Time travel is an everyday technology in the 2050 imagined by Alice, a 2020 Korean series that wraps science fiction, fantasy and romance around a son's long search for the truth about his mother.
What is Alice about?
The mechanism that makes the journeys possible is itself named Alice, and its future is in doubt: a rumour is spreading about a prophecy said to foretell the end of time travel. Two travellers, You Min-hyuk and Yoon Tae-yi, are sent back to 1992 to find out what that prophecy contains. While there, Tae-yi learns she is expecting a child and makes the choice to stay behind on her own. She takes a new name, Park Sun-young, and brings up a son, Park Jin-gyeom, a boy who has trouble feeling and showing emotion. In 2010 Sun-young is murdered. Ten years later Jin-gyeom, now a capable detective, is still hunting for whoever was responsible, and the trail leads him to a physics professor called Yoon Tae-yi, a woman with exactly his mother's face.
About the cast
Baek Soo-chan is the credited director. Kim Hee-seon and Joo Won head the cast list, followed by Kwak Si-yang, Choi Won-young, Lee Da-in, Yeon-woo and Bae Hae-sun. Because the story moves between 1992, 2010, the present of the investigation and the far-off 2050, the ensemble has to hold together characters who are seen at very different points in their lives.
Context & significance
Alice belongs to a strand of Korean television that sets a love story and a family story inside a science-fiction frame. The series uses its time machine less as a gadget than as a way of asking what a person owes to the people they leave behind, and the murder inquiry at its centre gives the fantasy a grounded, procedural spine. Three genres are listed for it, fantasy, romance and science fiction, and the premise needs all of them: the prophecy supplies the mystery, the mother and son supply the feeling, and the professor who resembles a dead woman supplies the question that keeps the plot moving. Episodes run to roughly an hour each.
Watching Alice on Ktime
Alice is available to stream on K-Time. Reading this page is open to everyone; to press play you sign in with a K-Time account. The service is built for Persian speakers around the world, with a Farsi interface that makes browsing international series as easy as finding Iranian ones.