Busted! Season 3 Review

Busted! is without a doubt one of the best shows to ever be on Netflix, the only original that I have back to every year and binged upon premiere, and this year was no different. If you aren’t familiar with the show, it’s a sort of detective themed escape room variety show mixed with an overarching plot and more scripted traditional sections, a great point of reference is the Zero Escape Trilogy of video games, especially the first game 999. I am not going to do a review of the previous two season’s plot, it would be a lot to go over and it’s better to just watch it. If you are just looking for a gateway into the series to see if you’d like it, this article may be a good, although spoiler heavy starting point.

Speaking of, FULL SPOILERS FOR SEASON 3 AHEAD. I’ll have my overall thoughts for the season first, then an episode by episode breakdown afterwards. I originally had that order reversed, but the full review was so far down I thought people might not see it. For context on my puzzle notes, while I am not claiming to be the best puzzle solver, or even an expert, I did work at an escape room company for two years, and was a team leader for most of that time, I also have played a number of escape rooms outside of that with only good times on my wins in the last few years, it’s one of the things in my life I actually have confidence about, and there aren’t that many of those. So I am fairly familiar with these kinds of puzzles

Overall Review (Score out of 10 at the end of this section)

This season was a fantastic finale for one of my favorite shows in my adult life. The cast was honestly at its best with the return of Kwang-soo and Seung-gi and the loss of Jae-wook, who I didn’t notice wasn’t there until I started writing this article, easily the best line-up. Se-jeong did hard carry a lot of the puzzles, this isn’t really new to the show, but I bet she had an even bigger piece of the pie than usual, Sehun, Min-young, and Kwang-soo were probably the next biggest contributors in that order, Min-young’s weakest season in terms of puzzle solving to date, I think partly because they had to spend time sowing doubt in our minds that she may be a traitor.

The puzzles actually weren’t my favorite, the season felt a little more character driven, and the ideas in each episode were great, but the puzzles seemed easier than before in general, and felt like they took up less of the episode compared to the general air of mystery. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, the writers shifted the focus of the show a little bit, and it’s hard to think of really cool and engaging puzzles constantly, especially when you need at least 3 or 4 an episode across an 8 episode season. I also wasn’t a huge fan of having the team battle at episode 7, it’s always a really fun episode, maybe a little too fun for how heavy the plot gets in the final episode, I think switching it with another episode may have helped the season flow a little bit better, this is a small nitpick though, every episode is fantastic in its own way.

The overall plot was super engaging, I like the Hwalbindang vigilante extremists as villains, they’re very Deathnote or Boondock Saints, one of the best manga and action films respectively. I do wish the Godmother had been somebody else, Min-young didn’t really make sense to me, and every season felt like it ended on betrayal, so I’m happy they didn’t just retread that ground, but a random side character from episode 1 seemed, well, random, I don’t understand where she got all her resources and power. I think the weird forensic specialist would have been a better option, she has knowledge and access to almost every quest along the way, and working with her boyfriend police captain would have given her even more room to get things done. Alternatively, the girl they save at the start of episode 8, the one who killed the heir’s grandfather, would have been good, she was so clearly set up as a pawn, so instead having her reveal later that same episode that she had been in charge the whole time would have been cool. I am a little bummed by the cliffhanger, it leaves some really interesting questions, but the cancellation means that we will likely never get our answers, the worst thing about the show is that it is ending.

I know it may seem like I had a lot of nitpicks here, but it’s because when the quality of a show is as high as this, it’s a lot easier to find the tiny mistakes than it is to identify everything that works well, because well, everything works well. The plot and team is fantastic, the writing in the scripted sections worked well, and the fun and sense of adventure in the more free sections was great to get lost in. The tone was generally well balanced throughout, and the cast just hit their stride front to back and never lost their rhythm across the almost 9 hours of the season. There was also a fantastic effort in balancing keeping the show feeling fresh without losing what made it special, just enough variation to keep everybody engaged throughout, and that is truly worth applauding. I think the whole team, actors and actresses, directors, producers, editors, writers, and everybody else involved did an incredible job, and I thank them for these 3 seasons, they brought me a ton of happiness and fun, and I don’t know if any other show will ever quite recreate the same tone and concept the same way again.

Overall Score: 10/10

Even with the things I would change, this show is perfect, and I look forward to getting to come back to it again and again as a complete 3 season affair, I think whenever I do that it’ll leave me finding new hints and clues I missed, and of course, leave me laughing and smiling all along the way. I’ve never been so happy to be Busted!

Episode Breakdowns Below

Episode 1

Episode Plot
We start the season with one of the lowest stakes cases in the history of the series, an investigation of who stole one roommate’s food in a sharehouse. Every member of the house seems suspicious, but it becomes pretty clear that one girl, who seems fairly disliked when seen on another tenant’s stream, is the food thief pretty early in the episode, case closed? Well, not exactly, that alleged food thief took scraps, but not the main part of any of the missing foods. The deceased father of the sharehouse owner left a mystery to be solved, which leads to a secret massive secret basement room and the discovery that another tenant has 3 personalities, his own, and the adopted personalities of his younger brother and sister, who had died in a car accident when they were young. But without a death or real major villain, the last step is to bring the hook into the danger of the series, and the 5th tenant, a quiet fan of the streamer tenant’s gets killed with a screwdriver driven through his eye. The police take charge of the site, and a member of the forensics team explains that the victim was first silenced through use of chloroform before getting stabbed.

Overarching Plot Scenes
Jong-min is missing from the main plot, and we learn it’s due to being called by their old team member and the murderer known as the Flower Killer they couldn’t catch at the end of season, Seung-gi. Seung-gi is being chased by an organization and in the chase gets hit by a car, Jong-min takes him to the hospital. Jae-suk meets him there and learns that our Flower Killer seems to have selective amnesia from the accident. There is also a newsreel that plays stating that a number of the criminals they caught in the past have been killed.

Puzzles
Honestly, the puzzles in this episode are probably the weakest of the season, and generally feel the least interactive, it’s a much more character driven episode than others, so I don’t have much to say on them.

Episode 2

Episode Plot
The team, now including amnesiac Seung-gi, gets a pair of cases and splits up to tackle both at once. The first group moves to investigate a missing psychology professor, and upon arriving at her house find a goofy police captain and a pretty nutty forensics team member, who has a lot of love for Sehun, that would have had the day off, except the forensics guy from the last episode took a half-day. The professor was starved to death, and whoever did it knew a good deal about killing somebody, cutting her fingernails in order to avoid any of their DNA being obtained from beneath them. This team then investigate further having to do some pretty funny tasks, like exercise biking a lot, and climb up stairs with no railing on a rooftop when they are all afraid of heights. The other half of the team end up investigating a gambler’s murder, and his looks familiar, nails cut, chloroformed, seems to be the same guy that did the professor’s murder and the murder from episode 1 as well. After digging, they find that all the deceased are related due to being cyberbullies who target a recently deceased actress, and were being killed according to the comments they left, telling the actress she was an eyesore, that she should starve, and so on. The last cyberbully was a competing actress who had posted on her brother’s account, so it was up to the team to save the brother. When they arrive to save the brother, he is in a tank filling with water, and the killer is there, and is none-other than the forensics guy from episode 1, who was the bullied actress’s father, she had killed herself due to their comments, and he wanted justice, since he say them as the killers, he also admitted he wasn’t free of guilt and killed himself on the spot. The team saves the brother and the episode ends with a few statements on cyberbullying, which is amazing because a number of young celebrities have committed suicide in Korea from all the pressure online.

Overarching Plot Scenes
Not really too much going on for the overarching plot in this episode, although it is notable that every killer seems to be placed on the end screen after getting caught, being marked as criminals.

Puzzles
The puzzles at the professor’s house were pretty entertaining, not particularly complicated, but entertaining. The gambler murder was also fairly simple puzzle wise, mostly just a scavenger hunt for cards with a few little games. The final puzzle was pretty clever, with highlighted letters at each murder coming into play and the order of the murders beings the key to unscrambling everything, still no true escape rooms this season though, which is where the content really shines in my opinion.

Episode 3

Episode Plot
The team gets set on a quest to find a missing sister, who seems to have gone to a cult-y suicide website in order to get help dying. The team all signs up for the site to try getting on the inside and both the girls are selected and given a location to go to. At the location the team finds the cooky forensics officer sleeping in a morgue, she was looking for a body-napper, and then leaves. The time has come for the girl’s meeting and the boys hide while they get taken up to a room, where they are locked up and here 4 different clients come in and examine them, picking up on traits of every single one of them, but now they’re locked in a room with all this information but no way out. The boys meanwhile hear a cry from a room on their way up and get locked in with the person making the noise, the goofy police captain, who claims he was trying to let them know not to come in or they’d get locked up too, likely story. They have to finally solve a little bit of a room in order to escape and get the girls out of their locked room. The information they’ve gathered leads them to the people behind the whole operation and the cops end up in a brawl with them while the team gathers evidence. They find the man behind the operation but he says their shepherd hasn’t been caught. Our heroes find this last bad guy trying to do a ritual to resurrect his sister, they thwart him and that’s another criminal for the end screen.

Overarching Plot Scenes
There’s only one major cutaway all episode, showing one of the men the police caught after their brawl, the mastermind behind the suicide site that was actually a black market organ selling ring, getting shot by a sniper while being escorted to a police car.

Puzzles
The escape room in the first part of the episode was the best bit of puzzling, although it mostly consisted of fairly straightforward puzzles. The puzzle to open the second lock by using arrows to spell numbers was actually pretty cool, and deserves credit, it would have taken me a decent chunk of time to figure out. Using the information that the girls had locked up and the clues during the police brawl to find the leadership among the bad guys was interesting, but not too exciting. The final puzzle to stop the last bad guy also didn’t grab me very much, I felt like it was easier than the team made it look.

Episode 4

Episode Plot
A rich heir to a fashion company is having the detectives solve the case of figuring out which of three women is the girl from his youth, as he claims his grandfather told them to search her out before dying so that he might marry her. The team splits up across the 3 women, each trying to help their pick win the game and the heir’s heart. After solving a variety of puzzles around the estate, Jae-suk, Kwang-soo, and Jong-min manage to be the first to the final destination, and their pick comes out before everybody wearing a wedding dress, finding and putting the dress on was the final way to determine a winner. The team wasn’t satisfied however, as there was a strange lock on the dress, and each woman had a key. The woman wearing the dress tried her key and the lock would not open, but when another woman tried, it opened and revealed that she was not supposed to be the heir’s bride, but that she was the grandfather’s daughter, his aunt, and the fortune was left to her. The girl who had put on the dress had been planted by the heir and given the answers in order to stop the aunt from taking everything, and in the end the aunt gets everything thanks to the detectives.

Overarching Plot Scenes
I did mention that the heir had three women in the competition, but the third was seemingly unimportant. She was not, as a final scene shows that she had actually murdered the grandfather, poisoning his IV drip and claiming it was revenge.

Puzzles
Some pretty good puzzles in this one, I liked the puzzle at the pool the best, because depending on how deep the diver went, the clues got progressively easier, but the puzzle was clever in its own right. The projector puzzle was also really cool, and using the light to form a shadow was a really neat trick.

Episode 5

Episode Plot
The team receives a strange USB card that shows a bunch of scenes from a 10 year old hit-and-run case, then the TV gets taken over by a man holding a woman hostage and telling them they had 8 hours to find him or the woman dies. The team finds the news anchor that was in the video from the USB, but he seems on edge and doesn’t help too much, but another message from the bad guy plays and points the team in the right direction with a puzzle. Once at the next location the team has a puzzle to find again to open a locker and get the next major piece of evidence, the fact that the prosecutor on the hit-and-run case had payed off the news anchor to not reveal the truth, that he had committed the crime back then and had somebody else take the fall for him, who he later had killed in jail. They also meet a journalist at this location who was also trying to solve the case, after sharing information with her, the team goes to their next step, one group to find the prosecutor, the other to the junkyard where the car he used was scrapped in order to get the dash cam. The junkyard team plays a game of beer pong with gross drinks in order to get the dash cam, not much else happens here. The other team has to solve a replication of an old locked-room murder in order to see the prosecutor, he seems extremely suspicious and guilty, dismissing the team aggressively. A last message from our bad guy helps the team get to the hostage’s location, only to find the prosecutor there, and the hostage turns out to be in control of the whole situation, her captor a mannequin, and she’s the journalist the team met earlier. She was the girlfriend of the man who to the fall for the prosecutor’s hit-and-run, and she wanted to get him to confess to the crimes, which he does, claiming that she can’t touch him due to his money and power, but she was broadcasting what he said the whole time, ruining him. Not to be outdone by her though, as the prosecutor was leaving, his driver gave him a drink saying it was and answered a monologue the prosecutor gave with by saying “for revenge,” just like the girl who killed the grandpa last episode, and the prosecutor died of poison that was within the drink.

Overarching Plot Scenes
So the journalist has an interesting tattoo on her arm that was shown a few times, it drew my attention because that’s not something I normally expect from a Korean show, but ultimately, I just brushed it off as coincidence. She also referred to the team as being recommended to her by somebody else, a woman with similar philosophical goals as her, but doesn’t give a name.

Puzzles
The majority of puzzles in the episode were decent, but the team had access to a website where they could post what they were working on and fans could help by sending them ideas or potential answers, which was interesting, but took some of the fun out of the puzzles being solved by our heroes. That said the locked room mystery was actually really cool, and reminded me of something straight out of Danganronpa, it was a fantastic sequence, and the solution was really clever, probably my favorite puzzle of the season.

Episode 6

Episode Plot
A man contacts Min-young recruiting her and the team to solve his death that he notes in a letter probably just happened. The team goes to the village where he lives and finds the goofy captain and forensic specialist pair pulling the body from a reservoir. The body has a number of different wounds, and it’s pretty unclear what actually killed him, except that he definitely hadn’t drowned and was dragged to the reservoir post-mortem. The man has four friends from grade school in the village, all of whom seem suspicious, and in fact, all seem to have attempted the murder. The first tried to poison the man’s food with rat poison, but the man’s cancer meds had a counter to the rat poison in it. The second tried to electrocute him at his computer chair, baiting him over with a ton of emails, but a timely power outage made him not sit down. The third tried to kill him with a trap in an abandoned building, one that would swing a brick at him when the door opened, but the victim was left handed, so instead of hitting dead center, the bring grazed his right temple. The last seems to have done the deed, sealing the victims fate in an otherwise lucky night with a bunch of stab wounds to the back. As it turns out, this last attempt also failed, because the man had died before that moment, killing himself so that the investigation would collect all the evidence on his four “friends” and their ultimate plot, which was an opium production product, they were making hard drugs. All four friends are taken into custody, but the last, who thought he was the ultimate murdered before the suicide twist, seemed like he felt free of guilt, no longer a murderer, and having no remorse for his old friend’s death, since he had been in their way.

Overarching Plot Scenes
Besides a side quest showing what had been very heavily implied, the police captain and forensic specialist are in a relationship, there is also the reveal of a file that shows that an organization had been targeting the criminals that the team had busted, and killing them. The file also happens to have the same symbol as the journalist did in the previous episode, letting us know that she is part of their team. Seung-gi also doesn’t have amnesia and the only other person who knows is Jae-suk, who promised to keep the secret believing that a member of the team is in the evil organization, since Seung-gi found one of their pins on the night he got hit by the car after being chased by them.

Puzzles
This case was interesting in general, as the solution became increasingly unclear, until it became clear that everybody had sequentially failed their attempts at murder, and then when it seemed solved, the one thing that you forget about along the way explains that the whole thing was a suicide. I think the general solution was really clever, maybe convoluted as well, but one of the more interesting cases in the season.

Episode 7

Plot

From here out, the overarching plot and the episode plot become on and the same.

The team learns that they have another group posing as them, taking cases under their brand, and using Min-young’s phone number to do it. When they go to confront this band of fakers, both teams are tasked with solving a case from a possessed woman, who’s possessor wants them to find her boyfriend, who had been about to propose. The teams solve a puzzle to get started, then split up into two groups each to solve a pair of puzzles that gave them coordinates to their final location. This final place was a theme park that they had to complete various missions within in order to find the boyfriend. They finally find a giant bag at the location of the alleged proposal and instead find the corpse of the girl who had been possessing the client, realizing that the boyfriend was actually her murderer. Before they could get cops on the scene to arrest him however, a sniper bullet comes out of nowhere and kills him, the overarching plot had caught up to the team. Min-young and Bo-hyun, a member of the imposter team, were both notably missing, and when they reach the location of the sniper, all that’s left is a card, revealing that the vigilante/criminal organization was called Hwalbindang, and that it seems Min-young was the mole in the detective team, and likely the leader of Hwalbindang, referred to as “The Godmother”

An end scene also shows that the original client was faking her possession, having been hired by Bo-hyun to set up the whole scenario so that he could kill the murderer boyfriend for Hwalbindang.

Puzzles
The puzzle in the ballet studio with the ballerinas, honestly, my brain doesn’t work that way, I would have needed somebody else in my team to solve it for me. Likewise, the opening puzzle was pretty clever as well. The sequence of puzzles in the theme part was fun, they were simple, but it was more about the race across both teams to solve the most the fastest, and sometimes having a bunch of puzzles that aren’t too hard can be just as tough as a small volume of really difficult puzzles. I think the best is to compromise, but I like that this leaned into the volume approach, as that isn’t usually the Busted! approach.

Episode 8

Plot

The team has no choice but to chase after Min-young and Bo-hyun, with the knowledge that their friend seems to have been the villain for the last few weeks. After navigating a village that had a machine gun armed-drone blindfolded due to the drone firing at people upon seeing their eyes, the team finally stumbled upon a hostage that they had hoped was Min-Young, but was actually the girl who had murdered the heir’s grandfather in episode 4, now noticing the ring she was wearing, the ring with the Hwalbindang logo on it. After saving her, as she claimed she was leaving the organization, they move to the location that they knew Min-young was waiting for them, but get trapped by Bo-hyun.

Meanwhile, Seung-gi had abandoned the team and went ahead, the Godmother wanted to kill the Flower Killer for his crimes, and had been baiting him out, so he wanted to confront and kill her first, keeping his friends safe by doing the dirty work before they got there. He gets captured by Bo-hyun however, but manages to kill him by tricking him into getting cut by a poisoned tip he had set up on a door handle, but both get caught in an explosion, presumably killing them, although Seung-gi doesn’t seem dead to me here. The rest of the team solve their way out of the room they got trapped in, but before leaving they open up a locked computer file which shows a list of likely criminals this year, where their picture borders turn red and have the word criminal over them, matching the end card of each episode. At the end of the list is Min-young, but her portrait isn’t in the criminal section yet, she hadn’t committed a crime, maybe she wasn’t the Godmother after all? She had been evaluated as being 95% likely to be a criminal due to her need for justice no matter what, which sadly does match the ideology of Hwalbindang though, it is also noted she has improved while being part of the team.

A video feed comes on showing both Min-young and the girl from the first episode, the one who was stealing scraps of food, but not the whole dish, both claiming not to be the Godmother. This girl is wearing the Hwalbindang ring though, giving away her position, and the team finally gets full confirmation that Min-young was never working against them, the pin that Seung-gi had found during his chase in episode 1 was dropped by Kwang-soo a long time ago when he had the chip from season 1 stolen from him. The Godmother is actually the daughter of the man that got run over by the prosecutor, and that event is what triggered her desire to bring justice to all who thought they were above the law. The Godmother gives them a task, one hour to find and save Min-young, or she gets killed by a bomb due to her likelihood of committing a crime, as the organization aims to punish criminals the law cannot, the people who believe themselves untouchable, even if they haven’t actually committed a crime yet. The team solves a pair of tasks finding a building and a floor number, and when they enter what they think is the correct room, they get locked in, discovering Min-young is above them and given one final problem to solve. They have a bomb just like Min-young, and both parties need to cut a wire every second, which removes time from the other person’s bomb, whoever hits zero first dies, the others live. So either Min-young dies like the Godmother wants, or she kills the others proving she is a selfish criminal and then they are justified in killing her. As the team works to find a solution they decide to try and both hit zero simultaneously, creating balance and beating the puzzle, as balance was continuously emphasized by the Godmother. As the timers are almost out, everybody realizes no combination of wire cuts will equalize everything, so Min-young has one last gambit, they both cut every remaining wire simultaneously, forcing both to zero at the same time. The gambit pays off and everybody is reunited, but the Godmother has long escaped, well, except Seung-gi had gotten up from the explosion, grabbed a gun and lines up on her at the end, with her looking right at him, and the screen goes to black with the sound of a gunshot.

The end scene shows the remaining six members of the team taking a new case living freely, Seung-gi presumably having turned himself in, but then it cuts to a room with a woman who is logged in to a computer and seems to be running Hwalbindang, the real Godmother lives and the other was just a pawn? It’s hard to say, the show has been cancelled, but maybe there is a chance of one last renewal, or a movie length special where the organization finally gets taken down, or maybe, it’s one last mystery, never to be solved.

Puzzles
None of the puzzles were particularly great this episode, but the bomb dilemma was really cool, probably top three puzzle moments this season.


End Notes
And with that, I wanted to thank you if you managed to get to the end of this extremely long article, easily the longest of the whole site. If you liked it, give our twitter a follow to see whenever new articles go live. Otherwise, have a great day, and we’ll se you in the next one.