Episodes 5-8 (Final) » Dramabeans Kdrama MGG

Death’s Game: Episodes 5-8 (Final)

by lovepark

A man who chooses to end his life is plucked by Death and thrown into a game. As he experiences twelve different bodies, he gains a new perspective on living. While some people are monsters with no redeemable qualities, others are pitiful individuals who were dealt bad hands. After experiencing the world through other people’s eyes, Death presents our protagonist with a second chance, but whether or not he takes it is up to him.

 
EPISODES 5-8

The second half of Death’s Game opens with a gruesome scene as the show immediately introduces our hero’s next body: serial killer JUNG GYU-CHEOL (Kim Jae-wook). An artist who uses his victims’ blood as paint, Gyu-cheol has no qualms about kidnapping people from innocent civilians to lowlife rapists and immortalizing their final moments on canvas which fetch for a high price.

After Yi-jae’s attempt to kill Death turned into a fool’s errand, he finds himself inside the eighth body and decides to use this demon to kill a different one: Taekang Group’s heir Park Tae-woo. Luckily for Yi-jae, psychopaths seem to attract one another, and Tae-woo approaches Gyu-cheol’s agent about purchasing a piece. Their encounter is tense thanks to Yi-jae’s thinly veiled animosity, but to Tae-woo, the man in front of him is a stranger and barely registers as a threat.

Though Yi-jae misses his chance to kill Tae-woo during their first meeting, he knows his address now and waits for him at his house that night. When Tae-woo sees the cryptic painter in his driveway, his already bad day turns worse, and he pulls out his shotgun without a second thought. He shoots Yi-jae in the back, but as crazy as this all seems, Yi-jae predicted this would happen and wore a bulletproof vest. His preparedness gives him the upper hand, and Yi-jae captures Tae-woo.

While Yi-jae manages to take Tae-woo to his studio where he plans to saw him in half, he faints as soon as he arrives due to Gyu-cheol’s brain tumor. This gives Tae-woo enough time to break his bindings and turn the tables on his captor. Once Yi-jae wakes up, he stares up into Tae-woo’s manic eyes, and the latter tells him that he relates to Gyu-cheol. He, too, experienced what it felt like being God when he accidentally hit a man with his car, and now, he can relive that euphoria all over again.

Shaking with excitement, Tae-woo orders Yi-jae to beg for his life, but Yi-jae spits in his face and laughs. With that, he experiences his most painful death yet, and ends up back in front of Death’s door. Despite the horrific end he just met, Yi-jae continues laughing in the face of Death. As it turns out, he never intended to murder Tae-woo in his eighth body, but instead, he planted the seeds to catch him in the next.

Thus, the show moves on to Yi-jae’s ninth body, detective AHN JI-HYUNG (Oh Jung-se). Though Detective Ahn joined the force to follow in his father’s footsteps, he made a promise to his mother to look out for himself first and foremost. His motto, as expected, turned him into a black sheep among his peers, but for Yi-jae, this body is perfect for him to catch his target.

Yi-jae leads a team into Gyu-cheol’s studio where they find all the evidence they need to solve the serial murder case, but the last recording of Tae-woo he pockets for himself. He knows the police are corrupt, so he hands the footage to a news station, instead. Like clockwork, the commissioner calls Yi-jae into his office, and Tae-woo greets him with an offer to join his payroll. Shredding the contract, Yi-jae tells Tae-woo that all he wants is him and gives Tae-woo thirty minutes to decide before he comes to arrest him.

Making the first move, Tae-woo approaches the reporters and twists the story so he becomes the victim and purveyor of justice. The news stations only release the footage where Yi-jae kidnapped Tae-woo, giving credence to his story, and the public hails him as a hero. Tae-woo becomes untouchable, but as he basks in his win, Yi-jae strikes.

Using all the skills he acquired from his previous bodies, Yi-jae set everything up as trap for Tae-woo and got him stuck in a replica of his first body’s death. However, unlike Tae-woo, Yi-jae gives him a chance at survival, and with only thirty seconds left before the plane explodes, Tae-woo finds the hidden parachute and jumps… right into Yi-jae’s speeding car.

Though Tae-woo survives the impact, it leaves him defenseless against his impending doom. As Yi-jae strolls up to him, he mirrors Tae-woo’s actions from the night his seventh body died, and he asks how it feels to be on the receiving end. However, killing is against the rules, and Death appears to stop him. Willing to go to hell if it means taking Tae-woo with him, Yi-jae tells Death to screw the rules, but then, Ji-soo’s pen falls to the ground.

Returning to his senses, Yi-jae leaves, but behind him, Tae-woo lunges forward to stab him. As if by fate (or is it death), a gust of wind blows him back, and a truck hits him. He wakes up days later in the hospital with both legs amputated, and everything he built crumbles around him as the world learns of his true nature. Paying one last visit to his enemy, Yi-jae tells him to enjoy his living hell.

With his revenge accomplished, Yi-jae passes the days as Detective Ahn until Death finds him again, but it takes a while for that to happen. As Yi-jae gets comfortable in this new life, a chase with a criminal leaves him and his partner at gunpoint, so he sacrifices himself to save the other man. When he returns to Death, she scoffs at his deluded sense of pride and asks him who he is. Her question confuses him, but before he can answer, she shoots him in the head.

Yi-jae wakes up in his tenth body (Kim Won-hae) and watches the news about the detective’s passing. For the first time, he attends one of his funerals, but the meaning behind Death’s question soon dawns on him. All his previous friends and colleagues see him as a smelly homeless man, and even the partner he died saving treats him with contempt. Realizing that living as someone else means nothing, Yi-jae wishes to end this torture and falls to his death while running away from the body’s crystal.

Only two more bullets remain, and Yi-jae decides that enough is enough. As soon as he enters his eleventh body (Kim Gun-ho), he quits trying and gives into the host’s suicidal thoughts. Though the eleventh body achieved everything Yi-jae once wanted, he lost it all and made the same decision as Yi-jae back then. Rather than rewrite fate, Yi-jae runs into traffic without a moment of hesitation.

In a surprising twist, the eleventh body turns out to be the same man who caused Yi-jae’s downfall as well as the man who ignited something within Tae-woo. Hence, Yi-jae’s hasty decision to commit suicide was the catalyst that started this mess, and history repeats itself once more. This turn of events comes as no surprise to Death who claims that humans constantly kick away opportunities, and she wonders what Yi-jae will do with his last chance.

Having lost all motivation to fight back, Yi-jae plans to end the twelfth body soon, too, but when he looks in the mirror, he finds his mother (Kim Mi-kyung) staring back at him. As her memories flood his conscious, he learns about the difficulties she faced while raising him as a single parent, but his biggest takeaway is her resilience. He realizes how foolish he was for not being happy despite everything his mother did for him and begs for forgiveness for all the pain he caused her. What seemed like a punishment at first becomes a way for Yi-jae to fulfill his mother’s wish, so he continues living.

After spending thirty-two years in his mother’s body remembering his loved ones, Yi-jae returns to Death’s door one last time. He kneels before Death and asks for another chance to live as himself. All he wants to do is hug his mother once, and Death tells him that he won. Pulling out a bullet, she allows him one more opportunity but leaves it up to luck on whether or not his wish is granted.

Accepting the revolver, Yi-jae points it to his head and shoots. A shot rings out, the screen cuts to black, and then, we return to the rooftop where Yi-jae jumped. His phone rings, and this time, he answers his mother’s call.

The final message of Death’s Game is predictable, yet the weight of its importance remains resolute. As with its final message, the show wants its audience to know that every individual is irreplaceable, and what might seem like a dark tunnel right now may only be a small part of a larger opportunity called life. In the end, the crux of Death’s lesson was never about solving a mystery or toppling a “big bad,” but instead, Death wanted Yi-jae to learn that he was loved. His death wasn’t a selfless decision that hurt no one, and only after experiencing the world through his mother’s eyes was Yi-jae finally able to step out of his own shoes and realize his mistake.

While the sentiment is admirable, I did find the show’s overall perspective on suicide slightly too individualistic, which turned out to be a driving quality throughout the show. The story never delves into the nuances of the characters’ situations, often coloring them in simple strokes. While this approach works for some of the more action-packed deaths like the second and fourth bodies, the message gets clouded with some of the other ones like the third, sixth, and tenth body. The show brings up issues like school bullying, child abuse, and homelessness, but ultimately, they are treated as plot devices rather than larger societal ills.

Take into consideration Yi-jae’s original story. His plight is treated as a momentary pain, but the reality is that unemployment and economic depression are real issues without straightforward solutions. Simply working “harder” doesn’t solve Yi-jae’s situation, and I would argue that he was already working very hard and his decision to commit suicide came from a moment of despair rather than abject selfishness. Thus, there is a small bit of me that feels like the show’s message is important but too simplistic.

The tone of the second half of the show is a bit different from the first, mainly because the focus switches to Yi-jae’s antagonistic relationship with Tae-woo rather than “beating” the game. He spends a good chunk of the show trying to take down his enemy, and I found their cat-and-mouse chase entertaining. The actors in the second half were also phenomenal, with all five of them getting to show off their craft in impactful scenes, and even the shorter appearances were quite pivotal to Yi-jae’s growth. The tenth body raised interesting questions regarding personhood — another central theme to the show — and the eleventh body was fascinating not just because of the twist but for its symbolic reflection. It highlighted how even if Yi-jae achieved his desires, it did not necessarily guarantee happiness. In other words, what we value as a society is not always the things that bring us joy.

On a personal note, the ending of Death’s Game feels adjacent to one of my least favorite tropes: “it was all a dream.” Yi-jae returns to the moment right before he jumps, suggesting that he chooses a different path this time around, but that means everything that happened in the show was all moot. Does this mean all those atrocities will still happen or was Yi-jae’s time in those bodies an alternate reality that never existed? If I think too deeply about the mechanics of Death’s so-called game, there are some loose ends that don’t make sense (I thought Yi-jae wasn’t allowed to commit suicide?). However, as I stated above, the show was always a character-driven story, and as such, even if none of these events actually occur, the effect they had on Yi-jae is the crucial part. Hence, everything that happened in the game did matter because they taught Yi-jae to value his life because every person is unique, and right now, I think it’s a message the world needs.

 
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