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This review may contain spoilers
Half a Concept: What's It All Mean?
I find myself going back to the same two questions: What does it all mean? And what was the message here? I paid attention. I was completely locked in for all 8 episodes, and yet I still cannot tell you exactly what they were trying to say.
The show is built on two main concepts, neither of which is particularly new: capitalism and the supernatural. It explores how far people will go for money, alongside the classic trope of those who exist in the "in-between"—fighting forces from the other side to keep the public safe. Here, the Spider Staffing Agency recruits people who are already willing to die, using them as part-timers for extremely dangerous supernatural tasks.
This is explicitly baked into their recruitment process - who places a job ad on the underside of a bridge? If you survive a suicide attempt, you get placed on these jobs. If you survive the jobs, you get a fat payout. If you get trapped or die? Well... you wanted to die in the first place, so good riddance, I guess. The bigger your debt, the higher the temptation to take on more shifts. See how that works?
The overall concept is great. What fails—disastrously so—is the execution. The episodes have incredibly short runtimes, which ultimately leaves massive lore and plot points completely unexplained by the finale.
Some glaring questions include
• What's on the other side? And what causes certain areas to be flooded with yang energy? Are these hotspots always active?
• How long has this staffing agency existed? Is it strictly a modern operation, or does it date back before the Joseon era? How and why did it start? Was there a specific catalyst that brought it into existence?
• Who is Mr. S, and how long has he been around? What was the deal with the spider on him in the first episode? Y'all ever seen a spider bleed red? Let alone the amount we saw?
• Do the locations that the part-timers work at go back to normal the next night if the part-timer who worked overnight successfully finishes their shift?
• Why did Mr. S not punish Hyeok Jun after he told not one but 2 third parties about the agency and the jobs?
• When our Hyeok Jun's sister goes through the door at the cinema, he is kicked out. What was that about? The theory of equivalent exchange? If so, how did she manage to leave, and why did the place let her go with nothing, or rather, no one to take her place?
• We are shown that some humans, outside Mr. S and the part-timers, know about and deal with the supernatural. They are willing to let people die. Eg. The security guard at the milk delivery building and the doctor who lets our main guy and his sister out in the clinical experiment episode. How do they know, and how are they paid for all that?
• Yeon Ju remains mysterious to the end. We learn that she's a monster from the other side, but how did she become that? Was the locker that her friend put her in a door to the other side that trapped her? Only for her to find her way back 40 years later?
In her final monologue, she mentions something along the lines of 'instead of one person dying unjustly, everyone will equally perish together.' What did she mean? Instead of just one part-timer risking death every human risks the chance of dying if they meet an entity from the other side? What? I didn't get it😭
• What was Yeon Ju mad at Mr. S for? Because he sent desperate people to die to 'feed' the other side? Or was there some deeper, hidden history there?
As I said, there are just way too many loose threads left unthreaded.
In terms of the horror element, I think only 2 episodes genuinely scared me. Ep 2 - A Journey with a Pierrot: that mime/clown thing was scary as fuck, my dude. And Ep 6 - The Walls Don't Talk: it was incredibly chilling seeing how little regard that foreman had for human life and how he justified all the murders he committed for a paycheck.
Final Thoughts
All in all, this feels like an unfinished story. It’s like being handed a book with half the chapters blacked out, only to reach the final page and realize you weren't given the full story, but half of one. Now, I’m expected to wait for a second half, keeping my fingers crossed that it actually restores the missing pieces from the first. Honestly, I'm not even sure I'd bother watching a second season at this point.
The show is built on two main concepts, neither of which is particularly new: capitalism and the supernatural. It explores how far people will go for money, alongside the classic trope of those who exist in the "in-between"—fighting forces from the other side to keep the public safe. Here, the Spider Staffing Agency recruits people who are already willing to die, using them as part-timers for extremely dangerous supernatural tasks.
This is explicitly baked into their recruitment process - who places a job ad on the underside of a bridge? If you survive a suicide attempt, you get placed on these jobs. If you survive the jobs, you get a fat payout. If you get trapped or die? Well... you wanted to die in the first place, so good riddance, I guess. The bigger your debt, the higher the temptation to take on more shifts. See how that works?
The overall concept is great. What fails—disastrously so—is the execution. The episodes have incredibly short runtimes, which ultimately leaves massive lore and plot points completely unexplained by the finale.
Some glaring questions include
• What's on the other side? And what causes certain areas to be flooded with yang energy? Are these hotspots always active?
• How long has this staffing agency existed? Is it strictly a modern operation, or does it date back before the Joseon era? How and why did it start? Was there a specific catalyst that brought it into existence?
• Who is Mr. S, and how long has he been around? What was the deal with the spider on him in the first episode? Y'all ever seen a spider bleed red? Let alone the amount we saw?
• Do the locations that the part-timers work at go back to normal the next night if the part-timer who worked overnight successfully finishes their shift?
• Why did Mr. S not punish Hyeok Jun after he told not one but 2 third parties about the agency and the jobs?
• When our Hyeok Jun's sister goes through the door at the cinema, he is kicked out. What was that about? The theory of equivalent exchange? If so, how did she manage to leave, and why did the place let her go with nothing, or rather, no one to take her place?
• We are shown that some humans, outside Mr. S and the part-timers, know about and deal with the supernatural. They are willing to let people die. Eg. The security guard at the milk delivery building and the doctor who lets our main guy and his sister out in the clinical experiment episode. How do they know, and how are they paid for all that?
• Yeon Ju remains mysterious to the end. We learn that she's a monster from the other side, but how did she become that? Was the locker that her friend put her in a door to the other side that trapped her? Only for her to find her way back 40 years later?
In her final monologue, she mentions something along the lines of 'instead of one person dying unjustly, everyone will equally perish together.' What did she mean? Instead of just one part-timer risking death every human risks the chance of dying if they meet an entity from the other side? What? I didn't get it😭
• What was Yeon Ju mad at Mr. S for? Because he sent desperate people to die to 'feed' the other side? Or was there some deeper, hidden history there?
As I said, there are just way too many loose threads left unthreaded.
In terms of the horror element, I think only 2 episodes genuinely scared me. Ep 2 - A Journey with a Pierrot: that mime/clown thing was scary as fuck, my dude. And Ep 6 - The Walls Don't Talk: it was incredibly chilling seeing how little regard that foreman had for human life and how he justified all the murders he committed for a paycheck.
Final Thoughts
All in all, this feels like an unfinished story. It’s like being handed a book with half the chapters blacked out, only to reach the final page and realize you weren't given the full story, but half of one. Now, I’m expected to wait for a second half, keeping my fingers crossed that it actually restores the missing pieces from the first. Honestly, I'm not even sure I'd bother watching a second season at this point.
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