The Believers – (Thai Drama) Episode 1 Recap & Review

To Live Is To Want

The Believers starts with our main character, Win, being questioned at a police station. The detective questioning him says that Win is a parasite profiting from religion, but he holds that the police have no evidence to hold him and asks for his lawyer. He adds that their actions are not illegal, and Thai people crave merit. 

The next scene goes back six months earlier, and Win is in their office, explaining that his team created an NFT game called Pirate’s Hell. The game has become a favourite among game lovers, and his dream of becoming rich and young seems possible. He calls his partners, Dear and Game, and tells them the good news, and they are excited about the progress.

While Game is at the office during the call, Dear oversees renovations at her shop while Game attends a party at home. Game gets angry with his father for always allowing the other family members to boss him around, and later, he scolds his sister for overworking while pregnant. He tells her nobody will appreciate or applaud her hard work in their family and asks her to take better care of the baby. 

Elsewhere, Dear buys a pizza and gets ready to eat, but first takes a photo and sends it to Win, accompanied by the text that she bought a large pizza and cannot finish it alone. Win, still at work, decides to head home for the day. He watches some news articles about their game, drinks some more alcohol, and then goes to bed thinking about his childhood memories with his father. In the dream, his father tells him that nothing is as it seems and some things may end up being nothing on the inside. 

Win’s alarm goes off, and he wakes up with a start. He runs over to the laptop to check on the game tokens, and a big surprise awaits him. Before bed, the game tokens for Pirate’s hell were trading at 2 dollars, but by morning, the price has dropped drastically by more than 50 percent, and it continues to dip even lower. The team rushes to the office and works tirelessly to try to salvage the situation, but they are unsuccessful since they were hacked. 

The price drops to its lowest, 0.024 dollars, and they cannot reach the programmer in charge of their online wallet, Golf. In addition to the game’s online wallets being hacked, the team lost a lot of money when players decided to withdraw their tokens to avoid losses.

Game thinks they can still get back on track by adding more savings and re-launching the game, and he offers to ask his family for assistance. However, the most urgent matter is that they have to pay back their creditor fifty million bhats in one month.  

While they deliberate on handling the issue with the creditors, Game gets a call from them. They know what happened to their company and want to know their payment plan. They add that failure to make payment will attract a 30 percent interest. Suddenly, Win realises that their creditor is behind the hack, and he hangs up the phone, saying he will talk to them after they understand the situation. Upon further deliberations, they realise it was an inside job done by their programmer, Golf. 

Later that night, unknown people at the office attack Win. The assailants take a video of them beating up Win and sending it to his partners and destroying the office, including smashing the windows and the computers. Dear and Game rush to the office to check on Win. He does not say much but asks them to help clean up. Win returns when Game tries to call the police and asks him not to report since the police cannot arrest the creditors. 

The following morning, Dear and Game oversee the office clean up, but Win is missing, and he does not pick up their calls. Dear wonders why the creditor hacked them when he would have made more money if he had allowed the price of their game to keep rising. Game explains that the creditor was not interested in their game but wants them to miss payments so they can add the 3o percent interest. 

Win heads back to his family home to escape everything for a while. He finds his mother in the sitting room, taking accounts of donations made to the local temple for a robe-offering event. He casually asks his mother if she would go with him if he moved to a different country, and she mentions something about his father. In a flashback to Win’s childhood, we learn that his father went missing as a child.

The following morning, he accompanies his mother to the temple since he has nothing to do at home. He also learns that someone moved into the house next to theirs. Meanwhile, Dear’s shop is vandalised. While on the phone with Game, she updates that an insider changed the codes of their online wallets, exposing a loophole to hack their system, and Game is convinced that Golf is behind the hack. 

Win arrives at the temple and is amazed by the donations displayed on the screen, which amount to twenty-one million baht. Suddenly, while asleep at the ordination hall, the words of a famous YouTuber he had been listening to the previous night about running a successful scam replayed in his mind, and he had an idea. He rushes back home and deeply dives into the regulations of running temples and the amount of donations they receive. Win then calls his friends over to share his new idea. 

Game and Dear meet with Win at the temple to show them a business model that has been successfully running for over 2000 years, running a temple. He adds that even though it is common knowledge that temples make a lot of money, no one seriously considers how they make and spend it. Temples have many avenues of making money besides donations, such as faith and belief, which make people want to donate. 

On the issue of the legality of their actions, Win says that they are neither forcing nor swindling anyone since the believers are willing to pay at the prices they can afford. Dear thinks it is impossible to execute Win’s plan since building a temple takes time and money, but Win is not considering building a new one. He then wants to partner with a not well-known temple and use modern marketing ideas to bring in more believers while they handle the accounting system.

They share the profits with the temple, make money to pay their creditors, and then quit. At the end of the episode, both Dear and Game agree to try implementing Win’s idea, hoping that it will save them from the hell they are currently in.  

The Episode Review

The use of religion to scam people has sparked global debates over recent years, and this drama brings a new, unique perspective to the ongoing discussion. The episode exhaustively introduces the narrative, giving our three main characters an outstanding background and giving the audience a reason to root for their success.

In addition to the superb acting, the storyline is so interesting that we cannot wait to see what transpires in the upcoming episode. Hints of mystery and family drama depict a more wholesome plot. What is the deal with Dear’s father, who is abroad? Why did Win’s father disappear? What is the deal with Game’s family?

The first episode captures the audience’s attention and to borrow Game’s words, “I hope Win’s Plan will save us from this hell, Sathu.”