The thread is now open for spoilers, discussion and theories.
I usually dislike second female leads who are crazily head over heels in love with the hero. But in this kdrama, I’m actually rooting for DoYeon to win JG.
#AnybodyButTaeYi
1. Gifs from yesdramas’ tumblr
2. Gifs from yesdramas’ tumblr
3. pictures from kdramastuff’s tumblr
This reminded me of Liam Neeson from “Taken.”
Let’s enjoy the show!
Thanks @pkml3. Somehow the week has gone by too fast, and I do not feel ready for the next episodes. 🙄 😬 😝 I wish I could time travel back a few days to catch my breath!!!
But if you have a time machine, will you want to travel to the past or to the future?
🙂
See, that always intrigued me about this writer’s premise. The book was a doomsday book so they traveled back in time to retrieve it.
🤪
But if I were the Alice CEO, I would have ordered my Alice minions MH and Taeyi to go the future instead, like any random year in the future, say 2060 or 2100, and so they could see for themselves what happened and where things went wrong. They would have to procure history books then, instead of a silly Book of Prophesy.
But that’s just me. 🤷♀️
It’s a good thought. I’d prefer to go forward to see if things had turned out OK or badly. If OK, I’d ignore the Book of Prophesy. If some things could have been avoided or righted, I’d be interested to go to those times in history before thing went wrong, to see if anything could mitigate or stop the ‘bad’ stuff.
I’ve not paid enough attention so I’m not sure if the premise of this writer is that we can only go backwards in time or if we can go beyond our present into the future.
Right, @growing_beautifully?
Why go to the past and get the Book of Prophesy? The book is just a prophesy, it’s fortune-telling written down.
I’d rather go to the future and read the history books to see what really happened and the ACTUAL string of events that caused the problem(s).
The premise of the kdrama, while interesting, doesn’t make sense to me. But then somebody at SBS gave this project the green light so 🤷♀️ I want to see where the writer’s going with it.
Okay. This show is getting puke-able by the episode. 🤮
I scanned Ep 7 and it seems like Prof Taeyi was Dr Jang’s little daughter. (Nice red herring there, writer. I didn’t bother rewind and see if she lied about her mom story. Whatever.) 🤮
Then as kids, she met Jin Gyeom at an amusement park and shared a balloon. So there we have the childhood trope. Double barf. 🤮🤮
But what was really maddening was Prof Taeyi being clingy. 🤮🤮🤮 The actress makes her character so unlikeable though.
To switch topics, after refusing to discuss matters with JG, Director Seok suddenly wanted to spill the beans be the assassin was after him now. What the heck??!! And he didn’t feel the urge to ask for help after the first colleague was caught dead?! If I were JG, I’d let him be captured and tortured by the assasin. Too little, too late.
This is where things will get messy.
@pkml3 I give you 10 upon 10 for forbearance if you watch this drama through. I have to admit being pissed off by Ep 7 and feeling cynical going in for other episodes. The fact that writer is a first time shows too clearly.
Eye Rolling Moments
The very efficient assassin who killed the cat and its owner only manages to chloroform TY. He then does the strange thing of calling his boss instead of killing or abducting TY, giving JG enough time to return to save the day. And not only that, enough time to have a conversation with assassin. It was pretty sloppy but writer had to keep TY alive to be attacked again, and JG had to be given time to be the hero again.
(Side note: assassin took considerable time and trouble to write out all those symbols/equations neatly (with what? His finger in red paint? Soo DRAMATIC). I hope there’s a message in there because otherwise, it’s like he had just too much time to spare while waiting for TY to come home.
The police force is super lenient in letting JG do whatever he wants without reporting to the superiors. He’s now taken to being escort and driver and personal body guard of TY.
It’s weird that the victim is allowed to interrogate the perpetrator in the police station, and without anyone present. Something wrong with the protocol here.
If Alice could have gotten MH out of custody so easily all along, why did it take them that long? I guess he had to hang around long enough to give TY warnings and clues.
I deplored the scenes where TY’s telling JG off for being cold and how he tries to accommodate her with music and aegyo. They were meant to be cute or break the tension but they irritated me. Also the scene of parents treating JG as the potential boyfriend. I found it such a waste of time (which maybe they are meant to be) when there’s so little progress in investigation. Instead of moving the plot along with how to stop the time travelers we are given ‘couple’ scenes.
That last Assassin as an old man scene just annoyed me so much.
1) How could the police just let in any man without more checks, just because he looks old.
2) When JG recognises the assassin after he drives off, instead of calling the police who are on the spot to protect TY he drives back without informing them.
3) Instead of outright killing TY, assassin (obviously loves writing equations) joins in writing on the board, and chats with TY, giving MH a chance to try to be a hero.
4) Only weapon being wielded recently is a knife. What happened to the nifty gun that shoots tiny bullets?
5) When MH saves her and TY can get away, instead of bringing in the cops in the corridor (they were fine when when assassin entered, when did they all collapse?) she returns by herself to do what? Pepper spray him??? (Should we praise her courage or deplore her stupidity.)
6) MH gets stabbed so it’s up to JG once again to bounce in as a hero, but once again Assassin gets away.
7) After being stabbed, MH gets up just fine and stands watching in the corridor.
2 Separate Times?
The strange scenes of Dir Seok being tied up in 2 different times by 2 different people who read the Book were the only really interesting points for speculation. WAs the poor man tied up once before and allowed to live? Why?
Dir Seok in modern day (2020) clothes, accosted by assassin, was abducted … but the person we see with him in his modern day clothes is not assassin but JG’s ‘dad’ Det Go/Ko. So is Det Ko in on this since 1992 with TY? If so he should know that she’s met and passed the book to Dir Seok. Why the ‘abduction’?
Other Dir Seok scene where he’s tied up in casual clothes, looks to be another time, but this time the person with him, who’s reading the book is Assassin looking like 2020 assassin. This is confusing. And there’s so much DRAMA again as assassin takes the knife to stab TY’s photo. I think I laughed.
Tropes
Piling on the eye rolls are the cohabitation and childhood meeting tropes that have both surfaced in Ep 7. I’m shocked that show is trying to pair up ‘mother’ and son as a couple.
JG (or even Do Yeon) should really show TY the photo of his mum, and shock her into realising why he thinks her ‘special’.
@pkml3 It’s becoming messier and messier and I have doubts the rookie writer will be able to tie up everything coherently. More scenes and setups are looking more and more contrived as we go along.
Yes, the turnaround of Dir Seok is sudden and unexplained. Also whom he ends up with when tied up.
Things were already rather loose and messy when we had 2 groups from the future after the Book, but neither party seems to be interested in finding out enough about their rival to stop each other at the source. Alice people are ineffectively in the dark about other time travelers.
I feel that story which could be a lot more, is focusing on getting JG and TY together a lot, and all the attempts on the life of her and her colleagues are just means to bring in some tension and drama where there is none. Like Min Hyeok who’s been at it over and over again, everyone and now even the Assassin is ineffective. They are not getting their jobs done.
It feels like writer is cobbling together bits as and when needed instead of having a sure plot with clear points for plot movement.
I’d really like to know what the fallout would be if the Book was read widely. The Alice people lack conviction. I’m not convinced that what they do matters. They’re a money making ‘hotel’ that allows crooks from 2050 to mess up the past in 2020. The hope, I guess, is that knowing the tragedies that could have been prevented, those physicists will not try to time-travel. But we know how humans are. No Book is ever going to stop people determined to push the limits of physics.
This whole exercise of trying to hide or retrieve the Book is a waste of time.
Ewww…. should I even continue with it? It was starting to get to no go territory for me with the mother-son romance…but I thought DY sorted that out? No? I thought I saw a trailer where JG was doing that brushing the hair off the girl’s face thing (I couldn’t see the face of the lady)…and I froze…surely not? I hope that was DY and not TY 🤢. And the whole incompetence of Alice as an organisation which was supposed to be “advanced” was starting to annoy me…
@nrllee I’m afraid that yes, it sure looked like when TY stayed in JG’s old house with him, they had a moment of him looking at her as she slept and he brushed her hair off her face.
I must make corrections to what I wrote above. I re-watched and saw that the first time we see a guy in checked shirt tied up in a living room of some kind with the Assassin, the guy is a younger person and is probably not Dir Seok. The Assassin was also looking at a red file and not the Book of Prophesy. Goodness knows who, where, why we had that scene. Presumably this is to lead into and we are to find out, in later episodes.
The police are disappointingly lame. JG’s partner is more interested in his muscles and can’t keep a secret to save his life, and not only that, feed info to reporter Do Yeon. Of course the info is actually going to be important since he notes that Det Ko has suddenly gone off the grid, and we get to see him with the Book of Prophecy and the tied up Dir Seok.
Since it was Assassin who came into the room to abduct Dir Seok, but it’s Det Ko who’s with him later, we assume that Det Ko could be the one he calls ‘Teacher’?
The detectives working the scene are more interested in (and heartily entertained) that all of them are from the liberal arts and can’t understand the equations, than they are in examining other parts of the crime scene.
The other bunch from the future who left the one legged Lee Se Hoon in prison are rather careless. He was able to give JG clues and info about the book. He should have been a minion that was expendable and should have been killed in prison.
On the whole, plot is too loose and looks likely to come undone.
@GB 🙁. Reminds me of when @packmule3 and I discussed the inappropriateness of another Alexithymia man (from He is Psychometric) slipping a ring on his mother’s ring finger…granted they had an intensely distorted survival story of being held captive for years together by the demented father…but still… 🤢.
@nrllee I feel that it could be solved (if only the writer would see this as a problem and avoid it), with TY being made to realise that JG is sticking to her to assuage his guilt or whatever trauma he has, over not saving his mother.
He’s actually installing her in his house where he used to live with his mum, it’s like he’s replaying history and thinks that this time he’ll succeed in keeping her alive. I don’t know how TY would feel, but realising that I look exactly like his dead mother and living in her house, where she died, would give me the willies, and get me to realise that JG should not be so closely tied up with the case. It’s too personal for him. It should not be just his responsibility to keep her alive.
It’s strange that he’s just a law unto himself and allowed to do this. Surely any protection program requires more than 1 person to do the guarding. He behaves as though he does not need to sleep or rest.
@nrllee @pkml3 and Everyone, I skimmed through most of Ep 8 and oh dear, it was messy before, but it just got worse. Parallel universes and all, we get bad kidnapper physicist kidnapping his past self? TY time traveling 1 year into the future and you’d never guess who supposedly gets killed by whom in 2020.
The problem with TY’s time travel is that then there must be 2 iterations of her in 2021.
I feel that show believes viewers want a heaping on of couple cohabitation tropes, around which some mystery gets to revolve, instead of giving the mystery at least 50% or more of the focus and having any relationships evolve naturally around that.
Do Yeon and the police detectives are sadly misused for frivolity and under-utilised for weightier purposes. I’m thinking that with the huge staff at Alice and another big group in the police, this show has a lot of extras who have absolutely nothing to do.
In the end, investigation and plot movement with regards to solving the mystery of why and what is going on got maybe 10% focus, annoying couple moments 70%, parents-child, teenage-level hormonal detectives and getting drunk moments got about 20% of the time. Do we get any answers?…no. Did we get any new information, just tiny bits:
– Confirmation that Oh Si Yong had known where 2050 Tae Yi was (hence the drones are probably from her)
– Confirmation that Dir Seok is still alive, location unknown.
– Confirmation that sweet daddy isn’t sweet. (I’m so disappointed)
No one is pulling together, everyone knows only bit and pieces and can’t put them together, there’s more division and individualism than a coming together to solve the issues that are obviously too big for any one person to handle.
I’d say, we can fast forward about 80% of this episode and just watch the last 10-15 minutes of the show at a decent speed, to get an idea of what’s going on.
I must say for an emotionless guy JG is an excellent karaoke singer. I especially liked how TY and DY are mesmerized by his love song as JG stares at both of them. JG’s choregraphed dance moves was a thing of beauty. That’s all I got.
Just finished ep. 8 while getting distracting by other things. The mother son couple is very troubling to watch just like R94. 🙁