Why Netflix’s Extracurricular Didn’t Want Parental Guidance

The first act of Extracurricular, the recent Netflix original drama about criminal high school students, took its time in disassembling teenage part-time pimps Oh Ji-soo (Kim Dong-hee) and Bae Gyu-ri (Park Joo-hyun) through their respective parents. Each interaction is calculated and precise while still leaving room to stake our emotions.

Dreams are Expensive without Parents

Beginning with Ji-soo, we come to learn his father’s gambling addiction and disinterest in his life as the reason behind his financial instability at a young age. When Ji-soo’s father (Park Ho-San) invites his son for an unexpected dinner, Ji-soo is aware of its implications and confronts his father, “You’re only a dad when you want money.” There is no love lost in this relationship, as Ji-soo leaves to focus on his illegal priorities, but it truly breaks apart later on in one of the most emotionally gripping scenes when it’s the father who runs away with Ji-soo’s life savings.

On the other hand, we have Gyu-ri who struggles not with money nor people. Yet during breakfast, tension hides beneath her stiff smiles to Gyu-ri’s mother (Shim Yi-Young) who essentially manipulates her daughter into becoming a corporate showgirl. We look into Gyu-ri’s perspective for the first time and it’s not a pitiful internal monologue but her vivid imagination where she sends invisible bullets through her parents’ skulls. However, it is later that we truly discover the extent of her mother’s controlling apathy when she disregards Gyu-ri’s previous suicide attempt simply as irrational teenage rebellion.

For Ji-soo and Gyu-ri, becoming criminals is more than rebelling. It is the means—the money maker—to achieve their conscious desire. Ji-soo is explicit in his want to live an average life, organizing sex trafficking to earn enough for his education, while Gyu-ri is more implicit. Only by the end of the series, she enunciates her need to leave her stifling home life and the billion won that it requires. “I can’t live with them,” she exclaims; not want but can’t. Aside from creating circumstances that Ji-soo and Gyu-ri deemed unlivable, how else do their parents encourage them into crime without ever really being there?

The Cost of Antithetical Parents

Ji-soo’s father and Gyu-ri’s mother become antitheses through series writer Jin Han-sae’s storytelling. Let’s first define antithesis as opposing forces – like life and death or good and bad – that Extracurricular utilizes as a rhetoric literary device. In his journal, Alfred H. Lloyd discusses how as opposites, antithesis is not only relative but also reproductive. The series uses familiar caricatures of parent and child but goes beyond its biological relation into the abstract such as transferring values and morals. Because Ji-soo is a victim of poor financial choices he explores “creative economy” and is meticulous with money, while Gyu-ri is a prisoner of corporate expectations and considers the pay of crime as her key to freedom. As antitheses, Ji-soo’s father and Gyu-ri’s mother expectedly become reproducers of their children’s careers in crime.

What’s interesting is the layer that the series writer Jin Han-sae brings into Ji-soo and Gyu-ri as they fall from one bad decision to the next. Antithetical characters can be described as both individuals and collective because of the interwoven nature they find in one another. In the series, it becomes a catalyst that continually worsens the teenagers’ dabble in crime. During an unfortunate encounter with an actual sex trafficking gangster, Ji-soo miscalculates a huge gamble that clashes with Gyu-ri who attempts and fails to control the situation—an infantile mimicry without parental guidance.

No matter how estranged, Ji-soo and Gyu-ri cannot truly detach from their parents’ difficult natures because they have it in themselves as well. Extracurricular is described as a chain reaction of bad choices and with the crafted relevance of antithetical characters, Ji-soo and Gyu-ri earn dimension to their desires and actions that justify but never absolves.

Are there morals to this story?

According to its creators and cast, Extracurricular is a story that needs to be told and it’s admirable how the series developed a narrative that understands the nuance and reality of youth crime. With Preview, Actress Park Joo-hyun emphasizes the weight of having the immaturity and questionable judgment of teenage protagonists, expounding how “this show [can provide] an opportunity for us to think about what we, adults, can do for them, and how we should lead them to a certain direction.”

The absence of parental guidance through the strategic use of antithesis allows Extracurricular to hold its characters accountable for their mistakes without forcing its audience to be judge, jury, and executioner of blame. Yet the series continuously challenges us to question what drives and reproduces the intentions of Ji-soo, Gyu-ri, and even our own in a society that is just as antithetical.

How do you understand Ji-soo and Gyu-ri’s actions?

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