The Soldiers (2021)

Happiness has no limits

I started this show accidentally, I saw a couple of TikTok's a couple months ago but forgot about it until I thought I saw a clip of this, but it turned out to be the first episode. I cheered on some of the guys throughout the show (Go in-ho, Kong Gi-Hwan) along with their teams Chaile and Bravo. It might be a short show, but it is 100% worth it to watch. Lastly, team leader Jay is hot and his British accent saying f*** is weirdly comforting.

A couple of side notes, I would recommend that if you want to watch this be prepared to someone to do some of the activities with you. For example, a piggyback ride because they carry 30kg on multiple occasions.

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Frustrating

This was an incredibly frustrating show to watch.

They had all the ingredients to make a decent, engaging and exciting competitive reality tv show - interesting concept, varied and likeable contestants, cool challenges, etc. - but in my opinion they failed to do so. For a few reasons:

1. The competition was not fair and the odds were skewed from the beginning.
One of the team leaders was a native Korean speaker, while the rest were not L2 speakers even in the slightest. This already put him at a real advantage considering the importance of communication in team exercises.
The team-selection process was outrageously unfair. One team received 3 of the Top 5 candidates/picks. This team also got to offload their lowest pick, resulting in an average pick score of 4.25. The other teams had averages of 6, 11.25 and 12.25. In a 16-man draft!

2. The challenge parameters/mission objectives were sometimes vague and poorly communicated. This arguably lead to losses or eliminations of teams who were disqualified on technicalities instead of purely on their performance.

3. For a gameshow supposedly emphasising the importance of teamwork and team bonding, one challenge required each team to chose one member to sit it out and be excluded entirely. This baffled me.

4. The long 'previously-on' recaps at the start of each episode quickly grew annoying and ruined the flow and watching experience. Furthermore, the constant micro-replays and rewinds during action scenes was very noticeable and distracting, and actually lessened the impact as I was forced to adjust between uninterrupted real-time events and rapid, jarring, fractured and nonsensical time-slices.

Overall, these negatives overshadowed the positives, and I couldn't really get invested in the contestants or teams. The competitive aspect of the show was completely ruined by the team imbalance, as well as the occasional glaring faults in the challenge designs which, regardless of whether I was rooting for that team or not, left me thinking, 'yeah, that is not really fair.'

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