'Alice' Episode 3: As Tai-yi's origin time and her son's present clash, Jin-gyeom continues to seek truth
'Alice' Episode 3 begins where we left Jin-gyeom (Joo Won). It sees the police detective walk towards professor Yoon Tae-yi (Kim Hee-seon) and hug her with no word about why or who he is. Sure, this is a result of Jin-gyeom's shock at seeing someone who looks exactly like his mother. However, Tai-yi is shocked by his show of affection and the fact that a stranger would act like this in front of her students. So she tries to call the cops on him only to learn that the man himself is a police detective. It is after the initial shock wears off that the man collects himself and asks Tai-yi relevant questions.
Is she a time traveler? Does she believe in the concept of turning into reality? Who is she and is she not 50 years old? This line of questioning confuses Tai-yi, especially when she is asked if she was not born in 1968 and if she doesn't have a son. She is a young physics professor and the reason why Jin-gyeom had originally attempted to make contact was to understand further about the timecard. He hadn't expected to see his mother in the professor and lose track of what he had originally intended to do.
Then Jin-gyeom begins to attempt to understand the situation that he is in, and he goes back to the start. The case of Eun-ha's kidnapping. Just as he beings to reinvestigate the case, Eun-ha's mother from the future tries to replace her mother from the present to ensure that her daughter is a lot safer. In this attempt, she kills her present self and replaces her past version. However, the body of the dead woman surfaces, resulting in an investigation. The cops are extremely confused though since they see that Eun-ha's mother is home. Her fingerprints and everything else about her identity matches. Considering how the same was true for the lifeless body as well, this case is going nowhere. However, having seen how the time card worked, Jin-gyeom has a theory and that is time traveling.
However, before he could investigate the time card that he took from the killer that he had caught the last episode, Min-hyuk's team arrives to get the card from him. Initially, they just ask him to hand the card over. However, he refuses. Then the team attacks him with their futuristic technology and this is followed by Min-hyuk arriving on time to snatch the time card that Jin-gyeom had on him. It is also at this time that Jin-gyeom learns the card is called a time card and could be used to travel through time.
The more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that everything he has experienced must be a result of time traveling. So he returns to Tai-yi and this time, he gives her the time card that his mother had left behind to investigate. Initially, Tai-yi doesn't believe him and the two end up getting drunk instead. However, the next day, when she keeps the time card on her phone by mistake, she watches a disturbance take place. This pushes her to take a closer look at the card in a lab.
In the meantime, Jin-gyeom's best friend Do-yeon sees Tai-yi when she arrives to pick a very drunk friend up. She understands why Jin-gyeom is so stuck on Tai-yi but what she doesn't understand is why her friend is reticent in accepting that Tai-yi is his mother's look-alike. This even leads to an argument between the two of them, but Jin-gyeom seems convinced more than ever about time traveling.
At this point, certain things become clear. The first is the fact that physics teacher Tai-yi doesn't know about her son because this is her origin time. Meaning, at this point in time in her life, Tai-yi hasn't begun traveling through time and neither has she actively involved herself in researching the same. It is much later that she joins team Alice and begins time traveling and it is her future self that travels to the past to take care of a mission when she learned about her pregnancy and decided to stay back. Now, we have to see how Jin-gyeom and his mother figure out the mystery behind team Alice.
'Alice' airs on SBS on Fridays and Saturdays at 10 pm KST.