Summary
“Fallen Flower 1” is a little cumbersome, as many opening episodes are, but it has an intriguing premise and a fun tone.
This recap of Tomorrow season 1, episode 1, “Fallen Flower 1”, contains spoilers.
There is an abundance of weekly k-drama on Netflix at the moment, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. April seems likely to be another bumper month, and the first offering — on the first day, no less — is Tomorrow, a fantastical comedy about a team of grim reapers who try to pull those on the brink of suicide back from the literal and figurative edge.
That’s… a risky subject, to put things mildly, and if Tomorrow is going to have a major problem it’s likely to be tone. This is a largely lighthearted show thus far with only snippets of seriousness, and it’s hard to say if that’s making too light of a dark subject or simply offsetting it with welcome levity. As the season better settles into its rhythms and starts properly dealing with actual cases, it’ll be easier to see quite what approach it’s hoping to adopt.
Tomorrow season 1, episode 1 recap
“Fallen Flower 1” is mostly setup, though. It’s about introducing characters, building the world they inhabit, and establishing some stakes, and it handles that pretty well. There’s little action — a brief car chase close to the start, and a short punch-up in the middle — and a lot of confused back-and-forth conversation, mostly for the audience’s benefit. But the physical performances are amusing and do a lot of the narrative heavy lifting, while the production design helps to create a distinction between the “normal” world and the vaguely supernatural one we frequently visit.
Kim Seok-woo, aka Rowoon, is particularly amusing as the lead, Choi Jun-woong, an enthusiastic job seeker who, after a trying day, tries to intervene in a homeless man’s suicide and ends up falling from a bridge and landing in a coma. Now half human and half spirit, he’s thrust into the crisis management team of Zumadung to work alongside Goo-ryeon (Kim Hee-sun) and Lim Rung-gu (Yoon Ji-on), right on the cusp of their team being dissolved, which will doubtlessly function as a handy ticking-clock device. He’s just happy to be employed and is keen on the idea of saving people, but he has an endearing, almost childlike personality and naivete that is juxtaposed nicely with Goo-ryeon’s stern professionalism.
Based on the manga of the same name by Llama, Tomorrow seems to be heading in the direction of a case-of-the-week format with an overarching plot developing in the background. The script, courtesy of Park Ran-i, Park Ja-kyung, and Kim Yu-jin, seems a little overburdened by exposition in the opening hour, but that’s expected in a show that has a whole new world and set of rules to introduce. The direction, by Kim Tae-yoon and Sung Chi-wook, is better, with a clear sense of visual style and some arresting compositions. And the performances, at least thus far, are intriguing, which one supposes is to be expected of an all-star cast. Given that last detail, Tomorrow is doubtlessly going to be popular. Given the recent disappointment of Thirty-Nine, it’ll be nice to see a show’s storyline and structure really do its acting justice. But we’ll have to wait and see.
You can stream Tomorrow season 1, episode 1, “Fallen Flower 1”, exclusively on Netflix.
