Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 12

Feb 8, 2022

All of Us Are Dead ends on a note of mystery. Not the cliffhanger sort, the “gee I wonder what happens next” sort, but the “I actually have no idea where it would go after this” sort, the “I’m not really even sure how I’m supposed to feel about this” sort. And I’m glad for it.

Recap

What leads up to that ending is the easiest episode of the dozen to recap. After one last battle against zombies in the streets of abandoned Yangdong, the students incur one last casualty, Wu-jin, whom Nam-ra kills in front of his sister Ha-ri. As they stagger away from the battle, Nam-ra’s zombie nature momentarily takes over, and she comes close to biting On-jo, stopped only by her own final reserve of strength. (Su-hyeok proved unable to attack Nam-ra when it came right down to it.) As the group moves on, Nam-ra slips away, leaving the rest to be stopped by the military and integrated into the quarantine camp.

Four months pass, and things are getting back to normal. Governmental inquiries into the bombing of Hyosan are on the way. The kids keep to themselves; On-jo passes Mi-jin, who’s unsuccessfully lobbying for the automatic acceptance into college of all high-school survivors of the outbreak, without a word. On-jo, wrestling with what she calls “the sorrow of a survivor,” slips out of the camp nightly to leave food and drinks at a memorial for all the friends the group lost on their way to safety. And it’s there she makes the episode’s defining discovery: Someone’s been lighting a campfire on the roof of the ruined high school at night, something Nam-ra had expressed the desire to do.

So the kids get together for one last excursion. They make their way through the mountain, the construction site, and the school grounds, climbing up to the roof, where indeed they find Nam-ra. For once, she’s all smiles, happy to see her old friends—and looking none the worse for wear for spending four wintry months on her own in just a school uniform while everyone else is all bundled up.

Recap

After saying that “there are a few more like me” left in the ruins of Hyosan—whether she means full-on zombies or half-zombies like herself is unclear—Nam-ra pricks up her ears, says “They’re back,” then leaps off the roof, saying “I’ll be back” as she goes. (Famous words, if you’re the Terminator!)

The move leaves all the surviving kids dumbfounded to varying degrees. Hyo-ryeong stands there literally slackjawed. Su-hyeok manages a slight smile. On-jo’s affect is that of a person who’s been through one too many surprises already—she’s just emotionally flattened out.

Recap

Will Nam-ra return after dispatching some nearby zombies? Has she made peace with her kind? Could it all have been a trap? Or is it simply what it seemed at first, a sincere attempt to reunite with her friends, interrupted by the arrival of the unseen undead? The long shot that ends the episode, showing us one kid after another looking uncertain and confused, offers us not just no easy answers, but no answers at all.

Much of the aftermath portion of the episode proceeds along such lines. We don’t know what becomes of Assemblywoman Park, who rips up the prepared-for-her speech about resigning in opposition to the bombing of Hyosan and then is never heard from again. We don’t know what happens to Jae-ik and Ho-cheol, the two cops who wonder “how heartless you are allowed to be” “to save the majority,” or the baby they rescued. Our last image of the little girl they also rescued is her all alone in a sell, crying for her dead mother. Eun-ji, their half-zombie guinea pig, is nowhere to be found; the cell where she was once experimented on is now a meeting room. Black-suited intelligence operatives locate and spirit away the son and wife of Mr. Lee, the virus’s first victims, for purposes unknown (though one can guess).

And of course we don’t know what becomes of Nam-ra, or all the kids who went to meet her.

It’s a melancholy way to end the story—and I’m glad for it. The show could have gone for a much tidier wrap-up in either direction, giving us either a new outbreak that would imply the virus is uncontainable, or a happy ending in which everyone moves on with their lives. Instead, our heroes are frozen in amber at a moment of great uncertainty, their future an open question.

It’s a bold, bold move by writer Chun Sung-il (adapting the digital comic Now at Our School by Joo Dong-geun on WEBTOON) and the rest of the filmmakers. All of Us Are Dead could easily have coasted on the strength of its many action setpieces, many of which are easy to rattle off by memory: the cafeteria fight, the library fight, the music room escape, the gymnasium escape, the battles with Gwi-nam, and so on. It could have been just a fun way to spend a snowy weekend, in other words.

Instead, All of Us Are Dead asks the viewer to sit with its unsettled, unsettling finale—lingering on that final image of a group of emotionally scarred kids, wondering what the future will bring them. Aren’t we all?

Recap