Bad guys have it easy

I recently watched Kairos. I didn’t have high expectations, but it turned out better than I thought it would! There is a man whose daughter gets kidnapped, and a woman who lost her phone. When calling her lost phone to try to get it back, somehow she gets connected to the man, and the story goes from there…

The synopsis does mention that they are connected between one month apart. But I had forgotten that detail when I started watching, and it was interesting to see the clues they dropped. (Recently I have started doing this: After I check the synopsis of a story and feel that it is worth watching, I will just bookmark it, and when I start watching, I will not recheck the synopsis. It does seem better not to know so much about the story, and let the details unveil themselves while watching!)

As usual I would have a few gripes about the details. Their phone call can only get connected for one minute, at 10:33pm every night. Any messages that they send will also only get through at 10:33pm. So once they had figured that out, you would expect them to send all the important information first, then make their call at 10:33pm and make full use of that one minute. But...they would check and read their messages at 10:33pm first, and then only make the call! Once they even took the time to watch a video before they started talking!

And they would also say things like, “I will send you the information” during their call, instead of “I sent you the information.” But if they send the information after the call, the other person would need to wait 24 hours to receive it!

As for the duration of the call, at the beginning I admired how they did it, because they would cut the call off in the middle of a sentence sometimes. But it became ridiculous at the end of the drama… at one point, the guy says, “here’s my plan”, and tells her the plan over the phone. There is no way the plan can be explained in one minute!

And after that it gets worse: The guy from the future calls her and she records the call while the guy from the future gets evidence. And in this call, somehow there is no one-minute limit. Again, it’s ridiculous because there is no way they can time the bad guy to say his confession at exactly 10:33pm to 10:34pm!

However, the twists and turns of the plot are really awesome, and keep you interested. Some people get to die multiple times! :P

There are of course some unexplained stuff about how certain things change, and somehow the memory of the guy in the future does not change to include the “new past”. Also, with different “future timelines” (the one where they didn’t change anything from the past vs the one after they managed to change things), they actually made it so that the person in the future would recall the “alternate timeline” when the time comes (for example, old 3 Sept - child gets kidnapped, new 3 Sept - child is fine → on 3 Sept the guy in the future would somehow recall the “kidnapped” memories even though the child is currently fine). At first the guy doesn’t know it was from the “other timeline”, and he needs to slowly figure it out.

However, as a lot of stories go, the good guy needs to spend lots of time figuring out how things work, but the bad guys figure things out pretty quickly! There was also a time when I felt they messed up the timeline and gave the bad guy a memory from the future (from the alternate timeline, but the day hadn’t arrived yet). I could be mistaken though...the order of events got quite messed up in my head as the story progressed, so I can’t be sure of anything!

I do like how they came up with events to make the people believe that they were connected through time. No one believes easily, and needs a good reason to. One was especially funny, because this person answers the phone call from the future, talks to the guy, then sees the same guy in the present, NOT talking on the phone!

The title of the drama is Kairos, which means “the right time” or “the opportune time” in Greek. It seems that there are two words for “time” in Greek. The other word is “chronos”, which refers to the sequence of time (which fits the word “chronology”). I looked up the word when watching this drama; you can find one of the explanations here.

Actually this drama reminds me of Nine, because they both have parallel timelines which are a certain duration of time apart.