For the next game, the players have to form pairs first and without knowing what they're getting into. Having a strategic mind, Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) teams up with strongman Ali (Anupam Tripathi), figuring the combination of brawn and brain is hard to beat. Hero of the piece Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) meanwhile joins up with dementia-plagued Oh Il-nam (Oh Yeong-so), out of pity more than anything else. Ultimately, it's only loud-mouthed Han Mi-nyeo (Kim Joo-Ryung) who doesn't find a partner because she has crossed one too many of the other players during the previous games ...

It's only eventually revealed that the paired up contestants are to play against one another in a game of marbles, with self-imposed rules - and of course, the loser will be eliminated. This is a shock especially for the married couple (Kim Yun-tae, Lee Ji-ha) among the contestants who of course have paired up. But it also comes as a shock for many of the other contestants, as games with marbles are based on pure luck more than anything else. So small-fry gangster Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae) finds himself on a losing streak against his own right hand man (Kwak Ja-hyoung) and ultimately forces a rule change to turn his luck. Sang-woo in the meantime straight out steals the marbles from Ali without him noticing until it's much too late, and Gi-hun uses Il-nam's dementia against him. But it's possibly hardest for pickpocket and North Korean refugee Kang Sae-byeok (Hoyeon), whose opponent Ji-yeong (Lee Yoo-mi) insists on having a long talk instead of playing and only competing in a single round at the end of the game period, and to her, hard-shelled Sae-byeok finally manages to open up, finally feeling she has found a friend - and then Ji-yeong intentionally loses the game, leaving behind a heart-broken Sae-byeok ...

One of the strongest episodes of the series, as it doesn't lose itself in subplots but focuses on the game at hand, with all its dramatic consequences, and dives deep into the characters to do so, this way also showing the characters' fallabilities. And this in turn is where the episode gets its tension from, as the deceivingly simple game played in this episode is a great catalyst to let us see how far each of the characters in question would go to save their own lives ... and the answers are not pretty - which really is the point here.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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