All of Us Are Dead: How Netflix's Bleak Zombie K-Drama Ends

Once there, they meet Nam-ra, and have another campfire like they did (sans Ha-ri and Mi-jin, who weren’t part of the group at that point) when waiting on the rooftop of the school for someone to rescue them. At the time, the group still had some hope that they might be saved—a hope that was eradicated when the Korean soldiers came and left without them. While they don’t remember that rooftop experience fondly, they hold onto the shared moment of friendship they had together. For Nam-ra, who didn’t have any friends prior to the zombie apocalypse and who is now living her life more or less on the run, it was one of the only times she felt part of a social group.

Of the 170,000 residents of Hyosan, 110,000 people make it out alive. The military reports that there were 60,000 casualties in the bombing of Hyosan, with 50,000 of those being infected people and 10,000 of those as asymptomatic or not infected. U-sin the firefighter makes it out alive, as does Detective Jae-ik, “Detective Seoul University,” our favorite YouTuber, the baby, and the little girl.

And if you were wondering: no, I am still not over Cheong-san’s death.

I suppose anything is possible. When On-jo and the others meet Nam-ra on the roof, Nam-ra tells them that there are a few others “like her,” meaning half-zombie, half human left in the area, before she jumps off the roof to go meet them. That being said, it seems unlikely, given that Nam-ra didn’t mention it to On-jo, and considering that, earlier, when On-jo returns to the construction site after the bombing, Nam-ra tells her that she can’t smell anything—that no one is there. Sure, Cheong-san’s scent and sounds could have been masked by the debris, but he seems to be pretty well engulfed by flames when falling down that elevator shaft. He’s probably fully dead.

Like all good zombie dramas, All of Us Are Dead is using the well-worn tropes of this horror sub-genre to ask and examine some very important questions about society, with a particular focus on Korean youth. All of Us Are Dead, which is based on a webtoon that was published between 2009 and 2011, is incredibly invested in calling out the intense pressures placed on high school students in Korea, where a good score (or not) on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) is seen as completely determining one’s (academic and professional) future. Several times throughout the series, Mi-jin compares the zombie apocalypse favorably to the experience of trying to get into college, and I don’t think the show is totally joking. Suicide is a major public health issue in Korea, which has the highest suicide rate of any developed country, with suicide having been the number one cause of death for young people since 2007.

On-jo’s dad is depicted as the ultimate parent not simply because he comes back to save his daughter, but because he has always valued her health and happiness over her test scores, and has tried to communicate that to her. She only seems to fully believe him when she sees him on the other side of that door. It’s telling that not only does On-jo, a student who is not good at test-taking, survive, but she manages to hold onto her humanity in the process. Past that, unlike Detective Seoul University, who doesn’t know how to feed a baby, On-jo has emotional intelligence, leadership ability, and emergency crisis response knowledge that makes her invaluable to her friend-group’s survival. As soon as a crisis breaks out, the somewhat arbitrary hierarchy of the social order is quickly exposed. Everyone is equal in an accident, So-ju tells On-jo before everything goes to hell. Nam-yeon’s money doesn’t buy her an escape; on the contrary, the lie she’s been taught that she is better than a kid on welfare keeps her isolated, turns her into a murderer, and ultimately leads to her death.