The 8 Show: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by solstices

Eccentric and artsy, Netflix’s latest offering whisks a motley crew of eight distinctive personalities into a vibrant stage set, where nothing is quite as it seems. The promise of easy money draws the contestants in like moths to a flame, but the lucrative game may be little more than a gilded trap.

Editor’s note: This is an Episode 1 review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
 
EPISODE 1

A spin on the popular webtoons Money Game and Pie Game, The 8 Show weaves avant-garde aesthetics and offbeat humor into its central premise — a game where participants stand to earn exorbitant sums the longer they stay within its compound. In a nod to the original creator, our protagonist is named BAE JIN-SOO (Ryu Joon-yeol), a down-on-his-luck window cleaner who’s neck-deep in debt. Scurrying away from his loan sharks, Jin-soo evades them by blending into a filming crew who’s using his neighborhood as a backdrop of poverty, oof.

Rather than continue dangling outside skyscrapers and swallowing his fear of heights for a measly salary, Jin-soo decides to end it all — until a notification pulls him back from the bridge’s edge. “I want to buy your time,” says the messages accompanying hefty deposits into his bank account. A limousine drives up to the curb, and figuring he has nothing left to lose, Jin-soo gets in. One fake glass of rock-hard champagne later, and Jin-soo arrives at a deserted theater, where he’s greeted by a list of rules and a set of numbered cards.

Technically, the game does offer the option to leave, but it’s arguably a mere illusion. There isn’t much room for choice, when the only thing waiting for Jin-soo outside is a lifetime of minimum-wage jobs that won’t make a dent in his debt. After surrendering all his belongings and hastily changing into the uniform provided, Jin-soo hunkers down to spend curfew in his assigned third-floor bedroom — until he realizes it’s absolutely freezing. Oh, and Nature’s calling. Urgently.

Alas, items are charged at 100 times the market rate, and Jin-soo is reluctant to part with his newly-earned cash. Surviving through the night with a blanket of newspapers, a cardboard mattress, and a plastic bottle potty, he curls up miserably until the projector-screen windows display an artificial morning. While he had to skimp and save in the real world out of sheer necessity, even in here with easy money flowing in, Jin-soo’s greed has him intentionally depriving himself of material comfort.

When the contestants converge in the common area, they soon come to a shared realization. All the props in the colorful lobby are fake, from the plastic model hotdogs to the bone-dry swimming pool. The pockets on their shirts and lapels on their blazers are merely printed-on outlines, too — everything in here is an artificial facsimile.

Still, there’s one redeeming factor to the common area. Below the clock counting down their remaining time is a delivery chute several times larger than the ones in their rooms, and they can buy items from it by forking over time in place of money.

Not only does this concept remind me of The Time Hotel, with the paradoxical dilemma of saving time to earn more money and spending time to acquire the means to stay longer, but I also like the metaphor it serves as. One can either pay with money, or with time — just like in the real world, where effort can be substituted with money.

Interestingly, we don’t learn the names of the other contestants, since they opt to call each other by their floor numbers for simplicity’s sake. There’s the limping ONE (Bae Sung-woo), the brusque TWO (Lee Joo-young), the pampered FOUR (Lee Yeol-eum), the peacemaker FIVE (Moon Jung-hee), and the brash SIX (Park Hae-joon).

The contestant who stands out the most is the ditzy EIGHT (Chun Woo-hee), who giggles that she tried a bite from each of the twelve meal trays delivered to her room, then took a bubble bath with the twelve bottles of drinking water. Needless to say, the other participants are appalled by her audacity. The intelligent SEVEN (Park Jung-min) swiftly deduces that the delivery chutes must be connected based on the building’s layout — forming a conveyor belt of trust, with the lower floors at a disadvantage.

Deciding to check how the delivery system works, the group heads up to Eight’s room, only to be stunned by the sheer scale of it. Beyond the extravagant embellishments Eight has decorated it with, the room itself has an impossibly high ceiling and a wide expanse of space. Worst of all, the rate that her prize money increases by is different — a whopping 340,000 won per minute, compared to Jin-soo’s measly 30,000 won. Every contestant has a different wage rate depending on their floor, with One the absolute lowest.

With that, the contestants have effectively escaped the income inequality of the world outside, only to walk right into a microcosm of it — there’s no escaping the social hierarchy. Their decision to use numbers in place of names only makes this more apparent; they are defined not by their personal identities, but by their tiers. It’s just like how people are born into their social class, and with infrastructure that perpetuates inequality rather than abating it, the lack of social mobility creates an imbalanced distribution of opportunities that further entrenches the pecking order.

So far, the unidentified gamemaster is still an inscrutable enigma, though they haven’t displayed any direct hostility or ill will towards the players — apart from the Orwellian surveillance cameras in every corner, that is. Rather than the presence of an external threat, the game is creating the conditions for discontent to sow the seeds of discord within the group. I can’t help but note that the room doors are unlocked with a card key, which doesn’t seem like a particularly strong or secure defense. As the stakes rise and emotions fester, the players might just resort to underhanded means like stealing or sabotage — and it’ll be far from a pretty sight.

 
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• Ryu Joon-yeol
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