This review may contain spoilers
Unexamined ethical dilemnas
There's many different kinds of time travel conceits and narratives. Alice's version is that there are many different parallel and branching time lines, dimensions, and multiple versions of one's selves can exist at once. The series serves up complex relationships built up from the consequences of the situation but doesn't dare actually explore what it means that their relations are warped and tangled in frankly taboo manners.
This drama is truly the tale of two Tae Yis. Tae Yi prime starts off as a scientist who also has fighting skills and very clearly has an active sex life leading to her pregnancy. Once she becomes pregnant though, she does not even bother to discuss with her boyfriend/work partner's concerns about the irradiation of the fetus nor the doctor later about the health defects detected. She just has a one track mind to birth this child. It's her right to decide, but there is value to a pros and cons discussion to choosing to go through with a pregnancy where there's already knowledge the child's quality of life will be severely impacted due to the radiation damage. As she grows older, she has not one iota of fighting skills left, not that she's rusty or out of practice, just nothing, like she was never a fighter at all. Her life is just entirely Jin Gyeom and even more so the radiation effects has left him with the condition of lack of emotions which in the drama can seemingly "improve" as he ages and forms different relationships with her death being the catalyst. The exact combination of events to keep him from being a serial killer in between timelines seems to be up to chance. She got lucky she got the timeline where he does decide to embrace the right and wrongs of society.
Professor Tae Yi is the most affected by Prime's time travel creation. Her mother is another complexity that the drama just mentions and doesn't delve into. An unseen and unnamed time traveler who stayed in the past with the book about the end of time travel that some one wrote and died in child birth to Professor. The time traveler may either be a peer or younger than Prime. Professor watches her father be slain and adopted by an alternate version of herself for a little bit. Jin Gyeom being her younger brother. She then meets this guy only a few years younger in her early 30s and she is no one's mother and develops a very much romantic and non familial feelings for detective Jin Gyeom even after she learns she's basically the genetic equivalent of being a twin sister to the mother they shared for a while to the point they have a sibling photo. Jin Gyeom for his part has kept a friendship with Do Heon who is very important to him but doesn't exactly reciprocate her romantic feelings. He seems to treat Professor similarly while the show is very much leaning into all of the romantic tropes in the scenes for Professor and him. He sees his mother and his promise to protect her no matter their relationship. This promise ties Professor and an architect version of Jin Gyeom together after the reset erases the police version of him with Do Heon not in his life at all except for interviewing him in the course of her work. He has memories of the green door house, but not in the way that he grew up there. He seems to be born in different circumstances in the new timeline and may no longer be genetically related though it's unclear.
The adopted familial relationships are very touching. Jin Gyeom with his adopted father and Professor with the family that adopted her after Prime returned her to the orphanage after seeing Professor remembering the last page of the time travel book. It actually would have still been interesting if Professor and Jin Gyeom developed a more sibling relationship, but for whatever reason this drama went the romance route which they tried to keep a subtle as a kdrama truck of death without outright saying it or again having any kind of discussion about it. Does her memories or feelings from Prime affect how she feels about him the way that serial killer Jin Gyeom possesses Police Jin Gyeom at times?
The show lost track of it's own time travel and also character logic by the end. The series does feel influenced by Dark with the time travel book, cycles that act more like spirals that differ enough each time that at the end the loop is finally broken with older alternate versions affecting the narrative, but with way less effective ending. To end time travel, they needed to break the cycle of Tae Yi's mom going to the past to have her, but grandma is no where in the picture of the story. The story is not time travel, it's the boy mom romance fantasy that wasn't mainstream terminology for at the time of airing.
This drama is truly the tale of two Tae Yis. Tae Yi prime starts off as a scientist who also has fighting skills and very clearly has an active sex life leading to her pregnancy. Once she becomes pregnant though, she does not even bother to discuss with her boyfriend/work partner's concerns about the irradiation of the fetus nor the doctor later about the health defects detected. She just has a one track mind to birth this child. It's her right to decide, but there is value to a pros and cons discussion to choosing to go through with a pregnancy where there's already knowledge the child's quality of life will be severely impacted due to the radiation damage. As she grows older, she has not one iota of fighting skills left, not that she's rusty or out of practice, just nothing, like she was never a fighter at all. Her life is just entirely Jin Gyeom and even more so the radiation effects has left him with the condition of lack of emotions which in the drama can seemingly "improve" as he ages and forms different relationships with her death being the catalyst. The exact combination of events to keep him from being a serial killer in between timelines seems to be up to chance. She got lucky she got the timeline where he does decide to embrace the right and wrongs of society.
Professor Tae Yi is the most affected by Prime's time travel creation. Her mother is another complexity that the drama just mentions and doesn't delve into. An unseen and unnamed time traveler who stayed in the past with the book about the end of time travel that some one wrote and died in child birth to Professor. The time traveler may either be a peer or younger than Prime. Professor watches her father be slain and adopted by an alternate version of herself for a little bit. Jin Gyeom being her younger brother. She then meets this guy only a few years younger in her early 30s and she is no one's mother and develops a very much romantic and non familial feelings for detective Jin Gyeom even after she learns she's basically the genetic equivalent of being a twin sister to the mother they shared for a while to the point they have a sibling photo. Jin Gyeom for his part has kept a friendship with Do Heon who is very important to him but doesn't exactly reciprocate her romantic feelings. He seems to treat Professor similarly while the show is very much leaning into all of the romantic tropes in the scenes for Professor and him. He sees his mother and his promise to protect her no matter their relationship. This promise ties Professor and an architect version of Jin Gyeom together after the reset erases the police version of him with Do Heon not in his life at all except for interviewing him in the course of her work. He has memories of the green door house, but not in the way that he grew up there. He seems to be born in different circumstances in the new timeline and may no longer be genetically related though it's unclear.
The adopted familial relationships are very touching. Jin Gyeom with his adopted father and Professor with the family that adopted her after Prime returned her to the orphanage after seeing Professor remembering the last page of the time travel book. It actually would have still been interesting if Professor and Jin Gyeom developed a more sibling relationship, but for whatever reason this drama went the romance route which they tried to keep a subtle as a kdrama truck of death without outright saying it or again having any kind of discussion about it. Does her memories or feelings from Prime affect how she feels about him the way that serial killer Jin Gyeom possesses Police Jin Gyeom at times?
The show lost track of it's own time travel and also character logic by the end. The series does feel influenced by Dark with the time travel book, cycles that act more like spirals that differ enough each time that at the end the loop is finally broken with older alternate versions affecting the narrative, but with way less effective ending. To end time travel, they needed to break the cycle of Tae Yi's mom going to the past to have her, but grandma is no where in the picture of the story. The story is not time travel, it's the boy mom romance fantasy that wasn't mainstream terminology for at the time of airing.
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