In the weeks leading up to the turn of the millennium, the small Korean town of Haeseong City is gripped by a series of unsettling events. People are vanishing without a trace, and an eerie new church is taking hold — a chilling echo of the horrors the town thought it had long ago buried. But for The WONDERfools’ trio of ordinary misfits, they’re more concerned with their own issues, until they wake up with newfound superpowers and discover that they’re the only ones who can save their town. As these unlikely heroes with somewhat questionable superpowers learn to hone their abilities, they learn that their real power lies in knowing what they’re truly fighting for.
Chae-ni is a 27-year-old who’s known as the trainwreck of Haeseong City. Born with a congenital heart condition and raised under her grandmother’s watchful eye, she has never seen the world outside her hometown. But when Chae-ni learns her heart condition is now terminal, she devises a plan to fake her own kidnapping to get ransom money from her grandmother in order to fund her bucket-list travels. When it all goes catastrophically wrong at the local trash dump, she accidentally dies — only to wake up with the power of teleportation and a superheart that won’t let her stay dead. The girl who could never go anywhere suddenly has the whole world open to her — and this time, it’s up to her to protect the town she couldn’t wait to leave behind.
“Even while she’s going through serious internal turmoil, [Chae-ni] still brushes things off with an irreverent sense of humor,” says actor Park Eun-bin about the character. “That is what felt different from other scripts I’d read before, and that contrast in her was what drew me to her.”
Hot Stove League
At first glance, Un-jeong is the stereotypical civil servant: quiet, reserved, and rule-abiding. But behind his straitlaced demeanor is a telekinetic superpower. With a mysterious connection to Haeseong City, anytime Un-jeong is not at work, he’s on a mission to find a person from his past so he can finally escape his traumatic history and find his birth mother. He’s a lone wolf who’s always intended to operate alone until Chae-ni and her friends unwittingly force him to join their cause.
Island
Gyeong-hun is well-intentioned but a sad sack of a husband who entirely relies on his wife, the owner of a flower shop. When he’s not disappointing her with his white lies, he spends his days at the City Hall Complaints Center raising hell about the phenol runoff at a toxic dump site. He agrees to help Chae-ni stage her kidnapping in exchange for a cut of the ransom, only for the operation to go south at the same dump he’s always complaining about. The runoff awakens in him a comically karmic superpower: Whenever he tells a lie, his hands stick to whatever he’s touching and they won’t let go until he tells the truth.
Despite his imposing size, Ro-bin is the biggest pushover in town. He works in the kitchen at Chae-ni's grandmother Jeon-bok's restaurant, and is Chae-ni’s only friend. An accomplice to her fake kidnapping, he develops super strength, with one catch: The superpower is triggered only when his feelings get hurt, which happens frequently.
Newtopia
Strict but loving, Jeon-bok is Chae-ni’s grandmother and the owner of a restaurant. But what Chae-ni doesn't know is that her grandmother is also a powerful local businesswoman who was once the main financier of the mysterious Hawondo Lab, originally built on the current trash-dump site. In response to her role in what happened at the lab, Jeon-bok keeps a watchful eye over the lab’s former victims.
Under the Queen’s Umbrella
Ha Won-do is a mad scientist who founded a cutting-edge lab to create people with superhuman abilities known as Wunderkinders. When the true purpose of his experiments was exposed, his lab was shut down and Won-do spent 20 years in prison. Upon his release, Won-do reunites with the surviving test subjects who have waited faithfully for their “father’s” return. He sets his sights on finding a long-lost lab patient from his past, his magnum opus that he believes will unlock the path to immortality.
Seok Ju-ran is a Wunderkinder, a loyal group of surviving test subjects who have spent years waiting for their “father” Ha Won-do to return and finish what he started. They are also suffering from worsening side effects from the experiments, which they hope Won-do will find a cure for through his experiments. Ju-ran can manipulate people’s minds with her voice.
Ho-ran can project the fantasy worlds she creates onto those around her. She cloaks Won-do’s lab with hallucinatory images to trick law enforcement from getting too close to the truth.
Wunderkinder Kim Pal-ho has the power to control gravity.
