Rappelling off 38-storey building on jewellery heist: Netflix game show filmed in billion-dollar Johor ghost town

Announced in 2006, Forest City was supposed to be a luxury housing project located on a small reclaimed island off south-west Johor.

It launched a decade later, but as of August 2023, the joint venture between Chinese property developers Country Garden and a private Malaysian company backed by the state government of Johor and its sultan, remained unfinished, with only RM20 billion (S$5.8 billion) invested by Country Garden out of the announced US$100 billion (S$135 billion).

While Forest City was meant to have a capacity of 700,000 people, less than 10,000 people live there currently — which makes it a great spot to film game shows and documentaries, reported Business Insider on July 2.

In fact, Netflix shot the entirety of season two of their reality game show The Mole in Malaysia, in locations including Kuala Lumpur, Tioman and Forest City.

The premise of the game show, which originally ran on ABC from 2001 to 2008 and was reintroduced in 2022, is having 12 contestants work together on various challenges to increase their prize pool, which only one person can win at the end.

However, there is a "Mole" among them who is set to sabotage the group, and in each episode, the contestants take a quiz to answer questions about the Mole's identity and actions. The person who gets the lowest score is eliminated.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The third episode of season two saw the 10 remaining members of the group heading to Forest City, with the contestants exclaiming with excitement at the high-rise apartments.

"We see these buildings as we're rolling up, and they're all like out of a King Kong movie, it's crazy," contestant Sean Patrick Bryan said in a talking-head interview. "And I'm thinking, 'Yo, what am I doing here?'"

After the contestants came into a multi-storey carpark, their host, Ari Shapiro, described the city as "a perfect spot for a glamorous holiday home, for those who can afford it. And, most of the year, they lie empty."

The contestants — split into two teams — were tasked to retrieve jewellery from safes in two of the apartments in a 38-storey building, but were warned of the "tight security" meaning they could only access them from the balconies or the stairwells.

This meant that the two nominated team leaders would have to rappel down from the roof to find which apartment to target — signalled by a red chair — and then get in and let their teammates in.

Sean and Melissa Lummus were selected as the two team leaders earlier, and while both were afraid of heights, took on the task. Both of their target apartments were on the fourth floor, and Sean's team got in first.

The next part of the task involved finding the safe the jewellery was kept in and discovering the correct code from objects around them that contained "numbers hidden in plain sight". If the teams accomplished the task within three tries and in the allocated time, they'd get US$10,000 each added to their pool.

Sean's team

Only one of the two teams got the prize in the end. While Sean's team got to a head start, and Quaylyn "Q" Carter discovered a blacklight torch that would light up the digits for the safe's code — three, four, six and eight — they tried the digits in order and whiffed one of their three chances.

Then they got distracted by a red herring — the clocks around the room all read 3.48. Trying 6-3-4-8 and 3-4-8-6 both didn't work, and they lost the round.

Ari told Sean's team where they failed later: They did not notice that only the "48" on a digital clock was lit up under the blacklight and so was a "63" on a music book. The correct code would have been 4-8-6-3.

Melissa's team

Meanwhile, Melissa's team discovered a letter that would give them a hint but make them lose US$5,000 of their prize pool, and decided to hold onto it in case they needed it.

The team also figured out the blacklight trick, and that a "95" on a magazine lit up under the ultraviolet light of the torch. Their safe showed the digits one, two, five and nine lit up, and they had previously seen the number "12" circled in a note, so they tried the code 1-2-9-5.

That didn't work, so they tried 9-5-1-2 and it didn't work either.

They realised that maybe the "12" wasn't correct, and found that "21" on a helmet was glowing instead. They could either try 2-1-9-5 or 9-5-2-1, but only had one shot left at the prize.

Neesh Riaz suggested they open the letter, but the team found to their dismay that it only revealed what they already knew, that the digits would be glowing.

Melissa shared her suspicions about Neesh in a talking-head interview: "Whose idea was it to open the clue?

"I mean, what a gift if you're the Mole, to get something that all you have to do is open, and it's US$5,000 down, and you have the cover that it was to help the group."

However, she also suggested that it could just be Neesh making the decision because he wanted the money badly.

Neesh suggested they flip a coin to decide whether to go for 9-5-2-1 or 2-1-9-5 and they got 9-5-2-1, which was correct.

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"It is baffling to me that we left it up to a coin toss," Melissa told the cameras later. "But if you look closer, Neesh is the one pulling most of those strings. I think if he is the Mole, that would be a really brilliant double bluff, honestly."

During the elimination quiz later, she brought up Neesh but said she's not "putting [her] eggs in one basket" with whom she's voting as the Mole.

Melissa' hunch turns out to be off the mark, because she gets eliminated, and the identity of the Mole still remains a mystery.

The next three episodes of The Mole release July 5 on Netflix, with the final two episodes available on July 12.

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drimac@asiaone.com

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