Waiting For Rescue
Episode 4 of All of Us Are Dead begins with an influencer on their way to Hyosan. He wants to figure out if the infection is really as bad as everyone is saying it is. Armed with a whole stack of survival gear, he heads into the heart of town… and tries to find a safe place to hide. While the helicopter closes in on the school, Cheong-San’s mother manages to escape the horde nearby and limps toward the school herself. Unfortunately she recognizes Gyeong-Su and calls out for him. But of course in doing so, he’s infected so that’s a bad move. And it leads to her surrounded and killed for her efforts. Eun-Ji is still up on the roof of the school, alongside Cheol-Su. Both of them embrace the carnages going on below, wanting to kill those inside the school who have wronged them. The difference here though is that Cheol-Su wants to live, while Eun-Ji is still flirting with suicidal tendencies. Inside the broadcasting room, the kids hold tight and come up with a solution for their bathroom woes. It may be a while before rescuers arrive. Like father like daughter; On-Jo and her dad both organize traffic and arrange for their respective groups to hunker down and wait for rescue. Gwi-Nam is still fighting too, and he manages to survive by slaughtering more of the infected. Another rabble of survivors happen to be held up in the girls’ bathroom. We saw glimmers of this last episode but here we see things kick off when Min-Jae and Mi-Jin fight. Back in the police station, Byeong-Chan is completely nonchalant to what’s happening outside. He sees it as a triumph of the weak fighting back against the strong. He’s been well aware of his son being bullied but the heartbreaking way the school dealt with this, claiming it was just kids “fooling around”, and how he should be a team player, pushed him into a corner. Jin-Soo’s bullying got completely out of hand and moving classes just made things worse. Believing he’s living in a system of assault, Byeong-Chan took the bold decision to infect his own son in the hopes of helping him fight back. Only, he created a monster in the process. The interview soon coms to an unceremonious end when the zombie infection spreads across to the police station. Jae-Ik fights them back as best he can but he ends up infected. Byeong-Chan saves the detective’s life, letting Jae-Ik escape but becomes infected in the process. The thing is, Byeong-Chan doesn’t appear to be like the other infected. He seems more sentient, able to walk calmly through the hallways. Before he was turned, he told Jae-Ik about his laptop which could hold crucial clues to stopping this infection. With this knowledge, Jae-Ik heads to Hyosan High School. At the school, Cheong-San and On-Jo watch as a whole bunch of helicopters begin flying into town. On-Jo wants to try and get their attention. Nam-Ri however, brings up a far more pressing problem. Dehydration. Although they’ve sorted their bathroom woes out, they haven’t got any water or food, which is obviously a big problem. In order to try and find a solution, the kids decide they need to get to get to the teacher’s office. Specifically, they need to find a phone to figure out what’s going on. That’s problematic though because up on the roof, Eun-Ji makes a bold decision to find Gwi-nam’s phone no matter what.. The video Gwi-nam took of her during episode 1 was actually scheduled to go live at 9am. That time has now passed and because Cheol-Su has been unable to pay him (thanks to the little complication of a zombie outbreak) their time is up. So Eun-Ji heads for the teacher’s lounge. Eun-Ji is infected by the zombies on the way down. Unbeknownst to her, that’s the reason the infected have stopped biting. Anyway, she does manage to make it into the office but so too do Cheong-San and Su-Hyeok. Unfortunately, Eun-Ji smashes up most of the phones. In their eagerness to find a working phone, Cheong-San and Su-Hyeok end up separated as they try to evade the zombies. Over in the office building, On-Jo’s father manages to hold off the oncoming horde thanks to a hose and some ingenuity. While the Congresswoman and the others scramble up the stairs. the firemen are left to hold several doors shut and use the hose to fend off the zombies. With the door upstairs to the roof locked, On-Jo’s dad is left alone to try and hold them all off and buy the group precious time to escape. The group manage to escape but for On-Jo’s father, it seems like he may be infected. The zombies are nowhere to be found and he’s left breathing heavily as they all make it to the rooftop. Throwing a signal flare, the helicopters nearby fast approach. Meanwhile, Cheong-San finds himself in the principal’s office with Gwi-Nam, who ties up the principal and prepares to kill him. With Cheong-San filming, he watches in shock as Gwi-Nam slashes the man’s throat and murders him. Cheong-San grabs the phone and rushes to safety, leaving the bully stalking through the hallways after him. As he throws his knife, whistling through the air, it hits Cheong-San right in the spine.
The Episode Review
The longest episode of All of Us Are Dead is also the most fitting thanks to the way these men and women are surviving through the night and into the early morning. There’s a consistent timeframe to all of this now too and the show has done a brilliant job so far setting everything up for a turbulent second half to this series. While this chapter is arguably the slowest of the bunch, there’s a good deal of nail-biting tension through the different set pieces. The office complex, with On-Jo’s father working to stop the zombies from approaching for example, is a really nice set piece and certainly tense. Elsewhere, the drama inside the school is starting to fragment the group, with the kids separated into different areas. The camera work in this show has been pretty good so far and it’s matched by an equally impressive tone that manages to keep things engaging and tense right the way through the series. Whether the show can keep this up though and continue through the rest of the episodes is another matter/
