'The Victim's Game' Ending Explained: Will season 2 portray what the future holds for Yi-jen and his daughter?
In 'The Victim's Game' the show spotlights the struggles and tribulations of the victims of a horrific crime where a killer induces individuals into believing that they will feel less pain if they chose to take their lives instead of continuing to live in a harsh world. The Taiwanese crime-thriller is the latest offering from Netflix, and consisting of eight episodes, the show takes us on a rollercoaster ride that introduces us to what the cops call one of the most horrific deaths to occur.
The cops initially believe that the body belongs to the woman who lived in the flat, a singer who is over her golden days. The scene is horrific. A body submerged in acid is what we see and it is a harsh way to go and that is also what confuses the cops too. If not for the means of death, everything directed towards suicide. However, the means confuse the cops. That's when the forensic investigator Yi-jen (Joseph Chang) finds out that the person who died in the bathtub and drowned in acid is a man. They are unable to identify the victim initially. It is when investigating this case that Yi-jen finds his daughter Hsiao Meng's fingerprint in the rubber bath stopper that was specially made to ensure that the usual acid wouldn't melt the stopper. This puts Yi-jen on a hunt for more information about his daughter and ex-wife who he abandoned when Hsiao Meng was a child. He learns that his ex-wife died from a terminal disease.
This is just the beginning. From this unidentified man's death, the case grows when they find the owner of the house burnt to death, and she leads to a real estate agent who was manipulated by his office, and this man leads to a blind artiste who is manipulated by his brother and then finally, a man who was guilty of murder but off without punishment because he was tried as a minor.
Each of these deaths is somehow connected to Yi-jen's daughter Hsiao Meng and it is while investigating this connection that Yi-jen gets involved with Hai-yin (Tiffany Hsu). The show sees the two of them investigate the death and the connection between the victims and Hsiao Meng. Turns out, Hsiao Meng has a plan in mind. She helped the other victims fulfill their last wish, after which they had help to commit suicide. The last of them was supposed to be Hsiao Meng, who lost her mother before she could fulfill her mother's last wish.
In truth, Hsiao Meng was manipulated by a nurse when she was vulnerable and this ended in Hsiao Meng pulling the plug off of her mother's ventilator. The resulting guilt pushed her further into the trap of "assisting" people break away from everything that they were feeling at the moment so that she herself could follow in the same direction soon.
The journey of hating her father started because he abandoned her and her mother when they needed him the most. For her to accept her father's flaw and win over the depression and loneliness that had begun to haunt her since her mother's death is something that isn't easy. In fact, Yi-jen almost loses his daughter. With Hai-yin's help the show ended with Yi-hen and Hsiao Meng coming together one final day, but what about all the conflicts that were not addressed over the season.
Such as, why did Yi-jen find the need to abandon his daughter and wife, especially when we see how much he loves them? He remembers all the important dates about Hsiao Meng. The first time she spoke, the first time she walked and a lot more.
Then there is Yi-jen's career as a forensic expert. Would he continue to be a professor who is bad at teaching or will he accept Detective Zhao Cheng Kuan's (Jason Wang) offer to work on a case together? If he does accept the Detective's offer, then that might bring up buried feelings that his daughter might have felt all the time that Yi-jen had felt abandoned by her father.
All eight episodes of 'The Victim's Game' can be streamed on Netflix.