Letter #156: Night Has Come

Good morning, Erin.

I’ve been slowly making my way through the discography of Chuu, the adorable spark plug formerly of Loona and currently of…Chuu. (Because she’s a solo artist, now, and I…don’t know why I wrote it that way. But whatever, what matters is that I'm listening to her music.) Which I mention as a piece of foreshadowing for what is to come—not in this letter, but beyond! 

You get 10 points if you can suss out what’s being foreshadowed.

And points are a thing you can earn in games, and Mafia is a kind of game, and that’s all a brilliant segue into introducing the next show in our “high schoolers with vague social hierarchy stuff” bloc: Night Has Come. 

I’ve been close to starting this one every few weeks for the last 18 months, always balking at the last second because of the implicitly dark edge to the show—but now it’s on theme, so…woo! Chickening out for the win!

…or was it? After all, the internet seems to have some, uh, choice words for the series. Did I find it equally as scornworthy? Or do I think the internet should shut its collective gob about what turned out to be a hidden gem?

Well, check your phone to see what role you’ve been assigned, dear seonbae, as we jump into the murder-y depths of Night Has Come.

1. I’m pretty sure I thought this was a horror series, when I started it. Which it is not. So, if that was something you also thought (and I’m not saying anyone but me would have that impression, but if you did…), then know it is not a horror series. It’s a bit gruesome, of course, but it’s about as much of a horror series as Squid Game is. Which is to say, by my estimation, not one. 

2. Also…the internet is full of dummies: this show is a pretty good time. It’s got its share of flaws, certainly, but I don’t think any of them is a dealbreaker. I mean, I don’t know specifically who thinks this show is bad, but I’m willing to bet they defended My Demon, Weak Hero, or When the Phone Rings as aesthetic masterpieces, which means they are to be dismissed wholesale.

2A. Like, there’s nowhere near enough character work (which is super-important in death game-oriented stories), and they really needed to step up the pacing in the first couple of episodes. But it’s totally worth the watch, especially once things really kick off. 

2B. …also, this show is about a high school class that gets trapped in a supernatural game of Mafia. Like, literally the party game. But where the deaths are 100% real. I don’t know if I made that clear. 

2C. Also also, people hate the ending—but I frikkin’ loved it. I don’t think it makes sense, exactly, which I know is a big part of why people hate it, but if you ignore how…um, unlikely it is, it’s pretty outstanding. (Like, the who, what, and why of it all is solid…but the where, when, and how of it all begs soooooo many questions.)

2D. Y’know what, I’m probably going to want to spoil things, now that I’m thinking about it. So, if you haven’t seen this one and think you’re up for a bit of a death-fest, come back to this after you track it down. Otherwise…well, we’ll just keep going!

3. The standard “this is a work of fiction” disclaimer at the start of the show includes “religion” in its litany of fictitious portrayals. Which stood out, when I saw it, but which I assumed meant that anyone character’s commentary or practices regarding religion were to be taken as part of the fiction—though I was also mildly curious about whether we’d get some RPG-style worldbuilding with the creation of a fictional religion. (Spoiler: we don’t. That said, I don’t think anyone comments about anything religious or even vaguely spiritual, so I’m guessing it was just a boilerplate catchall disclaimer rather than specific to the show. Which…was a little bit of a downer.)

4. There’s a microcosm of one element of the storytelling that is introduced in the first scene of the series that I cannot decide whether to believe is intentional or naivety on the part of the production: as the Main Girl bolts out of the bedroom she’s in in fear, there is a very, very obvious creepy ghost girl standing in the corner of the room that the Main Girl doesn’t notice. Now, that the Main Girl doesn’t see the creepy ghost girl is not an issue—she’s not meant to see her. But I don’t know if we, the audience, are supposed to see her or not. That is, while she’s certainly there for people to notice, I don’t know if she’s meant to be something only some people will notice (or wonder if they did, in fact, notice) or if she’s meant to be noticed by everyone. Because…I mean, there’s very obviously a creepy ghost girl standing in the corner of the room. It’s not like I used some unparalleled observational skills for this one; she was right there in our line of sight—the camera even holds on her for a beat after the Main Girl runs out of the room. 

4A. Which is to say that there are a few instances of this kind of seeming lack of subtlety in places where you’d think there would be a desire on the part of the storytellers to employ subtlety. And I found that quite odd—particularly since, in the end, I don’t think any of these weirdly unsubtle moments is ever used to particular effect (such as for misdirection). Instead, it seems very much like there are some plot twist reveals that seem (to me, at least) to rely on you not catching on to those unsubtle moments. Like, tell me anyone was surprised that Main Girl’s Best Friend was assigned a special role at the start of the Mafia game. ‘Cus the show treats it like a big reveal. And it most certainly was not. 

4B. In fairness, it’s possible the show wants you to know but wonder which special role she’s assigned, but…I dunno, they never really tease anything out with it, as far as I can tell. 

4C. Anyway—point is, I have questions about the intentions, here. 

5. While the creepy ghost girl sitting in the corner of the room that Main Girl doesn’t notice is part of a dream, there are instances where she appears during regular daytime moments that would seem to imply that there are, in fact, ghosts in the story. And…I’m not sure that goes anywhere. I mean, once the ending is revealed, there’s a way for us to justify why there’s a ghost, but…I mean, don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure they don’t do anything with this. It’s just sort of there. (With the element that could explain its presence being attributed elsewhere. But we’ll get there.)

6. Semi-relatedly, when the Main Girl is thrown in the pool by Mean Girl and her cohorts, she flounders in the water, both being unable to swim (possibly because of her asthma) and pulled under by the creepy ghost girl—and literally no one makes a move to help her. Which, sure, people are in shock (especially the Mean Girl’s lackeys who aided in her predicament and are worried for themselves), but even Main Girl’s Best Friend just sort of stands there. It was very strange.

7. Still speaking of Main Girl’s Best Friend…I am shocked there wasn’t even an implied unrequited girl-girl attraction running below the surface of that friendship. Also, disappointed—but mostly shocked. Because it seemed like the obvious trope to pull for that relationship, given how protective she was towards Main Girl. Not that two friends can’t be, y’know, protective of each other without some kind of implicit sapphic intention running beneath the surface, but it’s fairly standard literary convention (...in these types of stories, at least) for A) a pair of girls who are best friends, with B) one of the girls dreamily pining after a boy and C) the other girl being a very protective of the first girl, to turn out to have an unrequited girl-girl crush underlying their friendship. 

7A. THAT SAID…there’s a pretty good reason for why she’s being so protective, so it’s possible that the writers were using expectation to mask the actual reason. (And to, perhaps, deflect suspicion that Main Girl’s Best Friend was a Mafia. Which, of course, they’d already blown, in my opinion—though it’s possible they intended for us to suspect she was the Doctor. But…well, I digress.) 

7B. And that said…this show was put out by Studio X+U, which put out Friendly Rivalry, so I was predisposed to assuming there would be yuri shenanigans.

7C. Actually, while we’re on it, Studio X+U has put out some great stuff: this, Friendly Rivalry, Branding in Seongseu, and even the slightly lackluster B**** x Rich (which still has its charms). I should probably check out more of their stuff. 

7D. Wait, B**** x Rich isn’t from Studio X+U? Really? I thought it was. Hm. Weird. Okay, then, they really have put out some pretty great stuff—no cause for an asterisk (...of the three shows of theirs I’ve seen, that is). 

7E. Oh! B**** x Rich 2 is coming out in a month! What fun timing! I…remember almost nothing about the first season…and am kind of surprised they made a second season (despite very clearly setting one up)...but whatever—we’ve got that to look forward to, I guess! 

8. I think the idea is supposed to be that there’s maybe 30 kids who are on this school retreat, but, milling about on Day 1, it feels like there are 100 of them. Which is a touch jarring when Day 2 rolls around and only about 25 kids are left. 

9. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Main Girl, and I’m almost certain that has everything to do with her being boring and stupid and nothing at all to do with how I spent the whole series wishing she had been played by Bona. 

9A. Why Bona? I dunno. I just felt like that’s who I would have cast. 

9B. But, in fairness to Main Girl, I have no idea what her character was supposed to be. As in, I don’t know what kind of person she is meant to be. The characters are overall quite thin, but pretty much everyone else at least has a single, broad archetype to fit into: the mean girl, the tech wiz, the nerd, the jock, the bully, the nice guy—all very defined, if mostly one-dimensional. Main Girl, though, is just…a lot of nothing.

9C. Not that I think having Bona would have changed, since the writing is so…blah for the character. But at least she has a personality, even if she’s pretty deadpan, as an actress. Whoever played Main Girl was way too tied to what was on the page—which was nothing.

9D. Like, it’s laughable how often she runs up to the dead bodies and tries to play detective with what she sees—not just because this doesn’t matter in any way until about Episode 8 (of 12), but because we get no real explanation of why she would do this in the first place. Well, we get told that she likes to read, and I think we’re supposed to take it that she likes thrillers, which is kind of like detective stories, which means she, y’know, knows detective stuff. Or something.

9E. That said, she doesn’t understand QR codes, and neither do I. So…that was cool. 

10. For the record, I did not have a crush on anyone who turned out to be a Mafia. So…my superpowers are fading. Or my soul is healing. Depends on how you see my propensity for falling for the wrong girl. 

11. Also for the record: the two girls I did think were particularly cute made it waaaaaay into the series before being snuffed out! Yay!

12. I cannot FOR THE LIFE OF ME figure out why it took so long to kill the bully. They kind of tell us why the Mafia folks hold off, but everyone else should have voted him the f*** out as soon as they had the chance—regardless of whether they legitimately suspected him or not. He was OBVIOUSLY too dangerous to keep around.

12A. And yet…

12B. Morons. 

12C. Which is just one instance of the kids making decisions that had me literally grinding my teeth over how excruciatingly stupid they were being. (Like, why anyone trusts anyone else to advocate for them when the voting happens at the end of every night is just…guys. Guys.)

13. Speaking of the bully not being killed as soon as he was clearly going to be a bigger immediate threat than the literally required kills of the Mafia game, there was one instance of this that drove me up the wall—but in a good way: when he manages to convince enough people that the pervy camera-wielding kid was one of the Mafia so that the pervy kid dies instead of him. Infuriating because killing the bully was of paramount tactical import for any future strategy to have a chance at success and his eluding execution was so obviously the wrong move…but good in that he turned out to be right that the pervy kid was a Mafia, making it that much harder for anyone to suspect him as a potential Mafia in subsequent rounds, ensuing he’d be around to be a threat to the “good guys” for at least a few more episodes. Great writing decision. That nearly burst a blood vessel in my brain, I was so angry. 

14. You know I prefer subtitles to cover everything that is spoken rather than leaving us to presumably understand what characters are saying when they speak in English (which is not infrequently harder to do than the subtitles assume), but…

This is a little silly. I appreciate the principle, and, if that’s what it takes to stick to that principle during the spoken English, as well, then I have no complaints. But…I mean, it is a bit silly.

15. I really have to give it to the show: every time things got to the point where unexplained aspects of how the whole mysterious death game worked had been nagging at me enough to ask—out loud—how any of this nonsense worked, the show would soon thereafter give me an answer to those specific questions I was asking. For example, when the Mean Girl is exposed as a Mafia, the first thing I thought of was that she needed to rat out the other Mafias who did nothing to help her out when the accusations started flying. And then the show immediately shows Mean Girl attempt to do just that, only to have her mouth fill with blood, preventing her from speaking. Seriously, the timing for some of this stuff was uncanny. 

16. The subtitles don’t censor the swear words—but they do ignore them entirely. Which amused me. Like, I could hear swearing, but the subs would either water it down or just ignore it. 

17. In what I thought was indicating an All of Us are Dead-style ending, where characters you would never suspect of surviving actually do make it all the way to the end, the fat kid and his buddy last almost until the very, very end—and I had no idea why. Well, I assumed it was either so they could be fodder for when things boiled down to mostly just the main characters or that one or both of them would be revealed as totally unexpected Mafias, but neither of them was ever given any character at all outside of being visually recognizable filler members of the class. That said, they both die, as things wind down, so…we got our answer. 

18. A lot of the deaths are really great, by the way. That is, the ones “the system” makes happen when the class votes at the end of every night. Nothing quite beats the very first one at the end of Episode 1 (or the end of Episode 1 in general, honestly, which is soooooo good), but I enjoyed almost all of them. 

18A. I mean, I don’t know why the athlete kid who dies in Episode 2 has to claw his own eyes out before he tumbles down a cliff to be impaled on a branch, but…it was certainly effective. 

18B. The fat kid eating himself to death was a bit on the nose, though. I mean, yes, he had already started pigging out because he knew he was going to die—which is a totally valid response—but…we all know it wasn’t done as a matter of convenience. And it wasn’t like he’d been hoarding food from everyone else, so it wasn’t as though it was somehow a poetic demise. 

19. There’s a great moment where the Main Girl falls through the floor and lands on one leg on the concrete floor of the level below…and spends the rest of the scene nursing her injured shoulder.

20. In one of the more confusing moments of the series, Main Girl prevents the bully from stabbing the jock who whooped his butt by…standing in front of him and giving him a little shove. I…have no explanation for what this moment is supposed to be, apart from perhaps letting us know that the bully doesn’t think it’s right to hit girls. Because, though she is able to stop him from escalating his violence a handful of times, no explanation for why she has this sway over him is ever presented. And, given everything else about her, I have no idea why Main Girl would even do this to begin with. I was thinking that maybe he had a secret crush on her or that they’d be revealed to have been childhood friends, but no such revelation. I guess we’ll put it in the “why is she dectectiving?” basket. 

21. …which, after Weak Hero underlined this point, was another instance of a lesson about beating your enemy until he can no longer attack you, which the athletic kid obviously did not do. Good guys always think the bad guys will accept a loss. Like fools. 

22. And the Weak Hero connection doesn’t stop there! Because we’re about to get into who I recognized, and you’re never going to believe how unintentionally clever I’ve been about this bloc:

• the male lead from Social Savvy Class 101 as the male lead 

• the UFC bully kid from Weak Hero Class 1 as the bully

• the other lead girl from Cast (the Yoojung-at-the-amusement park series) as Mean Girl

• the hot “other woman” from Atypical Family as…a girl with a boyfriend

• the evil not-brother from My Demon as the dead girl’s father

• #212 from Squid Game (the first one) as the dead girl’s mother

22A. Which means, give I’m sure you remember that evil not-brother from My Demon was in Friendly Rivalry as Je-i’s father, this show has a cast member from each of the three preceding shows in this thematic bloc in it! How’s that for fate, hm?

22B. Further, the Mean Girl was in Cast with my girl Yoojung—and I just watched a YouTube video of Yoojung teaching the lady who played #212 on Squid Game how to do the dance for “Like Jennie.” So…I’m just sayin’: Phase V seems to be bangin’ on all cylinders. And you get to witness it firsthand. (You’re welcome.)

22C. Relatedly, Yoojung is also teaching another actress the “Like Jennie” dance at the same time as she’s teaching #212: the actress who plays the rhythmic gymnastics girl who is Bok-joo’s roommate on Weightlifting Fairy. Which is significant only because #212 says she is going into this dance tutorial very concerned about “swag.” Which I can’t say for certain is a reference to the Weightlifting Fairy, but it made me laugh. 

23. The cutest girl on the show twists her ankle in Episode 2, and, to her credit, the actress spends the remainder of the series walking with a limp. And being cute. Which is unrelated. But both are worth noting about the actress. 

24. I’m not always a fan of the “and here’s what this character was doing at that time!” quick flashback method of storytelling, but Night Has Fallen uses it a lot and usually to great effect. Good job, show.

25. I mentioned that the show has a pretty good habit of answering questions I had about what was going on relatively soon after I asked the questions. On a similar note, there’s a moment where I said the best thing for the “good guys” to do would be to kill one of the suspected Mafias outside of the allotted voting-people-off segment of the game (which is absolutely a thing they are allowed to do, as we saw happen earlier in the series), and, though they ultimately don’t have the guts to do it, the Mafias meet and discuss how tactically wise it would be for the citizens to kill him outside of the allotted voting-people-off segment of the game. And that was neat. 

26. I mentioned this way back at the start of the letter, but…I frikkin’ loved the ending of this show. It’s so completely out of left field and weird and dark: the parents of a member of the class who killed herself kidnapped the entire class, strapped them into mindjacking chairs, and are making them play a simulation of this insane death game over and over and over again, with each round of the simulation only ending when every one of them has experienced some horrible death during the game. Sure, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, but…damn, that’s a ballsy way to end it. 

26A. Okay, in fairness, it actually does explain a lot of the more outrageous elements of the logistics behind the death game and its seemingly supernatural ability to kill people independent of a physical entity to carry out the executions: it’s a video game! The programmers can make anything they want happen. So, the stuff inside the simulation—pretty much all accounted for. Everything outside it? Yeah, still doesn’t make a lick of sense. 

26B. No, seriously though; like, the turnaround on the Matrix-style supercomputer room the parents trap the students in is utterly insane—in both uses of the term: it’s clearly an undertaking that could only be driven by a deep psychosis (in this case spawned of grief), but…like, damn, they snatched these kids impressively quickly, since they’re all still in the same class! I mean, were they already working on hyper-VR? Were they already secretly working for a cult devoted to the technological singularity? Forget about how they managed to kidnap an entire high school class and force them into mindjacking chairs—which is absolutely its own set of cocked eyebrows—where in the hell did all this stuff come from?! What year is it?!

26C. And then weigh the existence of this hypertech against how the downward spiral for the daughter who kills herself begins: with a highly suspect, rinky-dink “deepfake” of the daughter doing sexy TikTok dancing. I mean, it could not look any faker. And, if anything, it should embarrass the boy who made it more than it should cause scandal for her. And yet…somehow an MS Paint-level fake lewd of her is the most tantalizing thing this class of high school students has ever seen. I just…come on. 

26D. Of course, if we’re being generous, it’s entirely possible it’s the show producing the rinky-dink fake (because it either can’t do a better job or wants it to be obvious to the audience that it’s totally fake) and, in-universe, it’s supposed to be a near-perfect edit. But…come on. 

26E. Again, I love it, love that (in a sense) the bad guys win, that the kids are likely going to be stuck in that simulation literally forever. So, I don’t care about the details of whether or not it makes perfect sense. I think it’s great. 

26E. And, for the record, while #212 does a very good job as a grief-stricken mother bent on revenge, the dude from My Demon (and a million other things) is pretty great as the worn down, reluctant-villain father. 

27. And, as a final note, I’m not saying I cheered when the male lead died. But I am saying f*** him for dating Kang Na-eon in real life, the jerk. 

And that, dear seonbae, is all I have on Night Has Fallen. Which, whatever anyone can say about it, is a pretty darn bingeable show. Kind of nonstop for almost the entire run of the series. Which I quite enjoyed, whether I’ll remember it much in the future or not. 

And with that in the rearview…any guesses about what might come next? Do you think we’ve reached the end of this bloc—or is it still going?

Now, if you’ve got your Sherlock hat on, you’ll have already figured out what’s coming. If not…I suppose you’ll see when we’re back here again. 

Hope all’s well with you and all your exciting new adventures. Or, if all of that is being just a bit of a pain, you can always go back and reread my old letters. Which should be awkward and overwrought enough to take your mind off of just about anything. 

More soon.

—Daryl