When the City Becomes a Character

The bigger the city gets, the more human the bodies inside it look.

There are moments when no street in Seoul looks like Seoul. The Wonderfools collects those moments. The alleys of Hongdae, the planned city of Songdo, the commercial core of COEX in Gangnam, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. All four sit inside the greater Seoul area, but they don't resemble one another. The show's awkwardly superpowered misfits travel across that incoherence — and they ask us, quietly, whether these places are really the same city at all.

Hongdae — The Right Kind of Mess for a First Stage

Start with Hongdae. Yanghwa-ro in Mapo-gu — clubs, buskers, murals, surfaces that don't fit together. The neighborhood's restlessness sets the natural stage for the team's first appearance. The camera does not tidy the space. It lets the texture of the indie alleys spill straight onto the frame.

Hongdae began, in name, as the street in front of an art university, but it has long since become a byword for indie music and street culture. Walk out of Hongik University Station and the air is different in every alley — bass from a club on one side, a busker's guitar on another, a quiet café lane on the third. It is no accident that the first episode of The Wonderfools begins here. An un-tidied city is the right opening stage for an un-tidied set of superhumans.

Around the 18-minute-40-second mark of Episode 1, the camera pushes from the station exit deep into the alleys — but this is not merely a location introduction. The street's structure itself, every frame carrying different noise and colour, spatially explains the fact that each team member runs on an entirely different frequency. The director uses Hongdae not as a backdrop but as a narrator.

An un-tidied city is the right opening stage for an un-tidied set of superhumans.

Songdo Central Park — Clumsy on a Surface This Smooth

Next is Songdo Central Park in Incheon. A planned city of glass-curtain towers and engineered waterways. Songdo is one of the most "not-quite-Korean-yet" landscapes in Korea, and the show takes that strangeness on as part of its comedy. On a surface this smooth, where everything looks possible, awkward superpowers look more awkward.

Songdo Central Park is an artificial-waterway park, built by drawing seawater into the middle of the city. Water taxis run those channels, and on either side the skyscrapers stand at even intervals — designed that way from the start. It is the most extreme form of a man-made landscape; Songdo looks like a city in which the future was built ahead of time. Setting clumsy characters onto that smoothness is the show's sense of comedy.

At 27 minutes 15 seconds in Episode 2, the team holds a crisis meeting in the plaza beside the waterway — and the scene plays the gap between landscape and character directly. The straight lines and glass behind them look like a perfectly engineered future, yet inside that future the characters keep misreading each other and making mistakes. The comic logic is simple: imperfect people look more imperfect in perfect places.

COEX, Gangnam — When Familiarity Anchors the Action

The commercial core of COEX in Gangnam absorbs the scale of the show's action sequences. The vertical density of mall and office towers makes urban action read big without effort. Gangnam is over-familiar to local viewers, but inside the show that familiarity becomes the anchor of the action — the place we know enough to read the scale of.

COEX is more than a shopping mall. It is a multi-layered urban complex spanning two basement floors and four above-ground levels, housing an exhibition hall, a convention centre, a hotel, and an aquarium. The central atrium overlooked by the tall shelves of the Starfield Library is one of the most photographed indoor spaces in Seoul. The action sequence around the 22-minute mark of Episode 4 understands and exploits the complex's layered structure precisely. The editing — cutting between team members moving through different floors in their own ways — would not work without COEX's three-dimensional layout.

Gangnam's "over-familiar" image is, in fact, a strength. Because viewers don't have to spend energy placing themselves in the space, all the energy of the action arrives at the scene itself. Action in an unfamiliar place raises the question where are we? Action in a familiar place leaves only one question: how do they get out?

DDP — The Surface of a Parallel Universe

The final landmark is DDP — Dongdaemun Design Plaza, the irregular structure designed by Zaha Hadid. Hadid, the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, was drawn to the restless dynamism of Dongdaemun — a district that never stops shifting from dawn to night — and built a space where the natural and the man-made flow into one another through curves and curved surfaces alone. Clad in more than 45,000 aluminum panels, this vast curved building is counted among the largest three-dimensional irregular structures in the world.

There is nowhere in Seoul, nowhere in Korea, that looks like this. The show's most visually adventurous sequence was filmed here. At 38 minutes 30 seconds in Episode 6, when the camera moves through DDP, the frame stops looking Korean and starts looking like a parallel universe.

DDP has a completely different face by day and by night. In daylight, the aluminum panels reflect the sky and the building blurs into its surroundings. After dark, the lighting comes up and light slides down the curved surfaces, lifting the building into sharp relief against the darkness. The decision to place this sequence at night is clearly deliberate. The lit curves of DDP look not like a city within a city but like a different planet within a city.

When the camera moves through DDP, the frame stops looking Korean and starts looking like a parallel universe.

The Sum of Four Cities — How Seoul Becomes a Character

What ties the four locations together is the show's comedy. The landscapes keep getting grander while the people inside them keep shrinking. The powers are clumsy, the missions absurd, the team's chemistry stays imperfect to the end. The bigger the city gets, the more human the bodies inside it look.

The Seoul The Wonderfools depicts is, in truth, not one city but the sum of several. The 1990s of the indie alleys, the future of a planned city, the capital of Gangnam, the unreality of DDP. When a single show lays those four time-zones out within the same frame, the city of Seoul itself begins to move like a character. The "wonder" the title promises is not in the superpowers. It is in the way this city changes its expression four times across a single screen.

Each location also mirrors the team's condition. In Hongdae, they meet for the first time. In Songdo, they fail together for the first time. In COEX, they accidentally succeed for the first time. At DDP, they discover what they actually are. Every time the texture of the city shifts, the texture of the team shifts with it. The place is the story.

Practical Notes for Travellers

For a traveller, this is a one-day Seoul route for a first-time guest: start at Hongik University Station and loop the alleys, take the subway to COEX in Gangnam and pass through the Starfield Library and the mall, then close the day at DDP in Dongdaemun. DDP shines brightest at night. As the lit curved surface rises out of the dark, the show's final sequence will surface in your mind on its own.

Hongdae to COEX takes about 25 minutes on Seoul Metro Line 2. COEX to DDP (Dongdaemun History & Culture Park Station) takes another 20 minutes on Line 2. The Starfield Library is free and open year-round; the DDP exterior is open 24 hours.

Songdo is best kept for its own day. About an hour out on the Incheon subway, take one ride on a Central Park water taxi and you understand at once why the show chose this place as its "not-quite-Korean-yet" landscape. The waterway promenades are at their best in spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October); water taxi schedules vary by season, so check ahead.

The Wonderfools' sense of city works best when you walk it. With each move between districts the city changes its expression, and that change is, in itself, already a story.