Time travel is a mess. Seriously. Most shows try to make it feel like a clean, mathematical equation, but the Alice South Korean TV series decided to take the chaotic route instead. It’s a 2020 SBS drama that basically asks: "What if you met your dead mother, but she was younger than you, and also a physics genius?"
It's wild.
If you haven't seen it, the plot centers on Park Jin-gyeom, played by Joo Won. He's a detective who literally cannot feel emotions. Like, at all. This condition, called alexithymia, makes him a great cop because he doesn't get rattled, but it makes his personal life a total desert. Then things get weird. He starts chasing down "time travelers" who are using a hotel called Alice to hop back into the past. The kicker? He runs into a woman who looks exactly like his murdered mother.
The Paradox of Alice and Why It Breaks Your Brain
The show leans heavily into the "Bootstrap Paradox" and the "Grandfather Paradox," though it plays fast and loose with the rules. At the heart of the Alice South Korean TV series is the concept that time isn't a straight line. It’s more like a tangled ball of yarn.
Kim Hee-sun pulls double duty here. She plays Park Sun-young (the mom) and Yoon Tae-yi (the physicist). It’s not a spoiler to say that watching a man in his 30s try to protect a woman in her 20s who looks like his mother is... uncomfortable. The show leans into that discomfort. It forces you to question the nature of identity. Is Tae-yi the same person as Sun-young? Biologically, yes. Mentally? Not even close.
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Most sci-fi fans complain about the "prophecy" trope. You know the one—a book or a person predicts the end of the world, and everyone spends sixteen episodes trying to stop it. Alice uses "The Book of Prophecy" as a central MacGuffin. It’s a bit cliché, honestly. But the way the characters react to it feels human. They aren't just trying to save the world; they're trying to save their specific, messy families.
Joo Won and the Art of Acting Without Emotions
Let's talk about Joo Won. Playing a character with no emotions is a trap for most actors. Usually, they just end up looking bored. But in the Alice South Korean TV series, Joo Won uses his eyes to do the heavy lifting. You can see the gears turning. When he encounters the time-traveling tech for the first time—cars flying through the air, drones that shouldn't exist—his lack of a "shock" response makes the scene feel even more eerie for the audience.
The production value was massive for this. SBS didn't skimp. The visual effects for the "time ripples" and the futuristic tech inside the Alice headquarters actually hold up, even years later. It’s got that high-gloss, cinematic K-drama sheen, but the underlying story is gritty. It feels more like Minority Report than Crash Landing on You.
What People Actually Get Wrong About the Ending
People hated the ending. Or, at least, a very vocal part of the internet did.
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The biggest misconception is that the ending didn't make sense. It did; it was just incredibly bleak and then suddenly hopeful in a way that felt unearned to some. In the Alice South Korean TV series, the writers decided to go with the "reset" route. Without giving away every single beat, the show suggests that the only way to stop the cycle of violence is to erase the cause of the time travel entirely.
This creates a massive logic hole. If time travel never existed, how did the protagonist ever become the person he is? This is where the show shifts from hard sci-fi to "emotional sci-fi." It cares more about the "feeling" of a mother-son bond than the physics of a closed timelike curve. If you’re a stickler for Christopher Nolan-level consistency, you’re going to have a headache by episode 14.
Why You Should Still Care About This Show in 2026
We’re currently seeing a massive surge in "multiverse" and "time loop" media. From Marvel to indie hits, everyone is obsessed with "what if." The Alice South Korean TV series was ahead of the curve in how it blended high-concept physics with the "makjang" (over-the-top) drama style Korea is famous for.
It explores the idea of "Apathy vs. Empathy." Jin-gyeom starts the series unable to feel. By the end, he has felt so much loss across multiple timelines that he’s practically vibrating with grief. That’s a hell of a character arc.
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- The Cinematography: Use of color is huge. The past is warm, golden, and nostalgic. The future—and the Alice hotel—is cold, blue, and sterile.
- The Physics: They actually brought in consultants to talk about wormholes. They didn't always listen to them, but the effort was there.
- The Supporting Cast: Kwak Si-yang as Yoo Min-hyuk is the unsung hero. His role as the "enforcer" from the future who realizes he's destroying his own family is heartbreaking.
How to Watch and What to Look For
If you’re going to dive in, don't binge it too fast. Your brain needs time to process the "who is when" of it all. Pay attention to the scars. A major plot point involves physical marks that shouldn't exist, which serve as the only reliable way to track which version of a character you're looking at.
The Alice South Korean TV series isn't perfect. The pacing stutters in the middle, and the "prophecy" stuff gets a bit heavy-handed. But as a piece of speculative fiction, it's bold. It doesn't play it safe. It’s a story about the lengths a parent will go to for a child, and the lengths a child will go to for a ghost.
Actionable Insights for Sci-Fi Fans
- Watch for the "cards": The time travel passes in the show are called "Alice Cards." Their design and the way they are used are actually based on early 2000s computing concepts.
- Track the "Timeline Reset": If you get lost, look at the character's clothing. The costume department used specific palettes to indicate which "iteration" of the timeline the scene belongs to.
- Compare with Sisyphus: The Myth: If you liked Alice, you'll see a lot of similar DNA in Sisyphus, but Alice handles the personal stakes much more effectively.
- Focus on the mother-son dynamic: Ignore the sci-fi for a second. At its core, this is a Greek tragedy set in a world of quantum physics.
The real takeaway from Alice is that time travel is never about the technology. It’s always about regret. Every traveler in the show is trying to fix a mistake, but they end up creating ten more. It’s a cautionary tale wrapped in a police procedural, and honestly, we need more shows that are this ambitious, even if they occasionally trip over their own shoelaces.
To get the most out of your viewing, start by mapping out the three primary versions of Yoon Tae-yi. Understanding her transition from the 1992 version to the 2020 version is the key to unlocking why the protagonist is so obsessed with her. Once you nail down the timeline of the "Book of Prophecy's" first page, the rest of the chaotic ending actually starts to fall into place.