'Alice' Episode 2 packed with reveals as Jin-gyeom investigates time travelers' connection to mother's death
'Alice' Episode 2 starts with a warning about how science is a weapon that is sharp and can cut through lives as knives can cut through butter. In reference to 'Alice', the science that Tai-yi is speaking of is the ability of people to travel through time. The moment Jin-gyeom met Tai-yi, who looks exactly like his mother, shocked him enough to get completely entranced, and even when time freezes, all that he can think of is getting just a bit closer to the woman who looks like his mother.
The fact that Jin-gyeom is right and in a way Tai-yi is a version of his mother is something that Jin-gyeom will have to learn through investigation. Before he can do this, however, he meets with an accident and ends up with a fractured rib. Despite this, he wants to continue looking into the woman who appeared in front of him and this upsets Do-yeon. So much so, she ends up lashing out at him and even tells him to not get in touch with her for a while. She believes that Jin-gyeom is obsessing over a dead person and is unable to convince him to accept his mother's death.
Jin-gyeom, however, doesn't pay heed to her anger and instead continues to work on the kidnapping case of Eun-soo, the little girl who claimed that her mother traveled through time to meet her and spend time with her. Jin-gyeom also sees the weird drone appear near Eun-soo's residence when they investigate her kidnapping. This is the same drone that has appeared on the day that his mother was shot dead. So Jin-gyeom sees a connection and digs further into the case.
Turns out, Eun-soo's mother had traveled from the future to the past to tell her daughter not to leave to the US to study when she turns 17 because that causes her death. Upon hearing Eun-soo's statement in the present, the only one to believe her is Jin-gyeom because he had registered something strange years ago in connection to his mother's death and that has left him open-minded to theories and speculations that other detectives shut down as results of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In this vein, Jin-gyeom continues the investigation. In the meantime, Do-yeon is assigned the kidnapping case by her senior at work to report on. Despite lashing out at Jin-gyeom earlier in the day, she decides to reach out to him for help when her other sources in the police don't help her. Turns out she has been researching the strange drone too and she has unearthed weird cases similar to the kidnapping case of Eun-soo that have occurred over the past year.
She says the one common denominator between all of these cases is the appearance of this strangely designed drone. At this time, another time traveler appears to exact revenge from his brother from the future for being abusive to his little brother. Jin-gyeom also ends up taking lead on this case and when he notices that a car that appeared around Eun-soo also appeared near this crime scene, he follows the breadcrumbs and even finds the perpetrator. However, before he could take any action, another person from the future appears and stops Jin-gyeom.
This is none other than Min-hyuk, who used to be Jin-gyeom's mother's lover. Of course, she left him the moment she learned she was pregnant to avoid aborting her baby or resulting in further contact with radioactive waves. With no awareness of the connection between the two, they get involved in a risky car chase. Min-hyuk manages to get Jin-gyeom off his back, but he is unhappy about having helped a psychopath from the future commit murder.
Turns out project Alice has grown into a project that helps people from the future heal wounds from their past. That was also why they helped Eun-soo's mother deliver a message to her daughter. However, their actions are creating new realities and the timeline is being disturbed in a way that people belonging to the project can never imagine. With the murder of Hong-seob's brother, he has changed his own past, thereby creating a new future. How Alice would compensate for this is something that makes us inquisitive about the science behind the basis of the show.
Also, Mr. Oh might very well be a villain because this person has lied to Min-hyuk and said that Tai-yi is currently happily married. For Min-hyuk it had just been a year since he separated from Tai-yi while in reality, it has been two decades. So why would Mr. Oh lie to Min-hyuk and why was Alice involved in Jin-gyeom's murder is just a few of the questions that come to our mind.
So Hong-seob, who had traveled from the future tries to punish Jin-gyeom for holding him responsible for committing a crime in the present. Instead, he ends up getting shot by Jin-gyeom for holding Do-yeon hostage. If you wonder how project Alice will clean up this mess that their client has created, we see Min-hyuk come into the hospital and wipe the evidence clean and taking Hong-seob away from the clutches of the cops. However, before he could do so, Jin-gyeom found what we would imagine is the key to travel through time -- what Project Alice refers to as Time Card -- on Hong-seob.
He remembers seeing something similar in his mother's belongings and that is how Jin-gyeom is able to make the connection between his mother and the time travelers. To investigate the card, Jin-gyeom attempts to get the help of a physicist who turns out to be Tai-yi. The episode ends with Jin-gyeom hugging her, assuming that she is his mother.
Now, this has us wondering if Tai-yi herself is not the little girl who had watched her father die in the past. If we recall, the Tai-yi from the future had tried her best to keep the little girl out of harm's way. In that case, the Tai-yi that Jin-gyeom has met is still not a time traveler. It is possibly this reason why Jin-gyeom's mother had told him to stay away from her if she ever met her again in the future. This is also the only way the timeline of Tai-yi's can be explained. So if this is the case, how much longer before Jin-gyeom figures all of this out?
'Alice' airs on SBS on Fridays and Saturdays at 10 pm KST.