The WONDERfools Episode 3 Review: Eun Chae-ni Gets Drafted Into the Worst Civil Service Job in Haeseong-si
The bad luck of being a superhuman in 1999 Haeseong-si is that someone professional, well-funded, and Bible-quoting has been hunting people like you for decades. Episode 3 names them, watches Chae-ni meet them, and quietly conscripts her into the only resistance she can find — a street-cleanup roster at City Hall.
The premiere asked a question about apocalypse. Episode 2 asked what you do with a body that won’t stay dead. Episode 3 names the people who would very much like to answer that second question with a scalpel, and it does it before the cold open is over.
The opening scene is one of the most chilling things this show has done so far, and it works because nothing supernatural happens. A man in immaculate clothing visits a prisoner holding a Bible. He dismisses religion as “deceptions created to ease humanity’s anxiety” and then says, with the pride of a craftsman, that he is the real deal — that the Child of Eternity was, in fact, his creation. When the prisoner won’t tell him where the child is, the visitor recites the verse about faith being “confidence in what we hope for” and walks the man off a ledge to test his belief that he cannot die. He walks back out alone. That is The WONDERfools dropping its antagonist into the river without raising its voice.
The Church of Eternal Salvation has a basement
For two episodes, “13 Haedeul-ri” was a flyer. A street-preacher’s promise. A dot on a map that several different conspiracies kept circling without ever quite landing on. Episode 3 lands.
When Chae-ni and Lee Un-jeong follow a missing-persons report to the Church of Eternal Salvation, the visit reads at first like Haeseong-si bureaucratic comedy — Un-jeong patient and apologetic, Chae-ni admiring the koi tank, the host volunteering a tour. Then the camera cuts away and finds Kim Bong-pal, the old man’s missing drinking buddy from Episode 1, alive and screaming at a police officer who cannot see him. He is there, gesturing inches from Un-jeong’s face, and Un-jeong walks past him toward the koi. The town’s missing people are not theoretical. They are stored — visible to anyone with the right eyes, invisible to anyone the church has trained to look elsewhere.
Director Choi’s suicide note arrives at Hearty House the same morning, addressed to Kim Jeon-bok, demanding she beg Dr. Ha Won-do for forgiveness. Four people involved in “this mess” are already dead, the private investigator tells Grandma over noodles. The Church is the building. Dr. Ha Won-do is the science. Kim Jeon-bok is, somehow, the older generation that helped bury all of it.
The phenol gang figures out it has a team
While the conspiracy plot sharpens, the comic plot keeps doing what The WONDERfools does best — letting four ordinary people fail at being superheroes in funny, embarrassing increments.
Ro-bin, the mayor’s insecure son, can punch a soda can through a wall — his super strength surfaces in the middle of an argument. The Nightmare, Son Gyeong-hun, has turned into “a giant sticky note,” his power glue-coded and adhesive rather than kinetic. Ro-bin only confirms what he is when he tries to lift a flaming police car. Chae-ni teleports without warning, including out of a hospital gown in the middle of the ocean. They diagnose it as phenol poisoning (“we’ve been cursed by the Industrial Revolution!”) because the only frame of reference for “ordinary man develops superpower” is the toxic-dump rumor the old men at City Hall have been screaming about for two episodes. The acrostic-poem scene at the bus stop — Super spooked / Perplexing / Powerful predicament — is the kind of small idiocy this show gets right.
What keeps the sequence from being slapstick is the cost in the margins. Mr. Son’s first speech to the group is about his daughter Cheong and his wife, and he is not joking when he says he will keep his family safe even if it means lying to them forever. Ro-bin, the boy nobody listens to at City Hall, finds out he is useful — and the Nightmare and Mr. Son mock him for it within a single scene. The WONDERfools will not pretend that getting powers fixes the dynamics that made you small.
The Wunderkinder reveal is the year zero of this show
The center of “Brutes and Bad Luck” is the moment Kim Pal-ho — a grown man with the voice of a teenager who never finished a sentence without his older brother’s permission — finds Lee Un-jeong in the bowels of City Hall and tells him, gently, that they are siblings.
Pal-ho is 4885. Un-jeong is 3972. “Father” — Dr. Ha Won-do — assigned them numbers, “took the soft, unwanted 4885,” and remade Pal-ho into a monster strong enough to throw cars at his enemies. He calls Un-jeong “brother.” He uses the word Wunderkinder without flinching, German with its sleeves rolled up: child wonders, miracle children. The Church and Dr. Ha do not consider what happened to Chae-ni and the others a coincidence. They consider it inventory. Defective variants, Pal-ho says, twice, like he is reading off a clipboard. They have been collecting them.
Cha Eun-woo plays Un-jeong almost completely still through the whole exchange, until the word “brother” lands and his jaw goes wrong for half a second. The premise we have been calling “defective superhumans” is suddenly a slur in someone else’s mouth. The orphanage explosion from the Episode 1 newspaper clippings was not a tragedy that happened to the WONDERfools. It was their birthday party.
And then Pal-ho stabs his brother and walks away. Un-jeong does not die. The wound closes. He shows it to Chae-ni, the way you show a coworker a healed scar, and tells her — flatly, almost tenderly — that her power doesn’t expire. You’re not gonna die. She hears that line in the same room where she spent the entire premiere trying to plan around the opposite. Her response is to whoop in the rain. Park Eun-bin has been waiting all season to do that exact whoop.
Chae-ni’s job offer is the episode’s quietest move
For a comedy with this many fire pits, the most important scene might be the one where Un-jeong asks Chae-ni to join the Friday street-cleaning campaign.
That is what it is on paper. A line item Mr. Yang asked him to fill that morning. But everyone in the scene knows what Un-jeong is doing. He is building a team without admitting it. He is forming the “public super trio” he spent the entire midpoint warning Chae-ni not to form. He is putting four targets on one cleanup roster because he has decided, against twenty years of policy, that he would rather they be his targets than the Church’s.
Chae-ni hears it as a job. Grandma hears it as a fortune-teller’s prophecy come true. The audience hears it as the recruitment scene the genre owes us, dressed in the clothes of a 1999 community service announcement. Grandma’s lap-of-honor through the Hearty House staff — Hello! Hello there! shouted at everyone in the lobby — is one of the warmest beats Kim Hae-sook gets all episode, and it is undercut, beautifully, by the closing image. Mi-hui returns home to find guests waiting in her dining room. “You haven’t changed at all, Ms. Kim.” The doors of Hearty House close from the inside.
Chae-ni just got a government job. Her grandmother just got a visit. The Church has been collecting variants for twenty years, and Grandma is, somehow, the older generation that knows where the bodies are buried. That is one hell of a payoff for an episode that opens with a man calmly explaining that faith is “assurance in what we do not see.”
Tiny details worth clocking
- The “Holy Bible” prop in the cold open belongs to Director Choi, who turns up dead two scenes later with a confession framing Dr. Ha Won-do as innocent. The Church is killing its own to protect the doctor.
- Kim Bong-pal — the missing drinking buddy from the Episode 1 City Hall tirade — is alive, imprisoned, and visible only to the audience inside the Church basement. The town has been right about its missing people the whole time.
- Officer Gyeong-hwan, the cop turned into a sweat-covered pool noodle on the highway, vanishes from the hospital records by sundown. The Church has paramedics, a clean-up crew, and Haeseong Hospital wired.
- Dr. Ha Won-do, “specialist in cell regeneration.” Un-jeong, who heals from a stab wound in seconds. The premise is becoming a thesis: the experiment that built these kids was supposed to make humans who do not die. Chae-ni is what success looks like when no one was trying for her.
Verdict
“Brutes and Bad Luck Do Come in Droves” retroactively makes the first two hours mean what they were always going to mean. The Church of Eternal Salvation is no longer background flavor for a 1999 setting — it is the season’s antagonist, vertically integrated, with a science wing, a basement, and a recruiter who calls his old experiments “defective variants” while drinking from a porcelain cup. The Wunderkinder are not Chae-ni’s peers. They are her predecessors, and the ones who survived the project were rebuilt into the men hunting her.
What keeps the episode from sagging under its own lore is the small-town comedy. The cleanup roster sliding under Chae-ni’s nose at exactly the moment Pal-ho slides a knife into her future partner. The only soft spot is the highway sequence, which leans hard on the same beat — Ro-bin can’t, Mr. Son can’t, then suddenly someone can — three times in a row. But it earns the team it forms. By the time Chae-ni and Un-jeong are standing in the rain at the end, soaked and grinning and quietly conspiring against a cult, the show has done the thing every fantasy premise has to do at some point. It has decided who is on which side.
Rating: 8.9/10