“Extracurricular” (인간수업)

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
May 12, 2020

☆☆½
Oh Ji-Soo (played by Kim Dong-Hee)
Bae Gyu-Ri (played by Park Joo-Hyun)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

“Extracurricular” starts off strong, telling the story of a high school boy who found an ingenious (and illegal) way to save money to attend a prestigious university. With his puppy dog eyes and mousy demeanor, you can’t help but want to protect him in the beginning. But as the storyline develops and viewers learn how he has rationalized his behavior, I saw him in a less favorable light. The plot peaks halfway through the series, before relying on a string of cliches and gory violence to hold the viewer’s attention. The loose ends are left dangling … like the protagonist’s meaning in life.

Perhaps that was the point of this dark series. Sometimes, things get so out of hand that there is no way to neatly resolve it.

Ji-Soo is a straight-A student who has a crush on a popular rich girl, Gyu-Ri. Though just 16 or 17, he lives by himself. His mother abandoned the family years ago and his father is a chronic gambler, who visits Ji-Soo every now and again when he needs money. Ji-Soo lives in a small apartment and pays all his own expenses, including the $2,500/month hagwon fees (cram schools that most Korean children attend so they can get into the best universities).

 

Ji-Soo’s dream is to graduate from Seoul National University — South Korea’s most prestigious school and the most difficult one to get into — get a job that pays well, get married and have children. He has no career goals. He just wants stability. On his wall, he has a hand-written note reminding him that he has to go to a SKY school. SKY stands for the three top universities in Korea: Seoul National University, Korea University or Yonsei University.

In a nice casting meta moment, the boy is played by Kim Dong-Hee (last seen in “Itaewon Class“) — who had a co-starring role as a high school student in the superb 2018-2019 K-Drama, “SKY Castle.” In that series, he was a a pampered twin with wealthy parents.

Soon enough, we will learn how Ji-Soo pays for his modest life.

There’s a story to be told about the haves and the have nots. But this series isn’t the one to do it. I’m not sorry I watched it, but it fell short of my early expectations.

Since just about everything I write from this point on will be a spoiler, I’ll continue the rest of my review after this photo of the main characters (clockwise): Ji-Soo, Min-Hee (played by Jung Da-Bin), Ki-Tae (played by Nam Yoon-Soo) and Gyu-Ri.

Spoiler Alert: Despite Ji-Soo’s protests that he’s not a pimp, that’s exactly what he is. He created an app that hooks up customers with young women looking for compensated dates. He doesn’t provide prostitution, he tells himself, but rather protection for the sex workers. Each woman is given a bracelet that can be triggered to alert their bodyguard. Played by Choi Min-Soo — last seen eating up the scenery in “Lawless Lawyer” — Whang-Chul is a grizzled former combat veteran who is fiercely loyal to Ji-Soo, whom he has never met in real life. Actually, no one has. Knowing no one would trust a teen, and also wanting to protect his anonymity, Ji-Soo uses an altered voice for his illicit business and is known by the codename Uncle, which makes him sound like a middle-aged man.

The series began to unravel for me when Gyu-Ri easily uncovers Ji-Soo’s secret. Yes, I understand that he is a teenage boy and that children are careless. However, this is a boy who has masterminded a prostitution business, where he protected his anonymity and was able to save more than $60,000 in one and a half years. I found it really difficult to believe that a boy that smart and driven would leave that much evidence for anyone to find, let alone another high school student.

It’s easy to make Gyu-Ri the villain. She doesn’t need money, but wants part of Ji-Soo’s action. She’s bored and wants some excitement outside of the life her parents have etched out for her. She even suggests selling some of her male friends into prostitution and later sets up a failed idol trainee to be their first male sex worker. Without her intrusion, Ji-Soo would’ve continued in his quiet life of crime and used his straight A’s and money to attend one of the SKY schools. But despite all his protests, what he did wasn’t any better. To get himself out of his squalid situation, he profited off of selling women’s bodies, including Min-Hee — an underage classmate who used her earnings to pay for the extravagant gifts her boyfriend, Ki-Tae, wanted.

By the end of the series, it’s clear that Ji-Soo will never be normal again. The question for the viewers is, does he deserve to be?

Airdates: All 10 episodes released on Netflix on April 29, 2020. Each episode ranges from 44- to 72-minutes long.

Nth Room: This series was already in production when the Nth Room scandal rocked South Korea, with news that a group of young men had profited from sexually exploiting and physically harming women and children. As such, the producers ended each episode with a list of organizations that viewers could reach out to if they felt hopeless and/or needed help.

© 2020 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved