Image of the drama’s promotional poster was taken from IMDb and reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

TVING’s recent 10-episode webseries Duty After School (방과 후 전쟁활동, 2023), based on the manhwa by Ha Il-kwon, follows a class of high school seniors who, from one day to the next, go from preparing for the SATs to training to repel an alien invasion. What motivates the students at first is the promise of extra credit on their SATs for those who participate in the war, but as the conflict drags on and the losses pile up, they begin to question whether they should continue following orders or abandon their duty and go home to their families. The group fractures and comes together again more than once before events bring an end to the war, and the characters who file into the test room to take their SATs at the conclusion of the story are left wondering about their role in the tragic events and what choices they can make as they become adults to be able to better protect every member of their community in the future.

Poster for the second part of the series. Photo from IMDb, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

If you’re considering watching this series, let me give you an idea of what to expect, because it’s definitely not suitable for all audiences, and it deserves its R rating. There’s a ton of violence and gore, bad language, attempted sexual assault and mentions of suicide. And it’s not a sci-fi series, despite some cool CGI of alien life forms. The extra-terrestrial nature of the enemy is not a significant aspect of the plot whatsoever. But the action scenes are thrilling and despite the heavy nature of the subject matter, there are many fun, comedic and heartwarming moments.

Despite the alien threat, the series isn’t really a sci-fi story. Photo from IMDb, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The series was released in two parts, each of which has a significantly different feel. Splitting a series into multiple short parts is a new technique for K-drama that coincided with the rise of streaming, but it works well here precisely because it allows the series to highlight the tonal shift between the two parts. The first six episodes, released in March, show the teenagers participating in an organized response to the alien threat under the guidance of an army officer assigned to lead them. Although they struggle to complete the difficult tasks expected of them, they have an experienced platoon leader helping them, and their duty and motivations are clear. The last four episodes, released in April, take place after a time jump, and show the teenagers continuing the fight on their own, completely removed from whatever the army and the rest of society are doing. It’s just them alone against the aliens, and those extra SAT points are no good to them if they get killed before they can write the test. (In case you were wondering, most of them won’t make it.) The second part of the series could have benefited from a longer episode count, because there are many interesting storylines that could potentially have been further developed.

Lee Soon-won and Shin Hyun-soo play the army officers assigned to lead the students’ platoon in the first part of the series. Photo from IMDb, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

One unusual aspect of this series is that it doesn’t have a hero. It has an ensemble cast comprised of the class of 19 students, their teacher, and two army officers assigned to lead them. (Don’t worry about keeping all these characters straight in your head, because they start getting picked off quickly. That said, the first episode does a very good job of presenting each of them according to their function in the class, so even if you don’t remember their names, you’ll recognize them by their defining traits.) The story doesn’t really have one strong plotline that drives the narrative from beginning to end, either. Of course, the characters’ goal is to fight the aliens and stay alive, but the story is more about observing the way the characters act when put into this situation.

The series has an ensemble cast rather than defined leads. Photo from IMDb, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The series signals this early on through the everyman character, Kim Chi-yeol, who becomes the audience surrogate character because of his ordinary and familiar personality. Chi-yeol is presented as an average student who is neither a nerd nor a slacker nor a leader nor a complainer. Before the war, he was a quiet member of the group, who mostly hung out with one best friend and became tongue-tied every time he tried to talk to the female classmate he had a crush on. He was often shown to be observing the class’ behaviour without engaging, but when he saw that one member was being bullied and isolated, he did unobtrusively reach out to that student, which shows his sense of decency and his concern for the well-being of the group. The fact that Chi-yeol doesn’t really stand out in any way becomes heightened when the teacher selects him to document the students’ war activities through video diaries, excerpts of which can be edited and sent to their parents. He essentially disappears behind the camera for many scenes, allowing us access to confessional moments from the other characters.

Kim Ki-hae plays Chi-yeol, the everyman character who is easy for the audiences to identify with.

As I said before, this story doesn’t have a hero, but in Chi-yeol, what it does have is a witness. The fact that the narrative wraps up without any explanation of the war against the aliens and with the survivors writing the SATs a year later as though everything were back to normal makes his character essential. We viewers experienced the senseless carnage with him, and in the end he doesn’t have answers, either, just questions about what the real issues were that made the students unable to protect the whole group until the end of the war and about what kind of adult he wants to be.