea.
And...this is also the WTF writing faceplant that I mentioned in the intro. I'll just summarize it as-is before I start explaining my problems with it.
Gyeong-su got his hand scratched up a little while fending off a zombie, and he also has a nosebleed from someone accidentally hitting him with the back of a broom-handle. Throughout the series, an infected person going zombiemode has usually (though not always) been preceded by bleeding out the faceholes. Seeing the hand injury and the nosebleed, Nyan exclaims that Gyeong-su must be infected and needs to be exiled ASAP.
She keeps insisting that he needs to be thrown out, they can't risk him turning while he's in the room with them. Most of the others are sceptical, and it doesn't escape their notice that Nyan has a huge chip on her shoulder about Gyeoung-su. Still, to assuage the urging of Nyan and a few other people who think she may have a point about being careful here, Sun-hwa firmly asks Gyeoung-su to lock himself in the sideroom for a little while where they can observe him through a small window. It seems to take anywhere from a few seconds to about five minutes for an infected person to turn (size and location of the bite appear to be correlative factors, but not the only ones), so if he's clean they'll be able to let him out pretty soon. Nyan then starts trying to negotiate about how long he needs to stay in time-out, and a disgusted Gyeoung-su finally declares that he'll just stay in for an hour to make sure she shuts up.
Cheong-san tries to cheer Gyeong-su up by playing a whistling game with him through the window, which has been a recurring thing with them. It helps a little, but not enough to get him to come back out. It's cute and heartwarming and stuff though, just like Cheong-san's friendly exchange of insults with Su-hyeuk was.
Sometime after the thirty minute mark, Sun-hwa reminds Nyan that she'd promised she would apologize to Gyeong-su if he seemed clean after thirty minutes. So, she reluctantly goes into the sideroom, approaches Gyeong-su concilliatorily, and cleans the wound on his hand with a handkerchief...only to then do a 180 and double down on the classist slurs and vicious insults. He gets mad, the others drag the two out, and then Gyeong-su starts showing genuine infection symptoms and has to be tricked into defenestrating himself using (tragically) his friend's own whistling to draw his attention and make him charge the open window.
Everyone is dazed at how he could have gone for more than half an hour without any symptoms at all before suddenly turning as soon as they brought him out again. Nyan blabbers about how she was right, she saved everyone just now. Fellow rich girl Nam-ra, however, is now sure that she isn't crazy, and that she really did see Nyan sneak off and rub her handkerchief on a pool of zombie blood before she went in to "apologize."
It doesn't take much social pressure to get Nyan to indirectly admit it. Which she does by rambling about how none of them are any better than her, the others ALSO made fun of Gyeoung-su for being poor, that's exactly the same thing as murdering him and quite possibly getting all the rest of them killed as well, stop judging her. When her guilt is made known and everyone turns on her, she flees the room to feed herself to the zombies before her classmates can kick her out themselves.
...
Okay, so. I like this in theory. I see what the show is trying to say in particular about the association of the urban poor with disease, angry mobs, and other fears that zombie media touches on. I like how the teacher trying to compromise with insane social elites even when she knows they're wrong just ends up hurting everyone. Nyan herself is a convincingly realistic kind of batshit insane that you can only ever get by combining "teenager," "insecure upper middle class," and "untreated hormone imbalance."
But...
If zombie blood getting into open wounds can indeed infect you, then she was fucking right to demand they quarantine him.
Both before AND AFTER this whole incident, we see all the characters nonchalantly standing around in blood-soaked clothes. Almost certainly zombie blood-soaked clothes.
Do we see anyone make an effort to clean themselves up and get the bloody garments away from themselves? No.
Do we see anyone frantically checking themselves for little scratches and cuts that could have gotten blood in them during their many recent zombie fights? No.
In my last post, I mentioned a chronic annoyance of mine with zombie media claiming that it's caused by a virus, but then not actually treating it like a virus. This episode of "All of Us Are Dead" repeats that trope right up until this scene, then suddenly DOES have the virus act like an actual virus, and then goes back to it not doing so again immediately afterward. And...it does all this while twisting around itself to make the one person actually pointing out the obvious viral contagion risks the bad guy. The show wants us to believe that Nyan was wrong to point out the risks earlier, but then her method of cheating to make herself seem right actually IN ITSELF proves that she wasn't wrong.
Frankly, he really should have been infected after getting scratched by a blood-covered zombie.
Like...is the show trying to do a sendup of a poorly thought-through zombie trope here, only to then forget what it was doing midway through? I'm baffled. Like, really truly confused by how the hell this got written and filmed without anyone realizing the problem.
Honestly? I sort of wish we could drop the entire concept of a "zombie virus" from pop culture entirely. These shows and movies never want it to actually behave like a virus. They want it to behave like evil magic. Which, oh hey, guess what, that's what zombies originally fucking were.
...
Anyway, the final scene of the episode has Sun-hwa run out after the suicidal Nyan to drag her back to safety even though she neither wants nor deserves it, on account of Sun-hwa taking her responsibility to protect all of her students to the best of her ability seriously.
We don't get to see if she succeeds or fails, but the last shot has a helicopter finally approaching the building, so the status quo will be changing either way.
Other things also happen in this episode, both elsewhere in the school and elsewhere in the city. The archery team members and some others are having their own little hunker-down, though it doesn't go anywhere just yet. We see the leader of the delinquents who kinda-sorta caused this whole mess in the first place, still evading the undead around the cafeteria area, throw the lunch lady into the middle of a zombie swarm to keep them busy while he escapes. More poignantly, there's a subplot involving On-jo's firefighter father being caught in a situation of his own when his team is sent to rescue the city council from another secondary outbreak.
Daddy On-jo is an odd one. In the pilot, we saw him tell his daughter that with her mediocre grades she shouldn't even bother trying to get into a good college...and also that that's perfectly okay, because not everyone needs to go to a top university, so she can just chill and do something trade-y. So, uh...good, I guess, maybe? In any case, he makes himself look much better now when he shuts down the city councillors' demands for priority evacuation and ensures that children and elderly get rescued first as per the letter of the law.
He's also tormented by the fact that he got sent to this outbreak instead of the school one. He still has no way of reaching his daughter.
On a similarly parental note, Cheong-san's chicken-frying mother sees the news about her son's high school being one of the major hotspots, and sneaks passed the police barricade to try to get to him. Only to run into a mob of zombies and (presumably; we don't get to see) infected.
Finally, and on the same theme, there's this one incredibly weird new subplot that...okay. So. Early on in the episode, we see a teenaged girl giving birth in a public restroom.
I literally can't remember if we've seen this girl before or not. No idea. But, um, she gives birth in a public restroom, while the outbreak is happening. She then somehow, after cutting the cord herself, manages to muster the strength to pick up her newborn (she tries to abandon it for someone else to find at first, but then finds out there are zombies eating people and runs back to protect it. She's, uh, surprisingly able-bodied, considering). She actually briefly bumps into Cheong-san's mother while the latter is racing into the quarantine zone.
She doesn't spot the babby before the zombies show up a second later.
After presumably killing her, the zombie mob chases the teenaged mom back to (coincidentally) the late(?) Mommy Cheong-san's own chicken restaurant and lock herself in and the zombies out. She's been bitten on the arm during the flight, and ends up shackling herself to the door. Both to keep herself away from the baby when she eventually turns, and to ensure that if the other zombies break through before that they'll kill her first.
Very strongly on-theme for the will to live, and for the even-more genetically hardcoded will to protect your bloodline. But also really bizarre and out of left field. I, uh, definitely am curious about where the hell this is going. Presumably the resolution of this situation will be something other than the obvious and depressing one, for this to justify its existence. Talk about weird though. It's almost like its own little French Surrealist-inspired artfilm intercut with the rest of the episode.
No sign of the rooftop duo this episode. Hmm.
So, strongest overall for its character work and thematic strength, but with the one weakest moment of the show so far marring it. And also another really weird thing with the babymother plot that I don't even know how to react to just yet.
I have a feeling that episode four is going to be a real mindfuck.
