'Extracurricular' reflects the current toxic chatroom culture in South Korea through a high schooler's life
Spoilers ahead for 'Extracurricular' Season 1
The Burning Sun Scandal, The Nth Room case, illegal sharing of videos of women in compromising positions -- all for this has one thing in common and that is the misuse of a chatroom on different apps such as Kakao Talk and most recently Telegram. How chatrooms turned toxic in real life is something that we saw play out through a string of evidence that was produced through investigating The Burning Sun Scandal and The Nth Room Case.
'Extracurricular' portrays a disturbing reflection of this toxic chatroom culture, a really tiny part of it but it hooks you right in with how spectacularly things could go wrong in one's life with a secret chatroom getting revealed. Case in point, JiSoo's chatroom that he runs under the guise of "Uncle". Whether the debate of sexual services should be legal or not is not what the show tries to bring up. Instead, it tries to portray the situation of women who freely choose this as a part-time or full-time job.
There is no judgment attached to these women's choices, the hatred is directed more at JiSoo for creating an app that allows a minor to take part in the business of sexual work. When Gyuri (Park Joo-hyun) coincidentally finds the app and the chatroom that JiSoo used to give instructions to the many women about their assignments, she uses it to initially blackmail JiSoo, and then forcefully enters into a partnership with him.
Gyuri then forces JiSoo to make make the business bigger by including men on the service, and in doing so, Gyuri ends up leaving JiSoo's business out in the open. That is how a group of mobsters ends up finding out about the app and the service and in turn, end up trying to force JiSoo and Gyuri into helping them set up a chatroom to get started with a similar compensated dating service app.
This leads to mayhem and chaos because the mobsters' head repeatedly attacks the wrong person in an attempt to find the real boss of the chatroom/dating service. First, they end up attacking a man who had just started using the service. Next, they attacked Mr. Lee, and when JiSoo along with Minhee tries to help Mr. Lee, that's when the gangsters attack him too. The gangsters getting their hands on JiSoo happens by mistake, but once they find out his real identity, they even go to the extent of trying to chops off his hands and legs with a saw.
If not for JiSoo's smart thinking on his feet, he might have been killed easily. The amount of danger that JiSoo faces increases because this business includes a lot of greed for money and power, so to sidestep being approached by power-mongering mobsters is not easy. In fact, the show stresses on how something of this scale will not leave JiSoo alone. The show ends on a rather dark note leaving JiSoo bleeding on the floor after his classmate stabs him for running a chatroom dating service that was used by the classmate's girlfriend.
Such cases of attacks out of spite are also something that JiSoo was ready to face because he thought that money was of utmost importance to make his dream come true. This portrayal of how a chatroom service turned his life upside down is just a minuscule amount of how toxic the chatroom culture really is, yet it is extremely shocking.
All 10 episodes of 'Extracurricular' can be streamed on 'Netflix'.
