Grid: Episode 8

by solstices

Devastating losses stir up some long-buried emotions, forcing our characters to reexamine what their loved ones mean to them, and how much they’re willing to sacrifice. Can change truly be enacted, or will the resulting consequences be too much to bear?

 
EPISODE 8 WEECAP

Upon witnessing Soo-geun get impaled, the janitor flees in a panic, and Sae-ha chases after him. Overwhelmed and traumatized from seeing his father die right before his eyes, Sae-ha grabs the janitor’s lapels and yells despairingly at him, asking why this always happens if he lives.

Little Shi-won, the janitor’s son, witnesses this confrontation, and he rushes up to Sae-ha. Sae-ha shrugs him off instinctively, but the disc in his hand accidentally makes contact, and it burns Shi-won’s eye.

Heaving a deep, exhausted sigh, Sae-ha activates the disc and time travels to the moment the Ghost is about to inject the unknown substance into his mother. He wrests the bottle out of her hands, only to realize that it’s a harmless vitamin. She’d manipulated him into time traveling.

Sae-ha travels even further back, to the night the Ghost helped Ma-nok escape the authorities. He asks her what he ought to do — she knows the solution to changing the outcome, doesn’t she?

Unfortunately, she claims she doesn’t. She’d only begun time traveling because she hadn’t known what else to do. Sae-ha points out that his DNA hasn’t been damaged like hers, despite time traveling many times. (Yeah, what’s with that? It can’t simply be protagonist plot armor, so what sets him apart from her?)

Sae-ha has as many questions as I do, and he fires them off at the Ghost. Does the janitor have to die for her to live? Did his father have to die too, or was it simply for the ID card? Declaring that she has no conscience, Sae-ha asks if she feels even an ounce of guilt towards the victims.

The Ghost scoffs at that. Countless people died back in the Joseon dynasty, so why isn’t he going back to save them, then? Sae-ha accuses her of manipulating and ruining everything just to save herself. She turns that back around on him, though, and says he’s the one ruining everything. Huh, then why did you approach his mother in order to set him on this path in the first place?

Sae-ha watches as the Ma-nok chase plays out, until Ma-nok comes running in his direction and grinds to a halt in front of him. Ohmygod, Ma-nok has a disfigured eye — Shi-won is Ma-nok! (Some of y’all guessed this in the comments last week — good call!)

Traveling back to the past again, Sae-ha materializes out of thin air in front of the janitor and his son. The janitor grabs a fire extinguisher as a weapon, and when the Ghost suddenly materializes too, he instinctively swings it at her and knocks her to the ground.

The janitor and his son run off as the Ghost’s body begins to disintegrate, but Sae-ha teleports in front of them, blocking their escape. He raises his disc as if to kill the janitor, only for the Ghost to beat him to the punch and do it herself.

Wait, why did Sae-ha have a sudden change of heart? I thought he returned to try and change things yet again, but I guess not. Perhaps the Ghost’s words cemented the idea that his meddling was only leading to worse outcomes, and that the deaths in the original timeline were necessary to achieve the best possible future.

The security guard (a.k.a the head of security in the present day) chances upon the scene, and Sae-ha stops the Ghost from killing him too. “If no one reports this, he’ll be lying here all night,” Sae-ha says, looking down sorrowfully at his father’s corpse.

Fast-forward to the year 2000. Sae-ha walks home alongside his nine-year-old self, then embraces him in a hug and reassures him that he’ll be okay. His mom loves him, and she’s just having a hard time right now, so he shouldn’t hate her too much. Oh, Sae-ha…

Back in the present day, Sae-ha slices his arm open and pulls the spherical chip out of his arm. Quick-witted as ever, Sae-byuk realizes he time traveled, and Sae-ha tells her that he saw a world without the Grid.

Just then, Eo-jin’s phone rings with a call from Jong-yi, but Ji-yoo interrupts her before she can finish delivering her warning. Sae-ha puts his disc in the Ghost’s hand as Eo-jin goes to check the door — and then the bombs are detonated, engulfing Eo-jin in flames. Nooooo.

Instinctively, Sae-ha pulls a shocked Sae-byuk away from the explosion, just as the disc in the Ghost’s hand glows.

A split second later, Sae-byuk finds herself at the construction site she once investigated, while Sae-ha’s suddenly transported to a hallway in the Bureau. Omg, Eo-jin walks by — this is the past! He’s still alive! And so is Sun-wool!

Losing Eo-jin right in front of her eyes has deeply shaken Sae-byuk, and she calls him to check if he’s all right. He’s confused by the sudden show of concern, as well as the sheer relief in her voice.

Sae-byuk heads to the abandoned railway station, but unlike before, there’s no sign of Ma-nok. There’s someone else lying dead, though, and it’s the cleaning lady. Ma-nok must have killed her while escaping.

Meanwhile, Sae-ha heads home to find his mother healthy and sober; it seems like the psychiatric clinic pamphlet he left behind anonymously in the past worked. A conversation with her brings Sae-ha up to speed — one, his father was suspected of murdering the janitor, and two, his father built the Grid. Of course, we know that it was Sae-ha, mistaken for his father due to their resemblance.

After the initial investigation of the crime scene, Sae-byuk leaves to drive the cleaning lady’s bereaved husband home. In a rare moment of impulsiveness, Eo-jin gets into her car instead of joining his colleagues, and that leads to a much-needed conversation between the two.

Eo-jin confesses that receiving the call from Sae-byuk had reminded him of their past together, when she’d call him during work breaks. He asks why she wanted to check if he was okay, but she deflects by saying she merely had a bad dream.

On a park bench, fugitive Ma-nok is having a nightmare, in which we see that the Ghost was present and watching when he killed the cleaning lady. Ma-nok jolts awake to flashlights in the distance, and he quickly hides in a playground slide. Ji-yoo’s men are searching for Ma-nok, and one agent draws nearer and nearer, stopping to peer up into the slide as Ma-nok holds his breath…

And that’s where the episode stops. Gosh, this show and its cliffhangers! At least it continued to give us more plot development this week, and it seems like Sae-ha might be able to make small positive changes such as nudging his mother away from her depressive spiral, even though he can’t alter the future too significantly. Though in a way, this can be considered a significant change, so perhaps Sae-ha simply can’t make immediate changes that are too large, but he can initiate a butterfly effect of chain reactions.

I’m glad that we’re also getting some long-awaited character development, with Sae-ha strengthening his resolve and learning to keep a somewhat cooler head. In addition, Sae-byuk and Eo-jin have shifted from defensive hostility to awkwardly circling around each other, which seems to bode well for a possible reconciliation. Both their sharp edges have been softened by what they’ve been through, especially Sae-byuk, and I hope they get that second chance they’re unconsciously wishing for.

I think the show’s uneven pacing really worked to its detriment, because we’ve seen in the past two episodes that it’s fully capable of tight and fast-paced storytelling. Its meandering start did no favors to the story, and now I’m left nervously wondering how it’s going to wrap up its story convincingly in just two episodes.

I suppose this means that the timeline we’re on now is likely the one we’re staying in, since our main characters are all alive (phew!) and they’re all one step closer to solving the mystery. Then again, it’s often one step forward and two steps back with this show, so I hope it doesn’t renege on its progress.

There are still so many questions to be answered! What’s the key difference between Sae-ha (who’s still healthy) and the Ghost (who’s crumbling away)? Why doesn’t the Ghost have an identity, and what motivated her to time travel in the first place? If the Ghost set Sae-ha’s time travel in motion, causing him to be mistaken for his father as the founder of the Grid, did this current timeline spark the Ghost’s time-traveling, too? And if that’s the case, which came first?

Also, Sae-ha seems to have come to a tacit understanding with the Ghost that both the janitor and his father had to die in order for the Grid to be built, but I’m not sure I’m buying that just yet. So far, the drama seems to be keeping to the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed and transferred. In other words, it’s like the law of equivalent exchange, in that humankind cannot gain anything without first giving up something of equal value.

When the janitor was saved, Soo-geun died in his place; when Eo-jin was saved, the cleaning lady died. However, this would suggest that the janitor’s death is weighted as heavily as the Grid that saved two-thirds of humankind, which doesn’t seem quite right. Plus, the exchanges haven’t been exactly equal; in some timelines, both the janitor and Soo-geun die, and in the timeline where the cleaning lady is dead, both Eo-jin and Sun-wool are alive. So perhaps there’s something more to it, or perhaps the law that governs time-traveling is a different one altogether.

Phew, you know it’s a Lee Soo-yeon drama just by looking at all that theorizing! I have to admit I’m still lost on some of the finer details of this drama, but I’m choosing to trust that she’ll have it all connected and worked out by the end. I’m still invested in these characters and their (hopefully safe and radiation-free) future, so that’s gotta say something, right?

 
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