Tomorrow (2022)

January 22, 2023

Our Take: A gentle reminder to find your hope and courage to keep living because your life is precious.

The Premise

Tomorrow centers around the daily work of the Crisis Management Team of Jumadaeng, Korea's afterlife company. Led by Team Leader Koo Ryeon (Kim Hee Sun), the team's goal is to prevent people from committing suicide by helping them find happiness and hope amidst their pain and suffering.

Choi Joon Woong (Rowoon), an unemployed young man, gets intertwined with grim reapers Koo Ryeon and her assistant Im Ryung Goo (Yun Ji On) when he witnesses a man attempting to end his life by jumping off a bridge. In the chaos of trying to save the man, he accidentally falls off the bridge and becomes comatose. While unconscious, he gets an opportunity from The Jade Emperor (Kim Hae Sook) to join the Crisis Management Team in exchange for shortening his coma from three years to six months.

Together, the team works to save countless lives while fending off the threat of disbandment from other departments who disapprove of their work, including the escort team led by Park Joong Gil (Lee Soo Hyuk).

On Mental Health

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), South Korea has the fourth highest suicide rate in the world. Tomorrow highlights the seriousness and gravity of this social problem through the lens of Choi Joon Woong, who straddles between life and death, and the work of the Crisis Management Team. The show explores a wide range of sensitive personal and social issues, including school bullying, poverty, the death of loved ones, workplace taboos, victims of imperialism, and more.

With each episode, the writers take us on a journey through people's pain, hardships, and agony. As we get introduced to different characters, their backgrounds and raw emotions pull us in and make it easy for us to understand why they feel the way they do. The writers do not place judgement on anyone or critique them for their decisions. Instead, they take a sympathetic approach to understand what is happening in the minds of people who have given up on life. Their take contrasts with reality, where people tend to judge others for leaving their loved ones behind or not having the courage to keep going.

Compassion is Key

In many cultures and religions, committing suicide is considered a sin or something only weak people do. But, this belief doesn't address the core of the issue, which is figuring out what drove people to this point of no return in the first place. When we demonize people using these negative and demoralizing narratives, it becomes impossible for people to ask for help.

Rather than focusing on the aftermath and the harmful narratives, Tomorrow asks us to be compassionate and cognizant of the people around us and their feelings. In a society that hyper-focuses on accomplishments and accolades, we never know what is going on in someone's life behind the scenes. On the outside, people may seem okay. However, inside they may be fighting every day to find a reason to keep going. All it takes is a display of disrespect, bullying, or one bad word to push someone past their breaking point.

So, we need to remember that our actions have consequences and understand the weight of our words before speaking. As long as we are alive, we should love and care for those around us.

Life is Precious

"Right now, you feel like you're falling behind others. Even so, you should live. As you live, there will come a moment when you'll realize it was all for today."

Koo Ryeon reminds us that there will always be hardships in life, but how we navigate them and become stronger despite these problems matters most. No matter how difficult the obstacles we face are, we must keep enduring them because the only one who can save us is ourselves.

Even if it may not seem like it when times are tough, our lives are precious, and it is not the end yet. We have so much left to see and discover in this world. While we may be sad, empty, lonely, or angry today, we may become happy, fulfilled, and full of hope tomorrow. If we keep moving forward, we can live out the best version of ourselves and discover a future more beautiful than anything we've ever experienced.

Learning to Love Yourself

Our unhappiness and lack of love for ourselves can cause us to feel trapped and paralyzed as if there is no other way to escape. But, Tomorrow reminds us that our lives are valuable and there is always a path forward in the darkness as long as we are alive.

The key is to forgive ourselves for our shortcomings and embrace all our flaws and hardships with grace and strength. Only when we truly love ourselves can we learn to take better care of ourselves and stop seeing our lives as failures.

Watching each character muster the courage to live to see another day reminded me of a powerful quote by Rocky Balboa:

Let me tell you something you already know.

The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows.

It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are…

… it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.

You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.

But it ain't about how hard you hit.

It's about how hard you can get hit... and keep moving forward.

How much you can take and keep moving forward.

A central theme throughout the drama is the importance of focusing on saving ourselves and not giving up. Life will repeatedly knock us down and cause us pain. But it's up to us to navigate the good and bad times and keep fighting.

Mental Illness is a Battle

While Tomorrow does a great job of highlighting the prevalence of suicide and what drives people to take this step, one area it falls short is the lack of discussion around the complexities of mental health and proper intervention. For many people, mental illness is a never-ending battle stemming from deeply rooted personal and societal issues. It is not something one can easily resolve with a couple of conversations and words of empathy.

Instead of wrapping up every character's story with a happy ending, a better approach may have been to give them tools to cope with their mental health problems through therapy, better coping mechanisms, or support from their family and friends. Therapy, in particular, is frowned upon in East Asian culture, so seeing a character seek help from a therapist, for example, would have been much more powerful, genuine, and impactful to the audience.

Final Thoughts

Tomorrow doesn't have the most intricate storytelling or worldbuilding, but it is still worth watching. It is a bold drama that sheds light on taboo topics such as depression, bullying, grief, sexual assault, and more. Despite some of the drama's shortcomings, it is perfect for anyone looking to connect and empathize with different struggles people face from all walks of life.