This article contains spoilers.
1.5/5 stars
Time-travel stories are a double-edged sword. They offer limitless juicy narrative possibilities that can be retroactively rejigged. But because anything can happen and then be changed, keeping the stakes raised for the audience becomes a challenge.
Brainy sci-fi, such as the American indie film Primer, explores the dizzying theories of time paradoxes, while something less demanding, like Avengers: Endgame, will use it for a narrative do-over. Sci-fi-action-romance K-drama Sisyphus: The Myth bets the house on time travel and it’s a gamble that doesn’t even remotely pay off.
The time-travel element is there but, at first, it’s mostly an excuse for some fun set pieces. Yet as the show entered its back half and introduced the main villain, Sigma (Kim Byung-chul), it became more serious about its time-hopping. The show’s weaknesses quickly became very apparent as well.
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Time-travel stories get knotty very quickly, so the rules need to be simple and adhered to rigidly. The writers of Sisyphus have added different rules throughout, only to consistently break them, as well as new technologies or magical drugs as they chased a high that kept getting further out of their reach.
There have not been many time-travel tales in Korean film and TV, but wrinkle-in-time stories, in which characters from two different timelines coexist, come up time and again. Last year’s Netflix thriller The Call, also starring Park Shin-hye, is one; another is the ace K-drama murder procedural Signal.Those stories benefit from the novelty of a quasi-time-travel device, but they largely exist in the forgiving realms of fantasy, while full-blown time travel operates in the much stricter realm of sci-fi.
Sisyphus tries to have it both ways, by bending time-travel concepts to suit its dramatic aims and ultimately a romantic pairing that quickly floundered when it shifted from the cute antagonistic phase to the ‘oh, we like each other’ realisation.
Tae-sool, the aloof, unflappable genius, and Seo-hae, the cute but fierce time-travelling warrior, were always destined to be an item, but the lack of chemistry between Cho and Park and the abysmal writing underpinning their relationship made theirs one of the least convincing romantic pairings of recent memory.
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Leaving aside time travel and romance, what else did the show have to offer? The big draw early on was its action set pieces. The plane crash sequence in the first episode was a brash, outrageous and tongue-in-cheek highlight. It was also the peak for a show that steadily went downhill from there.
There were other solid set pieces early on, and seeing Park in action mode was a delight. The manifold goons of the nefarious control centre featured prominently, but after a while these sequences became repetitive. Tae-sool’s on-the-spot science to get out of close scrapes never held up to scrutiny, but the gimmicks became less and less inventive, before dying off completely.
In fact, the action scenes themselves tapered off. Several episodes towards the end of the show featured no set pieces at all and the control centre disappeared completely, with several major characters not featuring in the finale in any way, shape of form.
Wherever the show’s problems manifested themselves, the source of the trouble was a common one: the writing. The show ticks several of the boxes for what a K-drama is supposed to do, but each element felt shoehorned in regardless of whether it felt true for the characters. Most of the time, it didn’t even make sense.
For example, illegal future immigrant broker Park Hyeong-do (Sung Dong-il) gets a family backstory very late in the game that doesn’t fit at all into his character. What’s more, he is confronted with a shocking reveal in the final episode – his daughter was with him all the time – that falls flat on its face.
Then there is the coda, which sees Tae-sool back in the same first class airplane cabin where we first met him. Beside him is Seo-hae, all is well and the world is safe. This tacked-on and despicably lazy happy ending is an impossibility given what happened in the previous few scenes.
It would count as a brutal betrayal if the show hadn’t already long abandoned common sense.
Sisyphus: The Myth is streaming on Netflix.
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