The WONDERfools: Episode 1 (First Impressions)
by lovepark
It is 1999, and while the rest of the world worries about the apocalypse at the end of the year, our leading lady wishes judgment day would come sooner. In a desperate attempt to live, our heroine comes up with a foolish plan to make some money, but instead, her life ends up in a surprising twist that no one saw coming.
Editor’s note: This is a first impressions post only.
EPISODE 1
EUN CHAE-NI (Park Eun-bin) is a 27 year old trainwreck with no job prospects. While the reasons for her unemployment are abundant — her odd personality, her lack of education, the national financial crisis — the main cause of her listless life is her failing heart. You see, our leading lady has congestive heart failure, and the doctor tells her that she may die any day. The news of her impending death feels ironic in the face of Y2K and all the doomsayers handing out flyers about salvation. Chae-ni shouts that she just wants to experience the end of the world like everyone else, but what she really wants is to travel.
Elsewhere in the small town of Haeseong, a homeless man rummages through a garbage heap hoping to find anything usable. He ends up taking a tumble and lands in a pool of black sludge. At first, the smell overtakes him, but then his skin starts growing scales and his ear falls off. This marks the second homeless man to have disappeared, but the only one who seems to care is their pal, a fellow drunken vagabond. He puts in a complaint at city hall, but the civil servants are distracted by the entrance of town nightmare SOHN KYEONG-HOON (Choi Dae-hoon).
Newcomer LEE WOON-JEONG (Cha Eun-woo) is given the task of dealing with Kyeong-hoon as a rite of passage, and as usual, the king of complaints starts whining about the illegal garage dump in the neighborhood (“There’s monsters and phenol!” he cries). However, the obnoxious hold no power over the oddballs, so with every complaint Kyeong-hoon makes, Woon-jeong counters with the straitlaced truth. If Kyeong-hoon wants to meet his supervisor, Woon-jeong is happy to connect him with the 15+ people on their payroll. Heh.
Noticing the new face, the vagabond finds Woon-jeong during his lunch break and warns him about the serial killer on the loose. He informs him about the missing people which started twenty years ago, and on that ominous note, he leaves while pocketing Woong-jeong’s lunch. The vagabond’s story, though, is not that far-fetched since later that night, he gets visited by the doomsayers wearing hooded cloaks. With a flick of their wrists, they levitate and crush the vagabond’s cart, corroborating the drunk man’s ramblings about the dark side of their rural town.
Meanwhile, Chae-ni begs her grandma (Kim Hae-sook) to send her on a trip, but the latter staunchly refuses. She briefly wonders if her granddaughter heard bad news at the doctor’s office, but Chae-ni remains tight-lipped. No matter how much she wants to go on vacation, she won’t stoop that low to guilt-trip her grandma, so instead, she comes up with a different idea to procure the funds. 50 million won to be exact to which her friend and neighborhood pushover KANG RO-BIN (Im Sung-jae) sighs after hearing the sum since he recently spent his entire savings fixing the leak in the apartment he rents.
Speaking of Ro-bin’s stingy landlord, Kyeong-hoon may be an ass outside, but at home, he is as meek as a mouse. His wife denies his request to send his mother to Hawaii for her seventieth birthday, and his daughter ignores him when he comes to pick her up after school. To their credit, they seem to be struggling financially since the stench from the garbage dump has impeded her flower business, and he is rather embarrassing, slipping and sliding in the rain.
While Chae-ni goes shopping for her upcoming trip, she bumps into Woon-jeong at the grocery store, and their respective items go flying. Their stuff is basically a serial killer’s shopping list — knives, duct tape, rope — and Woon-jeong remembers Chae-ni as the neighborhood trainwreck. With his danger-sense tingling, he follows her out and spots Chae-ni “borrowing” one of the missing homeless man’s cart while dragging a heavy suitcase. He asks to see what is inside, noticing the tuft of hair poking through the zipper, but Chae-ni refuses his weird demand.
As they fight over her bag, the flimsy suitcase breaks open, and her recently purchased knife comes hurtling towards her head. Woon-jeong pulls her to safety, but in that exact moment, the gutter breaks and douses Chae-ni in water. From her perspective, a strange man just broke her suitcase, threw all her luggage on the street, and then dragged her under a spout, so in retaliation, she smacks him with her teddy bear. That, though, is not enough to abate her anger, and she warns Woon-jeong to be ready for the bill.
Since her grandma will not fund her trip because she is worried about her health, Chae-ni decides the best way to get the money is through blackmail. However, things go terribly wrong since Chae-ni tells us that she dies, and standing over her body is Kyeong-hoon and Ro-bin (a.k.a. Dumb and Dumber).
Before opening that can of worms, the show takes a quick detour to Woon-jeong’s homelife and reveals his destroyed apartment with items haphazardly strewn across the floor and every piece of furniture either removed or taped. Woon-jeong is clearly on a secret mission as he shuffles through his records of Dr. HA WON-DO (Sohn Hyun-joo). The once lauded scientist was exposed for immoral human experimentation after a fire broke out at an orphanage, and the security guard at the time (the drunken vagabond) revealed everything to the media. The missing homeless men and the bizarre sightings all point to the return of Dr. Ha, and his latest victim is the ex-security guard.
Back to our trio, Chae-ni enlists the help of Kyeong-hoon and Ro-bin (the servants to her heiress) and shares her plans of a fake kidnapping. She promises them 5 million won apiece, which is how they get entangled in her harebrained scheme with Chae-ni tied to a chair in the middle of nowhere. As Kyeong-hoon and Ro-bin check their fake ransom video, Chae-ni feels her heart beating too fast, and before she can even utter a word, she dies. By the time the others realize what happened, it’s too late to call an ambulance.
Caught in a dilemma with their mastermind gone, the two sidekicks squabble over what to do. Ro-bin wants to call the cops and explain what happened, but Kyeong-hoon argues that they need to dump the body until they come up with solid alibis. There is no way the police will believe their statements while dressed as kidnappers, and Ro-bin eventually agrees to temporarily store the body elsewhere.
Kyeong-hoon’s brilliant idea is the illegal garbage dump in their neighborhood since no one comes by the area, not even the property owner. Alas, tonight of all nights, a person does stop by, and Woon-jeong catches Kyeong-hoon doing the exact thing he always complains about. As he tries to get a closer look at what they are tossing, our faux-kidnappers accidentally send the cart containing Chae-ni’s body careening down the hill, and her body rolls into the toxic black sludge.
As Kyeong-hoon and Ro-bin chase after the body, they fall into the sludge as well. They explain the situation to Woon-jeong who does not believe them, and when Chae-ni suddenly disappears, he assumes they have an accomplice. Soon, the police are called to the scene, and Woon-jeong tells them that he witnessed those two throwing away a dead body. The officer points to a person in the back, asking if that’s the same Eun Chae-ni he saw dead, and Woon-jeong nods his head. Doing a double take, Woon-jeong confirms with his own two eyes that the once dead Chae-ni is now alive.
In the midst of all this hullabaloo, Grandma called private investigator GU JUN-MO (Cha Seo-won) to locate her missing daughter, and he notified her that Chae-ni was in Jeju Island. That must be where her body went when she was missing, but it does not explain how she magically teleported or came back from the dead. However, as the episode comes to a close, we see that Chae-ni is not the only one defying physics since Woon-jeong also has superpowers. More specifically, he has telekinesis, and during their suitcase fight, he sent the sharp objects straight into the wall instead of her head.
The first episode of The WONDERfools introduces its main quartet, and within an hour, the show makes their dynamic clear. Chae-ni is the bold and reckless leader while Kyeong-hoon and Ro-bin are her floundering sidekicks. As for Woon-jeong, he’s the mysterious outsider who seems to be aware of the larger conspiracy going on in Haeseong, and the big bad is the notorious Dr. Ha. For the most part, the story paints these characters in broad strokes, and they act in accordance to their nicknames. However, the smaller moments sprinkled throughout hint at some complexity: Chae-ni’s nihilism fighting against her sweet nature, Kyeong-hoon’s brashness contrasted with his timidity, Ro-bin’s foolishness coupled with his desire to be cool, or Woon-jeong’s quietness which hides his instability. Hopefully as the show delves deeper into their characters, we’ll see them less as the town trainwreck, nightmare, or pushover, and more as ordinary individuals given a chance to do something extraordinary.
While I enjoyed the pilot for the most part, I did find it more somber than expected. There wasn’t a lot of humor for a show labeled as a comedy, and the color palette is a bit washed-out. I was also hoping that the setting would feel more prominent, but besides the old cellphones and constant reminder of the change in millennium, there aren’t a lot of visual cues indicating the era. Something about the show still feels like it’s missing that 2%, but hopefully that will be filled once all the main cast gets their superpowers and the plot begins in earnest.
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