God, where do I begin. I guess I'll say that at the start, I was enjoying myself. Sure, it was a little contrived and there were always pacing issues from the episode 1 on, but there were enough interesting elements to have me willing to go along. Over the following three months, I then experienced what the proverbial frog being boiled must have felt as around me the waters got hotter and hotter until I was being turned into rancid jelly.

Quick premise recap: Through a series of contrivances, Jack and Joke meet as youths (Joke is somewhere around 20, Jack is 18) and bond. Jack runs into Joke while Joke is robbing a bank, Joke approves a loan for him, then Jack gets accused of participating in the robbery, Joke turns himself in and goes to prison for 5 years while Jack ends up working for a loan shark referred to as Boss. Time skip forward, Jack is out of prison and wants to go apologize and is upset to find out that Jack is no longer the sweet kid he remembers but instead a (seemingly) brutal debt collector. He teams up with two of Jack's friends to steal Jack's parents' ring from Boss, which he's been using as leverage to keep Jack working for him, and free Jack from this life.

Okay. That seems fine, right? Except from there the plot proceeds to introduce more and more elements, getting increasingly out of control as it goes. I should have known it was doomed the moment they introduced The Evil Crime Boss monopoly game in a scene that must have taken a solid 10-15 minutes but felt more like an hour. I doubly should have known when in, like, the next episode they did an almost identical scene but with a digital game of Chutes and Ladders. In case you didn't get it, these rich people see the poor as their playthings. Do I understand what any of these people actually do? Nope!

From there, it just gets more comic book before reaching absurdist heights with a final episode that includes three characters handcuffed to video game consoles with bomb collars on while for some reason they're forced to play hangman in one of the most excruciating sequences of television I've been subjected to. And then it's revealed that all the danger the characters were allegedly in didn't actually matter, because the escalating events of the past three episodes were actually all just the Four Horsemen screwing with Boss. Which thematically, yes, makes sense, but also negated 90% of the character decisions that had come before.

It's hard to describe what a letdown this show was. It started with a promising premise and themes of the cycle of poverty and self-interest versus self-sacrifice, all to abandon that for a poor knock-off of Squid Game. Character arcs are introduced and dropped at the speed of light, interpersonal conflicts that should be a major problem are resolved in a few lines, and plot points that seem incredibly important just disappear into the wind.

Things that were good:
- War is still a great actor and manages to pull genuine pathos out of an insane script.
- Yin and War have the chemistry and heat to convince you of Jack and Joke's attraction even if their romance arc felt pretty anemic towards the end.
- For the most part, it looks great, and the early fight scenes especially are fun.
- Victor, perhaps the only actor who truly understood what genre he was in, chewed the scenery to bits and left no crumbs.
- The first heist involving the fashion show was pretty fun.

Things that were bad:
- Almost everyone was hopelessly incompetent. If you were looking for a fun, slick heist show, this is not it because no one is good at anything, including Joke who is allegedly a master thief even though we are given absolutely no reason to believe this.
- Wildly inconsistent pacing and tone. Perhaps the Saw traps at the end would have felt more fun and camp to me if the first couple episodes hadn't been relatively grounded.
- Character motivations bounced all over the place, especially for the antagonists. We're told in a two line exchange in episode 10 that Boss is actually doing his hostile takeover of the Four Horsemen as revenge for his parents, which is given no further explanation or depth aside from another single line in the finale that has no relevance and is never mentioned again.
- Characters and plot threads were dropped for multiple episodes. Side characters Save and Hope, who have a lot of bearing on the plot as minions for Boss, straight up disappear for like three episodes straight. Tattoo, Arun, and Hoy, who all seem really important at the beginning, also have arcs that are completely dropped.
- People/the show seems to conveniently forget there are guns for long stretches of time, or just forget how basic physics work.
- One of the most poorly executed twists of all time because we have no information about the people involved in said twist. You have time to make Jack bark like a dog for like five solid minutes but can't give us a Mean Girls-style rundown of the Four Horsemen? Please.

I think the most frustrating thing is that there were absolutely seeds of a good, fun show, but it was buried beneath ten layers of nonsense that should have been cut in the first round of edits. Like, not even. It should have been cut at the outline stage and then thrown into a fire never to be contemplated again. I am willing to accept a lot of nonsense in my media, I am able to suspend disbelief, and I have watched a lot of objectively bad television, but this manged to hit my threshhold on everything. Even watching it with friends didn't help; we ended up setting the finale on 2x when we realized there was still half an hour left after watching people mess with an ipad in a cheap-looking warehouse set for an hour. I guess I'm glad other people enjoyed it, because I like Yin and War, but kings, this one should have gone back to the drawing board.