This is for @GB and the folks who did the rewatch last Saturday. I didn’t read my old write-ups because I wanted to watch Ep 1 with a fresh start.

1. In a world apart

The drama begins in media res. Without any context, the audience is plunged into a hectic situation, a chase scene. We see the kid SeJoo talking on the phone and suddenly making a run for it. Terrified, he keeps looking back as if to check whether somebody’s gaining on him. But when the camera pans out to reveal a larger landscape, he’s clearly running alone. He crashes his way to the front of the train and heaves a sigh of relief as the train departs the station.

On the platform, however, no one is chasing him.

There’s this palpable sense of being in a world apart from the others. Only he is taking flight. Everybody else is going about their normal business as if nothing is wrong.

This sense of being in a world apart is seen in his older sister, too. In the land of Spanish people, she’s a Korean operating a run-down hostal in Granada. If I were to wander in her kitchen with its rules written in Korean and menu serving kimchi, bulgogi, japchae, etc., I’d wonder if I was still in Spain or somehow got teleported to South Korea.

Same with his younger sister. It’s 1:52 am when she enters the kitchen. It’s time for her to practice her hip-hop dance routine for an audition. Putting on headset, she begins to bop to the music only she can hear. She’s totally in her own world. She’s oblivious that her pony-tailed hair is smacking JinWoo (JW) on the head as he eats.

Jinwoo gets annoyed with the young girl, but when we think about this, he has plenty of common with her. When he engages in the Augmented Reality game, he’s totally in a world of his own, like her.

Her pony-tailed hair that smacks his head = his imaginary rusty sword that he swings around; his swinging arms could smack people

To onlookers, he looks like he’s also performing a weird dance as he slashes the air with his virtual sword and side-steps the imaginary Nasrid’s blade.

To me, then, these characters appear to have nothing in common, but they have similar solitary confinements – or worlds of their own making.

2. The time confusion

When we watch a new drama, the first thing we do to get our bearings is establish the time and place. Well, we know that ground zero is Granada. But the time is immediately jumbled.

As I said, the story begins in media res. The time on the clock at the train station is 11:36 pm. The kid SeJoo takes the overnight train to Granada. As the train arrives their destination early the following morning, he’s attacked by a mystery gunman. Blood spatters on the bed and the bullet punctures a hole in the glass window. But when his cabin-mate wakes up to de-train, there’s no sign that a crime has just taken place in the small quarters.

According to the narration of Yoo Jinwoo, this is the “last officially known whereabouts of this young man.”

In effect, the story of the kid SeJoo begins shortly before 11:36 pm and ends less than 12 hours later.

Meanwhile, Yoo JinWoo’s story begins at 1:16 am when he rings the doorbell at Hostal Bonita.

It must be noted that he arrived at Granada before the kid SeJoo because he took the plane. But flying time is 1 hr 30 minutes, so the director/screenwriter was playing fast and loose with the facts.

A sleepy HeeJoo opens the door for JinWoo, and he asks for a room. For some weird reason, the church bell begins to toll six times. I’m sure this is purely for dramatic effect. There’s no reason for church bells to ring at that time; it isn’t even the top of hour. And there’s no reason for church bells to ring more than the number of hours they’re announcing; church bells function as clocks in Medieval Age.

Methinks that church bells are meant to symbolize a fateful event…like their meeting or his death or the arrival of the big bad wolf at her door or the start of his quest.

By the time he clogs up the mousehole and unclogs his toilet, the time is 1:52 am (or 8:52 am in Seoul). He calls his staff, Choi YangJu in Seoul about the status of the AR game he wanted inspected, and he’s told that another half hour is needed.

At 2:21 am, he’s notified that he can start testing the game. All throughout the night till early morning, he plays Level 1 of the game. By 7:02 am, he’s on the phone with his private investigator to negotiate a deal with the kid SeJoo to buy his AR game.

Meanwhile, the kid in question hasn’t arrived yet at Hostal Bonita.

To me, it’s very interesting how we see the flowing of time in many different ways in this episode.

One, we get the fast-moving time with SeJoo. He gets on the midnight train and he disappears onboard by morning.

Two, we get the slow passage of time with JinWoo. He repeats the same task over and over again until he finally kills his AR opponent.

Three, we get the historical time when Jinwoo is magically transported to Alhambra’s past to duel a Nasrid warrior. He loses track of time here, literally.

Four, we get the present, in-the-moment time when Jinwoo is mocked by his colleagues for his incompetence and the waiter at the bar is baffled by his trips to the restroom.

Five, we get the normal time of the people going about their daily lives.

3. The stairs

@GB said I wrote something about staircase. I can’t remember what I wrote, and I don’t really want to revisit it.

To me, the staircase means several things.

One, it’s a foreshadowing. He jokes about his luggage carrying weapons, right? Little did he know that he’s going to see a lot of weapons in the next year.

It’s foreshadowing of the burden he’ll go through to climb up – or “level up” in gamer’s lingo – to reach his endgoal. Unfortunately, when he reaches the end of the game, he’ll find himself trapped in a bolthole. Just like his single room at the 6th floor isn’t the luxury room that he expected, but a literal dump, the final round of the AR game is neither the paradise nor the freedom he envisions.

Two, the staircase demonstrates his forbearance and determination. If that had been me, I would have settled for one of the rooms – even it’s a dormitory – in the lower floors. After all, it’s just for one night. But he wants what he wants and he’s willing to endure hardship for it.

Three, the staircase reminds of that iconic staircase scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

Just like in the movie, I think the staircase in this drama is a visual representation of Jinwoo’s life spiraling out of control because of his obsession with the “Memories of the Alhambra” (MotA) game.

4. Augmented reality

In this drama, Augmented Reality is nothing more than adding computer-generated graphics and other sensory elements to the real, physical environment. Jinwoo and his staffers are stunned that the computer graphics in the MotA game can actually integrate real-life surroundings into the game, e.g., the small car the warrior smashed.

To me, this is considered a breakthrough. Why? Because the perception of what is and isn’t real not only became more blurred, but it also became more manipulable and deceptive.

I think this drama is a cautionary tale of the hype of AR. In the end, we’re explicitly the real magic is not to be found in technology, but in faith…faith in people, faith in intrinsic goodness, faith in something bigger than us.

Faith provides the real augmentation or magnification or boost in everyday reality.

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

That’s it for me; I’ll have to work on “Alchemy of Souls 2” now. I’m just waiting for all the fuss to die down before I post.