The new Netflix action series The Wonderfools involves a group of goofy misfits who somehow get superpowers from a pool of toxic muck in the town dump. Yes, its’s a comedy. How did you guess?
Opening Shot: A closeup of a young woman wearing headphones. She puts goggles on, plays “Creep” on her Discman and picks up a knife.
The Gist: It turns out that Eun Chae-ni (Park Eun-bin) is using that knife to peel onions for grandmother, Kim Jeon-bok (Kim Hae-sook), who owns a popular restaurant in Haeseong City. But when her nose starts bleeding, she goes to the doctor. Some time ago, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and now the doctor is telling her that her heart may give out at any time and there isn’t much they can do to prevent it.
Despondent that she’s going to die before her life had barely gotten going, she goes through a public gauntlet of people prohesizing the end of the world at the turn of the millennium (yes, this show takes place in 1999). She rages at a woman handing out flyers that she won’t even get to see the end of the world. As she rants, a city employee named Lee Un-jeong (Cha Eun-woo) is told that she’s known as “the trainwreck of Haeseong.”
Un-jeong, who just transferred from Seoul, works in the office where the public can file complaints; he gets a frequent flier to the office, Son Kyung-hoon (Choi Dae-hoon), who often draws pictures of mutated animals he sees at a landfill outside town. He swears that someone is dumping phenol or something equally nasty there, but the civil servants he complains to, including Un-jeong, dismiss him as a crackpot.
Chae-ni decides she’s going to go on a trip before her heart gives out, but she has to sneak out of town or her grandmother will tell her to stay. She swears a worker at the restaurant, Kang Ro-bin (Im Seong-jae) to secrecy. But she also calls him the “Sappiest Sap of Haeseong” for paying to have his roof fixed when he rents.
She encounters Un-jeong outside a store as she lugs her suitcase… somewhere. He thinks she’s hiding a body in there, and in the struggle to get her to open the suitcase, it bursts open and everything comes out as rain pours down. Chae-ni decides to cool her heels at Ro-bin’s flat, where Kyung-hoon happens to be visiting. She hatches a scheme with them to extract money from her grandmother so she can travel and Ro-bin can get his roof fixed. But they end the night at the dump where Kyung-hoon thinks toxic waste is being dumped, and they end the night much different than how they started it.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Wonderfools (or The WONDERfools, depending on what press material you look at) is a comedy action-adventure superpowers show along the lines of Extraordinary.
Our Take: Wonderfools, written by Heo Da-joong, takes the MCU approach to its superhero story. What do we mean by that? Well, the intire 68-minute first episode sets up how the quartet of misfit superheroes meet and get their powers. Well, three of the four at least; we find out that the unassuming Lee Un-jeong already has those powers, as he can stop and move items in midair.
But the other three definitely get their powers from the toxic muck at the dump, and it seems that the muck affects everyone differently. For Eun Chae-ni, the muck literally brings her back to life, as her heart gave out while she was trying to execute her fake kidnapping scheme with Kyung-hoon and Ro-bin. That’s how they all ended up at the dump to begin with, as the two men decided to “store” her body there until they could figure out how they can avoid being implicated. Coincidentally, Un-Jeong was there to do what his colleague never did, which was actually investigate the things Kyung-hoon would complain about.
Sure, it’s a bit of a coincidence. But plot coincidences don’t take away from such a nicely-layered story that has a solid sense of humor and characters that are going to fumble around with their powers as they figure out exactly what they can do.
Who they’re fighting is what we aren’t sure about. We know that one of the “world is going to end” group has the same superpowers. And there’s something called “The Wunderkinder Project” that Un-jeong may have been a part of. How it all ties together will hopefully be cleared up in the next couple of episodes; given the runtimes of these episodes, it would do the audience a disservice if Heo Da-joong waits until late in the season to start explaining everything.
Performance Worth Watching: It’ll be interesting to watch how Park Eun-bin’s character, Eun Chae-ni, reacts to the literal new lease on life she got from the toxic muck.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: The member of the “end of the world” choir who has powers sees the items Un-jeong embedded into a wall so they didn’t fall on him and Chae-ni.
Sleeper Star: Kim Hae-sook’s character Kim Jeon-bok, Chae-ni’s grandmother, seems to have more influence in town than just being the owner of a popular restaurant.
Most Pilot-y Line: The way Chae-ni’s kidnapping scheme is shown is annoying, because the idea that she was the ringleader of the scheme didn’t need to be hidden for the 15 minutes or however long it took to reveal what actually happened.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Wonderfools looks like it’s going to be a fun and funny show about reluctant and misfit superheroes, even though the first episode takes its time to put the characters together and give them those powers.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
