SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Manxin
(만신/Manshin/Ten thousand Deities)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

This second (or fourth? 🤔 I’m a bit confused about the order) episode of the anthology takes place in a society that got dominated by the introduction of a fortune telling program called Manxin. The name is derived from the word manshin 万神, which literally means ‘ten thousand deities’ and therefore suggests a higher power. The program started out as an innocent horoscope app, but it gradually managed to gain the status of a prophecizing service with a 96.3% accuracy rate. Currently, the majority of people have started planning their entire lives around their daily Manxin horoscopes and only ever follow what the app tells them to do. This has in turn led to severe psychological issues, high levels of lethargy and low levels of productivity among people. No one even bothers to look beyond Manxin’s daily prophecies anymore, and everyone is so dependent on having the app that it’s become hard to imagine living an unpredictable life.

SF8: Manxin is either the second or fourth episode in the SF8 anthology. It has a duration of about 53 minutes and was directed by Noh Deok.

Among the countless people that use Manxin to predict every single day of their lives, lone ranger To Seon Ho (played by Lee Yeon Hee) is a rare exception. She’s never even installed the app and doesn’t intend to, not after what happened to her younger sister. Her younger sister used to be a true Manxin addict who completely based her life on its predictions and prophecies. One night, she had a horrific accident in which she fell into a massive sinkhole in the middle of a highway. Seon Ho, knowing that her sister would’ve never voluntarily gone to a place like that, is convinced that Manxin is to blame for her sister’s accident. The app must have told her something that made her go to that place at that time. Maybe it even told her to jump into the sinkhole, who knows. No one does. But Seon Ho strives to find out what happened and that’s why she’s gone in search of Manxin’s developer. She wants to get to the app’s server in order to retrieve her sister’s app data to find out what Manxin told her that day.
When we meet Seon Ho for the first time, she has just managed to obtain some intel on a certain Kim In Hong, a guy who she believes to be Manxin’s original developer. When she looks for him at the sermon of a community that’s completely devoted to Manxin and even prays to it as a God, she catches the eye of one of the speakers, Jung Ga Ram (played by Lee Dong Hwi). Seeing the big star on the back of Seon Ho’s jacket, he believes her to be the ‘Northern Star’ that Manxin prophesized to him as the guide that would lead him to his Lord. Despite their completely different attitudes towards the app, the unusual duo embarks on an adventure together in order to get to the bottom of Manxin, starting by tracking down this Kim In Hong, who inconveniently was not present at that particular sermon.

I just want to mention upfront that I thought it was really cool how different this episode was in contrast to the previous one I watched. It instantly made me excited to see the other episodes. Contrary to The Prayer, I thought the storyline and character development in Manxin was very straightforward and the ending had a pretty satisfying closure element to it. It wasn’t in the least abstract or suggestive, and it didn’t leave any references open for interpretation.
What I mean with ‘straightforwardedness’ of the storyline is that the story is very linear and easy to follow. It clearly establishes a setting in which a certain phenomenon is occurring and how this has influenced the lives of the people for a considerable time period (seven years, to be exact). Within this clear setting, we are introduced to two main characters who each have a certain experience or association with the app that causes them to either participate in the hype or not. Against all odds, these two characters team up to locate the source of the phenomenon for their own reasons. They manage to find a key person but ultimately encounter a dead end. There’s a classic moment of surrender and hopelessness before they eventually find their way back to their initial motivation. The story ends with a confrontation between the main characters and the person behind the phenomenon, and the issue is presented of whether or not to stop the phenomenon.
Interestingly, rather than a classic ending of the MCs putting an end to the phenomenon and restoring order to the world, Manxin presents a rather unique twist to its ending: rather than being disabled by the human ‘heroes’, the app makes its own decision to remain flawed and harmless. Rather than developing into an Almighty computer system that would quite literally dominate the human race (as classic evil computers do, looking at you, HAL) Manxin ironically decides it prefers to stay close to ‘humanity’ by maintaining an ‘imperfect’ system that gradually returns the need for personal action to people’s lives. The episode has a pretty satisfying ending, even though the majority of the people in the story don’t know that yet. No one ends up getting hurt, no one is under threat of being dominated by a computer system, all’s well that ends well.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into our two main characters.
Seon Ho is initially introduced as quite a stoic person. Until her motives for wanting to find Manxin’s server are revealed, it just seems as if she’s the only one in her vicinity who refuses to become a slave of technology and is more interested in finding out who is behind this app. Besides the very first scene in which she stands at the edge of the sinkhole, we only find out who Seon Ho is and what the sinkhole symbolizes when the story about her younger sister is revealed. Fuelled by her conviction that Manxin must have been responsible for her sister’s death – it’s so easy to blame machines for misfortune, after all – Seon Ho merely wants to get the confirmation from the app’s system to fully shape her bias towards it. Considering this conviction, it is not surprising to see how shaken she gets when she eventually finds out Manxin actually wasn’t responsible for anything at all. In fact, her sister had deleted the app a week before her accident, seemingly to take active action against her addiction to it. In addition, she’d been preparing a special birthday cake for Seon Ho, but stopped responding to the bakery’s service messages around the time it was ready for pick-up. Seon Ho finds out the truth when the repair store finally manages to retrieve her sister’s damaged phone’s data and is able to verify that the Manxin app is not installed on it. This is the only scene where we see an emotional side from Seon Ho, as she breaks down crying while listening to her sister’s last spoken messages directed at the ordering service that was preparing Seon Ho’s birthday cake.

We first meet Ga Ram at the sermon, where he’s giving a testimony of his dedication to Manxin and where he describes the prophecy he received about the Northern Star that would appear to him that day to guide him to his Lord. He takes a very easy chance on Seon Ho, even after realizing she’s strongly against the app. Initially, it’s probably because of his conviction that Seon Ho is indeed this prophecized ‘Northern Star’ that he sticks by her, all the more when he gets repetitive messages that only seem to confirm this.
Ga Ram’s personal reason for believing so strongly in Manxin is that he perceives it as ‘his savior’. Before he encountered Manxin, he was in a really bad place and this even caused him to jump off a building. The Manxin message he received right before jumping said something about a ‘dove of good luck’ being on its way. When he jumped, his fall was broken by a truck filled with bags containing soft plush toys that just happened to drive by at that moment, and as he opened his eyes a swarm of pigeons (or doves, I guess) flew up before his eyes. That was the moment he just knew that Manxin was real and that’s when he started worshipping it.

What’s interesting is that, following the linear storyline of finding out who’s behind Manxin and who or what is truly responsible for Seon Ho’s sister accident, both the main characters gradually start becoming more and more reflective in their opinions about the app along the way. While starting out on different sides of the spectrum – Seon Ho as the only person who defies Manxin and Ga Ram as someone who worships it – they ultimately start relating to each other’s perspectives as they each discover different sides to their own truths. For example, Seon Ho eventually does take a chance on the app after finding out that it was really just an unfortunate accident that killed her sister, and Ga Ram also starts accepting the way things are more. What I liked was that, despite their differences, there was never any serious tension between the two in terms of conviction. Apart from one specific clash moment, Seon Ho never actively tried to convince Ga Ram of the app’s flaws, and Ga Ram never tried to convert Seon Ho. They both stated their own opinions, and they accepted each other’s perspectives while maintaining their own. Honestly, if we could all just live like that, it would’ve been a much less crazy world.

When Seon Ho and Ga Ram manage to find and corner Kim In Hong (played by Seo Hyun Woo) in his hotel room, In Hong admits that while he is the original developer of the first model of Manxin, he hasn’t been involved in any of the developments that have made the app to what it is today. He was approached by someone in the very early ages of his creation, when the accuracy rate was still very low, and that person requested all his intellectual property to merge Manxin into a danger-warning program. As In Hong has no clue who that person might be and all the financial things were handled through cash and digital contracts, there is no way of tracing the transaction back to anyone either. Despite the fact that the original idea of Manxin was his, In Hong has completely washed his hands off anything that connects him to it, and has instead become just another slave to the technology. He listens to the app’s predictions just like everyone else, and he even became a part of the same community religion that Ga Ram belongs to, holding testimonies for it. While he initially also tries to push Seon Ho and Ga Ram away as he doesn’t want to get involved, he does provide them with a useful hint and even offers to go with them – until he unfortunately slips in his own bathroom and hits his head (I assume, as it’s not exactly shown how he falls, but in any case he doesn’t survive it).

The only real clash of convictions between Seon Ho and Ga Ram occurs in the scene after they’ve witnessed Kim In Hong’s death. While Seon Ho keeps saying it was an accident – and we’re indeed challenged to question it because we’ve seen with our own eyes that they asked the cleaning lady to leave before she could finish the bathroom, causing the floor to remain slippery – Ga Ram keeps saying that it all happened because they forced In Hong to ignore his Manxin message (which urged him to stay inside or else he’d meet with bad luck). Here, for the first time, Ga Ram uses his faith in Manxin to make Seon Ho see the truth about herself – that she’s only scared of using Manxin because she fears that it’ll see through her because she does believe that it works. In response, Seon Ho breaks Ga Ram’s phone.
The two split up when Seon Ho gets a call from the repair shop that her sister’s phone data has been recovered, and she leaves Ga Ram behind in the neighborhood where a package containing parts for Manxin’s next update is supposed to be delivered (the last piece of information Kim In Hong shared with them).

Ga Ram’s words take a while to get through to Seon Ho. It’s only after she’s discovered what actually happened to her sister and her talk with the phone repair guy that she suddenly realizes her life is in her own hands, whether she chooses to install Manxin or not, and she decides to go back and look for Ga Ram.
Speaking of the phone repair guy (played by Yoon Gyung Ho), I think what he said to Seon Ho before she decides to finally install Manxin was very important. Despite the fact that Manxin was predicting people’s lives, there was still the possibility to go against it, and in that way it still enabled human choice. Most people just went along with anything it said because it was the safe option, but it never truly disabled people from going their own way and choosing their own path. Manxin only served the purpose of ‘guiding’ people by providing them with one possible option. This notion causes Seon Ho to finally install the app, and the first message she gets is: “If you feel as though you’ve hit a dead end, it means you are almost at your destination”. Which is proven to be true, as it’s revealed when she finally meets the developer that the whole part of town she’d been driving through was basically part of Manxin, or at least of the place through where all of Manxin’s date was being collected and generated.

The truth about Manxin is revealed when Seon Ho and Ga Ram finally meet the developer, an elderly man named Lee Chi Ham (played by Nam Myung Ryeol). It is here that they find out about Manxin’s self-developed idolization of human behavior, and that it’s actually started creating prophecies addressed to itself. This tendency is proved even more strongly when the software ultimately rejects the Big Update, which would’ve either created a huge magnetic field that would’ve turned the app into an ‘Almighty’ entity (something that Seon Ho strongly opposed) or would’ve destroyed it completely (something that Ga Ram strongly opposed). As the two yell their own arguments for both these possibilities (loved this back-and-forth dialogue, by the way), they suddenly make the developer realize that Manxin would be perfectly able to make its own choice, as if it actually were a human being. As a result – and I’m thinking it might have actually been aware of Seon Ho’s and Ga Ram’s arguments – Manxin decides that it wishes to retain a human-like status rather than an Almighty one. It would retain its daily fortunes but simultaneously adapt a 50/50 accuracy rate to keep encouraging people to make their own choices.

The episode ends with a refreshing ‘new start’ kind of feeling in which Seon Ho and Ga Ram both get rid of Manxin for good while around them a new world unfolds, as was originally predicted by Manxin at the beginning of the episode, but it’s a different world than anticipated. This new world would have to start getting used to the new 50% accuracy rate and stimulate people to take control of their own lives again.
My favorite part at the end was the narration of several news reports about people showing discontent towards the declined accuracy rate of the app, while “meanwhile, the employment rate and economic growth rates are on the rise for a change. Experts are saying it’s only a temporary phenomenon caused by the public’s fear of the uncertainty of the future.” That cracked me up – I thought it was the perfect way to end the episode on a humorous but hopeful note.

Honestly, I’m always quite fascinated by stories about forms of technology that impact people’s lives a lot, because it feels like it’s partially a depiction of reality (we’re all part of a world that’s become a slave of technology) and partially a warning to what this technology can have in the long run. It actually reminded me of the Joalarm app from Love Alarm. That may have been a dating app, but it also took away the thrill and unpredictability of the chase in people’s love lives and only decreased the amount of independent action needed to look past the possibilities the app provided. Humans and machines have become such an interrelated thing and I’m always fascinated by how people manage to convey that correlation through visual images. I feel like the relationship between humans and machines/technology will be the main recurring theme within this anthology. Within the two episodes I’ve watched so far, this relationship was depicted in a really powerful way. It’s just so relatable to see how we’ve become so dependent on technology in our daily (social) lives and work, we’ve accepted it almost as a part of us, but as soon as it starts acting up or makes a mistake, we immediately tend to get angry, blame it for everything and want to throw it out the window. I’ve made this point in The Prayer and I also found it applicable in this episode, especially when looking at the final scene. As soon as Manxin becomes less reliable, people start complaining. It’s always our first reaction to point at the machine that’s not working properly before we stop to think about what we could’ve done ourselves to fix things without using technological tools in the first place.

I discovered a couple of links between The Prayer and Manxin, and I find it kind of exciting that I don’t even know whether it is the makers’ intention to create these links, but I have the feeling it was.
First of all, it can be said that in Manxin, technology has been given some sort of influence in matters of life and death. While it may not have been the intention with which the technology was made, people have literally started using Manxin’s predictions as if their lives depended on it (look at Kim In Hong and where that got him). Then, the association with faith as introduced through Ga Ram. How typical is it that we are introduced to a more extreme group of Manxin followers who pray to the system in the same place where they also pray to Jesus? It only proved, just like in The Prayer, that people typically need something to worship so as not to feel completely lost.
Secondly, and this was one of the most direct links, the guy who worked at phone repair shop was played by the same actor as Choi Jeong Gil’s husband in The Prayer. It remains to be seen whether he’ll appear in more episodes and if it’s even supposed to be the same guy or they just thought it’d be convenient to use the same actor, but something tells me this anthology won’t just do things without a reason.
I also found it interesting to see more references to literary and philosophical sources.
Whereas The Prayer made references to Biblical stories such as Cain and Abel and quoted a poem, Manxin‘s first spoken line quotes Voltaire in his definition of destiny as something that both guides and derides us. I just find it very interesting to see how these stories try to make sense of a future with advanced technological developments while simultaneously referring to traditional human sources. I wonder if this will be a recurring thing in the next episodes as well.

I want to say a bit more about the concept of ‘destiny’ as it’s presented in this episode. We all know that destiny is a very popular element in (K-)dramas, and it’s often used to prove some sort of fateful connection between the two main leads. However, some stories choose to take a different stance regarding the topic by creating stories that emphasize human’s reliance on it. Love Alarm presents a very similar stance to Manxin by using an app to predict a part of people’s lives to the extent that people don’t even think about putting in additional effort anymore, but it also reminded me of for example About Time, in which the main character had the ability to see how much time people had left before they’d die. It played with the idea whether people would actually become more in control of their lives if they’d know what was coming to them. In Manxin, the influence of the app actually caused people to live only by their horoscopes and not even take any chances to stray beyond that out of fear that something bad would happen if they’d ‘disobey’ the app (even though the app didn’t actually forbid anything). You could say that, all the more when its accuracy dropped at the end, the app proved how scared people generally were of the unpredictable. We get so busy in life we don’t even stop to think about being scared of not knowing what tomorrow brings, but the introduction of this app and the way it enabled these predictions made people aware of how convenient it would actually be to not live in fear of the unknown future at all. They only took the chance because the possibility presented itself to them, even though they may not have even stopped to think about it before the app was introduced. I find that pretty fascinating, how just the introduction of a new idea that no one ever thought about before can suddenly influence the entire human race like that. It’s both interesting and alarming. Manxin actually changed people’s concept of destiny by turning it into something that strengthened people’s fear of and unpredictable future rather than its originally mysterious and even romantic association. Manxin was created as a helpline that ‘generously guided you through’ your life, but it seems like no one even stopped to realize that it wasn’t stated anywhere that this meant they didn’t have free will anymore. It’s just so typical how people tend to go along with the safest option as soon as it presents itself and start seeing it as the only possible option. It was the people themselves that started constraining themselves. It was never Manxin’s intention to limit people’s choices. We can blame it on the addictiveness of technology all we want, but in the end it’s really about how we as users decide to use it.

Was it just me thinking that there was a point of relevance in Seon Ho’s rare last name? When she introduces herself to Ga Ram for the first time he remarks that he didn’t know the last name ‘To’ existed and she admits that it’s the rarest last name in Korea. As I’m hesitant to believe anything in this anthology was added in without a reason, I couldn’t help but think that it might have had a specific meaning. I couldn’t figure out what it could link to, except maybe that she seemed to be the only ‘exception’ to the system because she didn’t use Manxin. I wonder if there was another reason for giving her such a rare last name, because it wasn’t mentioned again after that one mention and it didn’t specifically play a role in the rest of the story either.

Another symbol that I’m sure has a hidden meaning but I’m probably too daft to figure it out is the dove. As we learn through the story, Ga Ram claims he was saved by Manxin when it showed him a dove after he failed to kill himself, which he attributed as visual proof to the app’s message that ‘the dove of good luck would come for him’. Besides that, we see doves around Ga Ram a couple of times. When Seon Ho and Ga Ram are waiting outside the hotel In Hong is staying at as they’re waiting for him to come out, Ga Ram is sitting on some steps and there’s a bunch of doves at his feet.
When Seon Ho ends up at Lee Chi Ham’s hideout when she’s tracking down Ga Ram, there are doves in the hallway just outside the door (which was strange because it was this dark maze of tunnels, it wasn’t a typical place for a bunch of doves to chill). Again, there wasn’t any further clarification about it, but I found it interesting that it seemed like they’d actually started following Ga Ram around after his Manxin-awakening or something.

Time for some cast comments! This episode had even less characters than the previous one, so this probably won’t be a very long section.

It was really funny to see Lee Yeon Hee as such a different character type than I was used to. I’ve seen her so far in Reunited Worlds and The Package, but I’ve never seen her in such an edgy role before. Not just in appearance but also in behavior, as Seon Ho was definitely a tough cookie. I honestly wouldn’t have even considered her for a role like this based on my prior reference of her acting, but I think she pulled it off surprisingly well. I liked that, despite her toughness, she never became unlikable. The way she immediately accepted Ga Ram as a companion and never let her own feelings regarding Manxin stand in the way of their teamwork even if she didn’t agree with his convictions made her a naturally kind person. I liked seeing a different side of her acting. I like that it’s always series specials like this that bring out unexpected sides of actors I thought I knew.

I’d never seen Lee Dong Hwi in anything before. I think what I liked most about his character is that, despite his devoted belief in Manxin, he wasn’t a completely mindless slave to technology. I think it was because he’d experienced going from a non-believer to a believer, and that’s why he was able to acknowledge both sides of the issue. While maintaining true to his faith he still chose to follow Seon Ho, he still accepted her despite the fact that her convictions went against his. He may have originally been introduced as a bit of a silly, comical character, but he definitely know what was going on around him, and he was able to make a really reflective observation about Seon Ho, which I thought was pretty amazing, especially since they didn’t even know each other that long. He portrayed Ga Ram in a very likable and relatable way.

Nam Myung Ryeol is a very familiar face in K-Drama. I’ve seen him in Coffee Prince, Sungkyunkwan Scandal, The Master’s Sun, Doctor Stranger, Blood, High Society, Shopping King Louie and Circle. It would’ve been very predictable if Lee Chi Ham had been an actual evil scientist who wanted to take control of all human life using Manxin or something like that, but I found it refreshing that he was just an elderly man who simply accepted whatever Manxin chose for itself. The way he was smiling when he realized that Manxin had completed the ‘update’ even though it was actually more of a ‘downgrade’ in terms of accuracy rate, also made me feel like he may have even been relieved himself that the program didn’t assume that Almighty status it was originally meant for. He seemed relieved to me, at least. While I get that it was the point that he remained a bit mysterious, I would’ve liked to get a bit more information about where he came from and how he managed to discover the Manxin prototype In Hong was working on. Also, as In Hong was still receiving updates of the packages containing parts as they were shipped, I was wondering whether there was actually some secret remaining link between Chi Ham and In Hong. Anyways, I was relieved that his character turned out not to have any malicious intentions with Manxin. I guess everyone in charge actually really wanted the app to remain just an app.

Apparently Seo Hyun Woo was in My Mister, but I don’t remember him from there. I found it really typical that In Hong, despite being the original developer of the groundbreaking Manxin app, had deliberately chosen to stay away from it, even while going on to anxiously use it himself. From what he said when Seon Ho was threatening him, it seemed like the app became so widespread that he lost confidence in claiming his involvement in its creation. He mentioned that the name Manxin, which referred to ten-thousand deities, aka a literal higher power, became too pressuring for him to associate himself with, as he was just a poor guy living in a suburb when he started making it, someone who was nowhere near a higher being. I guess In Hong’s character, despite having been involved in Manxin’s creation, was used as an example to show how people constrained themselves, but also to prove the ambiguity surrounding Manxin. After all, was it really just a coincidental accident that he slipped on the wet bathroom floor, or did Manxin actually manage to predict it? Even when he was dying, he got a new message saying, “You’re in a life-and-death situation.” How coincidental could that truly be? It remains a mystery.

All in all, I found this another very interesting episode. Just like with the previous one, I watched it twice in order to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I’m guessing that’s going to be my tactic for the remaining episodes as well. The reason this got a slightly higher rating than the previous one has nothing to do with the quality of the stories, as I was equally fascinated by both episodes. It’s purely because of the accessibility of the story and its characters. The first episode contained a lot of references I wasn’t able to understand, and this episode was slightly easier for me to watch, that’s all.
I’m very excited for the next episodes, so far it really does feel like I’m watching Black Mirror and it’s only reminding me of how much I enjoy these kinds of stories, as they’re both enjoyable to watch but also contain a powerful and very relatable message for the future. Especially in our current society, we have already become so dependent on apps and machines, and it feels good to have the risks and warnings of advanced technology pointed out to me. It makes me more aware and conscious of the technology I personally use and how relative the whole idea of ‘dependency on technology’ is.

I’ll be back soon enough with my third entry for this review package and I can’t wait to discover more overlapping and diverging themes between the episodes. Stay tuned!