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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Kim Go-eun, Kim Jae-won
Latest Nielsen rating: 1.7 per cent
Almost four years after the second season of Yumi’s Cells, Kim Go-eun is back as Kim Yumi for a third helping of the partially animated adaptation of the hit webtoon of the same name, penned by Lee Dong-gun.
In the intervening years, Yumi has risen in the world. No longer an employee of Daehan Noodles, she has realised her dormant passion for writing and has become a celebrated author of romance novels, which she writes in her sleek new office overlooking the Han River.


With adoring fans, more money than she knows what to do with and very proud parents, Yumi has everything she could want. Or does she?
She can still experience the thrill of adventure as she travels around Europe and jumps out of a plane – research for her forthcoming skydiving-themed romance – but these pleasures are fleeting.
In truth, everything has got a little too easy, and now she is on autopilot, albeit at an altitude few of us ever get to cruise at.
The formerly buzzing cell community within her mind has grown similarly sedate. Things are quiet, and with no immediate cause for emotional alarm, many of her core emotion cells have gone into hibernation – sleeping along a giant wall dotted with pods, just like those in the “real world” of The Matrix.

What Yumi needs is something to throw her off balance and force her to feel again, whether good, bad or anywhere in between.
That something presents itself as Shin Soon-rok (Kim Jae-won, The Art of Sarah), taking over the role of the potential romantic interest played in previous seasons by Ahn Bo-hyun and Park Jin-young.
Soon-rok is a new “PD” – essentially a manager – at Yumi’s publishing house who is assigned to her. Sharp and impeccably dressed, not to mention boasting chiselled cheekbones, Soon-rok is a promising new hire. He is not much of a talker, though, and after a couple of misunderstandings, Yumi finally begins to feel something – anger.
Whether it is taking the last strawberry-filled pastries at her favourite snack stall or questioning her position on the intelligence of Maltese dogs, everything Soon-rok does seems to rankle Yumi. She cannot stand being around him, but sure enough, his irritating presence starts to make her feel alive again.

In classic romcom fashion, we are a few steps ahead of her, recognising that these fevered emotions are about to transform into something else, but until then, chaos reigns anew in Yumi’s mind.
When we first met this live-action Yumi back in 2021, she was an ordinary office worker with relatively modest aspirations. We were granted a front-row seat to her frazzled and relatable attempts to balance her private and professional lives through vibrant animated sequences featuring her inner “cells”, depicting her conflicting emotions.
This effective conceit is a colourful way of representing internal, in-the-moment emotions without resorting to voice-over, and it vividly brings to life the minutiae of our daily interactions and the recognisable micro-anxieties they spark in us.
Granted, many viewers will recognise the concept from the animated film Inside Out – remarkably, the Pixar film and the original Yumi’s Cells webtoon debuted within a few months of each other in 2015.

What separates the two is that while Inside Out focuses primarily on the emotions within the human character’s mind, in Yumi’s Cells, it is Yumi we spend the most time with.
That worked very well in the first two seasons, which presented us with a more relatable Yumi. It is not that Yumi has not earned her success as a writer, but her new station in life and this season’s more caricatured love interest push this series away from the slice-of-life charm it began with and further into the realm of fantastical romance.
This time, the show has to make an effort to bring Yumi back down to a playing field we recognise. Thanks as ever to Kim’s sterling lead performance, the show mostly succeeds on that count, gradually turning Yumi the bestselling author back into the bumbling woman we fell in love with five years ago.
Fans will be happy to be reacquainted with Yumi and her animated emotions, and even though season three is a shorter reunion, with only eight episodes, it is a welcome return.
Since this will reportedly be her final screen outing, will Soon-rok be the man who finally gets Yumi and her cells to settle down?
Yumi’s Cells season three is streaming on HBO Max.


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Yumi’s Cells season 3 begins with the main character living on autopilot. Then, her life gets a jolt when a new love interest appears


Yumi’s Cells season 3 begins with the main character living on autopilot. Then, her life gets a jolt when a new love interest appears.


HBO Max K-drama Yumi’s Cells season 3: Kim Go-eun returns for a final romantic chapter

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Yumi’s Cells season 3 begins with the main character living on autopilot. Then, her life gets a jolt when a new love interest appears

Yumi’s Cells season 3 begins with the main character living on autopilot. Then, her life gets a jolt when a new love interest appears