. Billed as a science fiction story, it combined both scientific concepts from quantum physics and high fantasy tropes relating to Fate and prophecy to tell a story about the unintended consequences of scientific advancements that would allow humans to "time travel" - in reality, travel to parallel universes representing alternate versions of their pasts - by the year 2050.
Perhaps it is this eclectic mishmash of genres that led Alice, ultimately, to flounder. Although the cast members received widespread praise for their performances, the drama achieved mediocre ratings and confused viewers due to its many twists and woefully loose narrative.
It also, to be fair, required significant suspension of disbelief: not least in the idea that quantum physicists would so believe a fabled Book of Prophecy, which claimed to predict the end of "time travel", that they would be willing to resort to murder in order to preserve the technology they had developed.
In a break from my usual pattern, I actually watched Alice as it was airing (most of the time, I wait until after the entire series is completed), meaning that for the first time, I got to experience the full brunt of the story's meandering narrative: no spoilers, no knowing where the writers intended to go, nothing. So I, too, was one of those many viewers who was simultaneously caught on the edge of my seat trying to solve the core mystery (i.e. who killed the lead's mother?) and growing increasingly confused at how the multiverse concept at the core of this "time travel" was even supposed to work.
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| Oedipus Rex (c) Linda Mota |
Suffice it to say, in terms of
Alice's merits as a piece of science fiction, I wasn't convinced. However, I did end up enjoying it in a completely different way: as
a piece of moral philosophy.
See, the thing about
Alice is that although its title and visual motifs were allusions to Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland, I actually think that the drama's writers drew far more heavily from another classic narrative: the Aristotelian tragedy in the myth of Oedipus.
I don't think I am the only viewer who noticed parallels between Alice and the Oedipus myth. After all, many of us will likely recognize Oedipus's story as the Greek tragedy where a man ends up killing his father and marrying his mother, and shades of both of those are alluded to within Alice. However, as fascinating - and, let's be frank, disturbing - as that may be, the part that actually caught my attention was how both the Oedipus myth and Alice dealt with questions surrounding Fate, prophecy, and monstrosity.
This, as you know, is not the first time I've dealt with monsters on this blog - nor, I daresay, will it be the last. However, this time, I want to combine elements of my previous understanding of monstrosity - the monster as a warning - with the Oedipus myth and the story in Alice to unpack these concepts even further:
What does it mean to be Fated to live a tragic life - especially when said tragedy is not to experience monstrosity, but to become a monster ourselves? Are we truly stuck or is there still some way out?
(Note: In addition to what I've already revealed thus far, this blog post will contain further spoilers for Alice. Also, for anyone interested in watching the series, links to a streaming site will be provided at the end of this post.)
Missing the Mark and Outrunning Fate: The Tragedy of Oedipus
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Oedipus's Fury by Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard
(c) Princeton University Art Museum |
Before looking at Alice, though, we first need to lay a bit of groundwork: out of all the possible mythological and literary precedents out there, why does Oedipus's story stand out to me as being particularly tragic?
After all, there have been many stories - both before and since - that have been far sadder and angstier: stories of war and pestilence; stories of doomed lovers; stories of families ripped and torn apart; stories of innocent people dying undeserved deaths at the hands of tyrannical rulers and regimes.
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Roman fresco depicting Oedipus
killing Laius
(c) Egyptian Museum of Cairo |
For me, I think it's because there are, in fact, several different broad kinds of tragedy. Oftentimes, the tragedy we think of nowadays is the
modern tragedy: the type where the protagonists, usually underdogs or everymen types, seek to improve their circumstances only to fail due to their society's systemic inequities. However, Oedipus, particularly as presented in Sophocles' play,
Oedipus Rex, dates from an earlier time: the time of
Aristotelian (or classical) tragedy.
I am aware that the classical tragedy has its flaws. If nothing else, its focus on a royal or aristocratic protagonist is well out of vogue in today's day and age: we are now far more inclined as a society to view an aristocrat as the villain of the story rather than its hero. Also, nowadays, I think few of us have either patience or sympathy for these aristocratic characters who have been brought low by their own "tragic flaws". They deserved what they got, so why should we care? And besides, should we not care more for those they have harmed or exploited from their positions of power?
However, it's actually that concept of the "tragic flaw" and its implications for those who wield power and influence that makes the Aristotelian tragedy stand out for me.
This is because the term "tragic flaw" is, to some extent, a mistranslation. In English, the phrase makes us think of a weakness of character - arrogance, hubris, over-ambition, indecisiveness, impulsivity, etc. - such that many storywriters (myself included) have come away with the belief that they must artificially shoehorn some sort of deep moral flaw into their characters. And, to some extent, this is due to uses of the trope in later European Christian contexts, such as in Shakespearean tragedy, where the "tragic flaw" is equated with sin.
Yet, in the original Greek, this was not the case. Instead, what is translated as the "tragic flaw" is hamartia: a term from archery that refers to when the archer misses the target. In other words, the "tragic flaw", as Aristotle intended it, is when someone tries to do good, but ultimately fails.
We can see this very clearly in the story of Oedipus: both in the protagonist himself and in his parents.
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Illustration from Voltaire's Oedipe
(c) The Trustees of the British Museum |
Oedipus's father, Laius, the king of Thebes, is told by an oracle that due to sins committed in his own life, he will one day be killed by his son. Determined to stop this prophecy from coming true, Laius and his wife, Jocasta, have the infant Oedipus abandoned in the wilderness, but he is, through a series of events, ultimately adopted by the king of Corinth.
Years later, the adult Oedipus receives a similar prophecy that he is fated to murder his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and incidentally ends up in Thebes, but not before killing another traveller in a violent dispute. Once in Thebes, after successfully answering the riddle of the Sphinx, he is rewarded with the crown as well as the hand of the recently-widowed queen in marriage. However, when Thebes experiences divine punishment of its own, Oedipus discovers the terrible truth: the man he killed was his father, and the woman he married was his mother. By seeking to avoid the prophecy that he would become a murderous and incestuous monster, he has inadvertently brought it about.
So, what did Oedipus do wrong?
There are several answers. For instance, one common interpretation of the Oedipus myth is that the tragedy lies not so much in the acts that Oedipus committed as in the belief that both he and his parents possessed: that they could somehow outrun or outsmart Fate. This interpretation makes particular sense when you consider the extent to which hubris figures in Greek mythology; from this perspective, to try to change one's Fate is to place oneself on the same level as the gods.
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Oedipus Separating from Jocasta by Alexandre Cabanel
(c) Stephen Gjertson Galleries |
However, given the nature of the prophecy, I would argue that, under those circumstances, Oedipus was right to try to escape his Fate by fleeing Corinth. After all, what else was he to do? Instead, it's possible that Oedipus could have taken his prevention a step further: he should not have resorted to violence in his altercation with a noticeably older man en route to Thebes, nor should he have agreed to accept a noticeably older woman's hand in marriage.
In other words, if he had been so determined to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that he chose to leave his "parents" in Corinth, then he should have followed through on this commitment to the end.
Therefore, rather than his attempt to outrun Fate, I propose a different hypothesis: Oedipus's true hubris - and, thus, his hamartia - was that he assumed, after leaving Corinth, that he was safe and the prophecy had been thwarted. That misguided sense of security is what led to his lack of caution in the events that followed, and both he and his family suffered terribly for it.
The Birth of the Monster Within: The Tragedy in Alice
As I already mentioned at the beginning of this post, despite several overt allusions to
Alice in Wonderland, the Korean drama,
Alice, also draws heavily from the Oedipus myth. Granted, the actual mechanics of the plot are complicated by the inclusion of science-fiction elements like parallel universes and time travel, but the overarching themes of Fate, prophecy and monstrosity are still prevalent.
Much of
Alice's narrative centres around
Park Jin Gyeom (played by Joo Won), a police detective who joined the force specifically to find the identity of the intruder who murdered
his mother (played by Kim Hee Sun) when he was a teenager. The only clues he has are a mysteriously futuristic drone he had spotted near the crime scene; a similarly futuristic murder weapon; and a strange computer-chip-like "card" found among his mother's belongings.
And the mystery only deepens when a series of coincidences leads him to the physicist, Yoon Tae Yi (also played by Kim Hee Sun), who not only looks identical to his mother, but also recognizes the "card" as a more advanced model of the technology she is currently developing to enable time travel.
Now, Alice has far too many complex twists and turns for me to go into much detail here. However, suffice it to say that over the course of the story, our protagonists discover that Jin Gyeom's mother was a "time traveller" who had originally been sent from a parallel universe - where it is now 2050 - to the 1990s in our world to retrieve a legendary Book of Prophecy that was said to contain the secret to the end of time travel. The goal was to bring the Book back so that she and her fellow time travellers could find some way to avert the prophecy. However, upon actually reading the book, and discovering at the same time that she was pregnant, she refused to return: instead going into hiding under an assumed name and identity until, under the command of a mysterious "Teacher", she was assassinated by one of her former comrades.
And who was this "Teacher"? None other than Jin Gyeom's own future self from said 2050 parallel universe.
Wait, what?
To be fair, as previously stated at the beginning of this post, several key points in
Alice's plot don't really work as science fiction, and this element in particular is definitely more fantasy-based. Long story short, Jin Gyeom's mother, like Tae Yi, was a physicist in her original universe and she, too, was interested in developing "time travel" (i.e. inter-universe travel).
However, whereas Tae Yi has not yet succeeded in this plan, Jin Gyeom's mother already did. And by doing so, according to the Book of Prophecy, she had grossly violated the divine order of things. Thus, this young mother was presented with a terrible choice: 1) set things right by aborting her unborn son; or 2) keep the child and be punished by watching him grow into the monster that would eventually kill her.
Needless to say, she chose the latter.
Yet, how could this be? Even with this supposed prophecy, why would Jin Gyeom be a monster?
To be fair, it is clear from the outset that Jin Gyeom does have the potential for monstrosity within him. Due to the intense amount of radiation used in his mother's time travel technology, he was born with a significant neurological deformity that manifests as alexithymia: an impaired ability to identify, express or empathize with emotion. And while I am sure the reality for those with alexithymia (or any other sort of neurodivergence, for that matter) is far more nuanced, it is made clear in Alice's fictional world that, if not properly managed, this could lead to the development of violent, antisocial or psychopathic tendencies later in Jin Gyeom's life.
Also, as if that is not already enough, in his pursuit of the time travellers who killed his mother, Jin Gyeom inadvertently unlocks within himself a latent ability to control time, including both the ability to "freeze" time for short periods and to travel between parallel timelines/universes at will - a key part of the puzzle, as viewers will eventually find out.
Of course, none of this explains the crux of the problem: how it is that a future version of Jin Gyeom could go from one extreme of doing everything in his power to avenge his mother to the other of engineering her murder himself. Especially not when you consider that Jin Gyeom's mother, in attempts to thwart the prophesied curse looming over her, did her utmost to teach her son to live by a set of clear ethical rules and principles: if he could not achieve morality by feeling empathy for others, then he could at least do so by valuing justice above all else.
However, this is where the multiverse concept of Alice's version of time travel comes in. The world in the drama is set up in such a way that there exists an infinite number of parallel universes: each one the cumulative result of the outcomes of the individual decisions that each person makes in a massively compounded "butterfly effect". And while, because of this effect, there also exist infinite versions of each of the story's main characters, there do appear to be some consistent events in their respective lives....
Including Jin Gyeom and Tae Yi's own discovery of the Book of Prophecy.
While both of Alice's lead characters' lives are deeply intertwined with the Book of Prophecy and its contents, my focus here will be on what happens to Jin Gyeom once he discovers his Fate. Understandably, given his intense desire to avenge his mother, the thought that he could also turn out to be the culprit is horrifying, to say the least.
However, this is where Alice's "butterfly effect" multiverse concept comes into play. To put it simply, having the "Teacher" (i.e. the version of Jin Gyeom who does end up travelling back in time to kill his mother) appear as a literal separate character in the drama lets us see how the decisions made by the various parallel versions of Jin Gyeom, upon learning of the prophecy, affect their final outcomes.
See, the key fundamental difference between these two characters is their attitude towards the prophecy. Chronologically in the narrative, the "Teacher" was the one who discovered Book of Prophecy first - and, whilst trying to cope with this new knowledge, he came to a rather disturbing conclusion: that he was not only doomed to become a monster from the start, but also that his mother, by choosing not to abort him, was the one responsible.
To be fair, given that the "Teacher" is the drama's antagonist, we cannot assume that he is a reliable narrator. However, if we do take his story at face value, what we see is yet another potential harmful effect that knowledge of a prophecy about oneself could bring. Whereas Oedipus, as discussed in the previous section, inadvertently enacted his own tragic monstrosity by mistakenly believing that he had already escaped it, the "Teacher" in
Alice swings to the opposite extreme. He internalizes the idea, believing himself to be doomed by the prophecy anyway - and that his entire predicament was his mother's fault.
Ironically, though, it is this same internalization that even allows the prophecy to come to pass in the first place. Had the "Teacher" realized that his own resentment towards his mother was the actual problem, he might never have travelled back in time to kill her at all. Instead, by pinning the blame on another person, especially one who actually loved him dearly and tried to set him on the right path, he gradually lost sight of all the opportunities he actually had to simply make a different choice.
Killing the Monster: Reversing the Tragedy in Alice
Fortunately, Jin Gyeom does see the flaw in the "Teacher's" logic. Even before meeting his counterpart in person for the first time, even before hearing his side of the story, Jin Gyeom resolved not to believe in the prophecy. In his mind, if he does not believe it, then it holds no power over him - and everything will be alright.
Unfortunately for him, though, Alice is a sci-fi/fantasy drama. In other words: none of this is going to be easy.
As it turns out, Jin Gyeom has the odds stacked against him. For instance, one of the stranger, more fantastical elements in Alice's plot is that discovering the prophecy also opens him up to the "Teacher's" direct influence. And the latter, quite possibly in an attempt to rationalize his monstrous actions as simply inevitable, is incredibly determined to turn this younger parallel-universe version of himself along the same dark path.
We actually see this playing out when, in the midst of their adventures, Jin Gyeom and Tae Yi inadvertently travel into yet another parallel universe: one where a darker version of Jin Gyeom, already deeply under the "Teacher's" influence, wreaks havoc as a teenaged serial killer before murdering his own mother in cold blood. And it sometimes feels like there is no escape for our leads in the story's main universe, either. Using his ability to "time travel" at will, the "Teacher" stalks Jin Gyeom, seeking to gain control of his mind through a series of intrusive thoughts urging him to kill.
During these episodes, Jin Gyeom acts like a man possessed: lashing out indiscriminately at anyone nearby, including Tae Yi, in a blind rage. And although, at this stage, he is still able to refrain from actually murdering someone, he is understandably horrified by his own actions when he does successfully return to himself.
This is shown perfectly in one of my personal favourite scenes in the drama: still reeling after his attack on Tae Yi, Jin Gyeom confronts and destroys his own devilishly twisted reflection in his apartment mirror. While the drama's writers suggest that this image is, in fact, a hallucination caused by the "Teacher's" influence - he is revealed to be lurking just outside - I think there is a symbolic component to this as well that reveals a lot about Jin Gyeom's character and growing self-awareness.
Remember: up to this point, he has believed that his Fate - that he would someday be his own mother's killer - simply could not be true. Given how morally reprehensible it is, that is entirely understandable. However, now that he has seen his own potential for violence firsthand, Jin Gyeom starts to doubt. He finally begins to fear that the prophecy might be true after all and that he is, in fact, Fated to become a monster: a thought so horrifying that he would have shot himself had Tae Yi not intervened.
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