Early Access: Sisyphus E1 (Patreon)

E1. Woah. At the end of this episode, I still don't know what's going on, really, but I am properly intrigued, and quite hooked. Tell me moar, Show!

I went into this relatively blind, as in, I didn't really know what to expect except what I'd gathered from the trailers; that Park Shin Hye's character is some kind of time-traveling badass warrior, and she meets Jo Seung Woo's character, who seems to be from a different timeline than she. Now that I've finished Show's pilot episode, I feel like I don't know much more than what I knew going in, ha.

BUT - and this is pretty huge - Show sucked me in within its first few minutes, with the emotional scene between Park Shin Hye's character Seo Hae and her dad, as she's getting ready to leave her timeline. That pain of impending but unavoidable separation is so universally affecting, and Park Shin Hye sells it well, with her big doe eyes and her well-honed crying skills. Even though this was my first time setting eyes on these characters, I already bought into their difficult situation which I'm not clear on the details of, but which is clearly forcing them to make a very painful and potentially dangerous decision. Well done, Show.

I find it interesting that Show doesn't reveal the actual year of each timeline; I'm left guessing as to what year Seo Hae comes from, and what year she lands in, when she goes back in time. I find that this makes everything feel extra vague, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I feel like it does add to the sense of mystery that Show is serving up. And, as Seo Hae lands in her new time location, I feel like it adds to my sense of disorientation in a way that perhaps helps me to empathize with Seo Hae's disorientation too. I'm sure Show will fill in those blanks as we go, but for a start, this was a very interesting choice, to be sure.

When Seo Hae lands in her new time location, she does appear to follow her father's instructions, so urgently reiterated before her departure, in that she does get up and start running right away. But it isn't long before it becomes clear that she isn't necessarily going to follow those instructions so closely; that she might have other ideas, and those ideas most likely have to do with saving her mom. I mean, for a start, instead of pretending to be a mute when she's caught by someone, like her father had insisted on, she immediately asks for food. Heh.

Also, by the end of the episode, we realize that she's actually hoping to change the course of history, pretty much, because instead of avoiding Jo Seung Woo's character Tae Sul at all costs, she actually seeks him out and tries to leave him with crucial information that would prevent him from taking some key steps.

I am really curious to see more of Seo Hae and learn more about what she's about, and her plans to save the world.

At the same time, I find Tae Sul intriguing too. He seems to be such a bundle of contradictions.

On the one hand, he projects the type of casual, devil-may-care sort of confidence that makes him feel almost unreal, like when he's struggling to fix the plane while it's on its way to crashing. Even with very little time on the clock, he starts his conversation on the phone with Manager Kim in such a casual, everyday sort of manner, where most other people would be freaking out and imploring the other person to call for help. On top of that, he actually succeeds in pulling everything together and enabling the co-pilot to safely land the plane, thus saving everyone on board. That's some superhero level of offhanded badassery.

On the other hand, there's a deep sense of pathos about him, as we learn that he regularly hallucinates that his dead older brother is around him, talking to him, and he's deeply torn up and traumatized by the fact that he hadn't been kind to his older brother, the last time they'd seen each other, before his death. The fact that he's desperately dependent on medication just to get through each day, really undercuts his surface flippancy, and makes him much more sympathetic than I'd first imagined.

Above all, I'm curious to learn more about all this business about the Control Bureau (who seem much more menacing than their pedestrian name might first suggest), and what this business about the suitcase is. How is it possible that the person who appears on the blackbox recording, smashing into the plane mid-flight, could possibly be Tae Sul's dead older brother? Did Hyung not die? After all, the body had been too mutilated for Tae Sul to identify him? But if Hyung had come flying through the air with one of those suitcases, it means that he came from the future? Did he travel to the future and then come back, or did he simply survive that accident (unlike what Tae Sul's been led to believe), only to come back, and what we see is his older self? SO MANY QUESTIONS. And I'm really looking forward to how Show plans to answer them all.