Summary
“Someday, Because of You” still has some tonal woes and deploys a couple of cheat codes to create emotional poignancy, but the involvement of a dog is always going to improve something.
This recap of Tomorrow season 1, episode 9, “Someday, Because of You”, contains spoilers.
If there are two themes in the latest episode of Tomorrow, they are 1) the past and 2) how great dogs are. Those two things aren’t directly related, necessarily, but they’re both relevant here in “Someday, Because of You”, which is basically a cheat code for poignancy given how it deploys man’s best friend to do some emotional heavy lifting.
Tomorrow season 1, episode 9 recap
But the past is still there. Ryeon is clearly hiding something about hers, which might well explain why she’s in Jung-gil’s nightmares, but we’re being drip-fed this kind of information to give the season some structure and continuity.
The suicide risk this week is the dog itself, Kong, which is a novel concept. The team works to try and figure out why the mutt might have had enough, and of course, there’s something remarkably and immediately sad about just looking at the thing, even after it’s revealed that it wasn’t abandoned by its owner, Hun, but rather ran away of its own volition.
The reasoning behind Kong’s departure becomes the episode’s mystery, so to speak, and it leads to some emotional revelations. With Kong’s health failing, he ran away so as not to burden Hun with the pain of his death, fearing that his owner might die along with him. Knowing the end is near, the two of them get to spend their last day together, and Jun-woong and Ryun-gu even negotiate a little extra time when the Reaper arrives to take the pooch away.
Amongst all this sadness and, let’s be frank, blatant emotional manipulation, there are at least efforts to tie some of these themes and ideas back to the ongoing character arcs. There is certainly something to be said for animals being able to sense our pain, and desiring to protect us from it, and one imagines that many suicides are probably rooted in the same notion of freeing others from a burden. It’s a sad note, and in many ways, Tomorrow gets a lot of mileage from it, even though it still has some odd tonal discrepancies and is using the internationally recognized shortcut to emotional resonance, which is a very good boy. Tomorrow still has its share of the usual problems, but let’s face it – everything is improved by the presence of a dog.
You can stream Tomorrow season 1, episode 9, “Someday, Because of You”, exclusively on Netflix.
