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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
Lead cast: Seo Kang-joon, Jin Ki-joo, Kim Shin-rok
Latest Nielsen rating: 6.1 per cent
Undercover High School is a formulaic but very watchable high school series with a spy-action-mystery twist. It is also a prime example of how much suspension of disbelief is necessary while watching a typical K-drama.


Suspension of disbelief is a term that describes an audience’s willingness to set aside logic when consuming fictional stories. Writers constantly need to judge whether logic or entertainment is more important; as the old proverb goes, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
Seo Kang-joon (Grid) plays Jeong Hae-seong, a National Intelligence Service (NIS) field agent who goes undercover as a high school student. The character is in his thirties, but Seo’s boyish looks turn this unlikely proposition into the hook of the show.
That is only the beginning, however, as Undercover High School beggars belief at almost every turn.
Hae-seong is a top NIS agent with expert martial arts skills, who we see drop into a group of hardened thugs and calmly neutralise them all, before giving chase to a car on a motorbike, hopping on at top speed and breaking his way inside to subdue its driver.

However, when this 007-style screen agent enrols at Byeongmun High School, his secret agent skills seem to all but vanish.
His mission is to track down a stash of gold bars hidden by the school’s founder many decades earlier, but he struggles to sneak around the establishment without drawing attention.
The mission turns into a series of riddles, which typically involve him infiltrating one location, attempting to divine a clue hidden within a student ghost tale or a school anthem, before unearthing another piece of the riddle and moving on to the next location.
One clue leads him to a grandfather clock that stands in the locked student council meeting room. To do so, he has to make a Herculean effort to place in the top 10 students in exams, gain 100 petition signatures and curry favour with the student council president.
Why not just break into the room, like we would expect any secret agent to do? The reason is simple: that would be far less entertaining. If Hae-seong were too good at his job, we would not be left with much of a show.

The obstacles in his mission could be more complex, but their relative simplicity achieves two aims.
They force Hae-seong to partially regress from being the high-achieving professional that he is to the vulnerable teenager that he was. They also mean that once co-star Jin Ki-joo’s character Oh Su-a, a part-time teacher at Byeongmun, eventually learns about his identity, she is able to help him on his mission.
Speaking of secret identities, Su-a also has one. She may not be a secret agent, but her real name is Bong-ja, and she and Hae-seong knew each other as children, though it takes both of them a while to realise this.
Hae-seong’s experience at Byeongmun steadily brings him all the way back to his childhood. He has to recall his teenage years to navigate the school’s ecosystem and he is reacquainted with his primary schoolmate Bong-ja, but that is not all.

As he digs deeper into Byeongmun’s secrets, he discovers there was once another NIS agent who tried to unearth the location of the hidden gold. That agent was none other than his father, who disappeared when Hae-seong was a young boy.
If all this is not enough, Hae-seong eventually discovers that he has been doing the bidding of the person he thought was his rival: Byeongmun chairwoman Seo Myeong-ju (Kim Shin-rok, Hellbound).
Someone at the NIS has been leaking his reports and Hae-seong begins to suspect it might be his team leader, An Seok-ho (Jeon Bae-soo, All of Us Are Dead), who raised Hae-seong like his own son following the disappearance of his father.
Hae-seong’s personal connections at the school also cloud his mission. Beyond his reconnection with Bong-ja and the potential romance in the offing, Seok-ho’s daughter Yu-jeong (Park Se-hyun) is also one of his classmates.

Yu-jeong is one of the best students in school, but Hae-seong discovers that she is mistreated by high-society colleagues on the student council. He later discovers that all the exams and contests at Byeongmun are rigged in favour of the rich students.
Undercover High School is far too clichéd for any of these revelations to strike as surprising, but its mix of colourful genre codes and bright performances keep this familiar affair humming along nicely.
We may forget the journey almost as soon as it ends, but at least it will have been a pleasant one.
Undercover High School is streaming on Viu.


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Starring Seo Kang-joon, Jin Ki-joo and Kim Shin-rok, this K-drama requires full suspension of disbelief – but that doesn’t mean it’s bad


Starring Seo Kang-joon, Jin Ki-joo and Kim Shin-rok, this K-drama requires full suspension of disbelief – but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.


K-drama Undercover High School midseason recap: fun but far-fetched high school mystery

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Starring Seo Kang-joon, Jin Ki-joo and Kim Shin-rok, this K-drama requires full suspension of disbelief – but that doesn’t mean it’s bad

Starring Seo Kang-joon, Jin Ki-joo and Kim Shin-rok, this K-drama requires full suspension of disbelief – but that doesn’t mean it’s bad