Alice: Episode 2

by selena

The saying, “With great power comes great responsibility” comes to mind this hour as we learn more about our time travelers and what their plans are. With our hero being ever so logical, the information that he’s been gathering is going to force him to think bigger and realize that what may seem impossible at first could actually be the truth that he’s seeking.

 
EPISODE 2 RECAP

“Science is like a sharp tool, for if you play with it like a child would, you might cut yourself.” – Sir Arthur Eddington

The world comes to a halt around Jin-gyum but he barely even notices, eyes fixated on Tae-yi. Despite his mother’s warning to avoid anyone who looks like her, Jin- gyum can’t help but call out, “Mom.” A single tear hits the ground, setting off an energy wave that brings everything back in motion.

The truck knocks Jin- gyum down but he maintains eye contact with Tae-yi until he passes out. He regains consciousness at the hospital with Do-yeon by his side. She lectures him for disregarding traffic laws despite being a lieutenant.

Although seriously injured, Jin- gyum wastes no time at the hospital, ready to hunt for CCTV footage. He ignores Do-yeon’s pleas with him to get some rest, insisting that he saw Mom and needs to find her. Upset that the living comes second to the dead for him, Do-yeon storms off.

By the time he gets back to the plaza, night has fallen and there’s no trace of his mother’s lookalike. Tae-yi is elsewhere and with her is Eun-soo’s mother, Sun-hee.

The next day, the team debriefs the case and Sergeant Hong suggests that Eun-soo’s time traveller claims might be the result of experiencing something traumatic. Kids typically deny what happened to them or refuse to talk in these instances. Additionally, Eun-soo didn’t appear on any security footage at places she visited during her disappearance.

Jin- gyum leaves the meeting wordlessly when he gets an idea, frustrating his partner, Sergeant KIM DONG-HO (Lee Jae-yoon). Although Jin-gyum’s ranked higher, Dong-ho’s the hyung. As they leave the precinct, Dong-ho gets offended when Jin-gyum ignores his concerns. He places a hand on his shoulder to talk, but is promptly thrown onto the floor.

At a playground, Sun-hee steps aside to take a call, leaving the opportunity for another version of herself to appear before Eun-soo to say her final goodbyes. She tears up because there’s no Eun-soo where she’s returning to. Oh no!

Future-Sun-hee reminds Eun-soo to never go to the States. When Present-Sun-hee turns around, she grows concerned to see her daughter waving goodbye to another woman.

Oh his way to Eun-soo’s place, Jin- gyum passes by Future-Sun-hee and finds it odd that she doesn’t acknowledge him. He calls out to her so she pulls out a flashing red earpiece, transforming into her older appearance before turning to face him. The strange encounter prompts Jin- gyum to run the license plate of the van she gets into.

In private, Eun-soo explains to Jin- gyum that her mom made her promise not to study abroad in the States when she turns 17. That’s ten years down the line, but apparently she’ll get sick if she goes.

At the futuristic Alice building, Sun-hee looks forlornly at her daughter’s passport, where a teenaged Eun-soo smiles back at her. She sobs, recalling the devastating memory of weeping over her dead body at the morgue.

Jin-gyum visits a drone expert and the guy explains that there aren’t any drones without propellers, which is weird because the red one didn’t have propellers. Drones became popularized in 2015 – five years after Jin-gyum saw one hovering over his house. He whips out his phone to see the photo he took, but strangely, all he has is a picture of the sky.

Meanwhile, Do-yeon is dead set on exposing the famous news anchor’s “disgusting secret.” Her manager warns that publishing this article won’t change anything and will only hurt her. When she doesn’t back down, he offers the Eun-soo kidnapping story as an alternative. She gets a glint in her eyes and rushes off.

Captain Go gets confirmation that Sun-hee really was abroad, and when he returns to his desk he finds his “daughter-in-law” Do-yeon waiting for him. Hee, she gets embarrassed when he tells her to confess already. “Jin-gyum won’t be able to date any girl other than you, anyway.”

Pleased by the comment, Do-yeon gives “Father” a shoulder rub and asks, “Is the Hong Eun-soo kidnapping case giving you a hard time?” Captain Go puts up his defenses, knowing what she’s here for. He refuses to give any info (not that he has any to give) especially since she betrayed him once before.

Jin-gyum gets home to find Do-yeon already there, trying to gain access to his laptop. He recently set a password to prevent her from snooping around. Do-yeon’s already over their fight from yesterday, eager to learn more about the Eun-soo case but Jin-gyum says it’s off-limits.

She’s bummed that he’s out of beer and promises to leave after he answers three questions: Where was Eun-soo when she went missing? Does he have footage from the hotel where her mom stayed? And did Eun-soo see a drone? Jin-gyum’s interest is piqued and the pair relocate to her office.

Do-yeon shows him a file and shares that absurd crimes have been happening during the past year. The one commonality is that a drone is always witnessed at the scene. He tells Do-yeon about Eun-soo’s statement and that night, Eun-soo scratches her arm in her sleep – it’s covered in strange red dots.

At a hotel, a man we’ll come to know as Yang Hong-seob brutally beats a high schooler named Min-sung with a bat. The student begs for mercy, but Hong-seob’s out for revenge. He must be from the future because he claims to be Min-sung’s younger brother who used as a punching bag every day. With a smile, Hong-seob delivers the final blow with a hammer.

Someone types: “Chapter 1: The Door of Time Opens and the Hands of the Vindictive Become Stained with Blood.” Jin-gyum drives by and, seeing the mysterious red drone hovering outside the building, rushes inside to look for anything suspicious.

He discovers Min-sung’s bloody corpse and the rest of the team comes in to document the crime scene. Hong-seob blends in with the people crowding outside the room, grinning unrepentantly.

The security cameras for the hallway and elevators aren’t working despite having been inspected earlier in the week. Jin-gyum spots the van that he ran the license plate for on the parking lot’s security footage. He runs downstairs and meets Hong-seob there, who claims the van belongs to his tour guide.

When asked for his name and ID number, Hong-seob tauntingly lists off a number starting with “16,” which indicates he was born in 2016 and should be a child. Thinking Hong-seob is messing around, Jin-gyum smashes the man’s head into the car and Hong-seob mutters, “You’re dead when my guide comes.”

The guide is Min-hyuk. He rolls a device towards the pair and the smoke that’s emitted seems painful for Jin-gyum to breathe in. The lights shut off and Min-hyuk kicks the lieutenant down. Hong-seob adds in a few kicks of his own, but his guide drags him into the car and the pair drive off.

A car chase ensues and the drone follows, acting as eyes for the Alice control room where OH SHI-YOUNG (Hwang Seung-un) is calling the shots. Unable to shake Jin-gyum off his tail, Min-hyuk calls for help and the control room dispatches guides Seung-pyo and Hae-soo to back him up.

They enter a tunnel with Jin-gyum sandwiched in between the two cars. Jin-gyum attempts to overtake Min-hyuk, ramming into the side of his car. They’re neck and neck but Hae-soo launches a flying disk that disables the controls on Jin-gyum’s vehicle.

Barely avoiding incoming traffic, the lieutenant hops onto the hood of Min-hyuk’s car and pulls out his gun. However, he gets shaken off once they exit the tunnel and Team Alice has accomplished their mission.

The path to the Alice building is camouflaged with a force field that makes it look like a dead end. Wow, they have an entire fleet of the exact same vehicle with the same license plate. The place gives off major hotel vibes, and Min-hyuk escorts Hong-seob to his room.

Hong-seob is livid when Min-hyuk says they won’t be punishing Jin-gyum, who was merely performing his duty as a cop. In fact, it was Hong-seob who broke the time traveler rules first by committing murder.

He claims it was a (small) mistake, but Min-hyuk informs his client that he’ll be banned and fined. Hong-seob insits that the cop be punished and it’s clear that he feels superior to the people of the past. Grabbing him roughly, Min-hyuk says that Alice was created to heal past wounds. Everyone who works here does so with pride, so they aren’t here to cater to losers like him.

Min-hyuk then reports to Director GI CHEOL-AM (Kim Kyung-nam) that the screening process needs actionable change. They shouldn’t have accepted a problematic person like Hong-seob in the first place. Merely reporting the situation isn’t going to cut it because there are people who sacrificed a lot for this organization.

Cheol-am is aware that Min-hyuk’s referring to how he gave up Tae-yi for Alice. While it’s been 29 years for Tae-yi since the separation, it’s only been a year for Min-hyuk so why won’t he go look for her? It’s not a topic Min-hyuk’s eager to discuss, since he was told by Shi-young that Tae-yi’s happily married. Once alone, he recalls Tae-yi’s letter and is still very much affected by their parting.

Jin-gyum and Dong-ho attend Min-sung’s funeral to gather some information on the events of that night. The father grieves sorrowfully, but the mother doesn’t seem to care and taps away on her phone while answering their questions. When she gets called away, Dong-ho explains that she only married the father last year, and isn’t Min-sung’s biological mom.

When the mom walks over to a young boy calling him Hong-seob, Jin-gyum calls Captain Go, who confirms the kid’s ID number. It’s the same as the one the older Hong-seob had told him. He notices the severe bruises on the boy’s body, and the little Hong-seob tells him that Min-sung is the one who hurt him. “I’m happy he’s dead,” he chirps.

Cheol-am pays Shi-young a visit to follow up on Hong-seob’s expulsion from Alice. While things have been processed, Shi-young isn’t sure that it’s necessary to kick him out because it doesn’t look good on them if a client gets expelled. She can’t deny that it’s better than to go down for covering up a murder, though.

Seung-pyo (one of the guides who were called as backup) hands Hong-seob a Time Card, like the one Min-hyuk used to leave in 1992. Once he gets Seung-pyo to tell him where Jin-gyum works, Hong-seob knocks the guide out with a glass bottle and makes a run for it, taking one of their cars.

Do-yeon lets herself into Jin-gyum’s apartment, worried after hearing he was attacked. Jin-gyum didn’t see the need to tell her about it and she threatens to plant a bug on him if he continues to ignore her calls. His mind is filled with thoughts of the case so he leaves without acknowledging anything she said.

She scoffs, but grins to see that he re-stocked his fridge with alcohol. Aw, he totally did that just for her, since he doesn’t drink! Do-yeon gets the door when the doorbell rings, but it’s Hong-seob looking creepy as ever.

He knocks her out and calls Jin-gyum with her phone. “Did you meet the five-year-old me?” he asks. Jin-gyum heads back to his place and the moment the elevator doors open, Hong-seob comes swinging with a knife. The fight continues inside the elevator and Jin-gyum ends up on the floor, grabbing the knife by the blade to prevent being stabbed.

The killer is filled with resentment and claims that he can’t be beat because Jin-gyum will never be able to catch them. “Nothing is more fair and unfair than time.” When Hong-seob cackles that he killed Do-yeon, Jin-gyum knocks the criminal down and shoots him in the arm.

Uh oh, Hong-seob managed to make the emotionless man very angry. Jin-gyum seethes, “If you’re here to kill me, you should have known better. I don’t treat everyone like a human being.” He puts another bullet into Hong-seob’s arm and digs the barrel of his gun into the wound.

Hong-seob gives in and admits that he just knocked Do-yeon out, begging Jin-gyum to believe him when the gun moves to his temple. Jin-gyum doesn’t care who Hong-seob is or where he came from – he’s dead if Do-yeon has even the tiniest scratch on her. Handcuffing Hong-seob to a railing, Jin-gyum runs into his apartment and finds Do-yeon lying on the floor.

She’s weak but alive, so he tells Dong-ho to call an ambulance and that the suspect has been arrested. At the hospital, Do-yeon muses that she heard family of police officers can sometimes be threatened. Jin-gyum catches her smiling to herself, and she claims that she wouldn’t be his friend if she were scared of something like this.

After confirming that Jin-gyum’s hand is okay, Do-yeon asks why Hong-seob would say that he’s five years old. Jin-gyum dismisses it as nonsense. He later joins Dong-ho who’s keeping guard outside Hong-seob’s room – he’s unconscious and hooked to a bunch of machines.

Dong-ho figures that Jin-gyum went overboard with the shots because of Do-yeon, chuckling that he must like her. Jin-gyum denies it and claims that they’re just friends, bothered when Dong-ho laughs at his statement. Dong-ho hands over Hong-seob’s wallet, and Jin-gyum pulls out the Time Card.

While it doesn’t seem special to Dong-ho, Jin-gyum seems to know something. Min-hyuk arrives at the hospital just a second after Jin-gyum leaves, and begins the operation to save Hong-seob. He tosses the smoke grenade towards Dong-ho and shoots him with his fancy gun.

Jin-gyum casually enters Captain Go’s apartment, whose wife is especially happy about the visit. Aw, he used to live with them! Jin-gyum pulls out a box of his mother’s belongings from his old room, confirming that she owned the same metal card. He pockets both and after learning that Dong-ho was shot, runs back to the hospital to discover that Hong-seob is long gone.

Cheol-am reprimands Min-hyuk for needlessly shooting the officer. The guide just says that he made the best decision he could for Alice. Min-hyuk’s concerned to hear that the Time Card was likely taken by Jin-gyum, and Cheol-am reminds him that people from the past are the same as them, so he must take care of things quietly.

Min-hyuk holds an emergency meeting and Shi-young will send over everything they can dig up about Jin-gyum, while Hae-soo will bring Hong-seob back to the future.

The detectives visit Dong-ho at the hospital, and thankfully he’s doing relatively okay. He wasn’t able to see the man’s face, but his description of what happened leads Jin-gyum to believe it was the same guy he encountered at the hotel.

Sergeant Hong reports that none of the security cameras were recording, just like last time. Lieutenant Ha tells the team that Dong-ho wasn’t shot by a regular gun. When they hear that the bullet was oddly tiny, Jin-gyum and Captain Go both realize that it sounds all too familiar.

Police Chief Yoon urges Captain Go to quickly arrest the guy, since they should know his identity now that he’s been hospitalized. The problem is…his fingerprints aren’t in the database so they have no idea where he came from. Captain Go asks for a couple more days.

Captain Go revisits the case files of Tae-yi’s death, recalling how the coroner had informed him that the bullets were so small that you won’t be able to see them with your eyes. He calls Jin-gyum, and the pair take Dong-ho out for BBQ. Do-yeon joins them and compliments Dong-ho’s physique after Captain Go tells him he looks freaky with all his muscles, pfft.

Outside, Jin-gyum agrees with Captain Go’s hunch about Dong-ho being shot by the same gun that killed his mother. Although he has no evidence, Jin-gyum’s determined to catch the culprit. At home, he presses the button on Tae-yi’s old Time Card, which causes everything in his house to float, defying gravity. With a second click, everything returns to normal, but he’s unable to activate the card again.

Jin-gyum ends up passing the cards over to the forensics team, but they don’t find anything special about them, positive that they’re just normal cards. Meanwhile, Min-hyuk searches the entirety of Jin-gyum’s apartment, unable to find the Time Card. Seung-pyo reports that Jin-gyum is currently at a university, though he’s unsure why.

He’s there to look for a professor that can provide more insight, and walks into her lecture hall. The professor is in the middle of yelling at her students for not understanding the content that she’s teaching. It’s Tae-yi.

She spots Jin-gyum standing at the back of the lecture hall, growing emotional at the sight of her face. He wordlessly makes his way towards the front, confusing everyone in the room. She barks, “What are you doing?” but he doesn’t answer and instead, pulls her into a tight hug.

 
COMMENTS

I’m hooked! Joo-won is absolutely killing it as the man who has a hard time feeling emotions. It’s kind of funny watching him just brush off things that Dong-ho or Do-yeon say, knowing that he’s not doing it on purpose to be an asshole. He’s actually quite caring, and I’m finding his relationship with Do-yeon kind of sweet. She isn’t really deterred by his rejection just because she knows that’s how he is, and while it doesn’t seem like he likes her back at first glance, he’s quite attentive to her. It was so cute that he stocked up his fridge with beer just because she wanted some. That’s definitely a sign that she’s more than welcome at his place.

While the emotional moment of the previous episode was him grieving over Tae-yi’s death, this episode pushed him to the point of anger. When you have someone who doesn’t actually care about the feelings of most living beings and that person gets angry… that’s a pretty scary combination. As displayed during his fight with Hong-seob, he has zero hesitation giving you a good beating when you get on his wrong side. This means that besides caring about his mom, he also cares about Do-yeon. I would assume he bonded with Captain Go and his wife as well. It makes me feel better knowing that he was taken care of after losing his mother so abruptly like that. As for Tae-yi, I wonder what she’s doing teaching in 2020? She must be a part of Alice since she was seen with the Sun-hee from the future, but I thought she’d be a field agent like Min-hyuk rather than a professor at a university. If there’s a version of her here in 2020, then why hasn’t Min-hyuk sought her out? I suspect that Shi-young might be purposefully keeping them away, or spreading misinformation (like the fact that Tae-yi’s supposedly married) to keep Alice running smoothly.

It’s not immediately clear to me what the Alice building is, but it seems like a hotel of sorts where time travellers can stay. I’m not sure if the show will ever dive into the mechanics of the time travelling itself and while I don’t mind if it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty details, I find myself wondering about many things. For example, it seems that Alice is a fairly new organization that started in the year 2050, so most clients would be from that time. Min-hyuk himself is also from there, but he’s taking care of clients in the year 2020. Are there multiple Min-hyuks running around, escorting the different clients that have wounds to heal in 2020? Or is he specifically based in 2020 so that there’s only one of him in this timeline?

The concept of Alice providing an opportunity for people to heal their past wounds is really interesting. Typically with time travelling shows, the smallest action can create a ripple effect and drastically change the future, so interacting with people from the past is discouraged. It does sound like there are some time travelling laws in place, like “murder is not permitted under any circumstances,” but clearly there’s not a huge consequence for Hong-seob. If they want to keep everything under wraps, it seems that they’ll need to try harder because if Do-yeon was able to figure out a trend surrounding the weird crimes that keep popping up, it’s only a matter of time before time travelling is exposed to the people of 2020. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities that this show can bring, and I find that the storytelling is quite compelling so far!

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