Honestly, other than the impressively unpleasant violence, the lasting image of the episode is of the kids gathered around the fire, talking honestly amongst themselves. They’ve spent so much of their lives worried about their grades, their teachers, the opinions of their classmates, their future prospects—and now that their future may have been taken away, they’re able to be honest with each other about all this, for the first time in most of their lives.

In essence, the zombie outbreak functions like an encounter group, forcing them to shake free of their social constraints and relate to one another for real. I don’t know if that’s social commentary or just a convenient storytelling device, but it’s the kind of character work the show requires to stay ahead of the zombie-show pack. In a genre that, for the past twenty years or so, has largely focused on the need to survive above all else, it’s refreshing to see a zombie outbreak that brings out people’s most vulnerable sides, instead of turning them all into unrepentant hardasses. The hardasses are what got them all into this mess, after all. Now’s the time for something new.

I reviewed episode eight of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Zombie fans rejoice: The undead are back in a big way thanks to All of Us Are Dead. The Korean-made Netflix original series tells the story of a group of high-school students struggling to survive a zombie outbreak that begins right there in their school. Combining inventive and thrilling action sequences with a cast of relatable, sympathetic characters, it’s injected new life (no pun intended) into the zombie genre.

Adapted by writer Chun Sung-il from the webcomic Now at Our School by Joo Dong-geun, All of Us Are Dead appears to be following in the pop-culture footsteps of Netflix’s other big Korean horror hit, 2021’s Squid Game. But after all of its pulse-pounding zombie action, the finale ends on a decidedly ambiguous note. What does it all mean, and what does it say about the potential for more stories in the All of Us Are Dead universe?

Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of All of Us Are Dead—warning: major spoilers ahead!

I wrote a little explainer about the ending of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

It’s perfectly fine zombie-action filmmaking, adding some new wrinkles to the basic concept and positioning the survivors for one last push for freedom. I miss some of the emotional power of its predecessors, which here is limited to the plight of that poor kid on the roof. But this is all a setup for the next installment, and I understand the need to keep things plot-centric. My hope is that the remaining episodes will reinject (reinfect?) the proceedings with the sense of pain, loss, and against-the-odds optimism that distinguished its predecessors. I think it’s a smart enough show to pull it off.

I reviewed the seventh episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

When modern zombie media invokes the concept of “shades of gray,” it usually means that one of the heroes of the show or movie you’re watching is about to kill someone in cold blood, because it’s kill-or-be-killed time, bro. It’s tantamount to an endorsement of violence against outsiders, a fascist fever dream. Not so with All of Us Are Dead. Though the episode avoids making tidy proclamations about morals and ethics and then forcing all the characters to either abide by or defy them, thus self-categorizing as good or evil, it also genuinely wrestles with the morally ambiguous choices its characters make. It asks What price survival? and provides no easy answers.

I reviewed the sixth episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

“Hope and wisdom. Which do we value more?”

“Even if the entire world has turned into zombies, let’s not despair.”

“We need hope more than logic.”

The trapped kids at the core of All of Us Are Dead’s narrative understand how important it is to believe in a light at the end of the tunnel, to forego despair in favor of a belief that, somehow, things will turn out alright. Unfortunately for them, there’s little evidence to support their hopes at present. And if the episode’s surprise ending is any indication, things may well get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all.

I reviewed the fifth episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Jam-packed with action, humor, pathos, pitch-black cynicism, bright-eyed optimism, cutting social commentary, and major character developments across the entire sprawling cast, the fourth episode of All of Us Are Dead seems to be where the series has truly found its stride. If it keeps up this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, the copious comparisons to Squid Game may well be earned.

I reviewed the fourth episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

One of the unwritten rules that govern many apocalypse stories is the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” I was first exposed to this ethos in Stephen King’s The Stand, in which the character Nadine Cross comes to believe that killing anyone, after so many billions of people have died from a superflu, is the worst sin anyone can commit. She winds up eating those words, but they’ve stuck with me ever since, no matter what kind of apocalypse drama I’m watching. It’s a big part of why the kill-or-be-killed ethos of The Walking Dead has always rubbed me the wrong way—and it’s why I found this episode of All of Us Are Dead to be the most impressive one so far. 

I reviewed the third episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Now comes the big question: Is All of Us Are Dead good horror filmmaking? I’d say no—but with a big fat caveat, so don’t get mad at me just yet. Frightening the audience is the lifeblood of horror as a genre, and I said in my review of the All Of Us Are Dead Episode 1, there’s nothing here that’s actually scary. Gross and violent? Absolutely. Thrilling and chilling, in a Halloween haunted-house kind of way? Sure. Keep-you-up-at-night, jumping-at-shadows scary? Not from where I’m sitting.

You could maybe make an argument that, insofar as the apocalypse is a frightening concept, all zombie apocalypse films are frightening on a basic what-if level. But when you get to the point where the characters themselves are doing light comedy about how this is just like a zombie movie—Cheong-san compares it to the Korean zombie blockbuster Train to Busan—that end-times fear is pretty much evaporated.

Ah, but is All of Us Are Dead good action filmmaking? Here I’d have to say that the answer is yes. I mean, what else can you say about a show that revolves around kill-or-be-killed battles in enclosed spaces like classrooms and hallways, like it’s Oldboy or a Marvel/Netflix show? So what if the protagonists are students rather than vigilantes, and the enemies are ravening zombie hordes rather than armies of goons? The underlying principle is the same.

I reviewed the second episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Are there hints that there may be more to the show than meets the standard-zombie-fare eye? I think there are. Certainly, what appears to be the underlying concept—a concerned parent concocted a zombie rage virus in hopes that it would help his outcast son defend himself against bullies—is a powerful one, if you’ve ever been bullied or are the parent of a kid who has. That it appears to have backfired horribly, leading to more and worse violence rather than less—well, there’s your social commentary about the inevitable endgame of redemptive, retributive bloodshed. We’ll see if this underlying theme, coupled with some pretty strong zombie visuals, is enough to keep the show up and running.

I’m covering Netflix’s new Korean zombie series All of Us Are Dead for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Station Eleven’s core belief is that even amid the worst of things, at least a few people will look out for a few people more. Sometimes this takes the form of art, created to bring joy to people’s otherwise difficult lives, but it can take other forms as well. Jeevan’s long-ago care for Kirsten didn’t save the world, any more than Miranda’s phone call to the pilot of that stranded airplane did. But they both saved some people, and in the world of this powerful, humane series, perhaps that will do. 

I reviewed the series finale of Station Eleven for Decider.

There’s still one episode to go, and I suppose it could settle the question of whether Kirsten and Jeevan wound up happier apart than they would have been together. But there’s a beautifully sad moment from early in the episode that I keep thinking about. In the suburban house where he was attacked (he wound up knocking his attacker out), Jeevan finds a synthesizer keyboard; the father of the family who lived there, all of whom died before he did, had programmed it to “play” snippets of his wife and children’s voices. It’s a gutwrenching moment, hearing all those happy children with no idea what was coming their way. But what an incredible way to preserve their memory—indeed, to recreate the entire phenomenon of memory, our brains’ way of taking snippets of the past and constructing them into a story, or something more like a melody. What melody will Kirsten wind up playing in the end?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Station Eleven doesn’t bounce between timeframes and plotlines, it glides between them. This can make writing episodic reviews—recaps, in the parlance of our times—a dicey proposition. Any given episode can show you the same character in extremis at different points in his or her life, for entirely different reasons. How do you determine which outburst or confrontation is more important? The show can can insert crucial moments in a character’s growth, in their understanding of the world and art’s place in it—not to mention their own—in a flashback that lasts mere seconds, between minutes of meaty material set in the here-and-now. How do you pull it all apart and piece it back together in a linear way, a way that makes sense?

I reviewed episode eight of Station Eleven for Decider.

As is by now custom with Station Eleven, this episode (marvelously written by Kim Steele and directed by Lucy Tcherniak) is ripe with powerful details. Jeevan telling Kirsten everything’s going to be okay, and Kirsten replying that he’d just said “We’re fucked,” out loud. Jeevan “talking” to his dead sister, and the younger Kirsten showing her older self that this behavior started long before they staked out a cabin in the woods. Frank’s addiction, a direct result of war trauma, and Jeevan’s impatience with it: “We’re not heroin people. We’re barely even weed people!” The lone, Stand-esque voice on the television, fatalistically explaining how no one was prepared for “a flu that does not incubate, it just explodes…a one out of one thousand survival rate.” The terrific visual of the free-standing door that Kirsten passes through to access her memories. Older Kirsten crying at her youthful self’s optimism as she sings “The First Noel” to her new guardians. The passively suicidal Frank, who does not want to leave the familiarity of his apartment even though cold and starvation are now serious threats, refusing to vacate his home for the knife-wielding interloper. Kirsten’s adoption of the killer’s knife as a totem and her signature weapon.

It’s not a perfect episode; the costumes for Kirsten’s play are childlike only in the sense of adults trying to make something look childlike, and it takes you out of an important moment. But it’s a powerful episode nonetheless, in a series that seems to stack one such episode on top of the next. Like logs, or like bodies.

I reviewed episode seven of Station Eleven for Decider.

They can’t all swing for the fences.

Titled “Survival Is Insufficient”—there’s no particular relationship I can detect between the title and the content; it’s almost like they just grabbed a phrase from the Station Eleven graphic novel out of a hat, but whatever—this is the slightest episode of the series so far. Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine! Sometimes you just need to push the story in a certain direction, making incremental progress toward your eventual goal. (This used to be much more of a thing in the days of twelve-to-thirteen-episode prestige-TV seasons, but even early seasons of, say, Game of Thrones bear this tendency. You learn to live with it.)

I reviewed the sixth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Written by Cord Jefferson and directed by Lucy Tcherniak, this is a dense, rich episode—seriously, I’ve barely touched on the soccer team, and I haven’t even mentioned the nuns, or Clark rejecting Miles’s romantic advances because he’s grieving for his dead partner, or Clark spending most of his time blasted out of his skull on booze and MDMA he found in the belongings of the fake Homeland Security agent. (And that magnificent beard of his!) It’s the kind of thing you point to when you want to say no, the New Golden Age of Television is not over, there’s still enormously moving and intelligent work being done, coincidentally on a subject—pandemics—that now dominates every moment of our waking lives. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

It’s the end of the world, and for good or ill, art lives on. Even art about the end of the world—or a world, or a space-station simulacrum thereof. Station Eleven Episode 4 is all about art’s ability to soothe or exacerbate the world’s wounds; even its title, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” cheekily paraphrases the name of Tom Stoppard’s play, itself a riff on Hamlet, a play performed in a modernized version by the characters in the show. Sample quote: “Fuck you, Hamlet.” Times have changed, and art changes with the times. Even the End Times.

I reviewed episode four of Station Eleven for Decider.

In a way, this is Station Eleven’s origin story. Not the origin of the flu that wipes out humanity, nor the origin of any of the characters we’ve come to care about in the series’ previous two episodes. No, this is the origin of Station Eleven itself—the graphic novel that gives the series its title. In this installment (“Hurricane”), we spend time with the book’s creator, cartoonist and logistics expert Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler), as she navigates life, love, art, and death—the Big Four of all human endeavor, I’d say. Written by Shannon Houston and directed by Hiro Murai, the episode that results is a minor masterpiece.

I reviewed the third episode of Station Eleven of the initial batch of three released by HBO Max this week. Comparisons to The Leftovers are more than justified.

I’ll tell you when I lost it during Station Eleven’s second episode.

I reviewed the second episode of Station Eleven for Decider. Couldn’t make it through this one without crying.

When I say Station Eleven makes for difficult viewing, I’m referring to its subject matter: a flu pandemic that shatters society virtually overnight, effectively bringing about the end of the world. All the signs and signifiers we’ve learned from our own experience with a very real global pandemic are there: the overtaxed hospitals, the confusing news updates, the panicked grocery store runs, the fear of contact with other people coupled with the desperate need to be in contact with other people. Bonus points if you have or care about children: You’ll recognize he constant calculations you make to keep them as safe, happy, and healthy as possible in a world growing scarier by the second. 

Sure, the situation in Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel) is far more dire even than our own. But barring a murdered security guard here, a delirious victim in a stuck SUV there, or a presumably flu-induced plane crash in the middle of a major metropolitan area, it’s all too recognizable from our vantage point here in late 2021, with eight hundred thousand dead Americans and a host of ghoulish politicians and pundits attempting to profit from the carnage. It’s bound to be more than many viewers can bear.

That said, bearing it is easier than you’d think.

I’m covering Station Eleven for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. This is going to be a hard, hard sell for a lot of people, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s worth it.

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss the monsters of Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero in the latest episode of our TV podcast Cut to Black. Start off the Halloween weekend right!