Tomorrow season 1, episode 4 recap – “Forest of Time 2 & Tree 1”

This recap of Tomorrow season 1, episode 4, “Forest of Time 2 & Tree 1”, contains spoilers.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks moaning about what doesn’t work in Tomorrow, but in this latest episode, I was reminded of what does work. For me, it’s the fantastical backdrop. The show is doing a genuinely good job of building an interesting world with specific rules and figures, and it seems like the interplay between those rules and our main characters is going to be a significant source of drama and development as the season progresses.

Tomorrow season 1, episode 4 recap

Of course, given the title, this episode is about tying up one case and introducing another. But it’s also further developing the show’s worldbuilding and character dynamics, especially among the main players like Jun-woong and Ryeon. When we pick up after yesterday’s cliffhanger, those two break Reaper guidelines by preventing Jae-soo’s father from killing himself. They nip back and forth from present to past, and the two timeframes intertwine in smart ways. We’re seeing how one influences the other, how powerful memories and lasting sentiments can be. Saving one life might mean having a profound effect on several more, rewriting reality itself.

There are repercussions for Ryeon’s direct interference in the form of a ring that cuts off her powers, which is a very roundabout way of giving someone a suspension. This is also a roundabout way of fleshing out the dynamic between Ryeon and Jun-woong, who blames himself for her predicament. This is still going on when we stumble into our next case, that of Na-young, a dead woman whose spirit swerved the escort team so that she could enlist the crisis team to talk down her distraught partner, who has overdosed as, seemingly, a direct result of what happened to her.

The back half of this episode tightens things up a little. There’s more of a focus on Ryeon and also the relative seriousness of the relationship between Na-young and Woo-jin, and the show’s better when it’s like this. The goofy slapstick nonsense is still there, for what it’s worth, but here for the first time the stronger elements seem to be the overpowering ones, and I found both the lore and the current case to be compelling. The latter is even helped along by a last-minute twist suggesting murder, which is a promising note to end on.

You could pick holes in it all if you really tried, but I won’t, since I don’t think that’s the point. Tomorrow isn’t really a show about logistics, but about feeling; it keeps coming down to an almost unexplainable impulse to do the right thing, bureaucracy and rules and regulations be damned. It’s a worthwhile theme about the power of human compassion, and how everyone can be saved if we are simply willing to try hard enough to save them. It might not be perfect, but I’d say its heart is in the right place.

You can stream Tomorrow season 1, episode 4, “Forest of Time 2 & Tree 1”, exclusively on Netflix.