Night Has Come (2023) K Drama Episode 1

Night Has Come episode 1 starts with Lee Yoon-seo waking up from a nightmare. Within this, she was sleeping in a bunk bed and woke up to find blood dripping from the top bunk and the person sleeping there dead. She quickly exits the room and comes across a purple swimming pool. There is another girl in the room who jumps into the water, and everything turns from purple to red. She runs away again and comes across more students eerily looking like zombies. She turns to run again, but someone punches her. This startles her from her sleep. 

Presently, Yoon-seo is among the students in the second grade 3 class at Yooil High School going on a field trip. She was reading a book before she fell asleep on the bus. Meanwhile, the other students loudly play a mafia game until the bully orders them to quiet down as he wants to sleep. One student thinks about fighting the bully, but another warns him against this. As the other students joke around,  Yoon-seo can’t stop staring at Kim Joon-hee, the boy she is crushing on. Her friend, Oh Jung-won, teases her to sit next to Joon-hhe next time. Oh Jung-won is busy making a game on her laptop.

The students soon arrive at the youth centre, where they will stay during their field trip. The teacher gets a phone call, but the signal is weak, and he walks away, trying to find a better signal. Meanwhile, the students take their luggage off the bus and head to the house. Yoon-seo gets a sense of deja vu, but Jung-won says all youth centres look the same. 

As they enter the centre, the students automatically scan the OR code at the entrance to connect to the WiFi and install the youth centre app. The students continue talking casually, and the teacher gives up after failing to get a good phone signal.  

After settling in, the students start practising dancing. Some play basketball. One student captures the moments on his camera and is intrigued by those flirting. Jung-won and Yoon-seo sit by themselves and watch the other students. Jung-woon finds the youth centre app below par and remarks she can make a better one. 

After failing to communicate with the teacher from the other class, the teacher summons Jon-hee, the class president. He asks him to make sure the students go to their respective rooms and says he is going to pick the other guys from a different class. The teacher also asks the vice president, Kim So-mi, to ensure the students keep their uniforms on until they can take a group photo.

Soon, the students realise they are not getting any signal on their phones. Suddenly, a loud ring and a blackout scare the students. It turns out to be a student goofing around in an attempt to scare his classmates. He starts narrating a ghost story about a student who once committed suicide in that particular centre. The rest take it as a joke, but Yoon-seo seems scared. 

The scene cuts to the school bullies doing their thing. Randomly picking up on another fellow student who demanded they pay him back the money they owe him. The gang leader, Ko Kyung-joon, plays a mean joke on the student. 

Elsewhere, Jung-won and Yoon-seo settle in their room but realise the internet is not working. Yoon-seo is unbothered as she is reading a novel, but that is not the case for Jung-won. They get a message welcoming them to a mafia game and giving them information on their respective occupation in the game. 

They can either be civilians, doctors, police officers or mafias. According to the game’s rules, from 8am to midnight, the participants will select the mafia members through voting. At midnight, the member with the highest votes will be executed. After voting, all the participants except the mafia will fall asleep. During this time, the mafia must execute someone before 6 am. The game is over when either team mafia or team civilians kill the other team and win. It is also noted that civilians, doctors and police officers are on the same team.

Soon, the game starts, and the students get a message on their phones asking them to confirm their roles. The students think this is a random, fun game and start voting. They decide to vote for Heo Yool as the mafia. After voting, Yoon-seo and Jung-won realise that they never signed up for the game and question how it works without the internet. They head out to meet with Joon-hee to ask about the teacher’s return. They are surprised that the teacher has yet to return and no other adults are in the building.

They decide to check the offices, but even the landlines are off. Yoon seo gets a random message to head to the pool in the annexe immediately. While there, Kim So-mi and her friends mockingly try to throw her a birthday party. So-mi throws Yoon-seo into the swimming pool, and she nearly drowns. It is not that Yoon-seo couldn’t swim. It felt like an unseen force was pulling her down. 

Thankfully, Joon-hee arrives in time to save her after saving the boy Kyung-joon and his bully minions were bullying. Joon-hee takes Yoon-seo to rest in the infirmary and stays with her until she wakes up. She worries that he was re-traumatised after getting into the pool to save her. Apparently, Joon-hee gave up swimming after a fateful incident in the past.

So-mi comes to fake apologise, and Yoon-seo acts like it is all cool. The students gather in the hallway, and an announcement fills the air. A sixty-second timer is started on the students’ phones, reminding them they have 1 minute before the voting ends. All the students unanimously voted for Heo Yool because they thought he was a mafia.

Heo Yool starts hearing a loud ring and falls to his knees before stumbling along the walls. He lifts his head, and his eyes are rolled up and whitish. He then starts banging his head against the floor, and some students try to stop him, but to no avail. He stands and starts crushing his head against the art on the wall. Finally, he jumps out the window and falls to his death. Before the students have time to process what happened, it is announced that Heo Yool was a civilian.

The episode ends with a random song playing, and the students suddenly fall asleep. 

The Episode Review

What a spooky affair! This first episode left us with so many questions. First, what happened to the teacher? Why did he never return? Also, what happened to the people who welcomed the students to the youth centre? 

We can’t help but notice that  Yoon-seo and Jung-won are suspicious. What game was Jung-won working on while on the bus? Why is Yoon-seo so tense from the beginning, and why did she have the premonition? We also don’t know how the killer is committing his heinous murders and how they are making the game work without the internet. 

Either way, Night Has Come is making us scared even of our own shadows, and we are excited to see what happens next. Off we are to episode 2 to find out what the student will do following Heo Yool’s suicide. They have now realised it is not just a game but a matter of life and death. Somehow, this feels like the high-school version of squid games without the prize fund.