going seventeen | hide & seek
premise:
seventeen play an alternating game consisting of two parts: the defense hiding items in plain sight at a water park, with the offense taking pictures of items, followed by the offense hiding from the defense; if they are found, the pictures they took cannot be used as proof of "finding" the hidden items.
comments:
confusing asf concept. i remember being really tripped up and feeling like the concept was ... not strange per se but janky when i first watched this episode a few weeks after it came out, hot off the trail of the be the sun tour in 2022. (has it really been that long? this episode doesn't FEEL like it came out four years ago...)
this episode is slightly special in that while most gose episodes are split into 2 parts that are about a half-hour each, this one is one single episode that is almost an hour long. why? i don't know because i'm not team going. this episode did come out on the regular going seventeen schedule, though, with know thyself the week before and wonwoo's diary the week after, and due to the runtime, i don' think this decision was due to a lack of content. if i had to guess, though, it was probably split up this way because of pacing. again, the rules of this game are kinda confusing, and, even though most going seventeen games are quite confusing (in the fact that you never really get the rules from the intro and have to keep watching to understand), i think this one is a special case where the first quarter of the episode is the splitting of the group into teams (something that only really makes sense because seventeen is the group that it is that something as pedantic as splitting the group in half takes up 25% of the episode), the second quarter being the first round (where team not nolli was defense), the third quarter being the second round (where team hot pack was defense), and the fourth quarter being the third and fourth rounds. the logical (haha) thing to do here would just be to split the episode between the second and third quarter, but, again, i see why that would be hard to flow with since it would feel like the episode would stop abruptly. but that's a lot of words to say IT'S A LONG EPISODE.
and it FEELS long too. i really distinctly remember the episode feeling super long when i first sat down to watch it way back when it came out because it's the length of two episodes. not only that but the game is just really hard. while the rule was made to hide things in plain sight, i think the limit placed on the amount of photos you could submit was pretty harsh since you don't even know what you're looking for (the 'no diving' sign was something i think would've been impossible to find - the same thing with the shower head). while i think members who are captured not being able to submit their photos is a fair punishment, i think the fact that each team only got 1 point (with team not nolli getting a penalty leading to team hot pack's win) speaks for itself. there are some fun moments, like vernon only narrowly nabbing a win, jeonghan just walking around instead of hiding and just barely missing dokyeom, and "i think picking joshua was the right choice. he works so hard.". i especially like how they included wonwoo as the npc ("if you do well, i might give you hints" (no standard for well) to make up for what we later found out was him not being able to participate due to an ankle injury. HOWEVER, i do think since the game was super hard and wonwoo wasn't able to play anyway, they definitely should've utilized his 'hint' system more.
anyway i'm talking really ambivalently about this episode but i didn't dislike it!! i actually liked it a lot when it came out. just some places it should be polished.
ranking:
concept: 5.5; good in theory but so laborious in practice
chemistry: 8; it's fun seeing them work together and the game does enough to spur competition. we even get another jun "that was a lie" moment and minghao's hilarious reaction!
enjoyment: 7; i do remember liking this episode quite a bit before. it's not a bad episode -- there's just so many episodes of gose that are way better.
overall - 6.8/10