The thrilling high school drama Night Has Come has finally come to an end after 12 brutal episodes of gore and bloodshed. The Viki original series revolves around a bunch of high school students who visit a youth center. Before they know it, there’s a crisis, and the students are left all by themselves inside the center. This is when things start to get really strange, as the students have to play a harmless game of mafia that quickly turns sinister. With students dying every night and no way to escape the game, the remaining participants try to identify the mafia until there’s a winner. Yoon-Seo is the only student who sees the ghost of a girl named Se-Eun, who is apparently haunting the center and might have some connection to the game. In the last episode of Night Has Come, we finally get to know what really happened with Se-Eun and why everyone is playing the mafia game.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens in the Finale?
At the end of episode 11, Da-Beom tried to kill Jung-Won because she didn’t kill Yoon-Seo as promised. Night Has Come Episode 12 takes off right before he stabs her, and it’s announced that the mafias can’t kill each other. If Da-Beom breaks a rule, he dies, so he can’t kill Jung-Won. On the other hand, Jung-Won locks Da-Beom in the freezer, making sure the temperature is too low for him to survive. He tries to stab the body that is meant to be Yoon-Seo, but it’s actually Na-Hee’s body wearing Yoon-Seo’s bracelet. Da-Beom tries to plead with Jung-Won, but she tells him he has to withstand the cold only for 30 minutes before he dies. Da-Beom starts to hallucinate and sees Kyung-Jun wake up from the dead and come at him. He puts his headphones on Da-Beom, showing us that Da-Beom is actually still afraid of his bully, even after killing him. The trauma and fear never go away. Da-Beom may feel somewhat guilty of everything he’s done to his classmates, and now’s the time he can deal with it before he dies.
In the morning, Yoon-Seo and Jun-Hee are both surprised they survived the night. Yoon-Seo confronts Jung-Won, who tells her to hold on until she figures out what to do with Da-Beom. At the same time, Jun-Hee overhears their conversation, finally learning of Jung-Won’s role. He’s so angry at this point because she’s probably had a hand in killing all his friends. She tells them both to hide while she looks for Da-Beom, and Yoon-Seo tries to stop Jun-Hee from following her. Jun-Hee decides to go find Da-Beom on his own, while Yoon-Seo finally discovers the birthday gift left in her bag by Jung-Won on the day they arrived. It’s a thumb drive that Yoon-Seo connects to a computer to learn the truth about it all.
Who is Se-Eun?
It seems like Jung-Won was never really a human being; she’s an AI-generated character created by Se-Eun based on herself in this game. Jung-Won essentially plays Se-Eun and is programmed to stop the rest of the students from winning. Yoon-Seo remembers everything about Se-Eun at this point and realizes that she was her best friend before she died. All the memories she had with Jung-Won were originally with Se-Eun. Night Has Come seems to rush things up in the last episode because, out of the blue, Da-Beom finds Yoon-Seo and threatens to kill her. He can simply kill her, but he wants Jung-Won to commit suicide first. Jung-Won tells him that that is against the rules and would kill him anyway. Jun-Hee’s character arc is quite disappointing in the show because he goes from a sweet class president who wants to help everybody to a vengeful leader who is frustrated by all the deaths around him. I suppose it’s a parallel to how bullying works, too; even the kindest people end up becoming somewhat cruel.
With all the violence, someone is obviously going to get hurt, and ultimately, both Jung-Won and Yoon-Seo are hurt. Yoon-Seo gets stabbed in the stomach, and Da-Beom gets stabbed in the chest, finally dying. Jung-Won and Jun-Hee try to keep Yoon-Seo alive, and Jung-Won apologizes for everything. Yoon-Seo tells her that she knows the truth about her being Se-Eun and apologizes for everything that’s gone down. She hopes the game can finally stop, though. Jung-Won promises to make things better and jumps off the building to her death.
Who’s controlling the kids?
As expected, the game is virtual reality. Picture Don’t Worry, Darling, but it’s no fun at first; it jumps straight into the horrors. Yoon-Seo wakes up in a room full of pods and with electrode-like things stuck on her head. When she gets out of her pod, she sees all her classmates and a gigantic screen with the details of the game they just played on it (including video footage—really quite impossible, but okay). It turns out that Se-Eun’s parents are the ones making the kids play the mafia game that their daughter designed as revenge for bullying her so much that she killed herself. Yoon-Seo understands their plight, but what they’re doing is also wrong, so she pleads for them to let the rest of the kids go. Yoon-Seo was saved by Jung-Won, which is a sign that they shouldn’t send the kids back for another game, but Se-Eun’s mother doesn’t buy into the idea. In fact, she wants them to repent for the rest of their lives because nobody took responsibility for her daughter’s death.
What Happened to Se-Eun?
It was Da-Beom who created an AI-generated explicit video with Se-Eun’s face superimposed on it. Soon, the video spread like wild fire to the whole school, and more videos of Se-Eun started doing the rounds. The girls bullied her, and the boys watched the videos with no shame; even Yoon-Seo, her best friend, couldn’t save her from all the hate and embarrassment. Ultimately, Se-Eun took her own life, and yet nobody in the school seemed to care at all. Despite Yoon-Seo having regained her memories, Se-Eun’s mother doesn’t want the kids to leave the game. Yoon-Seo can’t even wake the others up because it could mess with their brain chemistry. Soon, she’s back in a hazy state, and before she knows it, she’s on the bus on the way to the youth center again. At the end of episode 12, Yoon-Seo is in the game and remembers everything but has her hands tied. She’s left with no choice but to sit through the game all over again.
Night Has Come‘s ending is rather pessimistic but deeply impactful. I suppose the students should understand that what they did was wrong, and even after playing the game 12 times, it seems the results are always quite similar. This is obviously not the way to teach the kids a lesson, but it’s a way for us as an audience to understand the ramifications of something as simple as spreading rumors and fake videos of someone. Maybe this time around, Yoon-Seo will be able to save everyone early on in the game by telling Jung-Won that she knows the truth. There’s obviously no ghost really involved, but the AI suddenly picked up on the idea that Yoon-Seo wanted to help Se-Eun as her best friend. A lot of the show doesn’t quite make sense, but at least the synth music that sounds almost like the Stranger Things theme song is quite a nice way to finish off the show.
