Blackout Game (Sun, Moon, Star)
Blackout game is played with two teams of five. Lawyer Yoonsun and Jinho are appointed as captains.
Yoonsun drafts Sangmin, Yohwan, Jiwon and Eyunkul. Jinho picks Doohee, Yoyoung, Hongchul and they get Junghyun as the last draft.
One team attacks and other defends. Defending team appoints each of their member by turns. There is a line drawn right in the middle of the hall and defender sits on the chair "guarding" it so nobody crosses it. In the beginning, all of attacking team stands on one side. Lights in hall go off, and attackers may try to cross the line within a minute. Defender who is sitting in complete darkness has to guess and press red or green button.
If defender pressed green button and nobody crossed — nothing changes. If some attackers did cross, each of them get a point. For each successful crossing they get more points (2 points for 2nd time, 3 for 3rd and so on).
If defender pressed red button, all players that crossed the border are eliminated for the remainder of attack phase. If nobody crossed — defending team gets fined for false alarm. Defending team can only press red button 4 times.
After all players in defending team get to be defender, teams switch sides.
Team with more points wins. Winners pick elimination candidate among losing team to send to deathmatch. Elimination candidate can only pick their teammate in loser's team for Deathmatch.
They play rehearsal game first. Yoonsun's team goes first and after their 5 rounds on defense, Sangmin has a good idea to lose on purpose during Jinho's defense, so that other players in Jinho's team don't even get to practice defending. They all cross and want Jinho to press red button so they all get eliminated. Jinho presses red but dumb Eyunkul got something wrong and didn't cross. Because of that other team has a chance to practice full 5 round of defense.
Real game starts, Yoonsun's team is out of ideas, so Sangmin goes to Jinho's team and says he will spy for them. He then goes back to his team, admits to being a spy and offers feeding the other team with disinformation. They agree for Sangmin to signal that they won't be crossing in rounds 1 and 2.
They don't cross round 1 to confirm Sangmin's information to Jinho. Then three of them cross in round 2 expecting that defenders will trust Sangmin's leak and will be lured into defending again. It fails: Jyunghyun presses red button instead and eliminates three people in Yoonsun's team. Next round desperate Yoonsun and Sangmin try to cross again and are also read and get eliminated. Their attack phase is a complete bust — they all got eliminated and didn't net any points.
All Jinho's team needs to win is just to gain 1 point and they can do that safely by sending one of their people over the border in each of the 5 rounds because defending team can only press red button 4 times. They do that and win.
Winners now have to pick elimination candidate among losing team and they do series of interviews with each of them. Yoonsun feels about bad about her failure as team captain (again) and readily agrees to go to the Deathmatch to take responsibility. When asked who is she going to pick for Deathmatch she says it will be either Sangmin who tried to pull his usual Double Reverse Quadruple Agent play but failed or Eyunkul (who is just untrustworthy in general). Yoyoung then slips and says there were just reasons to pick either of them.
This immediately raises Yoonsun's attention and from that little slip she unravels that Eyunkul was a spy right from the rehearsal when he played dumb by not going with Sangmin's plan of denying other team of practice. From that moment on, he was giving out cues if his team is going to cross or not. All he wanted in exchange is for winning team to pick Jiwon to the deathmatch, who he was perceiving as a member of "TV celebrity alliance" that needs to be taken down.
Jinho's team feels contractually obligated to pick Jiwon as Eyunkul wanted so they do that. But the jig is up, Yoonsun has uncovered that that Eyunkul was a mole out to crash his team with specific target being Jiwon. Jiwon of course picks Eyunkul to deathmatch as retaliation.
Deathmatch game is "Sun-Moon-Star" that they played before. This time Sangmin tries the same trick that Jinho did then with measuring stacks of sun-moon-star tokens and even bets his garnet that Jinho who went before him picked Star. But apparently Jinho was way ahead of him and after picking Moon he shuffled stacks of tokens creating the illusion that more people picked Star. Sangmin gets fooled by this trick and loses the bet and Jinho picks up a garnet in a classic Jinho way.
Jiwon is seemingly in an disadvantage because his only allies are his mates in losing team: Yoonsun, Yohwan and Sangmin, while Eyunkul is backed by entirety of Jinho's team. At least that is the idea, because Hongchul and Yoyoung betray Eyunkul and feed him false information and support Jiwon instead.
Eyunkul loses and Jiwon goes further.
Note that it is second time Yoonsun's and Yohwan's team falls apart because of betrayal and it is also Jyunghyun's fourth (!) consecutive win.
Tropes:
- Double Agent: Sangmin tries to play Jinho's team by pretending to be a spy for them. It fails by 2nd round.
- Foreshadowing: Eyunkul targeting either Hongchil, Jiwon or Sangmin is the first mentioning of so-called "broadcasters alliance" which doesn't even exist yet, but WILL be created few episodes later.
- Handshake Refusal: in pre-match banter, when Eyunkul complains that Jinho is hogging all the attention, Jyunghyun jokingly makes a motion to shake his hand but then dodges at the last moment and shakes Jinho's hand instead. Could it have been the reason behind Eyunkul targeting "broadcasters alliance"?
- Hollywood Darkness: during blackouts contestants genuinely can't see anything, and viewers are provided with picture shot in night vision
- Miming the Cues: Eyunkul was either going "aha" or coughing depending if his team was going to cross or not
- Obvious Rule Patch: this time in Sun-Moon-Star non-competing players can't bet on the result of a deathmatch, because last time they did it, it turned into a rather ugly scene of all players betting on one candidate to gain garnets and ditching the other one.
- Picked Last: Junghyun gets quite upset that nobody wanted him on their team in the draft
- Saying Too Much: Yoyoung and Hongchul both slip enough small details that let Yoonsun to figure out the mole in her team.
- Throwing the Fight: during rehearsal, Sangmin and his team want to lose on purpose to deny the other team practice rounds on defense.
