Extracurricular is an R16 Netflix original series about a top student who runs an illegal business and is caught by one of his classmates who starts to blackmail him. This is not the ordinary Extracurricular activity you know of, as it may be hard to imagine especially from students who wanted to escape from reality.
Jisoo (Kim Dong Hee) is a model student who secretly works on a “part-time job” and calls himself “Old Uncle”, helping women sex workers where one of them is his classmate Min-Hee (Jung Da Bin) who wears an SOS bracelet that can locate her from danger and help them through an application called ” Deng Deng”.
As Mr. Lee (Choi Min Soo) arrives and helps her from psycho clients to support Old Uncle’s own way of living. There are a lot of people who have dreams but in his case, he saves up a sum of 90 million to reach that dream of graduating, going to college, and getting a job. He eventually meets a girl who is the only member of the social issues research club named Gyu-Ri (Park Jung Hyun) also known as the “It Insider”, that will lead him to know about Jisoo’s part-time job and helping him bring back the amount of money he lost from his dad by joining him but with Jisoo rejecting her. As his life becomes more miserable after mock exams, Jisoo accepts Gyu Ri’s offer to join him in his business with Gi-Tae (Nam Yoon Soo) trying to save his girlfriend Min- Hee, as she suffers from the panic disorder due to the crime.
No matter how pure and innocent human beings are, you don’t know how terrifying life can be. Even if you’re privileged or unprivileged. People have a lot of things to hide just by working on various types of jobs that can help them make the amount of money they need, even if it meant taking on uncommon part-time jobs. Wherein, that job can be an illegal business as not what you expected from students in the series. As to how hidden Jisoo’s business is, people around him wouldn’t even know how he has been doing it. He intends to keep it that way thanks to privacy, but, if things won’t go as planned, Gyu Ri can protect him, thereby putting his job as an Extracurricular activity.
In Episode 3, the scene where Jisoo listens to a video about sloths tells us the metaphor on how he sees life or from the audience’s point-of-view it can be described as what Jisoo’s character is:
Sloths are very lazy animals. They move so slowly. That it is amazing that they are still in existence and have not gone extinct. Once they stopped moving, they may stay still in the same position for days on end. However, due to such slow movements. They are not that easily seen by predators, and they can continue to live on hiding”.
As we think of animals, Jisoo had a unique pet that is a hermit crab where we don’t know why it was precious to him. Apparently, hermit crabs tend to have the ability to know when to pull back or when to stand firm. It also symbolizes patience, social structure, and resourcefulness that can explain Jisoo’s personality as the boss of his business. However, hermit crabs also value alone time, and will retreat into its shell when it’s done socializing for the day, which is similar to what Jisoo wanted–that is to work without Gye Ri at first.
There may be lot of reasons why they would do such things for money but, if things get worse, there are people who will always be willing to help to get you through all the anxiety that goes with the problem. In addition, the show tells us the importance of knowing when to stop or continue with our engagements–may it be illegal or not. Finally, the series also shares information on where you can ask for help whenever you need them and that may always reach out to your parents, to a friend, to a school counselor, to an adult you trust or to a local helpline.
Words by KREW member Chiarra Mogol
THE KREW | MNL 