Recap Grid (2022) Episode 7

 

EPISODE 7 WEECAP

Rushing to the room where the Ghost is being held, Sae-ha and Sae-byuk hold the director at gunpoint in order to approach the Ghost. Sae-ha asks the Ghost what she did to his mother, only for her to reveal that his mother’s already dead.

The Ghost claims that there’s only one way to save her, then looks pointedly at the bloody incision in her arm. Sae-ha immediately understands, and despite the director’s panicked protests, he smashes the glass cabinet and retrieves the Ghost’s teleporter disc.

Sae-ha grits his teeth, picks up a scalpel, and cuts a deep gash into his forearm. Threatening the medical staff with his gun, Sae-ha forces them to implant the spherical chip into him, all while Sae-byuk and Eo-jin look on in panic and consternation.

It works, and Sae-ha teleports through time and space back to the Radio Research Institute in 1997. Hiding in a room (where a young Sae-ha is) to evade notice, Sae-ha witnesses the Ghost knock an employee out with her disc and swipe his staff ID card.

The janitor sees the unconscious man, and he rushes into an office to call 911 — but the Ghost is inside too. He sees the stolen ID card inserted into the computer she’s typing away at, and he rushes over to yank it out, sparking a fierce tussle between the two.

Meanwhile, Sae-ha approaches the fallen employee, turning him over. His name tag reads Kwon Soo-geun, but he has the same face as Sae-ha. Ah, this must be his biological father, since it was previously mentioned that the janitor was his adoptive father.

Hearing noises from the office, Sae-ha goes in to investigate, only to witness the exact moment when the Ghost shoves the janitor off of her — sending him stumbling back onto a metal rod that impales him.

He falls dead, right in front of Sae-ha’s eyes. Seconds later, the security guard runs in, followed by the young Sae-ha. The chain of events may have been different, but the outcome still remains the same.

 

Determined to save his father, Sae-ha travels back in time again, stealing Soo-geun’s ID card and handing it directly to the Ghost himself. He watches as she sets up the program on the computer, commenting that it’s different from the one they use. She doesn’t seem to know who he is, which allows Sae-ha to deduce that she hadn’t specifically targeted his father to murder, since he’s the spitting image of his father. It had all simply been for the ID card.

Sae-ha tearfully accuses the Ghost of treating his father like an expendable cog in the system, but before she can respond, her legs suddenly give out on her and she collapses in pain. Mustering up her remaining strength, she tries to tell him the rest of the code to enter into the computer, but her body disintegrates and disappears before she can finish. Without her, Sae-ha doesn’t know how to set up the Grid, and the program fails.

Traveling through time to see the repercussions, Sae-ha arrives in 2021, where passers-by on the streets all don black, protective clothing. Sae-ha, in his ordinary suit, soon notices the beginnings of a sunburn on his hand.

In this alternate timeline, his mother no longer works at a factory, and his father is no longer dead. Instead, Sae-ha’s family lives in a lavish penthouse, and his mother is alive, well, and looking every bit the elegant rich lady. Upon seeing Sae-ha soaked to the bone, she fusses over him, worrying that he’ll catch a cold. She cups his face tenderly, and tears well up in Sae-ha’s eyes.

Sae-ha follows his parents to their workplace, where all the employees that pass by them in the hallway have some form of skin deformity from the damage caused by the radioactive solar rays. In this world, Soo-geun is a renowned doctor who developed radioiodine treatment to remove radioactive contamination. His family’s wealth was founded upon the mass suffering that unfolded as a result of Sae-ha’s time-traveling intervention.

Later, Sae-ha tries to search up Sae-byuk on the internet, but his search returns no results. He manages to find her at a library instead, but she’s not at all like what he remembers. Half her face is disfigured from the solar radiation, and she’s also lost her hearing, presumably from the damage. Her spark is all but gone, replaced instead with an uncharacteristic reticence that unsettles Sae-ha.

It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and Sae-ha contemplates the disc pensively. He has a happy, peaceful, and sheltered life with his family now, but at what cost? The grave consequences of his one seemingly small decision are too much to bear, and Sae-ha gives his parents one last hug before teleporting back to the past.

 

Swiping his father’s lab coat and ID card, Sae-ha heads to set up the grid himself. When Soo-geun realizes his things are gone, he chases Sae-ha down, eventually finding and confronting him in the office.

Soo-geun shoves Sae-ha away from the computer, and Sae-ha tries to reassure him by saying that he’s Sae-ha — but it’s the wrong move, because Soo-geun’s fierce protectiveness over his son makes him even more suspicious and defensive.

The two start to fight, and again, the janitor bursts into the room upon hearing the crashing noises. Sae-ha sighs in frustration, and reaches into his pocket to activate the disc so he can redo it all over again. Noticing this, Soo-geun races to stop Sae-ha, but Sae-ha shoves him off — right onto the same metal pole that had previously impaled the janitor. Ohmygod.

Time and time again, Sae-ha’s time-traveling pursuits have led him down different paths to the same conclusion. It’s almost as if he’s destined to watch his father die in front of him, no matter what steps he takes to avoid it.

I wonder if the show is suggesting the Novikov self-consistency principle, which posits that it is impossible to change the past through time travel. Any action taken that prevents the original outcome would negate the reason for traveling back in the first place, thus creating a paradox; hence, traveling back would instead lead to you playing a part in the original outcome.

Sae-ha’s experiences in the various timelines are consistent with this theory, since his attempts to meddle in the past have only led to him getting involved in the sequence of events that cause his father’s death. It’s interesting that in the last timeline of this episode, Sae-ha has essentially taken on the role of the Ghost; he’s now the time-traveler, the Grid-installer, and the person that accidentally pushed someone to his death.

The only timeline in which Sae-ha seems to have averted his father’s death is the one where the Grid was never set up, though it could very well still lead to him witnessing his father’s death further down the line. Even so, that timeline is unique enough that it seems like an anomaly, and that makes me wonder if perhaps it was the original timeline — the one that motivated the Ghost to develop time travel and install the Grid to prevent worldwide human suffering.

I wonder why Sae-ha hasn’t experienced any adverse effects from time-traveling, unlike the Ghost. Is it because he’s still in the early stages and hasn’t traveled as much yet, or is there another reason? On that note, will the other characters appear in these alternate timelines too? We’ve already seen Sae-byuk, plus a glimpse of Ma-nok (as a swimming pool employee), and it’d be interesting to see how much the others’ lives have changed too.

Sae-ha clearly prefers to work as a lone wolf, but I think he’s beginning to realize that the butterfly effect of time-traveling may be too extensive for him to shoulder alone. With such a strong cast of supporting characters, it’d be a shame for the show not to utilize them, so I hope we get more of them teaming up to tackle this conundrum in the upcoming episodes.

In any case, the show is finally progressing forward in leaps and bounds, and it’s stoking my excitement! I’ve always been interested in the thought experiments and paradoxes of time travel, so I’m looking forward to how the show will explore those. Bring on the philosophical dilemmas!