I recently finished watching the Korean Drama, Alice. It is about time travelers and prophecies. The first episode opens with Yoon Tae Yi and Yoon Min Hyuk traveling to 1992 to retrieve The Book of Prophesy. Apparently this book tells of how a hole was opened to allow time travel, and how it will be closed and put an end to time travel. Tae Yi and Min Hyuk arrive at the home of physicist, Dr. Jang Dong Sik, to find a rival time traveler has arrived before them. This traveler is also looking for the book and has killed Dr. Jang. Jang's 5 year-old daughter is hiding under the desk. He tore out the last page of the book and gave it to her to keep it safe. Meanwhile Tae Yi and Min Hyuk fight the rival time traveler, Lee Se Hoon. Se Hoon grabs the young daughter to use as a hostage and Tae Yi shoots him and he falls to the ground. The young girl begins to scream and freak out. The police close in on the house, Tae Yi and Min Hyuk grab the book and take off. But not until they've put some futurey device on Lee Se Hoon's leg that chops off his foot and cauterizes it making it look like his foot has been cut off for a long long time.
Tae Yi realizes that she's pregnant. She and Min Hyuk worry that if she enters the wormhole again, the baby could be damaged. She suggests they could stay in 1992 while she has the baby. Min Hyuk is against it but in the end Tae Yi runs off. Naturally, she took the book. She changes her identity so that the time travelers can't find her, she is now Park Sun Young ,and will be referred to as such to avoid confusion through the rest of this review. She has a son named Park Jin Gyeom who later becomes a police officer because when he was a senior in high school his mother was murdered and they still haven't located the killer. Because this is a show about time travel, naturally there past versions of the time travelers. In particular, Park Jin Gyeom's mom. The past version goes by Yoon Tae Yi. She's a physics professor at the university and will from now on be referred to as Professor Yoon.
From here things get goofy and weird. There will be many many spoilers ahead.
There are two factions of time travelers. The ones from a place called Alice and then the "unregistered" or "illegal" ones. There are people in 2050 who pay for the services of Alice to go back in time and see lost family members. We learn that there are people who abuse this by going back in time with the intention of murdering people who they feel have wronged them. There are others who decide to kill the past versions of themselves and take their place. Since they are doing this in a separate time stream, it doesn't change anything directly for them. And this helps them avoid any time paradoxes that the writers would have to deal with.
OK so my issues with this show are a few different things. First, we learn along the way that the time travelers aren't from our same timeline. Think of the series Loki and the multiple time streams. They are entering a different time stream from their own. Time travelers have the same DNA, fingerprints, etc as their past versions. Knowing this, the writers have set up a romance between Park Jin Gyeom and his mother's past version, Professor Yoon Tae Yi. This is serious heebie-jeebie land for me. They really seem to press this. Even in the final two episodes when we learn that Professor Yoon has gotten Park Sun Young's memories she's still looking for him and interested in him at the end. I am incredibly uncomfortable with this in your face romance. Especially when there's a perfectly good person who is a friend from high school right there in Kim Do Yeon. They do Kim Do Yeon dirty in the end.
The next issue I have is we learn that another side effect Jin Gyeom has from having gone through a time travel wormhole while in the womb, he can completely freeze time. Also, he time travels without any special future tech. We only see him stop time twice, and it's in life threatening moments. This is never explained and never mentioned by any of his future versions. The prophesy does infer that he will be come the master of time. So him being able to do this and travel without tech seems to make sense. But to only show the time stopping ability twice, and never say anything about it again feels too convenient for just getting him out of these two situations. It also seems that when he time travels it is due to some life threatening moment. But, we don't know how the time travel moments are different from the time freezing moments because there is nothing to explain this or even to hint at why this happens other than the prophesy.
As the show moves along they start to hint that Professor Yoon is the orphaned daughter of Dr. Jang from the first episode. We learn that Dr. Jang's wife is the one who discovered The Book of Prophesy. Apparently she's a time traveler too and when she found the book, she ran away and married Dr. Jang, gave birth to the daughter and died during childbirth. Professor Yoon has lost her memories of her childhood and the day her father was murdered. She believes her mother dropped her off at the orphanage. This is because she remembers a woman bringing her there. Also, that woman signed the orphanage paperwork saying that she was the girl's mother. If you think about this, that would mean Episode 1 time traveler Park Sun Young was present at the murder of her father, and was consoling herself as a child. Do we know if she realized this at that time?
We learn of some Big Bad™ called, The Teacher. He's the one who sent Lee Se Hoon to get the book in the first episode. He's also behind other murders throughout the series. We never really figure out the logic behind murdering all these people. Also, time travelers have these Greek letter brand marks on them. Lee Se Hoon and some others have a sigma. Mom has an omega on her neck. We never see if anyone else from Alice have the same omega brand on them and the marks are never explained. The brands only seem to serve the purpose of showing who's a bad guy from another timeline and when Professor Yoon has gained all of Park Sun Young's memories.
Once the professor finds the lost page of the book that her dad gave her to hide, we only ever see one side of the page. They focus ONLY on that side of the page. They never show the other side. We get glimpses of an illustration of a dagger/short sword - the subtitles referred to it as sword, but it isn't big enough to be a sword. The actual dagger is used to stab Jin Gyeom and Sun Young. What was on the other side of that page that explained the importance of that dagger? You'd think they'd want to know the full prophesy and at least flip the page over.
We find out that if time travel is ended, everything will reset and all the time travelers will disappear and go back to where they belong. Of course this happens in the final episode. But first I need to talk about how Jin Gyeom from the future meets up with our present day Jin Gyeom. The makeup used to age the actor is absolutely laughable and the worst aging makeup I've seen in a long time. It was incredibly distracting in the tense moments that are meant to be on screen.
The hole in time is closed, old man Jin Gyeom fades away, we see our present day Jin Gyeom fade away. But, Park Sun Young and her teenage son Jin Gyeom, are still there. Nothing has happened to them. We cut to a new day and Professor Yoon wakes up confused, and she remembers everything. Her sister has no idea who he's talking about when asked where Jin Gyeom is. She can't find his number on her phone. Her sister thought she was at a conference and would be gone longer. The Professor runs off trying to find Jin Gyeom. No one has heard of him. Until, our done-wrong reporter who was actually a much bigger part of this whole series than I've mentioned here, Kim Do Yeon shows up to interview the Professor for a story. She has no memory of Jin Gyeom. She was a friend of his in high school. We saw that he and his mom didn't fade away. Why doesn't Do Yeon know him? She was totally in love with him. Do Yeon does mention an architect she interviewed who said nearly the same thing about time travel that the Professor did. Professor Yoon then runs off to track him down. We see the architect is Jin Gyeom. And as he walks past the Professor, it appears that he has no idea who she is. Then he looks through his sketch book where he has drawn a faceless figure outside his childhood home, which he seems to know nothing about other than picturing this house. He turns pages to where he has begun to draw the face of someone and he starts drawing the Professor. He runs off and the two meet outside his house (where neither he nor his mother live). And it looks like they're going to have a skeevy - she's got your mother's face and DNA - kind of relationship.
That whole ending is just all kinds of wrong. Why didn't time traveler Tae Yi and her son disappear? Seeing them walk up the block into the night, isn't the same as seeing them fade away like the two Jin Gyeoms did. The reset meant that all time travelers go back to where they belong. That would mean that the wife of Dr. Jang would not have found the book, run away, marry him and give birth to Tae Yi. Not only would Mom Tae Yi not exist, but also Professor Tae Yi would not exist. Also, Jin Gyeom wouldn't exist because his mom wouldn't exist either.
So the final two episodes made this otherwise compelling drama end horribly.