Food Chain (Quattro)
It's a new season and first we get introduction for new contestants. Two players are returning — sly Lee Sangmin and season 1 winner Hong Jinho. To make it more of a challenge for Jinho personally, producers brought in Lim Yohwan — his rival from Starcraft days.
First main match is Food Chain which is an ecological system where each player fills a role of some animal, each with a specific win conditions and abilities. All animals are roughly divided between predators or prey. Because there are so many animal roles, players first play rehearsal game to get a feel for it and then are given a cheatsheet with the list of what each animal does.
Each room of the redecorated set represents natural habitat: study stands for fields, garage is river, living room is a forest and warehouse represents sky. Sky is a special habitat where only birds can go to. Animals can choose their starting biome, but if they spend 1 round outside of their native habitat they have to come back "home" on the next round. Animals can stay in their native habitat for as long as they like or opt to try their luck in other rooms provided they will come back on the next round. Predators can attack prey only if they are in the same room.
Charismatic TV personality Noh Hongchul grabs five people around him and builds an alliance before even they got their animal cards. This is a mistake because they start to commit to team goals before they even get their cards and know their win conditions. On the other side Jinho and Yohwan build their team and Sangmin and Junghyun are left alone without an alliance because everybody knows from the first season that Sangmin can't be trusted and middle-aged politician Junghyun is simply ignored by most of the cast.
Math teacher Nam Hweejong gets the lion and becomes overconfident thinking the game is won. He fails to notice that lion is actually a risky option because he is the only predator who has to kill to stay alive in every single turn while other predators can wait 1 or 2 turns without food.
Lawyer Yoonsun who gets the mouse enters Jinho's team who has become hyena. Mouse and hyena have conflicting winning conditions: hyena wins if lion dies and mouse wins if lion lives (both regardless if they themselves survive or not). Yoonsun decides to sacrifice her win condition in favour of her team's so she refuses to meet lion in the same habitat to be eaten.
This is what kills Hweejong because he ends up in a room where there is no one for lion to eat. Hweejong dies and is quite angry at lawyer Yoonsun who refused his instructions to come at specific rooms at specific rounds so they could meet and lion could eat her if needed.
Winners are:
- Jinho who won as hyena because Hweejong The Lion died of starvation
- Sangmin who got the Snake and spent the game doing nothing because snake is invincible
- rapper Jiwon The Rabbit who was the last surviving herbivore and became invincible because of it
- Go player Dahye The Eagle who had to "eat" her teammate magician Eyunkul to stay alive on the last turn
- and Junghyung The Crow who despite getting killed early on still correctly predicted that eagle will be one of the winners and that was his win condition.
Winners picked prideful Hweejong who in turn, picked Yoonsun as his opponent in elimination deathmatch. Deathmatch game is Quattro card game and Yoonsun who had negotiated more people into her support team wins.
Thus ends the tale of Hweejong The Lion who got too arrogant and felt sorry for viewers because he thought he has already won it.
Tropes:
- Break the Haughty: Hweejong the Lion is the most famous example of self-assurance completely backfiring on The Genius.
- Divided We Fall: Herbivores have no defense against any predators but their special ability is to stay alive if all remaining living herbivores are in the same room. If there is only one herbivore left — he/she is basically invincible.
- More Predators Than Prey: Ironically for math teacher, Hweejong fails to do the math in a rather classic predators-prey equation. When he gets the lion card he becomes too sure of himself and considers the game won. Moreover, he makes another mistake when he builds an alliance with other predators instead of treating them as rivals for limited prey. He is forced into a room with Sangmin the Snake and surviving herbivores who are all inedible and he dies because there are no prey left.
- My Friends... and Zoidberg: Everyone's dismissing Junghyun for not understanding the rules and he gets eaten early on. After the main match Jinho gathers all winners in the room to decide elimination candidate but he forgets to invite Junghyun who was also the winner by correctly predicting that Dahye The Eagle will be among the winners.
- Scare Chord: Can be briefly heard when lawyer Yoonsun sees that Hongchul is already gathering some people around him to create alliance and she says she will target him today.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Yoonsun's strategy, she prioritizes loyalty to her team instead of following her win condition: survival of the lion. Instead she evades the lion all the way through, eventually starving him to death.
- Self-Sacrifice Scheme: Crocodile bird and mouse don't have to stay alive to win. They win only if their "master animal" (crocodile and lion respectively) survive, thus they can present themselves to be "eaten" if needed be.
- Secret Test of Character: Sangmin is avoided throughout most of the episode and nobody lets him in because people were aware of his betrayal-happy performance in previous season. Jinho who knows not to trust Sangmin first-hand asks him if he knows who the lion is, while he already knows that it's Hweejong just to see if he will lie or not.
