Grid: Episode 10 (Final)

by solstices

Time doesn’t flow, but our drama must come to an end. Actions coalesce into devastating consequences, and our protagonists must once again transcend the boundaries of time to hold on to what they treasure.

 
EPISODE 10 WEECAP

Yay, I was right last week — it turns out Ma-nok’s escape was indeed orchestrated by the Bureau, since they think the Ghost will likely show up for Ma-nok if she still has a use for him. A researcher detects 106 microteslas of electromagnetic radiation in Sae-ha’s skin, and Sun-wool realizes they can use radiation levels to pinpoint the Ghost’s location. Deciding to use Sae-ha as additional bait, Sun-wool dispatches the administrative team onto the field.

Things go awry, however, when an unknown masked man purposely collides with Ma-nok and removes the GPS tracker on him. The Bureau loses track of Ma-nok, but Sae-ha ends up walking past his hiding spot. Overcome with traumatic memories at the sight of his father’s killer, Ma-nok lunges at Sae-ha and drives a crowbar into his stomach.

He’s about to go in a second time for the kill, but luckily Sae-ha is saved by the agents who arrive in the nick of time. They shoot Ma-nok with a tranquilizer dart, knocking him out.

As Sae-ha collapses to the ground, we flash back to a conversation between him and the Ghost. Sae-ha asks her how many more must die, and her silence is enough answer — the last one is him.

The Ghost says that successfully setting up the grid is the only way for the future generations, including hers, to be born. No matter how many times she’s tried to find a different path, this is the only one that’s worked.

Sae-ha asks when his time will run out, and it seems like that moment is now. Bleeding out on the asphalt, tears leak from his eyes as he apologizes to his mother for leaving her behind. By the time Eo-jin and Jong-yi make it to the scene, Sae-ha’s no longer alive.

The next we see of the Ghost, she’s observing happy couples in a park when time suddenly stops. It doesn’t seem to be her doing — her disc isn’t lighting up — and all of a sudden, we’re brought back to the moment of Ma-nok’s escape. Except this time, without the Ghost and her motorcycle blocking Sae-byuk’s peripheral vision, she notices Ma-nok running away.

She immediately gives chase, but she loses track of him and bumps into Sae-ha instead. Immediately tearing off his earpiece and lapel camera, he updates Sae-byuk on the Bureau’s plan as they walk.

Yet again, they end up in front of Ma-nok’s hiding spot. Angered by the visible bruises on Sae-ha’s neck from Ma-nok strangling him, Sae-byuk lets out a tirade against Ma-nok, scoffing that she should’ve just shot him back then.

Furious, Ma-nok bursts out to smash Sae-byuk’s head in with a wrench, but yet again, time stops. The Ghost appears, grabbing Ma-nok’s hand in midair… except the masked man from before suddenly materializes with a flash of blue light, knocking her to the ground.

Both teleport away to fight, leaving the scene to continue playing out. Sae-ha whirls Sae-byuk around just as she instinctively fires her gun, and Ma-nok drops to the ground, dead — but his wrench is bloody. Having been hit in the back of his head, Sae-ha falls to his knees.

Tearfully, Sae-byuk cradles Sae-ha and urges him to hold on, but it’s too late and he dies in her arms. Above them, the fading Grid resolidifies upon Sae-ha’s death.

Eo-jin and Jong-yi rush to the scene, barely missing Sae-ha’s final moments, but they don’t get a chance to grieve before Sun-wool snaps at them through their earpieces — the Ghost is next to them.

The agents try to shoot, but time stops yet again — both time travelers’ discs flash, and they kneel down next to Sae-ha and Sae-byuk respectively.

With their discs, they form separate force fields, and the Ghost uses that pocket dimension to connect telepathically with Sae-byuk, who asks her if she came to save Sae-ha. The Ghost doesn’t answer, but it seems like a mutual understanding has been reached, and she dissolves the force field.

After Sae-ha’s wake, Eo-jin asks Sae-byuk to give him a lift back. There’s clearly a lot weighing on his mind, and he asks if she wants to have a drink together, but she turns him down.

Eo-jin ends up drinking alone below Sae-byuk’s apartment, and a drunk call leads to her joining him. He’s clearly affected by Sae-ha’s death, and Sae-byuk shares what she knew about him.

Sae-byuk ends up revealing that Eo-jin had died in a previous timeline, and he realizes that it explains the day she suddenly called him to ask if he was okay. Finally recognizing that both of them still care deeply for each other, he reaches out to hold her hand, and they share a gentle kiss.

A year later, Sae-byuk is now stationed in the countryside, where she lives with her baby daughter Byul. She happens to look at the clothes hanging on the washing line, and she realizes it’s the exact scene she had a momentary vision of when the Ghost’s disc made contact with her arm.

Just then, a car pulls up outside her house, and omg — it’s Eo-jin! With no preamble whatsoever, he tells her that she needs to leave with him immediately, and that he’ll explain on the way.

Eo-jin calls Byul by name, leading Sae-byuk to ask how he knows her daughter’s name. Eo-jin replies that she did, and that’s enough to get Sae-byuk to go with him. Hmm, it seems like this Eo-jin has traveled here from another timeline, especially with how different his appearance is — it looks like he and Sae-ha had a style swap, haha.

The pair drive off, and meanwhile, blue flashes of light suddenly strike the Bureau’s buildings, engulfing them in flames. Everyone inside is decimated by the explosions, and across the world, the Grid disappears.

Elsewhere, the masked man from before reports to his boss that the Grid has been wiped from all times and layers. “You never know,” says his boss, turning around… Omg, it’s Yoo Jae-myung! We got a Forest of Secrets cameo!

The camera pans to reveal the Ghost lying unconscious on a stone slab, and Yoo’s character repeats yet again that one never knows — is there truly ever an end?

Eo-jin and Sae-byuk arrive at a safehouse, and the doors open to reveal a very much alive Sae-ha. The Ghost steps out after him, taking Byul from Sae-byuk’s arms, and then the four retreat into the warehouse, presumably to carry out the next part of their plan.

And… that’s it. That’s the end of the final episode, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. While I did enjoy Yoo Jae-myung’s cameo out of pure nostalgia, I wonder if introducing him and the masked man so late in the game was truly necessary, especially since no mention had been made of them before. In typical Grid fashion, the episode ends with the introduction of new mysteries, except this time there isn’t a next episode to answer our questions.

To be honest, when I finished watching this episode, my initial reaction was simply stunned confusion because of how much they dropped on us in the final few minutes. Why inundate us with even more questions? Where are the answers we’ve been waiting for?

However, after thinking it through and trying to connect plot events to actual time travel theories, I realized that the ending does actually make sense in some way, and it also gives some form of closure — just not the traditional kind we’re used to.

Sae-byuk’s reiteration that time doesn’t flow pretty much confirms that the Grid is founded upon the growing block universe theory. I’ll be delving a little into this theory in an attempt to make sense of the ending, so please bear with me! (And if there are any mistakes in my understanding of the theory, feel free to correct me in the comments!)

In order to understand the growing block universe theory, we need to distinguish the “now” from the “present” — the “now” is the moment of time we are currently experiencing, i.e. it is subjective and relative. For example, the current place in time that you are experiencing is your “now,” but the place in time that Aristotle exists in is also his “now,” just not our perception of what “now” is. Relative to us, Aristotle existed in the past, but to Aristotle, we exist in his future.

In contrast, the “present” is the edge of the block where the future comes into being and becomes the present, i.e. it is theoretically objective. Accordingly, it is possible that none of our characters’ “now” moments are in the present. Drawing upon my earlier example, it could be that the Ghost is like Aristotle — she believes she is in the present, but there are in fact others who exist in a later point in time than she does.

That could be the trio of Eo-jin, Sae-ha, and the Ghost that we see at the end of the episode, but they still aren’t necessarily at the “present” edge of the block. They could be Shakespeare to Aristotle, existing at a later point in time yet still earlier than our current moment. And we might not even be in the “present,” either — there could be people existing in a later point in time than us, but we are unaware of their existence because to us, that is our future, and it’s as of yet inaccessible.

What this implies is that no time traveler truly knows what is the “best” outcome, nor what events must happen to achieve it. Every time traveler is merely acting on the limited knowledge they have based on their current “now,” and traveling back into the past to fix what they perceive to be mistakes. However, every time they time travel and alter events, they become a part of past events (like how Sae-ha became the janitor’s killer alongside the Ghost), creating a new version of the previous timeline.

This is supported by how the time travelers take the place of their selves in the timeline they traveled to (like when perfectly healthy Sae-ha morphed into injured time-traveler Sae-ha), because they are now inhabiting this new timeline, and no longer their original one. A paradox (such as the grandfather paradox) is not created, since the time travelers’ actions would impact the new timeline they are in, and not the one they came from.

With the introduction of even more time travelers in this episode, our original time travelers now have peers with diametrically opposed ideologies and goals to contend with. As seen in this episode, this suggests that both sides will constantly be traveling through time and making changes, creating even more variables and more branches out to alternate timelines.

Perhaps this could explain the Ghost’s motivations — she didn’t seem surprised when the masked man appeared out of nowhere, suggesting that she knows of him and his aim. Hence, she may have traveled to the drama’s initial timeline in order to ensure the birth of Sae-byuk’s daughter and successfully set up the Grid in at least one layer of space-time, so as to thwart the masked man’s mission and continue the fight against him.

This is why I’m of the opinion that the drama did in fact answer our questions, just in a very subtle and roundabout way. Its closure comes not from a neatly wrapped-up ending, but from the acknowledgement that there will never truly be an end to time travel and all its timelines; our drama ends here, but these characters’ journey will continue on in an infinite number of possibilities.

I suppose this means that the drama draws upon both the growing block universe theory as well as the multiverse theory, which really is a lot to wrap one’s head around! I’m not a physicist, nor do I claim to be an expert in time travel theories, so if you have any refutations or rebuttals, please go ahead and bring them up in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

In any case, this drama was definitely an interesting one to cover. I’m sure we all have our gripes with it, many of which we’ve voiced over the course of its broadcast, but I’d like to use this space to appreciate it for its strengths.

By no means was this a perfect drama, and I’m still disappointed by the potential it failed to deliver on. Still, I enjoyed how layered the plot was, and I found the characters’ conflicts quite compelling. Their clashes arose from incompatible goals that stemmed from the beliefs they held, which were shaped by their past experiences — many of which were influenced by one another through time traveling, thus bringing the conflicts full circle.

I find it tragically poetic that Sae-ha brought about his own death due to his actions in the past. If he hadn’t killed Ma-nok’s father, Ma-nok wouldn’t have had reason to kill him, yet he still went through with it to save mankind. It’s just as Sae-byuk said: Sae-ha spent his life through so many different timelines losing his loved ones, watching his family be used by the Bureau, and even sacrificing himself at the end of it. From the very beginning, when his goal was to uncover the truth of his father’s death, he hadn’t been able to truly live for himself.

That’s why even though I expected Sae-ha to show up again in some capacity, I was still happy to see him appear at the end. It’s a small reassurance that in another timeline, Sae-ha was able to live out his life even just a little bit longer, and hopefully a little bit happier, too.

Knowing writer Lee Soo-yeon’s penchant for social commentary, I have to wonder if Sae-byuk’s monologue about how we are destroying our planet, and depriving our future generations, is meant to illuminate a possible metaphor that undergirds the drama.

The solar winds are akin to the dire consequences of climate change that we can only mitigate or defend against, because it is too late for prevention once we have reached that point. While there are people fighting to protect the Earth, like the Ghost and our protagonists, there are also counter-forces like the masked man and his boss, who are akin to profit-driven corporations that display no remorse about polluting the environment and destroying our planet.

Perhaps there may never be an end to this conflict. But to stop is to fail entirely, and so our protagonists continue leaping through time in an effort to save mankind.

As someone who likes intricate plots and complex theories, I honestly enjoyed the weekly analysis and theorizing that came with each episode. The worldbuilding was immersive and piqued my curiosity to know more, and it was satisfying whenever disparate plot threads were finally connected.

Still, I think the drama bit off more than it could chew. An intricate plot taken too far just becomes convoluted, which can be tedious for viewers who just want an entertaining and tightly-plotted story, not a ten-hour philosophical course.

The drama may also have suffered from too much showing and not enough telling; it required careful attention to detail while watching, which meant viewers often had to struggle to connect the dots themselves without much guidance from the drama. This writer’s strength is definitely in how her dramas manage to be simultaneously cerebral and compelling, but I wonder if perhaps it went too far in the former direction to the point that it ended up becoming esoteric instead.

In any case, while the drama did leave much to be desired, it definitely had its memorable moments too. Although a fair bit of character development was sacrificed in favor of suspense and plot progression, I found myself growing fond of and rooting for our protagonists, especially Eo-jin with his quiet turmoil and restrained concern.

At the end of it all, I suppose I’m both satisfied and disappointed, and maybe a little too mentally exhausted from all the theorizing to parse through how I truly feel about Grid in its entirety. As a thought experiment, the show may have delivered, but as a drama? Perhaps not so much.

 
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