As New Year’s Eve 1999 looms over Haeseong City, the apocalyptic panic spread by the Church of Eternal Salvation turns out to be less about millennium dread and more about one man’s secret mission to conquer mortality at all costs. By the time The WONDERfools reaches its finale, Un-jeong, a former Wunderkinder, and Chae-ni, Ro-bin, and Gyeong-hun — the three town misfits who stumbled into their powers after being poisoned by the mad scientist’s lab runoff in the local garbage dump — have saved their town from a fate far worse than any Y2K bug.
For director Yoo In-sik, the ending reflects the series’ core message, that “only those who have truly questioned why they were given power can use their powers the right way.”
Ahead, here’s a breakdown of the series’ explosive final episodes, and how Yoo and actor Park Eun-bin approached the conclusion.
Eun Chae-ni (Park Eun-bin) is a 27-year-old born with a congenital heart condition who has never once left the small town of Haeseong City. She is the famed “train wreck” of Haeseong City, and Park says that she took care to portray Chae-ni as a force of nature through her looks as well. “I wanted Chae-ni to look like the kind of kid who’d get smacked by her grandmother … [and since] it was the era of chunky highlights, I wanted this specific section of her hair to look like she hadn’t touched up her roots. I personally love symmetry, but I thought Chae-ni might be someone who appreciates asymmetry instead, so her [space] buns were angled like a clock face.”
When she learns her condition has turned terminal, she hatches a plan to fake her own kidnapping and use the ransom money from her grandmother to fund a bucket list trip abroad. She recruits her one friend, Ro-bin (Im Seong-jae), a gentle giant, and Gyeong-hun (Choi Dae-hoon), her cash-strapped frenemy, to pull off the deed. But when Chae-ni dies unexpectedly in the middle of the scheme and the plot goes belly-up, the panicked duo takes her body to the garbage dump. Un-jeong (Cha Eun-woo), a mysterious civil servant, spots Ro-bin and Gyeong-hun, who believe the jig is up — until Chae-ni sits upright, right as rain.
What she and her friends don’t know is that, two decades earlier, a scientist named Ha Won-do (Son Hyun-joo) conducted illegal experiments on children at the Hawondo Lab in Haeseong City, funded largely by Chae-ni’s own grandmother, Jeon-bok (Kim Hae-sook), who did not know the true purpose of the lab at first. The lab’s work produced the Wunderkinders, children engineered with supernatural abilities. The most extraordinary of the group was the Child with the Eternal Heart, a boy whose heart could bring him back from death. The lab burned down in the middle of these experiments, exposing Won-do’s crimes.
Since then, twenty years have passed. Won-do has been released from prison, and he has a plan to retrieve the Eternal Heart. The uptick in churchgoers flocking to the new cult-like Church of Eternal Salvation in Haeseong City is no coincidence — it’s a front for Won-do’s lab starting back up again.
The chemical runoff from the old Hawondo Lab, long buried in the town’s illegal garbage dumpsite, is what triggered Chae-ni’s powers of teleportation, which are activated whenever her heart races, transporting her somewhere she cannot yet control. And the others find themselves affected as well. Ro-bin’s super strength kicks in when his feelings get hurt. Gyeong-hun’s power works like a flytrap: his hands stick to whatever he is touching, and will not release until he tells the truth.
Un-jeong, meanwhile, already had powers. He is former test subject number 3972, a Wunderkinder himself, with immense telekinetic ability that he’s spent years suppressing behind thick glasses and a deadpan exterior. It was his telekinetic power, erupting in an uncontrolled moment of rage, that caused the original lab explosion and led to the Child with the Eternal Heart dying and the other lab children becoming orphans. The guilt has followed him ever since.
The Child with the Eternal Heart was Won-do’s crown jewel. After so many failed experiments and dead children, he created a boy capable of coming back to life, who also happened to be Un-jeong’s closest friend inside the lab. Watching Won-do torture the boy sent Un-jeong spiraling into the uncontrolled rage that caused the explosion. After the blast left the boy brain-dead and in constant pain, his heart was transplanted into a critically ill Chae-ni, the granddaughter of the lab’s primary patron, Jeon-bok. The heart never quite worked as intended in Chae-ni’s body until she was exposed to the chemical runoff, at which point it began functioning as a true Eternal Heart again.
When Chae-ni learns the truth, the revelation devastates her. Chae-ni, who spent her whole life feeling like a burden, decides to forgive her grandmother and earn the Eternal Heart inside her by protecting Haeseong City and its people. Park Eun-bin says that “the secret of her heart coming from someone else’s sacrifice — even though she never wanted that — is probably the first real weight she’s ever carried in her 27 years of life. It makes her feel that she has to live well for the boy’s share too and [gives her] a sense of responsibility and mission that makes her think that she should try harder at her life, to treasure the opportunity to live.”
At first, it seems that Won-do is procuring the Eternal Heart for his new ultra-wealthy patron Nam Sun-kyu (Jeong Bo-seok), who secured Won-do’s early release from prison in exchange for the Eternal Heart to be transplanted into himself. Won-do gathers the Wunderkinders still loyal to him, and together they set up a new lab inside the basement of the Church of Eternal Salvation. When Won-do discovers the Eternal Heart is inside Chae-ni, he and the Wunderkinders kidnap her with the help of Un-jeong, who betrays Chae-ni’s trust in him. Inside the new lab, Won-do succeeds in extracting a serum from Chae-ni’s blood before she escapes ahead of the planned heart transplant. He injects the serum into Sun-kyu, who briefly experiences a dramatic rejuvenation before dying from the serum’s side effects.
But Won-do isn’t fazed by his patron’s death at all. For Won-do, Sun-kyu’s death, like the death of Wunderkinders before, are mere necessary costs. Won-do does not actually know how to recreate an Eternal Heart, which is why he has been so desperate to reclaim the one in Chae-ni. The remaining Wunderkinders have all been deteriorating from the effects of their mutations. Inspired by Sun-kyu’s death, Won-do hatches a plan to aerosolize the chemical substance and spray it over all of Haeseong City. If he poisons enough people, someone among the mutants that emerge might develop a new Eternal Heart. He tells Un-jeong it is simply a matter of finding the needle in the haystack again.
The finale is a full-scale siege against the Church of Eternal Salvation. Wunderkinder Ju-ran (Jeong E-suh), who has the power of mass mind control, has taken control of the police and the church’s followers, and has drawn the residents of Haeseong City out onto the main street on New Year’s Eve, making them unknowing participants in Won-do’s plan. At the same time, Un-jeong gets inside Won-do’s lab to kill the scientist, and succeeds in taking him down by redirecting gunfire from Won-do’s own men. But just as it happened 20 years ago, the lab explodes in the chaos. In a last desperate act, Ju-ran uses Chae-ni’s serum to try to revive Won-do during the explosion, but it fails. The loss sends Ju-ran over the edge. Using what power she has left in her own weakening state, she turns Un-jeong’s mind against Chae-ni and Ro-bin. Her fellow Wunderkinder Ho-ran (Choi Yoon-ji), who can make people see whatever she wants them to see, disguises herself as Chae-ni to get close enough to Un-jeong to stab him — only to be fatally stabbed herself by one of Ju-ran’s controlled men, who were trying to kill Chae-ni.
After the Wunderkinders’ tactics backfire, Chae-ni and the gang focus their efforts on stopping the fireworks display. When they see the church’s blimp floating above the city, they realize that it’s loaded with the aerosolized chemicals and rigged to explode over the crowds below. Ro-bin hurls Chae-ni and Gyeong-hun to the blimp, and then Chae-ni teleports herself and the blimp somewhere far away from Haeseong City before it can detonate, saving everyone below from a mass mutation event.
In the aftermath, most of Haeseong City’s residents have no memory of how close they came to catastrophe — or of who saved them. Nearly everyone returns to their normal lives, except for those closest to Chae-ni, who does not return after her teleportation. After some time passes, her friends and grandmother begin to fear that she died in the explosion, and plan a gathering to honor her life. But, in a twist, Chae-ni shows up at her own memorial, unshowered and unkempt — but alive. She relays to the group that she was able to get the blimp far enough away that it exploded safely, but couldn’t teleport back, so she had to return on foot. Park says that since her character’s goal from the start of the series was to travel the world, as evidenced by how she decorated her room, she imagines that Chae-ni “probably visited all the places she dreamed about, almost becoming a wanderer before coming back. Personally, because she was finally able to achieve what she wanted the most, I thought that was a happy ending for Chae-ni.”
After Chae-ni returns from her travels, Un-jeong and Chae-ni finally confirm what they feel for each other, and Un-jeong finds his birth mother. Gyeong-hun’s daughter, one of the few residents who retained memories of what really happened on New Year’s Eve, finally gives her father the respect he spent the whole series chasing. Ro-bin is simply overjoyed that his friend made it home. The three misfits continue on as part-time workers at Haeseong City Hall alongside Un-jeong.
But the final image of The WONDERfools is of the bullet-riddled Won-do. Surrounded by people picking through the rubble of the collapsed church, Won-do opens his eyes beneath the wreckage. It appears that Ju-ran’s injection of Chae-ni’s serum worked on him after all, and Won-do himself may have become something closer to eternal.
According to director Yoo, this ending was left intentionally open to hint at the expansive world of the cinematic universe of The WONDERfools. “The reason [Won-do’s] Wunderkinder were all so desperate [to side with Won-do] was because their powers came with side effects. The more they used their powers, the worse those side effects became. At the end of the series, the four walk off together. If Haeseong City remains peaceful, maybe they could live long, happy lives without using their powers much. But if they truly become guardians of Haeseong City and constantly have to use their abilities, then eventually the same [side effects] will likely come for them too. Sadly, the person who’s actually closest to solving that problem is Ha Won-do. If [all this], what kind of relationship will they have with the revived Ha Won-do?”
The WONDERfools is streaming now on Netflix.
