Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 9

Feb 8, 2022

The most impressive thing about All of Us Are Dead is how it can continue to mine pathos out of a premise — “zombies overrun society and a small band of survivors in a unique location struggle to stay alive” — that you could easily have dismissed as totally exhausted by now. (Hell, I dismissed it!) In this particular episode, that pathos stems from the fear, and the fact, of abandonment. It stands to reason: In a world overrun by the living dead, being left for dead by the living is perhaps the worst thing anyone can endure.

In what’s becoming an AoUAD trademark, the main action of the episode stems from a fortuitous chain of events in which characters from each storyline affect one another in unexpected ways.

The ep begins with a rooftop battle against Gwi-nam (who fails to poke out Cheong-san’s eye), a battle that ends when the equally powerful Nam-ra dumps him off the roof. Rest assured that he lives (if that’s the right word for his condition) to fight another day, though he’s now much worse for the wear. He does get a cool Matrix-meets-zombies back-bend maneuver in along the way, though.

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But soon thereafter, the group sees a helicopter headed their way. Turns out that the cops, Jae-ik and Ho-cheol, have made it to safety with their baby and kindergartner in tow, and the military authorities believe what they say about the cure for the outbreak residing in Mr. Lee’s laptop in the Hyosan High School’s science lab. The chopper is full of special-forces troops sent to reclaim the laptop. The kids, of course, are overjoyed. Finally, they’ll be rescued, even if that wasn’t the initial purpose of the mission.

Ah, not so fast. While the laptop-retrieval mission is underway, the commander in charge of martial law in Hyosan discovers the existence of asymptomatic infected people—hambies, to use Dae-su’s term—when Eun-ji, reunited with her fellow bullying victim in the quarantine camp, decides to eat him as payback for his abandonment of her.

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The general immediately institutes harsher quarantine measures against Hyosan refugees…and calls off the soldiers’ attempts to rescue the rooftop kids. In fact, he orders them to shoot the kids down when they protest their own abandonment, an order the soldiers mercifully refuse to carry out.

And so the helicopter departs, with the laptop but without the students. It even shines a spotlight on the archery kids elsewhere on the campus, but does nothing to save them either.

What follows borders on the poetic. A thunderstorm breaks out, and at first the kids—or at least Dae-su and Wu-jin—are overjoyed to have water to drink. But one by one, they all burst into tears, their sorrow and rage and grief mixing with the rain as it pours down their faces. It’s one of the series’ most memorable moments to date.

But the thunderstorm also provides them with hope. Since the zombies respond to sound, the kids deduce that the thunderclaps can be used as cover for their own movements. Their new plan is to descend through the school, using the back doors to reach a nearby mountain. After all, no one’s coming to rescue them—isn’t it better to die trying to escape than to simply sit and wait for death to come to them?

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The main storyline ends with Cheong-san, last in line, as he comes across his mother. At first it seems like a hallucination of the sort several characters have experienced—but it’s really his mind superimposing the memory of his kindly mother over her current, zombiefied self, whom he has coincidentally encountered during the escape attempt. The show rapidly cuts between her zombie and normal versions, mimicking Cheong-san’s denial and disbelief.

Elsewhere in the city, Assemblywoman Park accepts responsibility for So-ju’s escape, in a way that leads his former partner U-sin to conclude she’s basically cutting a campaign ad. Her aides attempt to stop the military from instituting the new, harsher quarantine measures against her, to no avail.

Recap

And So-ju continues to make his way toward the school and his daughter, On-jo—but he’s stopped by a survivor whose pregnant wife is trapped in a crashed car. He gives the man food, water, and even his gun, since he doesn’t have the equipment necessary to extract the pregnant woman from the car. But as he leaves, the man turns the gun on him, demanding his help. Sadly, So-ju has no help to give, and the man—who literally begged for his help—lets him go rather than pointlessly shooting him to death.

So once again, All of Us Are Dead counts on the audience’s ability to parse morally complex situations. So-ju is prioritizing On-jo’s survival over that of the man and his family, but what else could he do? Was there more he could have done to help them? Was the father wrong to point a gun at him and demand more? It’s not a matter of kill-or-be-killed, as it is in so much contemporary zombie media; it’s a question of saving who you can, saving those you care about the most, and sawing bits and pieces of your conscience off along the way. That’s a tough thing to chew on, and to its credit, All of Us Are Dead makes you swallow every bite.

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