Mr. Plankton: I Wish You Had Let Him Live

Woo Do-hwan photographed at a November 2024 Mr. Plankton promotional event. — Woo Do-hwan at the *Mr. Plankton* press event on November 4, 2024. K-POPIT via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0. Previously AI-upscaled. Converted to WebP for display.

This review discusses the entire series, including the ending.

I watched Mr. Plankton when it premiered in November 2024. Two years later, thinking about Hae-jo still makes me sad in a way I usually associate with missing somebody. The anger you might expect from the title has very little to do with it. What remains is an emptiness, and the absurd feeling that there ought to be more of a person who only ever existed for ten episodes. I loved this series so much that having my heart broken by it felt almost unbearable. I would love it even more if Hae-jo had lived.

That is an awkward thing to say about a drama that announces its destination in the snow before we know who is lying there. Jo Yong’s script and Hong Jong-chan’s direction spend the rest of the series giving that image a life around it. Some of what they give us is indecently funny. Some of it asks more patience of the viewer than it deserves. And some of it makes the ending feel less like the fulfillment of a promise than the withdrawal of a possibility I had only just learned to want.

What the wedding costs

My first objection to Hae-jo was simple. Jae-mi appeared to have found happiness with Eo Heung, and Hae-jo abducts her on her wedding day. He decides she should come with him to find his biological father, as though his certainty about what she needs gives him jurisdiction over her life. I disliked him for it.

His terminal brain condition changes how I understand his haste. He has only months to live, and a request made politely might be answered after it’s too late. Woo Do-hwan gives him the brisk, insolent confidence of someone who expects others to run out of time to object. Jae-mi and Heung still have to live with what he does.

The script leans too heavily on the fun of putting a bride on the run. It has a better instinct when it lets Jae-mi be furious and leaves Heung his dignity, even when he’s doing everything possible to misplace it.

The man with the Taser

Oh Jung-se’s Heung tries to threaten Hae-jo with a Taser and accidentally shocks himself. He has a weapon, a shaky hand, and a sincere belief that this is his moment to take charge. Oh lets the determination last long enough to make the physical gag funny. The humiliation belongs to somebody we already have a reason to worry about.

The pursuit gets stranger once John Na, played by Alex Landi, is involved. John’s composure makes Heung’s earnestness funnier. I remember the island chiefly for the indignity of it all, including the absurdity of the two rivals trying to outdo each other over something as basic as finding somewhere to relieve themselves.

I felt for Heung even after I became convinced that Hae-jo and Jae-mi belonged together. Heung wants to be good to her, and the possibility that this might be insufficient is allowed to hurt. The man Hae-jo once baited into a fight eventually becomes someone he can be alone with when the bravado gives out.

Jo Han-chul finds another register of comedy as Ko Jae-geun, a possible biological father. At the dawn fish market, he can scarcely contain his paternal pride. Later they prepare food together. Jo makes the enthusiasm embarrassing and genuinely attractive. I can see why Hae-jo enjoys it, even as I wonder how much Jae-geun enjoys the idea of being somebody’s father.

What Bong-suk already knows

Lee El’s Bong-suk has a life and a will of her own. There’s something maternal in her care for Hae-jo, alongside companionship, physical intimacy, and a familiarity that gives both of them permission to be difficult. Lee gives her the impatience of somebody who’s known him long enough to recognize a performance when he puts one on.

I read her as a woman who knows what she likes about their arrangement. She can need him and still value her independence. A conventional partnership would ask both of them to make promises I doubt either particularly wants to make. I’d happily trade some of the chase for more of Lee suggesting years of looking after somebody who could always walk out the door.

That history gives their last confrontation its force. Bong-suk has seen Hae-jo walk away before. She knows enough to hear what he’s asking for when he tries to send her away.

A birthday of her own

In the eighth episode, the rediscovery of their rings sends us back to the birthdays Jae-mi used to give herself. The orphanage used the day she was abandoned as her birthday, so she chose her own occasions, one a month. There’s seaweed soup. There are rings made from a lightning rod. Hae-jo promises to find her actual birthday and would very much prefer to celebrate it once a year.

Lee Yoo-mi gives the ritual a stubborn pleasure. Jae-mi decides when to celebrate being alive, even when the record of her arrival belongs to other people. Early menopause threatens a future she wants for herself and collides with the expectation that she’ll have a child for Heung’s family. Lee keeps those pressures distinct. Jae-mi can grieve and still decide who gets to know and what she owes them.

When Hae-jo brings her to her biological mother’s door, I understand why. He remembers his promise and knows what a missing origin can do to a person. He also leaves Jae-mi to deal with the consequences of a decision he made for her. She gets an address and a meeting that brings its own hurt. What she does with that knowledge is hers.

The part Woo Do-hwan plays between the lines

I found Hae-jo a more demanding role for Woo than Gun-woo in Bloodhounds. As the boxer, Woo makes it immediately clear what Gun-woo can do for the people he cares about. Hae-jo’s physical assurance initially tells us how little he expects anyone to do for him. Woo has to keep that man recognizable as he loses the ability to rely on his own body and discovers that he rather likes having someone beside him.

In Episode 5, Hae-jo tells Jae-mi about fighting alongside Jae-geun at the market. He insists it was a disaster, then laughs and explains that he’s taken on that many men alone before. The novelty was having a partner. Jae-mi remembers how much he used to dislike talk of teamwork. Woo can let him enjoy telling the story while the joke leaves him some room to retreat. By the time Hae-jo suggests staying a few more days, there’s a reason to think he likes it there quite apart from the pending test.

The birthday flashback gives that humor a different job. Hae-jo takes Jae-mi’s grievance seriously enough to promise to find the date, then bargains over how often he’ll have to eat the soup. The teasing makes the promise sound like something these two people would actually say to each other. That tenderness belongs to the man he was before the diagnosis.

In an interview with OSEN, director Hong Jong-chan recalled filming the Episode 6 collapse, when Hae-jo tries urgently to get his medication. Woo cut himself on the bottle and, Hong recalled, was so absorbed that he didn’t immediately notice. Hong also described Woo playing a loss of muscular control that included drooling. The accident is a detail about filming. What matters in the performance is the change in what a body can do. Early on, Hae-jo moves through an argument as though he can end it by walking away. Now reaching for something he needs can be the whole scene.

By Episode 10, he tries to reduce his place in Bong-suk’s life to that of a stray dog she once took in. It’s an ugly thing to say to somebody who has cared for him. She asks if he’s scared. He tells her he can’t sleep because of the pain, that he’s losing his memory, and that he’s afraid of dying alone. She tells him she won’t let that happen. It’s the particular history between them that gives the exchange its force. He can make their bond sound casual as long as he does all the talking. Once she asks the right question, he needs her answer more than he needs the story he’s been telling about himself.

Hong said he wanted the crying to be unguarded and kept the runny nose in the finished scene. I’d forgotten details like the drooling. Reading Hong’s account of the bottle brought me back to a stretch of the series I can no longer reconstruct moment by moment. What I remember clearly is how helpless I felt watching him grow more helpless. Perhaps part of me has wanted to forget. There are moments when I wish I could forget the story altogether. The details have faded readily enough. My heart has been considerably less cooperative.

That same episode gives Hae-jo somewhere to go. He returns to the father who raised him, who recognizes him and calls him Seung-hyeok. Hae-jo answers. His father says the name again, and he answers again. As they embrace, the sequence moves between Hae-jo at different ages. Woo plays the adult who can finally go to his father and answer to a name that belonged to him before he learned how precarious his place in the family was. His childhood room is still there, with recordings of his childhood and evidence of his graduation. After a series spent looking for a biological connection, he comes home to proof of a shared life. The room tells him he was remembered. It cannot give him back the years in which he had reason to believe otherwise.

Later, he tells Jae-mi that he’s happy to see his father and feels awkward around him. Home feels strange after so long away. She treats that as perfectly ordinary. It’s a quietly funny answer to a man who’s spent much of his life imagining that other people have some ease with belonging that he lacks. There’s a difference between finding the man who raised you and learning what kind of father he can be to you now. Saying Seung-hyeok aloud does something a test result never could. It acknowledges a particular boy. Being a father to the adult who answers will take a series of ordinary decisions. He and his father have managed an embrace. They still have to learn how to be in the same house. I wanted them to have the chance to get awkwardly good at it.

I wish you had let him live

When Jae-mi runs toward Hae-jo after he collapses in the snow, I remember having trouble seeing the screen through tears. I had known about the diagnosis and kept hoping anyway. By then Hae-jo wants more time. The man who could make a joke out of the prospect of disappearing has found people he wants to stay with, and Woo makes the wish to live feel plain and urgent. The series returns to the image it opened with and gives it the finality of his death. By then I knew exactly whose future I was losing.

It is a devastating ending. I still find it unsatisfying. I can see the formal appeal of returning to the snow and making an image we already know almost impossible to bear. I also think the series had earned the chance to ask what Hae-jo would do with a future. He would have had to learn to stay after spending so much of his life making it easier to leave. He and Jae-mi would have had to decide what belonging to each other meant once the urgency of the trip had passed. He would have had a father to see again, and perhaps to disappoint in the ordinary, survivable ways that sons do.

Keeping him alive would have put a different demand on the writing. It would have asked whether love could make him more accountable as well as less lonely, and whether a family could remain his even after the emergency ended. Those questions seem every bit as worthy of this series as the ones it answers in the snow. I remember the man who made rings and grumbled about soup, the man who could laugh with someone he had once treated as an obstacle, the son who ran to his father. I wanted him to get the chance to become somebody who could do all those things again.