Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 10

Feb 8, 2022

In this short, sharp shock of an episode of All Of Us Are Dead, virtually all the news is bad news. Sure, there are a couple of happy family reunions: Archer Ha-ri reunites with her brother Wu-jin when the two main groups of kids finally unite, and On-jo embraces her father So-ju after he unwittingly saves the collective group from getting devoured by zombies in a locked gymnasium. But in keeping with the grim reunion that kicks off the episode—Cheong-san nearly losing his mind with grief now that he’s seen his mother is a zombie—events keep getting worse and worse for our heroes…and soon, perhaps, for every survivor left in the city.

The plot is simple enough to recap. Once Cheong-san calms down enough to stop beating up Dae-su for fighting his zombiefied mother, the group quickly abandons their plan to flee for a nearby mountain in favor of seeking shelter in the nearby gymnasium. Along the way they bump into Mi-jin’s group, the bathroom/archery kids, and together they lock themselves in the equipment room, keeping the zombies at bay long enough to rest. (And for Dae-su to confess his feelings for Ha-ri.)

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But not everyone makes it. Ji-min abandons Hyo-ryeong, aka the girl in the pink vest, when she falls—but Wu-jin saves her, and it winds up being Ji-min who gets separated from the group and killed by zombies. Min-jae, the male archer, becomes separated from the group too; he seems to be safe for the time being, but his final status is an open question. And poor Joon-seong, the wounded kid that the archery gang has been trying to carry around, is helpless to defend himself when zombies attack him. That’s two deaths and one missing person from a group that was small to begin with.

It gets worse. Acting on an idea from Su-hyeok, the survivors decide to lash together the supply crates in the equipment room, using them as a sort of movable fortress that they can wheel across the gym floor to the back exit. A debate ensues between nerdy Joon-yeong, who advocates making the barrier tall but open up top, and Mi-jin, who wants to make the barrier shorter and closed up top to prevent zombies from climbing up and in. Mi-jin is outvoted, and Joon-yeong’s plan is put into effect.

The plan is, basically, a disaster. They barely get a few feet out of the closet when their progress is ground to a halt by the zombie hordes, which, sure enough, start threatening to climb over the top of the mobile barrier. Joon-yeong gets bit, and—to the shock of Mi-jin, who seems genuinely devastated that her erstwhile rival is sacrificing himself for the group—jumps up and out of the structure in order to fight and lure the zombies away on behalf of the group. This gives them the breathing room they need to make it to the back door, but it also adds another dead student to the pile. And in the end, only the fortuitous arrival of So-ju at the back door, which was locked from the outside, appears to save the kids from being eaten.

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Not that they have much hope regardless. For one thing, Gwi-nam is still out there, and seems to have caught their scent.

But more importantly, the soldiers in charge of handling the crisis finally watch the so-called solution to the virus proposed by its creator, Mr. Lee, on his retrieved laptop. Unfortunately, that solution is “completely destroy the bodies of every infected person until not a single surviving cell remains.” Why he couldn’t have simply told this to Detective Song back in the interrogation room instead of insisting on the whole quest for the laptop to begin with is beyond me—my best guess is “because then the show would be less interesting,” which can explain quite a lot—but yeah, there you have it.

The problem is that the infection is beginning to spread. By tracking the signals of cellphones still carried by the undead, an intelligence analyst indicates that the infected are starting to spread outward from the city of Hyosan in search of prey, and already a breakthrough has taken place in the neighboring city of Yangdong. So now that city must be evacuated and blockated—and Hyosan must be bombed back into the Stone Age.

There’s also a brief aside in which Assemblywoman Park, still in the quarantine camp, is ordered to resign her position by her party’s leader. He’ll let her spin it as a resignation in protest of the decision to abandon Hyosan’s survivors if she wants, but she still has to go.

So that’s where things stand after this grim episode: more kids dead, zombies on the move, and an entire city on the chopping block. Only two episodes remain; the question is now, to use the tagline for the horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, who will survive—and what will be left of them?

Recap