Grid: Episode 9

by solstices

More answers are unearthed, and our leads slowly begin to connect the dots that led them on this journey across time and space. Many secrets can no longer be concealed, and while some affirm our characters’ theories, others pull the rug out from under them.

 
EPISODE 9 WEECAP

Sae-byuk pays Sae-ha a visit at his house, where they discuss the death of his father. It turns out that this timeline’s Sae-ha had previously shown Sae-byuk the CCTV footage of his “father” (whom we know to be time-traveler Sae-ha) and the Ghost murdering the janitor.

When Sae-byuk asks about his time-traveling experience, Sae-ha tells her that he couldn’t travel further into the future than the time he originally came from. Sae-byuk offers up her own nugget of information too; back when the Ghost’s disc made contact with her arm, Sae-byuk had seen an image flash by, though she isn’t sure what it was.

Sae-byuk catches Sae-ha up to speed on Ma-nok’s latest murder of the cleaning lady, and Sae-ha informs her that Ma-nok is the janitor’s son. Connecting the dots, they realize that the Ghost must be related to Ma-nok — she time-traveled back to help him out, and if anything goes wrong in that plan, she ceases to exist.

That’s one answer gained, but there are still a slew of questions remaining — such as, why did the Ghost pretend to harm Sae-ha’s mother with a mere vitamin shot? Upon learning of this, Sae-byuk huffs, incredulous and perplexed. Now that he’s seen the events of 1997, though, Sae-ha has an answer. The janitor wasn’t the crucial link, his father was.

Still, Sae-byuk isn’t certain that the Ghost has been protecting Ma-nok all this while, since she killed his father right before his eyes. The Ghost has demonstrated her ability to teleport with other people, so why didn’t she use it before?

Before Sae-ha can make a guess, though, they’re interrupted by loud car honking. Hahaha omg, Eo-jin is parked outside Sae-ha’s house and holding up the traffic, since he’s (cutely) jealous over who Sae-byuk is meeting. Please, I want them to get back together already!

Unfortunately, Eo-jin drives off before Sae-byuk and Sae-ha make it outside to check on the disturbance. Sae-byuk asks Sae-ha how it feels like to have his father lauded as a hero, and Sae-ha replies that his father may not actually be a hero, but at least he got to spend time with him, and he now has a face to remember his father by.

“So that’s what you left behind,” Sae-byuk muses, and oh, Sae-ha’s small, sad smile at the acknowledgement of his sacrifice…

The next day, Sun-wool witnesses Sae-byuk leaving an orphanage. Sun-wool questions the warden, who reveals that Sae-byuk came to ask her about Ma-nok, who grew up in the orphanage. Sae-byuk isn’t the first, though — apparently Jong-yi had come to ask about him before. (I assume that was under Sun-wool’s orders?)

The warden repeats what she told them; Ma-nok had been found on a market street. He hadn’t been able to speak at first, so the orphanage had given him the name Kim Ma-nok. Having been previously adopted by the janitor at the age of one, he’d grown up thinking them to be his real family, until his stepfather died and the rest of that family abandoned him.

Sun-wool’s beginning to grow suspicious of Sae-byuk, though, since she wonders how Sae-byuk made the connection that Kim Ma-nok and Lee Shi-won are the same person. Returning to the Administrative Bureau, a series of vague questions allow Sun-wool to figure out that Eo-jin doesn’t know anything about that connection, so she realizes that the leak might be Sae-ha.

Sun-wool requests for the previous day’s security footage from the head of security, who muses cryptically that the time has come. Hmm, we know that he encountered time-travelers Sae-ha and the Ghost back in 1997, but is that all there is to it? Has he figured out more, too?

The security footage shows Sae-ha going from standing and perfectly unharmed, to collapsed and injured in a split second. It looks like the original timeline’s self is replaced by the time-traveler’s body and consciousness, which would explain why our protagonists haven’t been running into duplicate selves.

The exact moment of Sae-ha’s time-traveling has been clearly captured on camera, and Sun-wool realizes that it looks the same as the 1997 footage of Sae-ha and the Ghost suddenly materializing out of thin air. Belatedly noticing the resemblance, Sun-wool correctly concludes that the time-traveler was Sae-ha and not his father.

She calls the head of security to find out what prohibited weapon Sae-ha was carrying that triggered the security alarm, and the head of security texts Sae-ha to warn him that Sun-wool’s found out. Aw, I’m glad to know where his allegiances lie.

Sae-ha drives his mother to work, and we find out from their conversation that she’d given Sae-ha up to her brother for adoption in another timeline (hence the surname change to Kim), though thankfully not in this one. In another part of town, Ma-nok joins the queue for a soup kitchen, failing to notice the CCTV camera outside. Jong-yi catches it on her surveillance screen, and she calls Eo-jin over.

Meanwhile, Sae-ha returns home to find Sun-wool parked outside. She confronts him about his time-traveling, asking how he did it. Before either of them can pursue their questions further, though, Sun-wool gets a call from Eo-jin — Ma-nok has been arrested.

Sae-ha goes to change into his work clothes, and oh no, Sun-wool calls both his and Sae-byuk’s phones. Both lines are busy, confirming her suspicions that Sae-ha is the source of the information leak.

Our detective duo’s phone call is interrupted when Sae-byuk’s phone rings with another call, forcing her to end the conversation abruptly. Sae-ha looks like he still has more to say, but instead he just thanks her for working with him all this while. Oh no, that sounds suspiciously like a farewell…

Having requested an ancestral analysis of the Ghost’s and Ma-nok’s DNA, Sae-byuk receives the results over the phone. The Ghost’s DNA is no longer disjointed like before, and there is indeed an ancestral link… but not between the Ghost and Ma-nok. It’s between the Ghost and Sae-byuk. What?? Well, I suppose that sort of answers the question of why she appeared in front of Sae-byuk and let her witness her teleporting, but still. What???

To further complicate matters, Ma-nok and the Ghost share the same rare blood type. They could be distant relatives, but it’s not possible to tell how many generations apart.

Ma-nok is brought to the Administrative Bureau, where he instinctively responds to Sun-wool addressing him as Lee Shi-won. She presses him for information about the Ghost, but he has none to offer. Her patience wearing thin, she jogs his memory of the night his father died, shoving Sae-ha right in front of his face.

All of a sudden, Ma-nok launches himself at Sae-ha, strangling his throat. Sun-wool stops the rest from intervening, until Sae-ha manages to push Ma-nok off. Eo-jin and the agents quickly subdue him, and Sun-wool has them take Sae-ha into custody as well.

It’s Sae-ha’s turn to sit in the examination chair where the Ghost once was, and he confesses his time-traveling adventures to Sun-wool and the Bureau director. Sae-ha explains how the Ghost played right into the Administrative Bureau’s plans by allowing them to capture her, and Sun-wool theorizes that they had to kill the janitor together for the Ghost to exist in the future.

In the security room, Jong-yi makes conversation with the head of security. She asks for his name, and he’s caught off guard for a moment before introducing himself as Han Wi-han. Hmm, something’s beeping my suspicion radar…

Just then, Sae-byuk barges into the Administrative Bureau’s lobby, gun drawn. The agents all raise their own guns in response, until Eo-jin arrives to defuse the situation, putting himself in between them and Sae-byuk.

He asks for a moment with her outside, where she requests for just one minute to ask Ma-nok a single question. Eo-jin counters with a question of his own — did Sae-ha really meet Ma-nok in his childhood?

Her silence is answer enough, and Eo-jin tells her she’ll only be able to meet Ma-nok under extreme scrutiny because the entire building is on high alert, waiting for the Ghost to show up and attempt to rescue him. Sae-byuk rescinds her request, and Eo-jin receives a text that sends him running back into the building.

It’s an emergency alert that calls all employees from their posts, leaving only two agents to guard Ma-nok — which he then, of course, escapes from. Even though they both have guns and he’s unarmed. Seriously? This had better be a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bureau, because I don’t want to believe I squinted through several minutes of a poorly-lit scene that was equally poor in logic.

Ma-nok runs out of the Administrative Bureau, while the Ghost pulls up on a motorcycle, and I have absolutely zero idea how Sae-byuk failed to notice either of them. She just drove off! They were literally a few yards away! Also, Ma-nok ran right past the Ghost, yet she didn’t even bat an eye, so it seems he may have finished serving his purpose.

That’s the end of this episode, and I really have no idea how this drama is going to tie everything up next week. With the latest revelations, it now seems that the Ghost must ensure both Sae-byuk and Ma-nok’s survival to exist in the future, but how does Sae-ha tie into all of this? The original timeline didn’t seem to have any of them in mortal peril, so what was the Ghost’s motivation for interfering at the exact moment she did?

We do learn a little more about the time-traveling mechanic, which seems to be based on the growing block universe theory. While the past and present exist and can be traveled to, the future has not occurred yet and thus does not exist. Rather, the potential future is constantly changing based on the events of the present (and in the time-travelers’ cases, their actions in the past).

One criticism of this theory, though, is the inability to know “whether now (the current moment) is now (the present)” — in other words, the moment in time in which the person exists may not be the moment in which the present exists. Just as Sae-ha traveled to the past and others mistook him for being part of that timeline, he could very well still be in a moment of the past now, with the Ghost further along in the present.

That could explain how the Ghost is able to manipulate them all into doing exactly as she wishes, since she comes from 2091, meaning that the events unfolding now are merely past knowledge to her. There’s still so much we haven’t seen, such as the years in between, and I really hope it will all be explained in a satisfying manner.

Admittedly, the Ghost has remained too much of an enigma for me to get properly invested in her character and goals, so at the very least I hope to understand why she started this wild goose chase in the first place. All the people she’s made contact with seem to have been chosen deliberately, so I’m curious to find out how they all tie in to her timeline.

This episode also dropped hints that Sae-ha might have a less than desirable fate waiting for him, what with that glimpse of him asking the Ghost how much time he has left, and the head of security’s cryptic comment that “the time has come.” It seems like Sae-ha’s remaining time may be quickly running out, though it isn’t clear why as of yet.

Is his DNA finally beginning to break down like the Ghost’s? Did he have a realization about time-traveling that the audience hasn’t been privy to yet? Why did the Ghost blame him, saying he’s the reason for all of this? What are the Ghost’s plans, now that she’s arrived at the Administration Bureau? As usual, we end up with even more questions than answers, and I can only hope that the finale delivers a satisfying conclusion.

 
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