Overlapping Timelines
We begin episode 8 of Kairos at the secluded villa with Hyun-Chae and Do-Kyun wondering how to deal with their problem. Seo-Jin awakens bloodstained and heartbroken as he realizes his entire world is coming crashing down. At the start of September, Hyun-Chae runs into an old classmate who reveals she dropped out of class. That’s obviously news to him though, as Seo-Jin didn’t know. When he stumbles home drunk later that evening, he asks her outright about her Father and business. Hyun-Chae tells him everything wasn’t a complete lie but their marriage most certainly was built on a whole stack of them. Meanwhile, Ae-Ri struggles to get through to Seo-Jin, whose phone is switched off. Back in October, Do-Kyun remains concerned and wants to take Seo-Jin to the hospital given he’s continuing to bleed through. Hyun-Chae meanwhile doesn’t want the uncertainty hanging over them. That uncertainty of course, has been carefully constructed by Hyun-Chae who – as we see from flashbacks – has been counting down the hours until she can drop the façade of playing a distraught mother mourning for her daughter. Ae-Ri is not ready to give up just yet though, as Gun-Wook decides to decipher the text messages sent between the two phones and figure out when everything started to go wrong. We’re up to September 5th now and there’s less than 48 hours until Da-Bin is captured. Time is very much against these guys. While Gun-Wook pieces together a time stamp of when the messages were sent and from where, Ae-Ri puts up missing person posters again while scouting out the venue from afar. Eventually the big day arrives and Soo-Jung happens to be posing as hired help inside the venue. Gun-Wook meanwhile is tailing Jin-Ho, sensing he’s the one responsible. Finally, Ae-Ri keeps a close watch on Da-Bin. The infamous smashed glass incident occurs just as before and Seo-Jin berates his daughter out in the lobby. While he does, Do-Kyun and Taek-Kyu move into position. The violin performance begins and Jin-Ho shows up at the building. Gun-Wook follows from afar as he watches the man enter a stairwell. Da-Bin leaves the recital and heads off but she’s stopped by Do-Kyun who distracts her long enough for Da-Bin to leave her line of sight. She scrambles downstairs, struggling to find Da-Bin but drops her earpiece on the escalator along the way. Because of this, she doesn’t hear Gun-Wook mention Jin-Ho arriving on the 3rd floor. He walks past Taek-kyu who receives a message from Do-Kyun confirming that Ae-Ri has shown up. Ae-Ri however is hot on the heels of Da-Bin and rushes up to Seo-Jin’s daughter, managing to save her just as Jin-Ho looks set to make his move. Suddenly, time changes and just like that, everything in October fades away too. Seo-Jin’s life is saved but Ae-Ri is taken and arrested by police for taking Da-Bin. They believe she’s the one who intended to kidnap her after all. Even worse, the missing person poster she left on Seo-Jin’s door earlier that day doesn’t look good either. The police find the messages on Ae-Ri’s phone but that number has only been active for a day. They believe Ae-Ri staged all the messages herself and things certainly do not look good for her. Some things don’t change though and Taek-Kyu decides to go after Jin-Ho and stop him. Do-Kyun however, believes they should be focusing on Ae-Ri instead. She’s in serious trouble too, especially given she’s going to be locked up for this. Everything now seems to fall on Gun-Wook who decides to try and phone Seo-Jin during the scheduled time of 10.33. It’s no good though and right now the future is under jeopardy and unknown, especially after Da-Bin rocking up absolutely fine. Seo-Jin shows up at the police station and speaks to Ae-Ri, who’s desperate to try and save her own skin. However, she’s also desperate to find Song-Ja too. When Seo-Jin sees the text messages they sent one another, he scoffs at the notion and tells her she disgusts him. He tells the police to properly make her pay for everything and walks away. When Seo-Jin leaves, fragments of the parallel future where Da-Bin was kidnapped come back to him – especially upon seeing Detective Park and walking in the main atrium at work. Could this be him getting his memories back from what happened in the future? Now that time is overlapping, it seems to be the case. Anyway, Gun-Wook and Soo-Jung head inside the prison and speak to Ae-Ri, convincing her to stay strong as they’re going to get a lawyer involved. Watching on the news, Song-Ja notices that her daughter has been taken in for questioning and hurries out from the shop she’s working in. However, Soo-Jung receives a call from Song-Ja where she learns that Ae-Ri is in serious trouble. Meanwhile, Hyun-Chae and Do-Kyun continue to hang out, with the latter promising to put their plan into place sooner rather than later. Hyun-Chae receives a call later that day from the burned man who’s presumably her Father. She promises to kill him but he’s got enough dirt on her to ruin her life. Hyun-Chae rings Seo-Jin soon after and tells him to pick up Da-Bin on the way home. Only, when he steps outside for a second Da-Bin has completely gone from her seat at the table. It’s Deja vu all over again as a single tracking shot sees Seo-Jin fade in and out of shot as he desperately tries to find his daughter. This series of actions, of course, bring back more flashes from the past. Thankfully, he finds her and it turns out she was just by the water fountain. Ae-Ri manages to get hold of a phone courtesy of one of the officers showing some kindness. Unfortunately when she rings Seo-Jin, she fails to connect and she breaks down crying. As she curses the heavens and screams down the phone receiver, the officer restrains her and takes the phone back. Meanwhile, Do-Kyung visits Jin-Ho and tells him the plan has been delayed for now. He mentions Song-Ja and it turns out Taek-Kyu didn’t actually tell him about this. As we soon see, these two aren’t exactly on the same page. Seo-Jin agrees to visit Gun-Wook who tries his best to convince him to see reason. He’s having none of it though and refuses to listen. On his way out the door, he receives a call from the chairman telling him he should get started on the Taejung New Town Project. This, of course, happens to have a lot of meaning for him given he survived the previous incident at Taejung. Later that night, Seo-Jin drops the charges at 10.33pm and phones Ae-Ri just as she leaves the police station. She vows it’ll be the last call they have together but suddenly she stops in her tracks. Choking and struggling to breathe, a blood-stained Seo-Jin pleads with her for help. As the camera pans out, we see that both Da-Bin and Hyun-Chae are in the car too and it looks like a car accident. What on earth happened?
The Episode Review
With time now being rewritten, the interesting overlapping technique of Seo-Jin getting some of his memories back from his parallel future seems to hint that eventually everything is going to catch up to him. There’s a new mystery that’s about to grip the second half of this drama now too and interestingly I think a lot of this stems from Hyun Chae’s father. We already know that Hyun Chae trapped him in a fire after a torrid childhood but clearly there’s more going on here. And what of Do-Kyun and Taek-Kyu? What we originally thought was a tight bond between the two seems to hint now that actually they’re not really on the same page. Taek-Kyu seems to be driven by money, especially last episode when he asked about the contract and being paid. However, he also acted independently with Song-Ja, which Do-Kyun didn’t know about so we could see this fractured alliance implode soon. It also remains to be seen exactly why Hyun-Chae is doing all this and why she hates Seo-Jin so much. While their marriage has clearly been built on a stack of lies, it still doesn’t excuse her behaviour of upending his life and using Da-Bin as a weapon. Still, we’ll have to wait and see what happens next week but this sci-fi thriller is certainly turning into quite the intriguing dark horse of the year.
