Another episode, another set of theories. It’s never-ending.
1. What’s/Who’s Sigma?
WEnchanteur, I’ll keep this short. They’re North Koreans. 🙂
lol. I wanted to say Chinese operatives because the uploader is a cheap knockoff, and didn’t pass stringent quality controls, judging from the mangled bodies of the assassins. But let’s go with the North Koreans this time. They’re the favorite baddies in kdramas, aside from the Catholic Church.
2. The bizarre, dizzying spells experienced by Taesul and Seohae
It seems to me that when they try to break out of their Sisyphean cycle, and work independently, they’re bound to experience a dysrhythmia or a disturbance in their rhythm.
And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the cars honking in the background. In my delusional mind, the sound is coming from over here…
when she ran in the intersection without regard to the traffic.
Her vertigo ended when he grabbed her.
I thought this was a good shot. They had no choice but to be locked in together.
3. “Once you get soft, you’ll lose something even more precious.”
Well, she just became soft when she relented to Taesul’s demand to be allowed to meet his brother even when circumstances are dangerous.
Taesul: I must find my brother. So no matter how dangerous the situation is, don’t drag me out like you did last time when my brother is right in front of me. Can you do that? If your answer is yes, I want you to protect me from them and save the world.
Seohae: Okay.
I like the way she looked here. She looked like she was about to cry.
I want to say that she probably signed her own death warrant here, but if we’re going to use her father’s words as an oracle, then that “something” precious she’s going to lose is Taesul’s life.
His prime goal is to see his brother and apologize once and for all to fix his regrets. But the warning behind the painting said, “Don’t look for your brother. If you do, you’ll die.” By agreeing not to hinder him, she’ll have to put herself directly in harm’s way, and take the bullet for him.
Like Bongseon the old bodyguard did.
4. Diary
So he gave her the original diary.
But who gave the diary to the young Seohae in 2021? Was it herself after Taesul died? Or was it Taesul who went looking for the child after Seohae died? My guess is Taesul.
Seohae was reluctant to meet her young self because it wasn’t yet the right time.
5. The lottery
Hyunki: A time machine? Then what about the lottery? They’d all win the lottery?
Chief: Right, everyone is curious about that. Upon encountering the very first illegal entrant in 2002, the government established the Control Bureau. What did they do first? Here. (throws a folder) The lotto. They founded the Lottery Commission to take care of all the expenses for catching the illegal entrants.
Aaaaaah. So that’s why we were given the detail about the lotto on the news. The TV announcer said, “The 911th draw generated sales of 89.3 billion won. The total prize was 21.1 billion won. There were ten winners in total, and each winner received 2.11 billion won. In 2020, Lollo accumulated 809.4 billion won in total.”
This means that the Control Bureau has a big budget to spend on their mission to round up all the illegals.
6. Illegal immigration
Hyunki: Okay, so what? So what do you want me to do?
Chief: You don’t have to believe me. I don’t expect you to anyway. I’m sorry to say this, but while you were here, your mother passed away.
Hyunki: What?
He rushed home to see it for himself. This tells us that he was released by the Control Bureau but he returned on his own. He was then fed misinformation by the Chief. He was told that Seohae had broken into his house, shot and killed his mother who couldn’t fight back, stole his gun, and ran away in his car. By the time, the Control Bureau arrived at the scene, she had already fled.
lol. That’s why he was agitated while Taesul was trying to start the electric car. I said that he was more worried about Seohae approaching the car, than he was of the Control Bureau agents. He believed that Seohae was a ruthless killer, and that she presented a bigger threat to their survival than the Control Bureau team.
The Chief also indoctrinated him with hatred for the aliens. They come with their sob stories of missing their home and their parents, but once they arrive, they become greedy.
Chief: Have you ever thought about how strange it is? Some people keep making a fortune in the stock market or real estate. So why does nothing in life work for ordinary people like us? Some people act as though they can foresee the future, so why are ordinary people like us struggling to just to make ends meet? We no longer have the opportunity to become successful by pure chance and luck. Do you want to fix it?
I dislike it that the Chief framed the whole illegal immigration as nothing more than economic issue: the illegals are stealing fortune and opportunities from the ordinary folks. Illegal immigration is wrong for a whole lot of reasons.
Take Mr. Park for one. Of the 5% who make it through the teleportation and get past the Control Bureau, the futurists are subjected to abuses by unscrupulous people like Mr. Park. Then, there’s the health risk of exposing the unsuspecting population to radiation. And there’s the philosophical problem of causality. These time travelers violate causality. Whenever a time travel travels back to the past to undo a mistake, he’s in fact breaking the link between cause-and-effect, and altering the course of history.
Of course, from our standpoint, from this kdrama’s standpoint, and from Seohae’s standpoint, altering history is a noble task. lol. But in any other scenario, this ability to travel back in time to “fix” things opens up a Pandora’s box of evil.
7. Eddie Kim
I assume that Eddie Kim knew they were hiding in the closet but, like SeoJin, he decided not to open the door so Taesul could hide in there. His order to the guards to stay till the following morning was made within Taesul’s hearing in order to let him know when it was safe to come out.
That said, I don’t think SeoJin and Eddie Kim are on Taesul’s side. There’s something shifty about them on that day of the Busan conference. Plus, I don’t trust anybody with a doctorate diploma in “Parapsychology.” hahaha.
8. The key
I had to google this up. It seems like most keys are made out of brass, silver, nickel or steel. Brass and silver aren’t magnetic. Nickel and some steel keys are magnetic. The steel keys which are magnetic must have a high concentration of iron.
9. Trope vs cliché
I’ve never really defined a trope, have I? A trope is a situation, gesture, or character behavior that’s consistently crops up in a drama or movie. A trope, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. Certain genres require specific tropes. For instance, a horror movie is expected to have a scene where the ghost suddenly jumps out of nowhere. This is called a jump-scare trope. In a romcom, the couple is expected to have a funny and memorable first encounter. This is called a meet-cute trope. So by itself, a trope isn’t bad thing to be able to spot in a kdrama.
However, when a trope is overused, forced in, or arbitrarily added, then it becomes a cliché. A cliché is the bad version of a trope. A lazy kdrama writer will go through the tropes as if he/she is crossing them off a checklist.
In this episode, we began to see the romantic tropes. Let me list some of them:
a. the accidental CPR kiss
b. the piggyback (he wasn’t kidding when he observed that his body wasn’t made for a kindergartner)
c. the hooked-up-to-an-iv trope (kdrama’s answer to all maladies: dextrose)
d. covering the sleeping girlfriend with a blanket (Hmmph! There was a thicker blanket, and he gave her the light one)
e. feeding the malnourished girlfriend (she must have a tummy made of steel. Pizza and coke for breakfast?)
f. buying clothes for the girlfriend (this is an excuse for couple clothes)
g. first misunderstanding
h. the “I-don’t-want-your-money” spat (hey, at least she just trashed the bundle of cash, and didn’t slap his face with it)
i. the trip to the sauna
j. Buying the girlfriend a cellphone (I was hoping Taesul would call himself “Oppa” lol)
k. matching sneakers (yes, nothing says that they’re a couple like wearing Converse Chuck Taylors All Stars)
l. hiding inside the closet
m. watching the skyline (reminds me of Crash Landing on You, when Seri and Capt Ri were looking at the skyline of Pyongyang)
n. drinking beer while reminiscing of their younger days
o. nodding off to sleep, and resting head on his shoulder (reminds me of Crash Landing on You)
For me, these tropes weren’t cliches.
I enjoyed them because they reminded me that I’m watching this kdrama, not so much for the science fiction element (which is hit and miss), but for the romantic relationship between the two lead characters. After “Memories of the Alhambra,” it’s about time that Park Shin Hye gets wooed and courted in earnest in a kdrama.
Thanks @pkml3. So much fun reading you.
I’m just putting this here.
Time displacement?
From the way show depicts the actions of TSul and SH, they spend something like 5-6 nights missing, if we could only figure out the actual dates. It looks like they spend only a night in each place or at the most 2, or that they do several things in 1 day.
15/08/2020: TS and SH in Busan at 4 pm. Seo Hae runs with Tae Sul. They get kidnapped by Broker Park.
16/08/2020: Seo Hae and Tae Sul still with Broker Park
17/08/2020?: SH and TSul are brought to witness the Download of Jung.
18/08/2020?: Seo Hae and Tae Sul go with Jung to his home and his mother dies. ICB shootout. ICB chase them. They jump off bridge. Seo Hae and Tae Sul spend the night in Seo Jin’s office. Time on Seo Jin’s watch was 10:55pm
19/08/2020?: Seo Hae and Tae Sul leave Seo Jin’s office, go to Convenience Store and separate. They have strange episodes of seeing things or being disoriented.
19/08/2020?: Tae Sul locates SH and they go to the Sauna. Tsul passes SH a phone and a new diary. They go to his home.
19/08/2020?: Eddy comes to Tsul’s home. Seo Hae and Tae Sul hide. They hear Eddy say that the police will give up looking for Tae Sul after 2 weeks. It’s been 2 weeks!!! But if we take the nights, there might have been only 5-6 nights that they’ve been missing since the Busan conference.
20/08/2020?: Seo Jin comes to her office, sees the mess and calls the police but changes her mind.
Some time in the near future we see the ICB with a plethora of arms. It looked like overkill with everyone trying to look like they knew what they were doing while each examining a gun … it actually looked funny. LOL.
My key takeaways:
There was a war. Nuclear war happened, starts in Wolsong. Nuclear power plant is nuked by NK. And then Seoul was also nuked. So TSul or his invention was not the direct cause of the war. But he is instrumental in preventing the war as long as (per SH) he does not get killed and he does not make the Uploader (time machine). Still trying to connect these things together.
Yes, Sigma can be NK, they wanted to kill TSul so that war will proceed but if they kill him now, he will not make the Uploader so the 2 conditions are not met? Argh!
Convo with CB head and Officer Jung…
Uploader built in 2021, it’s a time machine. First illegal entrant in 2002, the CB was established.
TSul invented the downloader in 2001. This opened the other side of the portal to time travelers, first time in 2002. An Uploader in the future is needed to make this process happen. Uploader created in 2021. TSul already has the makings of it thru his quantum teleporter of sugar cubes. But there’s no time element to that yet.
If TSul dies in 2020, uploader will not be created, what will happen? The war can still happen but no more time travel to be able to correct the past. Sigma aka NK still wins.
If TSul lives and he will not create uploader, What will happen? CB and Sigma will still pursue them. He marries SH but SH will get shot and dies, then he will eventually create uploader. SH has to also live so that the uploader is not created. CB should be pursuing Sigma instead of them.
If TSul lives and he creates uploader, war still happens and the loop is created and will never end?
How can they stop the war?
This is so mission critical to save the world! If that was my future self, I should not write cryptic notes in my diary!!! Geez!
I am so curious on TSan’s role in all of these. Is his goal to also save the world same as SH? He used to work as train mechanic- that’s most likely how he found out about time travelers. He also found out about brokers like Mr Park. He staged his death then he traveled to the future? He got blueprints of the uploader time machine from the future? Was he a frequent traveler – too much risk for a 10% success rate. And then went back to 2020 and hit a plane? 👀
Never-ending… Ahhh, isn’t that good drama?
It’s true that it asks you some work! ^^
I know some crazy fans here waiting assiduously for your work.
I won’t say who for privacy reasons. 🙂
1 – Who’s Sigma ?
And to think that I wrote a 100-line pad when it maybe fits in one line. ^^
Thanks for the picture of Jim Carrey, this guy makes me laugh 😉
It’s a serious lead, and in phase with the future nuclear attack. The drama mentions that it comes from North Korea.
I still have a reservation about this.
So far all the South Korean dramas I’ve seen never treat North Korea as an enemy.
Of course, a lot of dramas start that way, there is friction, misunderstandings.
But inevitably, the real enemy is someone else. And North and South Korea always end up working together to defeat this enemy.
– IRIS: A mysterious espionage organization masquerades as North Korea, even though it is an enemy of both Koreas. The South Korean secret agent must infiltrate North Korea, but he ends up allying himself with the North Korean spy leader.
– King2Heart: The biggest international financial cartel tries to control South Korea, threatening to provoke a conflict with North Korea. The Korean king joins forces with the most valiant North Korean soldiers.
– Crash Landing On You: The villain is North Korean, but officers from the North unite with those from the South to catch the renegade.
– Other dramas could be taken as an example.
So, certainly, maybe Sigma is a North Korean organization?
Or an organization similar to IRIS, trying to provoke a conflict?
Or renegades?
Or maybe… Sigma is a concept, using renegades.
2 – Dizzing spells.
As soon as I saw the previous scene, and the rather forced conflict between Tae Sul and Seo Hae, I wondered…
What is this sudden need of Tae Sul to go it alone?
It doesn’t make sense, except for that scene, half melodramatic, half comical.
Of course, it leads somewhere, to the next scene.
Which I couldn’t understand.
But now it’s done, thank you!
So what is this mysterious phenomenon that forces Tae Sul and Seo Hae to stay together?
Then produce the future as it’s supposed to be? Get married in the end?
To be a sum?
S-i-g-m-a. 🙂
Ok ok, it’s more of a subtotal, it’s only about two people.
6 – Illegal immigration.
Here, travelers do not seek to violate causality, which seems already established.
They can’t prevent something but just make peace with their regrets.
That’s how it was supposed to work.
However, by cheating in the lottery, they still violate causality!
I don’t have the impression that ICB works for causality, but rather for economic problems. Hence the chief’s speech.
And as for the causality violated by the lottery, it is part of the immutable loop. So in fact, nothing is changed. To violate causality, one would have to provoke a new event in relation to the previous time loop. Is this possible?
Here we see that things repeat themselves as they are supposed to happen.
Policeman Jang will take the gun and set a trap for the heroes.
Policeman Jang of the future has alerted the heroes. But we don’t know if Policeman Jang killed the heroes in the previous loop. Probably not. In this case, the loop repeats itself identically. Rather than a loop, it is as if time were linear, despite the people from the future, who are perfectly integrated into this linearity.
7 – Eddie Kim.
I felt the same thing… He knew!
For my part, I don’t believe someone who’s 35 years old in 2020, and who has a diploma dating back to 1980. 🙂
Gotta bring a personal touch… 😉
8 – The Key.
There, it doesn’t matter the material and the conductivity. There is one overriding rule over the trivial laws of physics.
The RULE OF COOL ! 🙂
Yeah, it’s so cool to see the hero playing the smart guy. To think that the key is in front of everyone.
Then see a VISUAL trick, where he takes a magnet and fishes for the right key right away.
9 – Trope, cliché.
Yeah, arf, too hard to differentiate.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s subjective.
I call Trope what I write knowing that it’s not a cliché. Then when I go to the TvTropes site, and use it to analyze my scenes, I realize that there are 50% tropes. LOL.
Whatever, trope or cliché, your list is a very acceptable accumulation of things in a kdrama. Let’s even say indispensable to get the message across quickly.
Feed the girlfriend: she didn’t even eat a tenth of her meal when she left!
It’s terrible, kdramas drive me crazy. Always tons of food, never anyone who eats it. Every time they sit in a 4-star restaurant and order, they argue and leave, the food stays on the table.
I AM HUNGRY!!!!!
Dextrose: I allow myself to be in partial disagreement. Certainly dextrose saves lives in kdrama. I do not deny this fact 😉
But the true universal remedy that cures colds, indigestion, insomnia, amnesia, cancer and bullets in the head is… The rice porridge !!!
Sishyphus turns out to be a drama with comedy, either obvious or stashed all over the place.
I think the actors laugh too much on the set. After a while, nobody wants to tell a too serious story anymore, the actors are making a joke during the scenes on a green background. Everybody in the crew thinks it’s cool and funny. AH AH AH !
For Park Shin-Hye, I accept everything she does as long as she cries a lot during the drama. Hum, I enjoy to see her crying, she does it too well 😉
WEnchanteur, about hiding the key in plain sight…
One of the things I remember about Indiana Jones movies is when he picked the Holy Grail. With so many golden goblets and bejeweled chalices on display, of course, the carpenter’s cup would be none of those.
Yes, the food wastage in kdramas drives me nuts too. Same with the drinks. The characters always order coffee or juice that they don’t finish. They take one sip and that’s it.
I don’t mind when Park Shin Hye does aegyo. Maybe because her cheeks remind me of chipmunk cheeks. 🐿
Park Shin-Hye is really easy to find for ICB.
– Hey guys, find a girl with big bulging fish eyes and chipmunk cheeks.
🙂
Don’t know where to put this-trope?, cliche? Anything related to a convenience store- buying beer, drinks, eating heated up ramyeon, buying and eating prepackaged kimbap, drinking, working in same store part time, buying snacks, owning convenience store, going to convenience store after a night of drinking to ease a potential hangover. So much of K Drama revolves around convenience stores. What would those overstressed workaholics do without them.
On a similar note, for all the early rising workaholics, mid day breaks and for some blind dates, among other things-coffee shops with baristas.
And speaking of food waste,nobody seems to drink their beverages-they do a lot of straw sucking. Same thing goes for cake. After the birthday wish and candle blow, I’d love to see the entire cake actually eaten. As to the food waste, I just hope that the some of the uneaten food is reheated and served to the crew. That’s why I think it’s such a big deal when coffee trucks are gifted to actors and crew. I don’t think that Korean crews get craft service or meals. And the working conditions for everyone seem difficult, looking at the condensation comiing from the mouths of these actors and the portable fans and heaters seen in the behind the scenes films. Does Korea have an OSHA?
I don’t think Korean actors have the egos of their American counterparts. And culturally, when I watch the award shows, the Koreans are self-deprecating and always promise to do a better job in the future. Hollywood could learn from this. Thanks all for tolerating my rant.
@Janey About Han Tae San (Episode 6) – we finally get to see him (a lot more of him than expected). So he too is hiding in plain sight since he can walk around in the party. We are continually being gaslighted. It’s been done since Episode 1 when we realise that TSul thinks/knows that he is imagining Tae San. Now we wonder is TSan in control of what he is doing? Is he in the know about Seo Hae and is he present in 2020 to warn her and to save his brother? Or is he a victim and held against his will?
Yes, you’re right about how his job in the railway company led him to discover the people who were Downloaded with their suitcases. As luck or coincidence would have it, he gets to see the very Downloader (who from the side looked like Tae Sul!!) who has a photo of him and his brother. Of course he never lets go after that. Unfortunately he goes to Seo Jin for therapy.
As for frequent traveling, I’m under the impression that the Upload and Download work in 1 direction. The people of the future want to return to the past but not the other way around. I’m thinking that it’s the Tae San of the future who came back to warn his brother, but it backfires because the second TSul knows about him, he’ll also not let go of wanting to find him.
@Old American Lady @pkml3
About food not being eaten … IKR. It always bothered me that actors in the scene barely eat and the meal is over.
However, I didn’t feel too bad about it after watching the making of (of all things) Pride & Prejudice (1995). There they spoke of making the mistake of eating during filming which because it often required multiple takes, meant that the same actor had to eat the same quantity of food for every take!!! The actor would feel rather sick of the one dish he’d been feeding himself and the props people would have to keep supplying more of the same.
The other drawback of eating as part of a scene is that the food often gets cold (and stale) and if the shoots with food go on overnight, it’s actually not safe to eat. Hence, we see that actors wisely hardly eat anything. They drink a bit more than they eat, I imagine!
I know right? The very first illegal traveler looked like TaeSul himself. 😆 The director was definitely trolling us there.
I wish @ Miracle23 or somebody here can translate the writing on the back of that photo. Looks like there’ll be more attempts made on TS’ life.
Agree. Travel seems to be one way (except for Taesan, I guess ). No one wants to live in the future since there’s nothing there. So once they escape it, they don’t want to go back.
I haven’t really given Taesan much thought. As a character, he’s flat. He seems to exist only to move the goalposts and make things difficult for TS. Just like SeoJin exists just to be the villainess.
Yup @pkml3… that was a good troll!! Camera angle ensured that we saw something of the side of Downloader’s face but not enough to confirm if it was a future Tae Sul who’d been the first to download himself!
I need a stretch of time to re-watch in slo mo, loads of scenes (show was so dense). It’s going to take me forever as I make notes along the way!!
One thing that hit me with this Ep 6 is that Show has taken the concept of FATE to it’s extreme. What the ICB Hwang says about knowing the future (and I assume it means that it does not change), that the time to get Seo Hae was not yet … We have everything working out as is Fated, and yet people continue to go along with it, not able or willing to challenge it. Fatalism at its height.
However Hwang can lie and tell Jung that he’d ultimately catch SH in order to continue manipulating him. Still, as Jung will never stop wanting to avenge his mum, he will also never stop trying to kill SH, even knowing that he’s fated to fail. Such a tiresome, self-defeating cycle, is Fate.
Trying but failing to discover what cars (black suv’s) the Control bureau are driving, what brand are they!?
Craig,
Kdramas usually use luxury imported cars for their rich male heroes. The cars are sponsored or product placements.
But the rest of the characters just use Korean brands: either Kia or Hyundai.
My best guess? The Control Bureau black SUVs are Hyundai Palisade 2020 model.
The front grille seems to be the same. It isn’t rectangular in shape; it has those little “horns” on the upper corners.
Please Google it bec I can’t attach photo links now.
The other option would have been Kia’s SUV, the Telluride. But the grille isn’t as monster-looking as Hyundai’s SUV, and the shape is all wrong.
I checked. It isn’t Ford Explorer, GMC Acadia or Toyota (no way they’ll use Japanese cars, lol).
Palisade and Telluride are American names of Hyundai’s and Kia’s full-size SUV models. Don’t know if they’re named differently in Korea.
Thanks Packmule, it’s closest to the Pallisade for sure, but the grill emblem is wrong and the tail lights aren’t quite right… My hope/ guess was that it is that other Korean, the Ssangyong Rexton, the grill and front is really close again the rear lights are not right.
Ssangyong Rexton looks like a possibility too. 👍
Don’t worry too much about the emblem and tail lights. The CGI folks can change those anyway if they don’t want to clearly show the model of the car.
That’s how Taesul ended up driving an “ange over” instead of a Range Rover. 😂
The production team probably failed to get the brand to sponsor the show OR they already have a contract with another car company OR the car company didn’t want to be associated with the image of being the corporate car of an “evil” bureau.
I saw this on YT and thought it a good mesh of the many time travel kdramas that we’ve had. I was able to recognise many but not every single one. It even has the very long ago “Rooftop Prince” in the lot.
There are quite a number of scene shots from “Sisyphus” and very few (surprisingly) from “TK:EM”, and from “Alice”.
Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QHFufEuw70
Annyeong,
@Pacmule3 thanks for your quick takes. love this.
your list of romantic tropes/side notes made me laugh. i enjoyed them as well esp M, N, and O most of all haha. yes love to see PSH getting wooed and courted by the “single by choice” TSul <3
i noticed the "ange over" in that vehicle too. your explanation makes sense. very funny.
@WEnchanteur i love the rule of cool – to see the hero playing a smart guy. funny how we all agree regarding the "Food wastage" thanks @Packmule3 for this word. @GB's explanation for why it looks like a waste but not really makes sense though. it doesn't change the fact that it makes us all hungry. i feel there are shows where they don't eat the food (like the richie rich folks) and there are shows where they really eat the food (the common people- love how they slurp those noodles like nothing haha).
@old american lady, SK has K-OSHA aka K-ISHA. good question 🙂
@HK_Lady
I’d forgotten what I said. LOL, yes… the actors may wisely not eat the food if it had been the umpteenth take. There was something similar said about the making of the Harry Potter shows where Hogwarts had those huge meals on long tables.
I don’t watch those reality shows where people really cook and eat … I’d be so hungry and so jealous all the time LOL.
Meal time is a continuity nightmare for most shows and movies. There was a doc about Downton Abbey that discussed everything that could go wrong like the levels of liquid in glasses, moved plates and cutlery, disappearing food. Each scene has to match up, so you can just imagine trying to make the scene look right. And then in Game of Thrones, they had to deal with the Starbucks cup. I had an acquaintance who was a food stylist. A other problem with food photos is that shaving cream is a great substitute for whippedcream, wax is used,certain paints are added so 6ou really couldn’t eat. There are all sorts of articles about this topic. Let’s just say you’d ,one your appetite eating these “appetizing foods”.
@OAL, you’re absolutely right. The actors hardly move anything on the plates so that all the takes will match up. I heard something similar about the food being covered over with wax or something is sprayed on them to make them look fresh, or keep them from looking bad… but they become inedible as a result. So yes, lots of wasted food, but at least it’s the same lot of food for all the takes.