Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

The Prayer
(간호중 / Ganhojoong / Nurse)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

The anthology’s first episode takes place in a futuristic society in which caretaker/nursing robots are employed to take care of hospital patients. To accommodate the patients and create a familiar environment, the caretaker robots typically are designed with the face of the patient’s main guardian. This way they strive to relieve the human guardians from strenuous hours of caretaking. The robots are equipped with different levels of skill and function depending on the buyer’s financial status. In other words: people with more money can afford a much higher level caretaker robot with more advanced functions than people with smaller budgets. While higher level robots possess the ability to perform tasks without specific instruction and have a wider capacity of understanding certain human situations, others barely manage to achieve their intended purpose.

SF8: The Prayer is the first episode in the SF8 anthology. It has a duration of about 53 minutes and was directed by Min Gyu Dong.

The majority of this episode’s story takes place at Paradise Nursing, a hospital which employs these caretaker robots as well. It focusses mainly on one of these nursing robots, who was put in charge of taking care of a comatose mother and her daughter. When a decade passes without any change in the mother’s situation, the daughter starts becoming more and more frantic and depressed and even starts doubting the meaning of life in general. The nurse robot, who has developed a significant and almost human-like attachment to her patients, especially to the daughter, recognizes her anguish and starts debating what she can do to relief her worries. This inner debate ultimately leads her to make a decision about whom to save: mother or daughter.

Before moving on to my official full analysis, I just want to note that my first thought after finishing this first episode was that I must have missed a majority of its (hidden) messages. That’s why I watched it again 🙃. When doing so, I immediately caught a lot of things I’d missed the first time; I was able to follow the conversations better and make more connections between dialogues and references. However, I still don’t feel confident enough to claim that I understand all of it. I’m not sure if that’s even possible. For me, it’s mainly because I am simply not familiar enough with the many significant Biblical references that are made in this episode. It was definitely a good decision to rewatch it and I will probably do the same for the other episodes (if necessary), but I still don’t have all the required understanding to explain all the hidden messages. I just wanted to say that in advance. I acknowledge my own lack of knowledge.

If I thought I’d be able to write eight reviews for all the episodes easy-peasy in one go when I started on this review package, I will already say right here and now that that was incredibly naive of me, lol. Even though this is only one individual story, there is SO MUCH to unravel. I want to avoid writing a too-detailed summary (I think I’ve summed up the foundation of the story’s setting briefly and clearly enough in the introduction) I’ve decided that I will just go over the main characters’ respective perspectives one by one and highlight some significant details and references. I will also mention a couple of interesting themes and aspects that jumped out to me when watching the episode (both times).

Now, back to the story. Yeon Jeong In (played by Lee Yoo Young) has been taking care of her comatose mother for about ten years. Three years after her mother fell unconscious she employed a caretaker robot and had it designed with her own face. She called the ‘nurse’ Gan Ho Joong, after the literal Korean word for ‘nurse’. As Jeong In invested quite some money to equip the robot with special skills (such as advanced linguistic abilities), Gan Ho Joong has been performing greatly, and has even become like a sister figure to Jeong In. The two have become quite close, and this bond is stimulated by Gan Ho Joong’s significant human-like communicative and responsive abilities.
Despite the support she’s been getting from Gan Ho Joong for seven years, it hasn’t been easy for Jeong In, and it’s also not getting any easier. Besides the stress she experiences due to her mother’s condition, the business of her printshop and her attempts to find a suitable marriage partner aren’t going well either. She’s gradually starting to lose sight of the meaning of life. Watching all the other sick people being treated by caretaker robots while no one including her mother is getting any better, she starts wondering whether anything really has meaning anymore. Her mental state worsens despite Gan Ho Joong’s persistent attempts to offer her help and comfort. She eventually reaches a point where she actually starts contemplating taking her own life, just to escape from all the misery. This feeling is only strengthened when the wife of the patient in the next room unalives herself. This woman was in a similar situation as Jeong In, taking care of her husband whose condition didn’t get any better. However, you could say the woman’s situation was worse than Jeong In’s for several reasons. For example, she couldn’t afford a properly functioning robot and was still forced to do most of the exhausting caretaking by herself, all the while being terrorized by her increasingly dementing husband. In her own pessimistic state, Jeong In never reached out to this woman even though she was aware of her situation, and she’d even reached a point where she took satisfaction from another person’s situation if it was worse than her own. The woman’s husband was doing worse than her mother, whose situation was at least stable and stagnant. After hearing about the woman’s suicide, Jeong In is overwhelmed by an even stronger feeling of guilt for ignoring her and taking satisfaction from her situation. She eventually doesn’t even accept Gan Ho Joong’s help anymore and goes off the grid for a while as she contemplates whether or not to end her own life as well.

Gan Ho Joong has been assigned to take care of both Jeong In and her mother, and in the seven years she’s been providing care she’s also been consistently observing and analyzing Jeong In. Besides the fact she needs to keep an eye on her as she’s her official caretaker, Gan Ho Joong has undeniably gone beyond the basic type of care she’s expected to provide as a robot. Despite not having a heart, Gan Ho Joong seems to have developed some remarkable human-like responsive systems, things that surprise even Jeong In from time to time. One example we see is that when Jeong In cuts her finger, Gan Ho Joong doesn’t hesitate to put said finger in her mouth to stop the bleeding, forgetting that she doesn’t even have saliva to do so. While she’s been observing Jeong In’s deteriorating mental health for a while, it takes Gan Ho Joong considerable time (and a short-circuit) to deduct that Jeong In’s mental state is worsening because of her mother’s unchanging condition. After the alleged suicide of the woman next door, Gan Ho Joong also recognizes that this only made matters worse for Jeong In. When she becomes overwhelmed by Jeong In’s feelings of guilt and depression, something flips inside Gan Ho Joong – she decides she needs to take action in order to save Jeong In. It’s without a doubt that this feeling goes way beyond her programming; she’s developed a remarkable sense of compassion and even desire for Jeong In. When Gan Ho Joong discovers a ‘Call to Save a Life’ card that a nun left in the hospital room one time, she calls the number and comes into contact with a nun called Sister Sabina. While asking the nun questions as she simultaneously debates on what to do, Gan Ho Joong becomes fascinated with the concept of praying. While constantly praying for Jeong In and her mother, she ultimately makes the decision of disconnecting the mother from the system – letting go of her mother after all those years of uncertainty regarding whether she’ll ever wake up again will save Jeong In.

To take a little segue from here, it is important to look at Gan Ho Joong’s attachment to Jeong In. Sure, we’ve also seen how much Jeong In cares about her, she’s referred to her as a sister and she’s eternally grateful for the nurse robot’s help. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that Jeong In is still very much aware that Gan Ho Joong is a robot. While she may have developed some sort of attachment to her, it’s nowhere near the infatuation that Gan Ho Joong seems to develop towards her. This predominantly becomes clear in the scene when Jeong In is summoned to the hospital with the news that her mother has passed away. When she learns about her mother’s death and sees the body for herself, Jeong In’s first reaction is to thank Gan Ho Joong for her service. She hugs her tightly and says her mother must’ve passed away peacefully thanks to the years of TLC she was provided.
When Jeong In hugs her, it’s like something primal awakens in Gan Ho Joong. She pulls Jeong In back in when she’s pulling out of the hug and even starts rubbing her face into her neck – heck, it seems like she’s even about to KISS her. We didn’t see Jeong In’s face during this shot so I’m not entirely sure what she thought of that sudden intimacy, but when the robot handler guy came in she didn’t seem particularly flustered. I found this a really weird moment, because it almost seemed like Gan Ho Joong developed more than just sisterly feelings for Jeong In, feelings that were definitely not supposed to be included in her programming.
To emphasize what I mentioned earlier about Jeong In’s awareness of Gan Ho Joong as a robot rather than an actual sister, her reaction when she learns about HOW her mother came to her end immediately proves the core relationship that defines humans and machines as two separate entities. In one breath, all the good things Gan Ho Joong has done for seven years are wiped off the table. Despite Gan Ho Joong’s good intentions when unplugging her mom from the system, as she thought that’s what Jeong In actually wanted deep down, it becomes painfully clear that this is NOT what Jeong In wanted. Gan Ho Joong has drawn an irrevocably faulty conclusion. Within ten minutes, Jeong In turns from a beloved sister into a raging human being as she starts beating and kicking the living daylights out of Gan Ho Joong.
I found this so typical for the relation between humans and machines. We humans love technology, we are so incredibly dependent on it and we praise it into the heavens when it’s all working well. However, one mistake, one error, one miscalculation from the machine and we’re ready to throw it out the window. It just created such a typical but powerful image of how, even in this ‘advanced’ futuristic setting in which humans have become so dependent on robots they’ve even given them human features (as many as possible, preferably), they still end up acting the same way when these precious machines don’t work according to their wishes. Even when they’ve provided years of excellent service, even when they’ve become part of the family, one misstep and immediately they’re back to just being ‘machines’.

Let’s talk a bit about Choi Jeong Gil (played by Yeom Hye Ran), ‘the woman in the next room’ who has been taking care of her husband (played by Yoon Gyung Ho) for an unindicated period of time. It’s not clear what exactly her husband is suffering from, but I’m guessing it’s a severe form of dementia since he seems to have completely lost himself: he acts like a little child and refers to Jeong Gil as his grandmother while he refers to the caretaker nurse with Jeong Gil’s face as his wife.
As mentioned before, Jeong Gil is in a similar position as Jeong In in the sense that she’s all alone in taking care of a loved one, but she has absolutely nothing on her ‘cheap-level’ caretaker robot. We might say cheap, but of course it wasn’t exactly cheap: she had to sell her house and take out an additional loan, go figure what a higher level one would’ve cost. In any case, her caretaker robot is nowhere near the functionality levels of Gan Ho Joong, and Jeong Gil has to do the majority of caretaking herself, which completely wears her out. So much, in fact, that her husband’s childish behavior eventually leads her to attempt strangling him one night. With no one on her side to cut her some slack or make an exception for her financial situation, she ends up taking pills to escape the madness. Just when she’s choking on the floor next to her husband’s bed, her husband starts talking as if he’s lucid. Regretting her choice to take the pills, Jeong Gil begs the caretaker robot to save her, but as she’s not its assigned patient, the robot merely looks on as she chokes to death.

I realize I forgot to mention this specifically, but each caretaker robot is assigned to help, assist and save only specifically assigned people. Gan Ho Joong was assigned to support both Jeong In and her mother, that’s why she developed a dilemma in whom to save as she saw one patient’s condition was starting to negatively influence the other’s. It would make sense to think assigning a robot to take care of more people would also cost more money. Seeing as Jeong Gil had been barely able to afford this malfunctioning robot, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that she wouldn’t have been able to assign the robot to help her as well. In any case, the caretaker robot in the next room was only assigned to Jeong Gil’s husband, and therefore didn’t even reach out a helping hand to Jeong Gil even when she was begging it to help her. It’s quite a cruel capitalistic system.

The relation between Jeong In and Jeong Gil is a bit strenuous, as they both acknowledge they’re in similar situations but they don’t communicate about it. We do see that Jeong Gil attempts to talk to Jeong In a couple of times in the beginning, and after she’s gone Jeong In reveals to Gan Ho Joong that she felt guilty about ignoring her in the hallway the last time she called out to her. She was using Jeong Gil’s stress about her husband to feel better about her own situation, as her mother was at least in a more stable state than Jeong Gil’s husband. On the other hand, Jeong Gil also seemed almost envious of Jeong In’s situation – when she attempted to strangle her husband she let slip that she wished he would be as ‘nice and quiet as the old lady in the next room’. After Jeong Gil’s death, Jeong In’s mental state worsens as she fears she might end up just like her, driven crazy by the neverending and unfruitful care of her mother. It is at this point that Gan Ho Joong starts picking up alarming signals from Jeong In’s mental state and starts worrying about her in a nearly human-like compassionate way, even going so far as to think of ways to improve Jeong In’s situation by sacrificing the mother, something Jeong Gil’s robot would’ve never been able to do.

I’m not exactly sure where Sister Sabina (played by Ye Soo Jung) came from, but I got the feeling that she went around public places to drop off cards to offer religious support to people. We don’t know much about her as a person, but she only gets involved in the story when Gan Ho Joong contacts her. They have an interesting conversation on the phone about the relativity of prayers, and whether non-humans are capable (and allowed?) to do it. Sister Sabina initially seems to keep a firm stance on that Gan Ho Joong is different from her patients as she doesn’t have a human heart. At the time of the phone call, she underestimates the caretaker robot because she isn’t aware of how human-like Gan Ho Joong’s responses have gotten.
When we jump to one year later, Sister Sabina manages to track down Gan Ho Joong, who was returned to the manufacturer’s headquarters in Germany and was demoted back to the name of TRS-70912B. The robot hasn’t stopped praying ever since the hospital incident. Furthermore, she asks Sister Sabina to ‘kill’ her, because she cannot bear the ‘pain’ she still feels in her body when she thinks of Jeong In. Sister Sabina, who apparently changed her outlook from their initial phonecall, now claims she cannot kill the robot, even though she’s not a human and it wouldn’t be a sin against the Lord. TRS-70912B tries to persuade Sister Sabina by screaming at her that she needs to help her and she can’t now suddenly take this stance to lessen her own guilt about what happened to the robot after their last phonecall.
While the alarms all go off and the German staff yell at Sister Sabina to get away from the robot as she’s got an error, Sister Sabina remains uncertain whether or not to press the robot’s killswitch. The episode ends with a close-up of her uncertain expression while the machines guarding TRS-70912B seem to turn against the oncoming security staff.

It cannot be denied that a heavily religious theme runs through the core of this episode. Not only is the episode’s title ‘The Prayer’, prayers in general are undeniably a central theme. While usually depicted as something pure and good, because praying is most often done in order to ask for a miracle that benefits someone’s situation in a good way, this episode puts the nature of praying in perspective by creating a rift between human and artificial interpretations of it.
The theme of praying appears in different forms throughout the story. We are first introduced to Choi Jeong Gil as she and a group of other believers loudly chant prayers around her husband’s hospital bed. One guy even refers to the woman as ‘Sister Choi Jeong Gil’, suggesting she is part of a Christian community. While she’s praying to God, her husband who is rolled up under his bedsheets is holding an artefact that (I believe) belongs to more traditionally Korean form of prayer, at least I got the impression that he might have been from a different religion and Choi Jeong Gil actively tries to stop him from using the object.
Besides that, Jeong In tells Gan Ho Joong that she’s currently printing a book at her shop that consists of a father’s journals and prayers.
Then of course there’s the direct link with Sister Sabina, a nun to the Catholic Church, who encourages anyone she meets to pray to the Lord when they’re in doubt or have struggles.
You could say that the conflict over prayers arises between Gan Ho Joong and Sister Sabina, as different notions of praying and who should and shouldn’t be able to do it are brought up.
In the end, Gan Ho Joong keeps praying, even after she unalived the comatose mother and was discarded by Jeong In. What exactly she kept praying for all that time until Sister Sabina came to find her at the TRS headquarters isn’t clear, it seems like she’s just repeating a specific psalm.
Admittedly, I have no idea of Christianity, I was raised without any religious influences and I’ve never read The Bible so honestly the Biblical references mentioned in this episode are lost on me. Still, I tried to capture the exact segments that Gan Ho Joong quoted in order to make more sense of everything that happened.

After her first phone call to Sister Sabina, Gan Ho Joong is seen taking care of the comatose mother while telling her the story of Snow White, specifically the part where she’s unconscious after eating from the poisoned apple. This seems to be almost like a metaphor referring to the mother’s comatose state.

“Snow White ate the apple that the evil queen gave her, and fell into a deep sleep. The seven dwarves felt sad and cried, but Snow White did not wake up. The princess slept for a very long time.”

After these first few lines, the dialogue turns into a voice-over in which Gan Ho Joong digresses from the story and adds her own perspective to it.

“In the end, the princess woke up from her sleep. They say that she woke up because a prince from a faraway kingdom kissed her. But in real life, there is a slight chance that things like that happen. The place where the princess wakes up is a mysterious, mystical place in the sky that is very far away from where we are. Maybe that is the best ending for the princess.”

As you can see, this basically suggests the sleeping princess to ascend into Heaven, and that that might be the best possible option, another direct metaphor referring to Gan Ho Joong’s conclusion that making ‘the sleeping princess’ (the mother) pass away.

When Sister Sabina finds Gan Ho Joong demolished on the floor of the hospital room after Jeong In demolished her, Gan Ho Joong is muttering the following before the screen goes black:

“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial. The true sheep of the Lord. We live today. My joy will prove your resurrection. Through you. When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she will become the first fruit of those who have yet to wake up.”

Now I don’t know if the part about Sleeping Beauty actually appears in a Bible verse, but it could also very well refer to yet another fairytale of a princess who is put to an eternal sleep and does not wake from it.

When Sister Sabina visits TRS-70912B in the TRS headquarters, the robot is muttering the following before she opens her eyes to acknowledge the nun:

“Send out thy light and thy truth. Let them lead me. Let them…”

Apart from the Bible verses and prayers, there are also references to some other literary works, for example the poem Nothing Twice by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. This is a poem that Jeong In has apparently been reading and which Gan Ho Joong refers to in order to soothe her when she finally manages to get hold of her on the phone. Jeong In expresses her anguish over the fact that while robots like Gan Ho Joong get upgraded every single day while her mother has been unconscious for ten years and she feels like she’s being left behind. The part Gan Ho Joong cites in return (taken from the original poem) is:

“Though we be the most obtuse
Pupils in the school of this world,
We will never be held back to repeat
A single winter or summer.”

It’s clear that in this moment, Jeong In isn’t in a state where she’s able to appreciate Gan Ho Joong’s support, and it even suggests that she’s officially drawing a line between them because she acknowledges that Gan Ho Joong will never understand her pain for the very reason that she’s a robot. Even when Gan Ho Joong tells her that she’s there for her and tries to soothe her, Jeong In dismisses her attempts.

Just to be sure I looked up the entire poem, which is about the singularity of existence: we only live once and nothing, not a single moment or day will ever happen twice. It might have been just a poem that was picked out as a way to comfort Jeong In, but I still feel like there may be some hidden meaning behind this particular poem that connects more directly to the message of the story.

Finally, and this is probably the most important reference of the entire episode, there’s a strong reference to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Just to give a quick summary: it’s a story from the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Christian Old Testament about two brothers, Cain and Abel, the first two sons of Adam and Eve. Respectively a farmer and a shepherd, they both made sacrifices to God, but God favored Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. This made Cain so mad and jealous that he murdered his brother Abel and, as punishment, was made to wander the earth for eternity.

The first reference to Cain and Abel is seen in the very first shot of the episode, which features Sister Sabina’s face while her voice recites:

“The Lord asked Cain, “What have you done?” The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

In the final scene of the episode, where Sister Sabina is faced with the dilemma of pushing TRS-70912B’s killswitch, the same voice-over is played, although this time it starts in TRS-70912B’s voice and then changes into Sister Sabina’s voice halfway through.

“The Lord asked Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” Cain answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Then the Lord said to Cain, “What have you done?” The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. This ground that has opened its arms to receive the blood of your murdered brother.”

This segment comes peculiarly close to the earlier scene in which Sister Sabina visits Jeong In to ask her about Gan Ho Joong’s whereabouts. When she asks her what happened to the robot, Jeong In literally says: “Sorry? I don’t know. Am I that robot’s keeper or something?”, creating a direct parallel with the Cain and Abel story. Honestly, to this moment I still do not entirely understand the parallel between this story and the Cain and Abel one (please enlighten me if you do!). In any case there doesn’t seem to be a shared moral lesson or anything. I guess that Jeong In and Gan Ho Joong could be perceived as sisters, and it definitely seems like the Cain and Abel reference is directed at the two of them. But Jeong In didn’t actually ‘kill’ Gan Ho Joong and it’s not like they both made a ‘sacrifice’ of which only one was ‘accepted’.

I checked the summaries of my go-to drama source websites to see if they offered any insights on the main message of the story. DramaWiki and AsianWiki both summarize it by referring to Gan Ho Joong’s predominant dilemma in whether to save the mother or the daughter.
On MyDramaList, a more insightful part was added which says: “When a machine is programmed for one purpose it becomes closer to the essence of that objective, so it inevitably reaches a realm that includes choice, anguish and obsession beyond the programming. Is it still just a machine then?”
They all seem to refer directly to the core dilemma Gan Ho Joong faces, without any reference to the religious aspects depicted in the episode.
I personally feel like the message of the episode went beyong Gan Ho Joong’s struggle to determine who to save, but I think I just have to accept that my limited understanding of the Biblical references falls too short here and I’m just not educated enough in the field to understand the real message, which is a pity.

One thing I actually found funny was that, in contrast to my previous watch Doona!, which couldn’t be more different from this series, this episode actually pulled off a really clear link between the first and final scene through a voice-over. This was exactly what I was talking about in my previous review, if they’d done something like this it would’ve made much more sense to me.
The final scene and the repeated use of the same voice-over segment made clear that the first shot is actually foreshadowing: we see Sister Sabina’s face and hear her recite this verse, followed by the shot of some liquid being flushed down a tube. When looking at this first shot after seeing the one at the very end of the episode, it could even suggest that the liquid flushing down the tube is, in fact, the result of the nun’s decision to push the killswitch after all. In any case, the repeated use of the narrated verse at the end very much clarified the first scene for me. I kind of liked how the open ending basically enabled an ethical debate on whether or not Sister Sabina would oblige to the robot’s request or not. She’d really have to weigh her own morals and values to make that decision.

One final element I found remarkably well done in this episode was the use of subtle transitions. The way the liquid flushing down the tube in the first shot seamlessly transitioned into the scene where Gan Ho Joong was changing the comatose mother’s fluid bags. The way the back-and-forth scenes between Jeong In and Gan Ho Joong were shot while it was the same actress (I really wonder how they did!)
There was a really satisfying use of framed shots, for example when depicting the many monotonous layers of the hospital floors. All in all the cinematography was really remarkable.

All in all, I found it very interesting to watch. The quality of filming and acting was very high. While I really wished I could have understood the depicted references better, I do think that the unclarified details only attributed to the eerie vibe of the story’s setting. It was constructed in a very interesting way, and it left a lot to the interpretation and attentiveness of the viewer. If the other episodes are going to be anything like this, I am very excited to move on to the next one. It actually feels like I’m watching a Korean version of Black Mirror and I’m not complaining so far.
By the way, and I’m just noticing this, but it’s also interesting to look closely at the poster of this episode. It features Jeong In and Gan Ho Joong standing opposite each other, and it looks like they are reflected through a mirror as we can see a crack in the glass. This crack is positioned right in-between the two, and cinematography usually uses images like this to display a disparity or dividedness between two characters. It really does suggest that the Cain and Abel reference is directed at the two of them, albeit more figuratively than literally.

As I’ve come this far, let’s just include a short cast comment section, shall we? I figure these sections will remain quite short in this package of reviews as each episode seems to only include a small core of main characters.

I’ve seen Lee Yoo Young once before in Tunnel, which I thought was really good. Tunnel was actually her debut drama. I was really impressed by her performance in this episode. Not only did she pull off a double role, she actually manage to portray two completely different characters. Apart from having the same face, Jeong In and Gan Ho Joong were incredibly different in posture, movement, behavior and expression. This was some next level Orphan Black acting, for sure. I remember finding her a bit stiff and, admittedly, a bit robotically emotionless in Tunnel, but her acting in this particular episode completely changed my mind about her acting. She showed a wide variety of emotions while playing out Jeong In’s depressive episodes, but she really blew me away with her portrayal of Gan Ho Joong, especially in the final sequence. To be able to portray a human-like robot who started experiencing human-like pain it couldn’t progress properly, that’s on another level. She was incredible in this and I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for her in future shows.

Not me going ‘OMG!!’ when I realized Yeom Hye Rim is the maniac mother from Mask Girl, LOL. I was thinking she looked familiar but I didn’t connect the dots, even though I praised her into the heavens two reviews ago. Anyways, I think her portrayal of Choi Jeong Gil was also very impressive. This woman just doesn’t know any shame when it comes to going all the way in her acting. I honestly felt very sorry for Jeong Gil, it was clear that she just wanted her husband to go back to how he used to be, and the way she was begging the caretaker robot to save her from her own suicide attempt as soon as her husband seemed to become lucid again was really heartbreaking. She was definitely a victim of the capitalistic system that employed these robots, and I thought it was very powerful to include her story in contrast to Jeong In’s, to show how other people in similar situations ended up drawing the short straw. She died only because she wasn’t assigned to a caretaker robot herself, and that’s why it feels like her character was used as a plot tool to show an example of how useless the whole caretaking system really was.

Apparently I’ve seen Ye Soo Jung before in God’s Gift – 14 Days, but it’s been too long ago for me to remember her from that. She did look a bit familiar, though. I’m sure I’m going to see her in other series in the future. Accordingly to TRS-70912B’s remark in the final scene, I also think Sister Sabina’s character was a perfect example of human hypocrisy. Despite her good intentions to introduce everyone to the relieving act of praying to the Lord to relieve their worries, she really needed to get her own morals and values straight. It was so typical that she would recommend everyone to share their worries with the Lord and trust in his plan but then admit that no one actually knew what His plan actually was. As a robot, I would’ve also gotten confused, lol. Anyways, I kind of like that the meaning of faith was also put in perspective through her character, especially as she herself changed her mind as well. She first told Gan Ho Joong off for trying to act like a human, telling her that robots weren’t made to kill humans, but then when TRS-70912B put her in that same position, begging her to ‘kill’ it because it wouldn’t be the same as killing, it would be setting the robot free, she couldn’t bring herself to do it because it still felt like murder. There were a lot of interesting contradictions this woman had to go through, and I’m actually curious as to what decision she would’ve made. I liked the naturalness of the actress’ acting and how she displayed such different sides to her character as well, even though we aren’t actually given that much background information on Sister Sabina.

As I said, I was impressed by the concept and structure of this episode and I’ve become increasingly excited to watch the other episodes. For this one, the main disappointment lies predominantly with myself, as I was simply not knowledgeable enough to understand all the Biblical references in this episode. I’m sure there are other reviews out there with more informed reviews, I might just check those out. This time I chose not to look for other reviews beforehand because I really wanted to share my own unbiased thoughts on the episode. Besides the many question marks this episode left me, I was really impressed by the structure of the story, the dialogues and the events, and the acting was really good. I feel like I’m going to like this anthology.

On to the next one!