133
255
24
2
5
6
10
5
7
6
4
10
5
2
8
41
3
5
4
2
1
4
5
5
2
7
30
39
13
24
This review may contain spoilers
THREE DISASTERS, ONE RELUCTANT GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE, AND A WHOLE LOT OF SLIME
OVERVIEW:
Set in 1999 in the coastal city of Haeseong, The WONDERfools follows Eun Chae-ni, a terminally ill 27-year-old who attempts a fake kidnapping to fund her dream of travelling, involving her neighbour Kang Ro-bin and struggling florist Son Gyeon-un. The plan goes wrong when she dies, is exposed to a mysterious slime, and returns with teleportation, while the others also gain powers. They become entangled with Lee Un-jeong, a vigilante civil servant investigating the Wunderkinder Project, a covert orphan experimentation program from Hawondo Lab. Together they clash with the Church of Eternal Salvation, a cult led by Dr Ha Won-do, who seeks the mysterious Child of Eternity.
________________________
COMMENTARY:
Let me start by saying this: I had fun watching The WONDERfools. And I say this as someone who had zero intention of coming away feeling that way. A superhero K-drama set in 1999 with Cha Eun-woo in the lead? The scepticism was real. But Park Eun-bin as Eun Chae-ni is genuinely one of the most entertaining female leads I have seen in a while. She is chaotic, relentlessly optimistic, and absolutely unhinged in the best possible way. One minute she is dying, the next she is teleporting to a boat near China, and then screaming into the void about Northern Lights. She showed up to a hostage situation with a chainsaw. A CHAINSAW. I don't make the rules, she does.
The trio dynamic of Chae-ni, Ro-bin, and Gyeon-un is genuinely the best thing about this show. These three people share approximately one brain cell between them, and watching them figure out their powers through pure trial, error, and accidental chaos was genuinely hilarious. Gyeon-un sticking to a refrigerator while arguing with his wife, Ro-bin accidentally punching holes in walls when he gets emotional, Chae-ni teleporting into the middle of a period drama shoot because her heart rate spiked. The comedy writing in those moments was sharp, self-aware, and earned every single laugh.
The period setting of 1999 adds a fun retro texture to everything. The millennium panic, the cassette players, the general energy of a world that had not yet been worn down by smartphones and social media, it all works as backdrop and adds a nostalgic warmth that makes the show feel distinct. The show leans into its setting well without overselling it or turning it into a history lesson.
The villain trio, Pal-ho, Ju-ran, and Ho-ran, were more compelling than I expected. Their backstory of being experimented on as orphaned children and being fully indoctrinated into Dr Ha's cult worldview added real emotional texture to what could have been flat antagonists. Seeing Ju-ran and Ho-ran slowly start questioning Dr Ha's motives, and Pal-ho's bitter jealousy of Un-jeong going all the way back to childhood, gave the antagonistic side of the story some genuine weight. When Pal-ho died in Ju-ran's arms I felt something and I was not expecting to.
Gyeon-un's family subplot was also a surprising standout. His painful attempts to reconcile with a wife who has completely lost faith in him and a teenage daughter who is embarrassed to be seen with him gave the show some of its most grounded and human moments. The moment his daughter Cheong watches him be an actual superhero and finally sees her father as someone worth admiring was genuinely touching. The show knew what it was doing with him emotionally even when the plot around him was a mess.
________________________
MIXED EMOTIONS:
Let us talk about the Jeon-bok situation because my feelings are all over the place. For most of the show she is framed as this overprotective, financially stingy grandmother who refuses to let Chae-ni live. Fine. Normal kdrama grandmother energy. But then it is revealed that she helped fund the Wunderkinder Project and essentially contributed to the experimentation on children including the Child of Eternity, whose heart was later transplanted into Chae-ni. That is huge. That is an enormous moral failing. And the show just sort of... glosses over it? She cries, she apologises, she runs a memorial when Chae-ni disappears after saving the city, and somehow by the end everyone has largely moved on. I needed a harder reckoning there. I needed Chae-ni to sit with that longer.
I also had genuinely mixed feelings about Jun-mo. He is framed as this loyal protector figure for Jeon-bok throughout the whole show, and the eventual reveal that he was one of the orphaned children saved from the lab because of the fire Un-jeong caused was actually a nice full-circle moment. But I felt like his character was underwritten for most of the runtime. He kept showing up, providing just enough information to keep the plot moving, and then stepping back into the shadows. Give the man an actual arc, please.
The tone inconsistency throughout was also a source of whiplash for me. One minute the show is giving you full slapstick comedy with Gyeon-un stuck to a flower pot while his wife is on the phone yelling at him. The next it is serving you gut-punch imagery of children being injected with experimental chemicals in an orphanage. The drama did not always manage the transitions between those registers gracefully. Some scenes felt tonally orphaned, like they belonged to a completely different show that wandered onto the set by mistake.
________________________
DISLIKES:
Un-jeong's betrayal in episode five. I cannot let this go. And not because it was bad storytelling in theory, but because it was handled badly in execution. We have spent five episodes watching Un-jeong be suspicious of Chae-ni, slowly warm up to the group, even show moments of genuine care. And then suddenly he injects her with a sedative, hands her over to the villain, and we are supposed to be shocked. The problem is it did not land as a twist, it landed as a writing shortcut. There were no breadcrumbs, no seeds planted, no subtle hints that he was in contact with Dr Ha or being blackmailed. The explanation that he wanted information about his mother felt underwhelming compared to what he actually did. Like, sir, you could not have found another way? You handed her over to a man literally trying to cut out her heart.
The romance between Un-jeong and Chae-ni was the other major sore spot for me. The kiss in episode six was meant to be this pivotal moment where he uses the one sure-fire way to raise her heart rate and trigger her teleportation. In concept, cute. In execution, it had the romantic charge of two people shaking hands at a networking event. The chemistry between Park Eun-bin and Cha Eun-woo reads more like an older sister dragging her reluctant younger brother on an adventure than a love story. They are warm together and they clearly have fun in scenes, but romantic tension? The show kept insisting it was there and I kept waiting to feel it.
And speaking of Cha Eun-woo, let me be fair and honest here. He is not doing anything wrong. He is playing his signature brand: cool, brooding, trauma in the background, soft heart underneath. He hits his marks. He has good delivery in the quieter scenes. But he does not bring anything new to Un-jeong beyond what you have already seen from him, and a character this important to the show's emotional core needed more range than what was on offer. The monotone delivery works for stoic mystery but it does not work for vulnerability. The scenes where Un-jeong is supposed to be unravelling emotionally needed more and did not get it.
The explanation for why Chae-ni, Ro-bin, and Gyeon-un specifically gained superpowers from the slime remained vague throughout the season in a way that was frustrating rather than intriguing. Everyone else who touched the slime either died horribly or turned into something resembling human jelly. Why did these three survive and thrive? The best answer the show offered was essentially a shrug with a plot point about Chae-ni having the Child of Eternity's heart. But that still does not explain Ro-bin and Gyeon-un. This felt like a gap that the writers hoped the comedy would distract you from. It mostly worked, but it kept nagging at me.
Gyeon-un's power was also a comedy bit that outstayed its welcome by episode four. The sticking-to-things-when-he-lies gimmick was hilarious the first five times. By the seventh episode I needed it to evolve or to matter in a way that felt consequential rather than decorative. He did eventually use it to cling to the ceiling and overhear crucial villain plans, which was genuinely clever, but we waited a long time to get there.
________________________
LIKES:
Park Eun-bin. Full stop. She is the reason this show works as well as it does. Chae-ni in lesser hands could have been insufferably loud and one-note, a walking quirk machine. But Eun-bin brings this layered, lived-in quality to the character that makes every scene richer than it has any right to be. She does comedy and heartbreak in the same breath without either one cancelling the other out. The scene where she stays up comforting Un-jeong through his nightmares, and the moment where she breaks down crying after Ro-bin delivers her grandmother's food, both hit because Eun-bin grounded this whole chaotic story in genuine emotion. She is versatile, fearless, and completely committed. It is no wonder every project she touches turns into must-watch television.
The moment in episode six where Ro-bin explains to Gyeon-un why he has to save Chae-ni: because she was the only person who ever stood up for him when he was being bullied at school. That flashback of a teenage Chae-ni, presumably already carrying the terminal diagnosis, stepping in front of bullies on behalf of a kid she barely knew, is the most efficiently emotional scene in the drama. It tells you everything about who she is and why everyone around her loves her in about forty-five seconds.
Im Seong-jae as Ro-bin deserves a standing ovation. His power activation being tied to emotional overwhelm meant that the show kept putting him in positions where he had to be genuinely moved to do anything useful, and Im Seong-jae played every single one of those moments with such earnestness and warmth. The Ro-bin versus Pal-ho fight scenes were genuinely some of the funniest sequences in the show. Watching Pal-ho, a villain who has been established as terrifyingly powerful, look genuinely confused about why his abilities were not working on this random guy was comedy gold.
Choi Dae-hoon as Gyeon-un was consistently funny without ever being cartoonish. His dynamic with his wife Mi-hui was one of the most entertaining relationships in the show. They bicker constantly, she has no patience for him, and he keeps trying to do the right thing in the most roundabout possible way. But underneath all of that was a man who genuinely loves his family and is desperate to earn back their respect. That emotional throughline made his comedy land instead of feeling hollow.
Kim Hae-sook as Jeon-bok was phenomenal as always. This woman can communicate an entire complicated emotional history with a single look. Even when the writing did not fully commit to exploring the moral complexity of her character, Hae-sook showed up and did the work anyway. Her scenes with Chae-ni in the second half of the season carried genuine weight.
The ending of episode four where Chae-ni and Un-jeong end up beneath the Northern Lights together while she is bleeding out was genuinely beautiful. It was exactly the kind of moment this show is capable of when it slows down and lets itself breathe. She had been chasing those Northern Lights as a bucket list dream her entire life. The fact that it happened by accident, through a chain of absolute catastrophe, felt thematically right for who Chae-ni is. Life gave her what she wanted, just not in the way she planned. I adored that.
The finale, for all its messy pacing, delivered on spectacle. Chae-ni grabbing a blimp full of apocalyptic chemicals and teleporting it away from the entire city at midnight on New Year's Eve while fireworks go off around her was exactly the kind of unhinged, go-for-broke ending this show deserved. I was fully on board. My emotions were doing parkour. It worked.
________________________
FINAL THOUGHTS:
The WONDERfools is a flawed, uneven, frequently ridiculous show that I enjoyed far more than I was prepared to. It is not a masterpiece. The writing has real gaps, the romance does not work, the betrayal arc needed better setup, and the tonal whiplash will genuinely give you emotional jet lag. But the core trio is an absolute delight, Park Eun-bin is doing the most impressive work on television right now, and when this show hits its comedic or emotional beats correctly it genuinely soars.
It is the kind of drama that is better experienced than described. Trying to explain to someone why you are cackling at a man stuck to a ceiling in a villain's lab while simultaneously tearing up because a little girl realises her embarrassing father is a superhero is a conversation that only makes sense once you have watched it yourself.
The season finale leaves Dr Ha alive, the Church of Eternal Salvation still under investigation, and the entire slime-chemical situation unresolved. A second season is clearly being set up, and honestly? I would watch it.
Would I recommend it? Yes, with caveats. If you go in expecting a tight, well-plotted superhero narrative you will be frustrated. If you go in expecting a chaotic, funny, occasionally moving found-family story anchored by one of the best actresses working in Korean television right now, you will have a great time. Manage your expectations, embrace the chaos, and for the love of everything do not expect the romance to make you feel things.
Anyway, with all that said, I give The WONDERfools a 7.5/10.
Thanks for reading! ♡
Set in 1999 in the coastal city of Haeseong, The WONDERfools follows Eun Chae-ni, a terminally ill 27-year-old who attempts a fake kidnapping to fund her dream of travelling, involving her neighbour Kang Ro-bin and struggling florist Son Gyeon-un. The plan goes wrong when she dies, is exposed to a mysterious slime, and returns with teleportation, while the others also gain powers. They become entangled with Lee Un-jeong, a vigilante civil servant investigating the Wunderkinder Project, a covert orphan experimentation program from Hawondo Lab. Together they clash with the Church of Eternal Salvation, a cult led by Dr Ha Won-do, who seeks the mysterious Child of Eternity.
________________________
COMMENTARY:
Let me start by saying this: I had fun watching The WONDERfools. And I say this as someone who had zero intention of coming away feeling that way. A superhero K-drama set in 1999 with Cha Eun-woo in the lead? The scepticism was real. But Park Eun-bin as Eun Chae-ni is genuinely one of the most entertaining female leads I have seen in a while. She is chaotic, relentlessly optimistic, and absolutely unhinged in the best possible way. One minute she is dying, the next she is teleporting to a boat near China, and then screaming into the void about Northern Lights. She showed up to a hostage situation with a chainsaw. A CHAINSAW. I don't make the rules, she does.
The trio dynamic of Chae-ni, Ro-bin, and Gyeon-un is genuinely the best thing about this show. These three people share approximately one brain cell between them, and watching them figure out their powers through pure trial, error, and accidental chaos was genuinely hilarious. Gyeon-un sticking to a refrigerator while arguing with his wife, Ro-bin accidentally punching holes in walls when he gets emotional, Chae-ni teleporting into the middle of a period drama shoot because her heart rate spiked. The comedy writing in those moments was sharp, self-aware, and earned every single laugh.
The period setting of 1999 adds a fun retro texture to everything. The millennium panic, the cassette players, the general energy of a world that had not yet been worn down by smartphones and social media, it all works as backdrop and adds a nostalgic warmth that makes the show feel distinct. The show leans into its setting well without overselling it or turning it into a history lesson.
The villain trio, Pal-ho, Ju-ran, and Ho-ran, were more compelling than I expected. Their backstory of being experimented on as orphaned children and being fully indoctrinated into Dr Ha's cult worldview added real emotional texture to what could have been flat antagonists. Seeing Ju-ran and Ho-ran slowly start questioning Dr Ha's motives, and Pal-ho's bitter jealousy of Un-jeong going all the way back to childhood, gave the antagonistic side of the story some genuine weight. When Pal-ho died in Ju-ran's arms I felt something and I was not expecting to.
Gyeon-un's family subplot was also a surprising standout. His painful attempts to reconcile with a wife who has completely lost faith in him and a teenage daughter who is embarrassed to be seen with him gave the show some of its most grounded and human moments. The moment his daughter Cheong watches him be an actual superhero and finally sees her father as someone worth admiring was genuinely touching. The show knew what it was doing with him emotionally even when the plot around him was a mess.
________________________
MIXED EMOTIONS:
Let us talk about the Jeon-bok situation because my feelings are all over the place. For most of the show she is framed as this overprotective, financially stingy grandmother who refuses to let Chae-ni live. Fine. Normal kdrama grandmother energy. But then it is revealed that she helped fund the Wunderkinder Project and essentially contributed to the experimentation on children including the Child of Eternity, whose heart was later transplanted into Chae-ni. That is huge. That is an enormous moral failing. And the show just sort of... glosses over it? She cries, she apologises, she runs a memorial when Chae-ni disappears after saving the city, and somehow by the end everyone has largely moved on. I needed a harder reckoning there. I needed Chae-ni to sit with that longer.
I also had genuinely mixed feelings about Jun-mo. He is framed as this loyal protector figure for Jeon-bok throughout the whole show, and the eventual reveal that he was one of the orphaned children saved from the lab because of the fire Un-jeong caused was actually a nice full-circle moment. But I felt like his character was underwritten for most of the runtime. He kept showing up, providing just enough information to keep the plot moving, and then stepping back into the shadows. Give the man an actual arc, please.
The tone inconsistency throughout was also a source of whiplash for me. One minute the show is giving you full slapstick comedy with Gyeon-un stuck to a flower pot while his wife is on the phone yelling at him. The next it is serving you gut-punch imagery of children being injected with experimental chemicals in an orphanage. The drama did not always manage the transitions between those registers gracefully. Some scenes felt tonally orphaned, like they belonged to a completely different show that wandered onto the set by mistake.
________________________
DISLIKES:
Un-jeong's betrayal in episode five. I cannot let this go. And not because it was bad storytelling in theory, but because it was handled badly in execution. We have spent five episodes watching Un-jeong be suspicious of Chae-ni, slowly warm up to the group, even show moments of genuine care. And then suddenly he injects her with a sedative, hands her over to the villain, and we are supposed to be shocked. The problem is it did not land as a twist, it landed as a writing shortcut. There were no breadcrumbs, no seeds planted, no subtle hints that he was in contact with Dr Ha or being blackmailed. The explanation that he wanted information about his mother felt underwhelming compared to what he actually did. Like, sir, you could not have found another way? You handed her over to a man literally trying to cut out her heart.
The romance between Un-jeong and Chae-ni was the other major sore spot for me. The kiss in episode six was meant to be this pivotal moment where he uses the one sure-fire way to raise her heart rate and trigger her teleportation. In concept, cute. In execution, it had the romantic charge of two people shaking hands at a networking event. The chemistry between Park Eun-bin and Cha Eun-woo reads more like an older sister dragging her reluctant younger brother on an adventure than a love story. They are warm together and they clearly have fun in scenes, but romantic tension? The show kept insisting it was there and I kept waiting to feel it.
And speaking of Cha Eun-woo, let me be fair and honest here. He is not doing anything wrong. He is playing his signature brand: cool, brooding, trauma in the background, soft heart underneath. He hits his marks. He has good delivery in the quieter scenes. But he does not bring anything new to Un-jeong beyond what you have already seen from him, and a character this important to the show's emotional core needed more range than what was on offer. The monotone delivery works for stoic mystery but it does not work for vulnerability. The scenes where Un-jeong is supposed to be unravelling emotionally needed more and did not get it.
The explanation for why Chae-ni, Ro-bin, and Gyeon-un specifically gained superpowers from the slime remained vague throughout the season in a way that was frustrating rather than intriguing. Everyone else who touched the slime either died horribly or turned into something resembling human jelly. Why did these three survive and thrive? The best answer the show offered was essentially a shrug with a plot point about Chae-ni having the Child of Eternity's heart. But that still does not explain Ro-bin and Gyeon-un. This felt like a gap that the writers hoped the comedy would distract you from. It mostly worked, but it kept nagging at me.
Gyeon-un's power was also a comedy bit that outstayed its welcome by episode four. The sticking-to-things-when-he-lies gimmick was hilarious the first five times. By the seventh episode I needed it to evolve or to matter in a way that felt consequential rather than decorative. He did eventually use it to cling to the ceiling and overhear crucial villain plans, which was genuinely clever, but we waited a long time to get there.
________________________
LIKES:
Park Eun-bin. Full stop. She is the reason this show works as well as it does. Chae-ni in lesser hands could have been insufferably loud and one-note, a walking quirk machine. But Eun-bin brings this layered, lived-in quality to the character that makes every scene richer than it has any right to be. She does comedy and heartbreak in the same breath without either one cancelling the other out. The scene where she stays up comforting Un-jeong through his nightmares, and the moment where she breaks down crying after Ro-bin delivers her grandmother's food, both hit because Eun-bin grounded this whole chaotic story in genuine emotion. She is versatile, fearless, and completely committed. It is no wonder every project she touches turns into must-watch television.
The moment in episode six where Ro-bin explains to Gyeon-un why he has to save Chae-ni: because she was the only person who ever stood up for him when he was being bullied at school. That flashback of a teenage Chae-ni, presumably already carrying the terminal diagnosis, stepping in front of bullies on behalf of a kid she barely knew, is the most efficiently emotional scene in the drama. It tells you everything about who she is and why everyone around her loves her in about forty-five seconds.
Im Seong-jae as Ro-bin deserves a standing ovation. His power activation being tied to emotional overwhelm meant that the show kept putting him in positions where he had to be genuinely moved to do anything useful, and Im Seong-jae played every single one of those moments with such earnestness and warmth. The Ro-bin versus Pal-ho fight scenes were genuinely some of the funniest sequences in the show. Watching Pal-ho, a villain who has been established as terrifyingly powerful, look genuinely confused about why his abilities were not working on this random guy was comedy gold.
Choi Dae-hoon as Gyeon-un was consistently funny without ever being cartoonish. His dynamic with his wife Mi-hui was one of the most entertaining relationships in the show. They bicker constantly, she has no patience for him, and he keeps trying to do the right thing in the most roundabout possible way. But underneath all of that was a man who genuinely loves his family and is desperate to earn back their respect. That emotional throughline made his comedy land instead of feeling hollow.
Kim Hae-sook as Jeon-bok was phenomenal as always. This woman can communicate an entire complicated emotional history with a single look. Even when the writing did not fully commit to exploring the moral complexity of her character, Hae-sook showed up and did the work anyway. Her scenes with Chae-ni in the second half of the season carried genuine weight.
The ending of episode four where Chae-ni and Un-jeong end up beneath the Northern Lights together while she is bleeding out was genuinely beautiful. It was exactly the kind of moment this show is capable of when it slows down and lets itself breathe. She had been chasing those Northern Lights as a bucket list dream her entire life. The fact that it happened by accident, through a chain of absolute catastrophe, felt thematically right for who Chae-ni is. Life gave her what she wanted, just not in the way she planned. I adored that.
The finale, for all its messy pacing, delivered on spectacle. Chae-ni grabbing a blimp full of apocalyptic chemicals and teleporting it away from the entire city at midnight on New Year's Eve while fireworks go off around her was exactly the kind of unhinged, go-for-broke ending this show deserved. I was fully on board. My emotions were doing parkour. It worked.
________________________
FINAL THOUGHTS:
The WONDERfools is a flawed, uneven, frequently ridiculous show that I enjoyed far more than I was prepared to. It is not a masterpiece. The writing has real gaps, the romance does not work, the betrayal arc needed better setup, and the tonal whiplash will genuinely give you emotional jet lag. But the core trio is an absolute delight, Park Eun-bin is doing the most impressive work on television right now, and when this show hits its comedic or emotional beats correctly it genuinely soars.
It is the kind of drama that is better experienced than described. Trying to explain to someone why you are cackling at a man stuck to a ceiling in a villain's lab while simultaneously tearing up because a little girl realises her embarrassing father is a superhero is a conversation that only makes sense once you have watched it yourself.
The season finale leaves Dr Ha alive, the Church of Eternal Salvation still under investigation, and the entire slime-chemical situation unresolved. A second season is clearly being set up, and honestly? I would watch it.
Would I recommend it? Yes, with caveats. If you go in expecting a tight, well-plotted superhero narrative you will be frustrated. If you go in expecting a chaotic, funny, occasionally moving found-family story anchored by one of the best actresses working in Korean television right now, you will have a great time. Manage your expectations, embrace the chaos, and for the love of everything do not expect the romance to make you feel things.
Anyway, with all that said, I give The WONDERfools a 7.5/10.
Thanks for reading! ♡
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