This is the worst type of show to suffer preemptions, because how are we to survive this suspense with our nerves intact?! But once again, Kairos serves up an intense, satisfying hour of revelations and barely averted disaster. As one of our protagonists desperately tries to find our heroine’s mother before the worst can happen, and our heroine does her best to decode what clues she has with only a blurry outline of the changing future.
EPISODE 6 WEECAP
Seo-jin doesn’t immediately recognize the dead body as Song-ja, Ae-ri’s mother, and he loses Taek-kyu, who’s caught on to being followed. (How many people has this evil assistant killed now?) Taek-kyu lies low, and waits for Do-kyun’s orders. We see now how Do-kyun and Hyun-chae planned this whole thing out: figuring out that Kim Jin-ho’s weak spot is his surviving daughter, and using her as leverage to rope him into their plan.
Seo-jin can’t bring himself to tell Ae-ri it was her mother’s body he saw, but furiously tracks Song-ja’s movements. Ae-ri, not knowing Hyun-chae is watching her, visits Da-bin while she plays (to put a tracker on her teddy?).
Ae-ri figures out that Taek-kyu is the one who sent her mother 100 million won. She connects the dots about Song-ja’s murder when Seo-jin warns her to find her mother by Sept. 26, and devastated and desperate, travels to where she knows Song-ja will be in two weeks.
Kim Jin-ho decides he can’t trust Do-kyun after all and contacts Seo-jin to come see him—only for him to be pushed off a building by Taek-kyu before they can meet.
The police find Seo-jin’s tie pin in Song-ja’s mouth, and track his phone signal at the murder scene, so they run him to ground and arrest him.
Ae-ri runs into her mother.
In Seo-jin’s timeline, the police dissolve, Infinity War-style, and Seo-jin is alone and free.
This episode once again has our main characters desperate to save the life of someone close to them, and it struck me that this time it may feel even more personal to Seo-jin, because while of course he wants to save her life, he viscerally knows the pain of losing his closest loved ones. They’re also becoming closer as the days pass. The fact that Seo-jin survived the accident that killed Ae-ri’s father—after a horrifying 31 days, how is that even possible?—has given her hope to see the light at the end of the “dark tunnel” she finds herself in. They’ve become true partners by this point.
It was chilling to see Do-kyun and Hyun-chae smilingly plan to fake Da-bin’s death and forge her DNA by stealing and mutilating an orphan’s body, as though they’re planning a vacation. And the flashback of Hyun-chae killing her alcoholic dad proves what we’ve already suspected, that there’s something seriously misaligned about her moral compass, whether because of childhood abuse or some other reason.
She claims to both Da-bin and Do-kyun that it’s her daughter’s happiness that will make her happy, but I’d bet the truth is in her murmured desire to escape her current identity. It’s hard to tell if she loves these two, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she discards Do-kyun once they all escape the country.
While the protagonists are still desperately trying to prevent murder every week, we did get some great forward movement in this episode that clarifies a few questions about who is behind all this, and how they managed to kidnap Da-bin and fool the police. (Although I’m still convinced there are other accomplices we don’t know about.) I’m very glad Seo-jin found a connection between Taek-kyu and Do-kyun. And poor Ae-ri finally found Mom, what a relief! And saved Seo-jin at the same time. I could watch these two saving each other over and over again for the next six episodes and not get tired of it.
But the question I’m left with at the end of this episode is Why? Couldn’t Hyun-chae have just gotten a divorce? Why go to these extreme lengths to destroy Seo-jin? At this point they’ve bumped off his wife and daughter, framed him for using illegal materials, pinned a murder on him, and now it seems Do-kyun is stealing his project at work. It seems like overkill (no pun intended). The man already suffers from PTSD so severe he can’t sleep. There has to be something we don’t know yet in Seo-jin’s past that explains all this.
I wonder if Kim Jin-ho was also saved in this new future after Ae-ri met her mother, or if he’s still dead. I hope he’s alive, because Seo-jin is in grave need of some help in his own time. All I know is, there had better not be any more sports-related preemptions, because getting one episode per week is killing me slowly. These cliffhangers are bad for my health!