I'm constantly in the market for good reality competition shows and when I found The Devil's Plan on Netflix, I had to give it a try. While a lot of the games were interesting and most of the contestants seemed cool, the show still had a few issues that kept it from reaching the highest possible caliber. But hopefully if they get future seasons, they'll be able to iron out those wrinkles.
First thing's first: I'm not really sure why this show is called The Devil's Plan. It doesn't really have anything to do with the concept of making a deal with the devil, it's not particularly designed for people to be terrible and ruthless, there doesn't seem to be any sort of big finale endgame that reveals what said plan is.
Other than that, I liked the overall game design from the start. Each contestant starts with a piece, and the goal is to get as many pieces as possible by the final round to become a finalist. Having the fewest pieces could land you in prison and having none gets you eliminated. Pieces are won from the Main Match and the Prize Match, the first of which is a competition among the players, and the second is a collaboration to secure money for the pot.
As a fan of The Mole, I like the concept of having to earn your prize pot by collaborating with your competitors, though The Mole is already steps ahead of this show in that aspect (and all aspects) as people must simultaneously compete and collaborate whereas here, it's separate and so there's not really an element of distrust during the Prize Match.
Each of the matches has some sort of game like a mafia-style game, a large tabletop board game involving pre-set rules (the most suspenseful thing in this whole show), a territory expansion game, an animal sequence betting game, a joint scale balancing game with separated teams that can't communicate, social deduction games, and more. Most of these games were really cool, and although it does take some time for the announcer to go through all the rules, the uniqueness and creativity involved make it all worth the while.
However, the final game before the finale was literally just mathematical poker....one game alone eliminated the vast majority of the players in the entire show, with only a few having been eliminated previously, and only two remaining to go into the finals.
The final round itself was not very interesting. It came down to a game of nine men's morris, which is fun enough to play in real life but not at all good for TV, and a really difficult memory + math game, which isn't fun to do or watch.
One of the finalists had a massive advantage coming into the final and the round before because they managed to use the pieces to unlock a secret area in the prison that presented a high risk high reward game of colorblind Gomuku. Losing would result in instant elimination, but winning would result in an addition of ten extra pieces, which literally defined the entirety of the poker game. The advantage was too much and felt like it was only there because they wanted the prison to have more of an impact, which is fine as a concept, but doesn't really work in the execution.
Now, I'll get into the spoilers for the show:
Reddit seems to lean heavily in favor of my least favorite player in the whole show, Siwon. This girl was literally so annoying the whole time. She expected people to trust her when she was constantly off scheming, always tried make herself look good and make Orbit look bad, had this sort of attitude like she was doing people a favor just by talking to them during the game, and overall contributed very little other than drama.
She's the only person in the whole show that was straight up unlikeable and I cheered when she was eliminated because she was manipulative as hell, though her elimination would've been more satisfying if it was during one of the matches rather than the prison game.
Her partner-in-crime Dongjae was annoying, too, but at least he had a bit of a redemption before he left. I'm not sure why people were surprised that nobody trusted him after he secretly formed an alliance with Siwon and helped the terrorists win the first match even though it wasn't in his best interest to do so for the game itself. It made him even more untrustworthy afterwards when Siwon and Guillaume gave him pieces for his help.
I'm probably one of the few people who actually rooted for the majority alliance because despite their numbers, they were literally still the underdogs. Siwon tried to argue it was the other way around, but she and her team still had many more pieces each than anyone on the other alliance. The rules race was awesome because the majority alliance had been smart when setting their rules and going for the escape tickets rather than trying to screw the other team, and this ultimately saved them while the minority alliance screwed themselves because they chose rules that would attack the other team rather than save themselves.
Guillaume was the eliminated victim of this game which was partly his fault for not choosing a better rule, but also Dongjae's fault for his terrible rule idea. He was the only likeable member of the minority alliance and if only he had chosen a rule like Seokjin who ended up winning the game, then he might have stayed another round and sent one of the two jerks packing.
I didn't mind Seokjin sometimes, but other times he seemed to be too triggered by the other alliance. Like dude, it's your fault for choosing the other side. He was mad because Orbit wanted to save as many people as possible and thought they had too many freeloaders, but having those numbers was helpful to people in that alliance. Normally I'm against big alliance type games, but Orbit was really such a genuinely nice guy with good intentions, and despite Reddit arguing he's some sort of sneaky and evil master manipulator, I prefer to watch and root for people who are kind-hearted rather than mean-spirited like Siwon and Seokjin.
The only reason Seokjin even made it to the finals anyway was because of his massive prison luck. Yes, he won the prison game, but the whole time he complained that elimination should be contingent on a person's individual skill rather than alliances or luck, then ended up breezing past everyone in the poker game due to his extremely large number of chips that he received from his newly collected pieces. All those people were eliminated because they couldn't afford to bet as much as he could, and while Orbit and Dongjoo made significant ground, it was extremely difficult and risky for them and took a long time.
Also, if there's any time to be mad about the whole individual skill versus alliance thing, it should be that Seokjin's own teammates got Guillaume eliminated because of their own greed, and that Seokjin's win came at that team's sacrifice.
But speaking of individual skill, the last prize match was really unfortunate as Dongjoo didn't make it to the finals only because of Orbit's mistake. I really hate that sort of situation in many reality shows, where people don't make it because of someone else's mistake. If Dongjoo had faced off against Seokjin, she definitely would have won, because Orbit's loss came down to being too nervous to function at an optimal level, and Dongjoo wouldn't have had that problem.
All in all, it was a mostly interesting show. If there's a next season, then I hope they continue to cast diversely because these contestants were of many different backgrounds, ages, and professions. I also hope they make the final stages more interesting and resolve the massive prison piece advantage since doing the small puzzle for an extra piece was really enough of a reward for being in prison.
I would also like to see a season where the alliances don't play as much of a part. The only reason the majority alliance even existed in this season was because there was a secret minority alliance that won the previous game because of it, and they were very open about that alliance continuing into this next game, so of course the others were going to do something about that.
Going forward, I hope they can keep the good, rip off the bad, and continue to prioritize intelligence and creativity over drama.