Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 6

Feb 6, 2022

When modern zombie media invokes the concept of “shades of gray,” it usually means that one of the heroes of the show or movie you’re watching is about to kill someone in cold blood, because it’s kill-or-be-killed time, bro. It’s tantamount to an endorsement of violence against outsiders, a fascist fever dream. Not so with All of Us Are Dead. Though the episode avoids making tidy proclamations about morals and ethics and then forcing all the characters to either abide by or defy them, thus self-categorizing as good or evil, it also genuinely wrestles with the morally ambiguous choices its characters make. It asks What price survival? and provides no easy answers.

Recap

Obviously there are thoroughly bad apples in the bunch, or at least one: Gwi-nam, the murderous bully who survived the zombie attack in the previous episode and came hunting for Cheong-san this time around. He winds up locked in mortal combat with Su-hyeok, a superior fighter who manages to launch him through the window to the ground below. (Gwi-nam, who is hilariously transparent about his goal of killing Cheong-san, appears—appears—to have truly died on impact, then revived as a zombie, but I won’t rest easy until we see him full-on crackling and snarling with the rest of the bloodshot-eyed bunch.)

Recap

But there are much more complicated figures to think about here. Take Na-yeon, the pink-sweatered snob who effectively killed Gyeong-su a few episodes earlier. She finds herself locked in a supply closet when the big gang of surviving kids takes over the music room—and she’s surrounded by food and beverages, which the kids desperately need. She’s about to open the door to let them know when she overhears them calling her “subhuman” for killing Gyeong-su and the still unaccounted-for Ms. Park, at which point she locks the door and hides, even when they attempt to break it down. What she did to Gyeong-su is unforgivable, yes. But is she wrong to imagine that she’ll face exile in Zombieland if the kids come across her again?

Then there’s Cheong-san, up until this point a morally unimpeachable character. When he discovers that Nam-ra got bit during Su-hyeok’s tussle with Gwi-nam, whom he’d unambiguously witnessed getting chowed on by zombies, he’s convinced that the infection will soon claim her. And when Su-hyeok insists that Gwi-nam was not, in fact, a zombie when he bit Nam-ra, a fight breaks out between the two boys over her fate. Nothing really gets resolved here: Nam-ra herself admits that she was briefly overcome with an urge to bite Su-hyeok, though she recovers her rationality very quickly, while On-jo theorizes that Gwi-nam might have been immune, and by extension Nam-ra is okay too. Ji-min, the girl who discovered both her parents had been zombiefied last episode, continues to insist on Nam-ra’s exile despite it all. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Is it better to save one person at the risk of the group, or vice versa? Sympathetic characters take all sides of this debate, and no easy answers are offered.

(Sidenote: It’s fascinating to watch the kids’ various crushes become, effectively, political faultlines—Su-hyeok siding with Nam-ra, whom he obviously has feelings for; On-jo defending Su-hyeok, whom she has feelings for; Cheong-san coming to blows with Su-hyeok, at least in part out of jealousy over On-jo.)

Perhaps the most striking example of this welcome tendency toward moral complexity comes in the person of Nam So-ju, On-jo’s firefighter father. In the episode’s most surprising storyline, he persuades his colleague U-sin to help him overwhelm two of their guards in the quarantine camp and use their uniforms to escape, only to abandon the younger man in favor of his own continued progress toward his goal of rescuing On-jo. The episode ends with So-ju getting shot while swimming to safety, as On-jo records a message to him on a camera the kids find in their latest classroom hideout. Perhaps he’s doing the right thing, but at what cost to the other people who’ve counted on him?

Recap

Elsewhere on the show, the bathroom/archery kids survive a pitched battle outside the archery training room, to which they eventually gain access; Detective Song and his partner rescue a little girl who points out her zombiefied mother in one of the episode’s most emotionally grueling scenes (“What’s wrong with this world?” the cop wonders aloud as he tries to comfort the child); Ji-min, who tries and fails to kill herself, vows vengeance against all the first responders who never came to rescue them, even as her parents died trying; the bullying victim on the rooftop creates an SOS sign out of debris; and Mr. Lee, on videotape, vows to find a cure to the Jonas Virus that caused the outbreak.

All of Us Are Dead is such a busy show that at first it was hard to pay attention to anything but the zombie attacks. Over time, however, the characters have more room to breathe, and the show has more of an ability to differentiate its themes from other zombie media. It’s a compelling trajectory, and one I hope keeps up till the end.

Recap