“Kairos” (카이로스)

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
December 26, 2020

Kim Seo-Jin (played by Shin Sung-Rok)
Han Ae-Ri (played by Lee Se-Young)
Seo Do-Gyun (played by Ahn Bo-Hyun)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

In ancient Greek, time is referred to by two words: chronos for chronological time, and kairos for opportune time. (Ancient Greek experts: If I have this wrong, please advise and I will revise!) “Kairos” refers to the latter.

The series starts off promising and is reminiscent of the best elements of “Signal.” But where the latter kept the suspense going until the end, “Kairos” fizzles out midway, with redundant story arcs and some characters that are not only irredeemable, but highly unlikeable. And I’m not talking just about the villains.

Still, I watched it all and enjoyed it for the most part, thanks to some strong acting by the leads.

Seo-Jin is a wealthy upper management employee at Yujung Construction. He has a beautiful, classical musician wife, Hyun-Chae (Nam Gyu-ri), and a darling little daughter.

Ae-Ri lives with her sickly mother. Her father was killed in a construction accident run by Yujung, the same company that had employed Seo-Jin’s father, who had also died shortly after the accident. Her mother knows more about the accident than she’s willing to tell her daughter. And there are many frustrating episodes dedicated to the mother running away for Ae-Ri’s benefit, Ae-Ri running around trying to find her and Seo-Jin proving to be helpful … from the future.

That’s right. There’s a time travel element. At precisely 10:33 p.m. every night, Seo-Jin and Ae-Ri are able to communicate, with him one month in the future knowing what will happen in her timeline 31 days behind.

Their trust is solidified when Ae-Ri helps Seo-Jin save his daughter, who has been kidnapped. And let me tell you: I’m usually pretty good at guessing who the perpetrators are, but I didn’t see this coming.

Shoutout to Kang Seung-Yoon — who was so good in “Prison Playbook” — playing Gun-Wook, Ae-Ri’s friend. He would love to pursue a romantic relationship with her, but she doesn’t think of him that way. And congrats to Ahn Bo-Hyun, who showed many sides as he portrayed Seo-Jin’s ambitious assistant.

One thing I could’ve done without was the shaky handheld camerawork occasionally utilized. I get that it was used to offer a different perspective (i.e. the view felt by a terrorized victim), but it was annoying.

There were several characters I just wanted to disappear, including Ae-Ri’s mother. She was written to be sympathetic, but I found her irritating more often than not, because of her lack of foresight. Wanting to protect your child doesn’t matter much when you have no feasible plan to follow through on it,  other than to throw yourself into harm’s way, which does nothing to save your child.

And there are several villains who are given too many chances to escape and continue causing havoc. I mean, really?

Airdates: Sixteen 70-minute episodes aired on MBC from October  26 to December 22, 2020.

Spoiler Alert: OK, it turns out that Do-Gyun and Hyun-Chae had dated prior to her marriage. She didn’t want to date a poor man and when she had the opportunity to date Seo-Jin, she took it. Her backstory is that when she was a little girl, she set her alcoholic and abusive father on fire. She was adopted by a wealthy couple, who eventually went bankrupt. But raised and educated as a rich girl, she was able to keep up the pretense, even hiding her past from her husband. But, surprise, her biological father never died and has been blackmailing her about revealing her true identity. Honestly, I thought, “Who cares?” But it seemed like she not only wanted to hide her indigent roots from everyone, but also the fact that she had been adopted, because adoptees are still viewed as less than.

In the final episode, the corrupt head of Yujung Construction says as much, saying he should never have taken Seo-Jin under his wings after his father died, because no good can come of raising someone else’s family member. Oh, by the way, that same corrupt man was responsible for having Seo-Jin’s father killed and covering it up as a suicide.

Ae-Ri’s father had been trapped on the construction site along with a teenaged Seo-Jin, who had gone to work that day with his father. Realizing he was going to die and wanting Seo-Jin to live, he threw his water bottle to Seo-Jin. Seo-Jin survived for 31 days trapped in the rubble before he was rescused. Ae-Ri’s father died at precisely 10:33 p.m. Dun dun dun! This explains (sort of) why Seo-Jin and Ae-Ri could only communicate at 10:33 each evening, 31 days apart.

Do-Gyun was quite the gorgeous himbo, who wanted to treat Hyun-Chae like a queen — even after she left him for a rich man. But the two maintained their affair throughout her marriage and plotted to pretend kidnap Da-Bin (her daughter), get fake passports and money from Seo-Jin and start their lives off together somewhere fresh. I didn’t see that one coming and it was fun to watch it all come together. When Seo-Jin catches them in their charade, the couple is startled, but neither seems bothered about the possibility of killing him.

Once they have him knocked out, Do-Gyun figures out the time travel element and begins to read all the texts between Seo-Jin and Ae-Ri. Apparently no one locks their phones, even after they’ve realized people have been reading their messages. Of course locking the phone wouldn’t prevent rich people from hiring techies to break in, but it would’ve slowed them down a bit.

The last two episodes were incredibly frustrating, because so much of the chaos that ensued — and that had happened previously — could’ve been prevented if they used modern technology to livestream the actions of the criminals and catch them in the act, rather than playing a cat-and-mouse game of setting up traps in the past to prevent them from happening in the future … or was that vice versa?

Ew Factor: There is a scene near the end when Gun-Wook is concerned that Ae-Ri has caught a cold … because she sneezed … all over a tray of food she was going to share with her friends and family and just nooooooooooooooooo!!!! WHYYYYYYY?  Neither seems concerned that she contaminated food others will eat. Granted, she didn’t deliberately sneeze on the food, but that doesn’t matter, because the end result is that she sneezed on a tray of food. The. End.

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