Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 8

Feb 8, 2022

After eight episodes of bites, tears, disembowelments, stabbings, shootings (with bullets and arrows), blunt-force trauma, falls from multi-story windows, and more acts of violence, who’d have guessed that the first one to really squick me out would be a simple thumb to the eye?

Recap

All of Us Are Dead Episode 8 builds to a vengeful Gwi-nam making it to the rooftop, where he attacks On-jo and nearly puts Cheong-san’s eye out, in direct payback for losing his own eye to the kid several episodes back. (Does he succeed? Tune in next episode, same zombie-time, same zombie-channel!) Until that climax, though, it’s a relatively mellow episode, especially after the all-plot extravaganza that preceded it.

We’ll start with the core group of kids, as usual. After Nam-ra uses her super-strength to subdue Gwi-nam on the stairway, the group finally make it to the rooftop, thanks to, of all people, Eun-ji: When she sets one of the rooms ablaze in hopes the whole school will burn down, she triggers a switch on the rooftop door that automatically unlocks it in the event of a fire. But they’re too late to catch the attention of the departing helicopter, which takes off when the single bullying victim who’d been up there assures the crew no one else in the school is alive, despite knowing better.

Recap

So our heroes build their own SOS sign, then a fire around which they gather as night falls. They share their hopes and fears and even their crushes—Dae-su likes Ha-ri, the archer who’s stuck in the training center elsewhere on school grounds, for example. But things take a turn when Cheong-san confesses his feelings for On-jo. She’d believed them to simply be best friends, dating back to when they were six; finding out that he has romantic intentions toward her is, to her, like losing yet another friend. This is incisive writing by Chun Sung-il, revealing how unrequited love can hurt the beloved just as much as the one who loves them.

Elsewhere around town, So-ju charts a course to Hyosan High School, still hoping to rescue his daughter On-jo. Jae-ik rescues the idiot vlogger with the help of his partner Ho-cheol, who returns for the rescue in a schoolbus; they subsequently crash into the escaped Eun-ji on her bike and get waylaid by soldiers.

And elsewhere at school, archer Ha-ri teaches the trade to Mi-jin, who’s pretty obviously hot for teacher. Na-yeon—who witnessed Ms. Park’s death, or at least her getting bitten by a bunch of zombies—debates whether or not to take a cache of food and drinks with her and reunite with the rooftop kids, but Gwi-nam puts a stop to all that by biting the living shit out of her neck. (Watching her blood spill onto her dangling sneakers is the show’s other gnarliest image.)

Recap

Cheong-san and Su-hyeok piece together the superpowered nature of the half-zombies, Nam-ra’s a secret smoker, and Dae-su can sing.

And that about covers it! Honestly, other than the impressively unpleasant violence, the lasting image of the episode is of the kids gathered around the fire, talking honestly amongst themselves. They’ve spent so much of their lives worried about their grades, their teachers, the opinions of their classmates, their future prospects—and now that their future may have been taken away, they’re able to be honest with each other about all this, for the first time in most of their lives.

In essence, the zombie outbreak functions like an encounter group, forcing them to shake free of their social constraints and relate to one another for real. I don’t know if that’s social commentary or just a convenient storytelling device, but it’s the kind of character work the show requires to stay ahead of the zombie-show pack. In a genre that, for the past twenty years or so, has largely focused on the need to survive above all else, it’s refreshing to see a zombie outbreak that brings out people’s most vulnerable sides, instead of turning them all into unrepentant hardasses. The hardasses are what got them all into this mess, after all. Now’s the time for something new.

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