All Of Us Are Dead: Why [SPOILER] Kills Himself | Screen Rant
Warning: the following article contains discussion of suicide and spoilers for All of Us Are Dead.
All of Us Are Dead has exactly one scene depicting a character taking their own life. Combining classic zombies with the coming-of-age stories of students from Hyosan High School, the new Netflix K-drama series All of Us Are Dead tackles how Korea's youth suffers from the problem of extreme bullying and the threat of suicide. During earlier episodes, both Lee Jin-su (Lee Min-goo) and Min Eun-ji (Oh Hye-soo) attempt to take their own lives because of how they're being treated by bullies at school. However, a different cast member of All of Us Are Dead actually dies by suicide in a later episode.
In All of Us Are Dead season 1, episode 11, the military forces in charge of martial law in Hyosan find out that the zombies are attracted to 24hz frequency sounds, and that the only way to kill the infection is to burn or completely annihilate the host. Using drones blasting a 24hz frequency tone, the military corrals the zombies towards specific locations across Hyosan, which they planned to bomb. Despite the estimated death toll to uninfected civilians being in the tens of thousands, Hyosan martial law commander Jin Seon-mu (Kim Jong-tae) gives the order to bomb Hyosan Sports Complex, Hyosan Intersection, Future College, and Hyosan High School. This moment serves as the crescendo of the series, as the military finally manages to stop the spread of All of Us Are Dead's zombie virus – but at the immeasurable cost of countless civilian lives.
All of Us Are Dead season 1, episode 11 ends with Seon-mu taking a well-deserved break after just commanding the bombing of Hyosan, calling his wife, and taking his own life with a pistol. As the commander explains in his farewell message, Seon-mu simply could not live with the guilt of being the one who green-lit the bombing of Hyosan city, even though it was the only way to stop the Jonas Virus. When Seon-mu saw the videos that Lee Byeong-chan (Kim Byung-chul) made to document the evolution of the Jonas Virus, he respected Byeong-chan's inability to kill his own zombified wife and son. However, as Seon-mu further explains, unlike Byeong-chan, he is a soldier, and he has a duty to the people. Seon-mu dying by suicide right before the ending of All of Us Are Dead isn't just a curveball to keep audiences on their toes. It's a surprising twist because, although Seon-mu refused to abuse his powers as martial law commander, he's also portrayed as a cold military leader. Beyond that, Seon-mu's death was necessary in terms of painting a full picture of the gravity of the decision that he had to make.
Whether or not Seon-mu did the right thing, the fact is that Seon-mu's decision led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, and in the end, the weight of those deaths was too much for even a cold and calculating military veteran to bear. Seon-mu's fate is just one of the many ways in which All of Us Are Dead dissects larger-than-life themes. Through the science fiction of a zombie outbreak, All of Us Are Dead unravels the social realities that pervade modern society and institutions of power.
The surviving characters of All of Us Are Dead are bound to face similar problems in the next season. In fact, Seon-mu's final fate could foreshadow what's in store for any new authority figure that's introduced in All of Us Are Dead season 2. The government has lifted martial law in Hyosan, and the zombies seem to be gone. That being said, as the last scenes of season 1 reveal, there are several zombie hybrids that survived the bombings. What happened to Seon-mu is a warning to anyone who gets encounters the Jonas Virus in All of Us Are Dead season 2.