Review of Tomorrow / 내일

I had no interest in watching Tomorrow until I was in New York City for a couple of days and staying with my friend in Queens.

As we were on a bus to Flushing, we were chatting about Korean dramas, and she was mentioning how she thought Rowoon, who was a K-pop idol and an actor, was so attractive.

I had seen him in a drama I had hated—the one where he works at a cosmetic company and spots the girl he likes being cheated on by her boyfriend—because that drama was so slow and there was nothing going on in at all.

But lo and behold, when I was back home in Maryland, I got curious and started looking and seeing what dramas could he be in that were on Netflix.

And that was how I ended up pressing play on Tomorrow. I typically don’t care for the fantasy genre and wouldn’t watch these kinds of shows on their own, but I thought the first episode was decent, so I gave it a chance beyond the first episode.

And then I kept using that logic, and suddenly I was episode sixteen and thinking, wow, I actually finished this. And I will say, I kind of enjoyed the drama throughout. Let’s dig into the reasons why.

Onwards with the review!

Choi Joon-woong says a man from committing suicide, ends up in a coma, and joins the afterlife’s squad to help those about to kill themselves.

The protagonist in this Korean drama is Choi Joon-woong, a young jobseeker who has only saw failure when it comes to the insane amount of interviews he’s done.

Our first scene with him shows him in another promising interview, as the other candidate doesn’t really have much to say, but when he steps outside and cheerfully tells his mother he has this one in the bag, he discovers the other candidate actually is a family member of the company and got the job over him.

Dismayed, he goes drinking with his best buddy, who’s studying to become a police officer, and while going home, he discovers a man on a bridge about to commit suicide.

He tries to stop the man and tells him to keep on living, but in the process of saving him, he ends up going overboard with the guy.

Joon-woong ends up in a coma because of it and the odds don’t look good, but when he finds himself out of his physical body, he actually meets Ryeon and Ryung-gu for the first time.

They’re grim reapers in charge of the small team that tries to stop suicidal people from killing themselves, giving a purpose for those who see no hope anymore.

They take him to the head of the afterlife company, Jumadeung, who tells Joon-woong that if he works for them for six months effectively, they will allow him back into his body and the chance to live.

The added perk of taking this contract is that he will get whatever job he wants. He naturally accepts, and is assigned to join the suicide unit with Ryeon and Ryung-gu.

At first, he seems like dead weight, trying to get things done in a way that isn’t effective for them as a unit, but as time goes on, they warm up to him and his methods.

Because he has been given a new face to the outside world, no one who know Joon-woong in real life can recognize him, so when he sees his mom and sister, they don’t recognize him. One episode also is about his suicidal best friend, who isn’t doing well at the academy after he’s gone.

The different episodes focus on someone different who has become suicidal. There’s a screenwriter who has been confronted by her now successful high school bully, an anorexic cosmetic worker who sees no purpose in living, and a Korean War veteran who is about to die the next day but still finds no reason to keep on living.

Some stories are split into multiple episodes, especially when we delve into the subplots. One of the big subplots is about Ryung-gu’s past life and how his mother becomes one of the most important people even in his afterlife.

Ryeon’s storyline also is another big one.

The antagonistic force in her afterlife is grim reaper leader Park Joong-il, who has a vendetta against anyone who tries to commit suicide. As it turns out, Ryeon was his wife in his past life, and when she was captured by Japanese invaders and defiled, he saved her.

The village ostracized her as she had lost her honor in the process, and she simply couldn’t handle it after a certain point. She killed herself, and Joong-il, after living several lives, asked for that part of his life to be sealed. He doesn’t realize the extent of their past together until the fifteenth episode.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is a good concept overall, and there’s a lot to learn from shows like these about empathy. I think that’s something we see from all of the characters throughout the show, even though it’s most apparent in Joon-woong.

He sees how the survivors of comfort women are and how the elderly are abandoned in their old age, left to pick up trash until the day they die, and that ends up becoming a learning moment, even though in the end he will remember none of his time with the team until he himself dies.

Even the dog that comes depressed (I will admit I started cackling when Ha-kyeon popped up on the screen, I did not expect that cameo) into that one episode becomes a learning moment that animals have feelings too.

Although Joon-woong is annoying and immature at the beginning of the series, he has the most charted and obvious growth. That’s really nice to see in a show with the main character.

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