It’s late 1999. The world is bracing for Y2K, church bulletins are warning of the apocalypse, and in the fictional town of Haeseong City, something genuinely strange is happening: people are disappearing without a trace, and a suspicious new church has started drawing in worried locals with promises of salvation before the end of days.
Against this backdrop of millennial dread, we meet a trio of small-town misfits who are far too busy dealing with their own problems to notice the encroaching weirdness — until a fake kidnapping scheme at a toxic waste dump goes horribly wrong and leaves all three of them with superpowers. Unfortunately, “superpowers” here doesn’t mean flight or super strength delivered in a neat, movie-ready package. It means powers that are glitchy, embarrassing, and often activate at the worst possible moment. Now this reluctant, bumbling trio has to figure out how to use their new abilities to stop the “Wunderkinders” — superpowered villains threatening the town — while City Hall’s newest and most suspicious employee starts sniffing around their business.
It’s a premise that shouldn’t work on paper. A superhero comedy stitched onto an end-of-the-world period piece is a big tonal swing, and K-dramas don’t always land that kind of mashup gracefully.
The Cast Carries It
Park Eun-bin leads as Eun Chae-ni, a terminally ill outcast nicknamed “Lady Trainwreck” around town, who ends up with the power of teleportation. It’s her first major reunion with director Yoo In-sik since Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and the chemistry between actor and director shows — she brings the same gift for physical comedy and unexpected emotional gut-punches that made her breakout role so memorable, this time channeled into a much scrappier, chaotic character.
Cha Eun-woo plays Lee Woon-jeong, a specially appointed civil servant investigating the disappearances with a level of suspicion that borders on obsession. He spends much of the early episodes as the show’s designated straight man, reacting to the trio’s antics with a deadpan exasperation that turns out to be some of the funniest material in the whole series. Watching his controlled, buttoned-up character get slowly pulled into their orbit is one of the show’s quieter pleasures.
Rounding out the central group are Im Seong-jae as classmate Ro-bin and Choi Dae-hoon as the hapless neighborhood florist Gyeong-hun, both of whom also gain powers in the accident. Neither is played as a pure comic-relief sidekick; the writing goes out of its way to give each of the three misfits their own real emotional arc rather than treating their powers as the whole point of their characters.
Where It Wobbles
If you’ve read other early reactions to this show, you’ve probably seen a common thread: the first two or three episodes are a rough entry point. The pacing drags at the start, some of the character writing leans into caricature before it settles, and the trio’s chaotic energy can feel genuinely exhausting rather than charming in the opening stretch. It’s the kind of show that seems to be figuring out its own tone in real time, and viewers who bail early might reasonably wonder what all the praise is about.
Stick with it, though, and the show course-corrects. Once the mystery of the disappearing townspeople and the ominous new church start to intertwine with the characters’ personal stakes, the story tightens up considerably. The millennium setting stops being just a nostalgic backdrop and starts actually informing the characters — that pervasive sense of dread about an ending, about not knowing what comes next, threads through the group’s arcs in a way that feels more thematically intentional than you’d expect from a show this openly silly.
The Verdict
The WONDERfools is far from a flawless series — it’s front-loaded with pacing problems and its brand of chaotic humor won’t land for every viewer — but it recovers well enough to be genuinely worth the ride. Yoo In-sik’s knack for grounding absurd premises in real emotional stakes is on full display again, and the cast, especially Park Eun-bin’s central performance and Cha Eun-woo’s comic timing, does a lot of the heavy lifting when the writing wobbles. By the back half, the show knows exactly what it wants to be: loud, ridiculous, occasionally sloppy, but ultimately sincere about its characters and its themes.
If you can push through a shaky start, there’s a genuinely fun, surprisingly heartfelt superhero comedy waiting on the other side.
Have you watched The WONDERfools? Did the opening episodes test your patience too, or did you fall for the chaos right away? Let me know in the comments.
