going seventeen | rebellion of the moles
premise:
team moles must move everything in team human's house to their den to win. if even one item is left behind, the humans win.
comments:
this one's a toughie for me because i feel it was a case of team going trying to make another medium-concept game. instead of being 'low-concept,' barebones and leaving much of the interactions between the members (ttt most prominently, but i'd also group insomnia zero, kickball, and how to eat rice the perfect way here), or extremely high concept (hide and seek, treasure island, water battlegrounds, for example) with complicated rules to match the high budgets, rebellion of the moles sits somewhere in the middle. it's in this middle ground that some of their best episodes were formed too, including mousebusters, don't lie, and the tag.
but the thing is with this episode it just doesn't have.... the sauce.... idk how to explain it. but i think it's mainly because the game really has some balancing issues. the premise of "we need to take everything from the house" is actually really challenging and, thus, fun, but spoilers it doesn't really give them much to do. it's clever that the mole team figures out the traps early on but it basically renders them moot and makes it really difficult for the human team to set them up at all. seungkwan is kidnapped first thing in the rules but then he just becomes this joke character with nothing to do and also that kidnapping of a human isn't really pulled again. then the creation of the spy character, which feels like it should be a don't lie broker level addition in a second season, kinda breaks the game because the 'if even one item is left in the house' rule gets exploited and the humans stop really putting any effort into the game. idk. it's funny but it really doesn't work at all as a concept for an episode... and anything that we could learn about the members got kinda squashed by this game which doesn't really carry much at all ;-;
ranking:
concept: 3; really disappointing tbh ;-; and i'm a firm believer in 'if i don't understand the rules it's fine because seventeen will make me laugh as i watch them play anyway' but i understood the rules and also didn't find this episode very entertaining... so...
chemistry: 3; again same as above
enjoyment: 3; just makes sense
overall - 3/10