Joo Won 주원 [Drama- The Midnight Studio/ 야한(夜限) 사진관] (2024)

Okay...are we literally dealing with a physics nerd serial killer, because wha...??? (Sorry, I know it all makes sense in the drama, but I just never thought I'd end up putting those two things together in a sentence ) Right now, what seems the most plausible is that the five people who end up dying according to the prophecy were involved in the negative energy/time travel research that Yoon Tae Yi talked about. Which I know doesn't bode well for her (especially with the murderer now literally inside her house), but we're also only six episodes into a sixteen-episode long drama, so....

(In other words: good job creating tension there, show - since we'd normally get through all the other targets first -but I doubt you'll be killing off leads until closer to the end of the story)

That being said, though, I'm with Jin Gyeom in that I still don't trust Seok Oh Won as far as I could throw him. He knows way too much about what's going on, and seems almost to take some pride in that knowledge,especially given his assertion in Episode 4 that life and time should not be interfered with - which, given what we've seen since, has been a bit hypocritical. Or maybe it's just the fact that he's always shown just reading the book with this knowing smirk whenever something bad happens, and...I dunno, it just gets infuriating after a while. Even if it's true that the murders are inevitable (because I'm interpreting Oh Won's "One person's future is another person's past" to mean that Park Sun Youngwarned him about events that would be in his future but would have already been history for her in 2050), I totally understand Jin Gyeom's frustration here.

And speaking about that prophecy, I think (going by the preview) we're really going to start getting into Oedipus-esque territory now. This serial killer appears to be going after Yoon Tae Yi "for the future" - is that in reference to the future of time travel? If so, then there's quite a massive irony here, as, according to the prophecy, Tae Yi (2020)could bring about the end of time travel (so...not Jin Gyeom? Or is it both of them, as mother and son?), but attempts to take her out now in order to prevent that from happening will also, according to the prophecy, actually bring about that end.I don't know; we'll have to wait for future episodes to see just what exactly these people want.

So maybe, rather than trying to make sense of head-exploding prophecies, I should focus on the main character focus in this episode: the relationship between Yoo Min Hyuk, Yoon Tae Yi, and Park Jin Gyeom. Like Jin Gyeom, Min Hyuk tends to come off as being a very cool and calculated sort, so it's worth noting that both of them are easily softened by the exact same(?) person. I'm also glad that it was revealed in this episode that, despite Tae Yi (2050)'s claims to the contrary, Min Hyukdid notchoose "Alice" over her or their child, as evidenced by his decision to hide that Tae Yi took the book with her. That being said, there's definitely more to Ms. Oh than meets the eye, so along with their direct superior, I'm wondering what her game is.

I also love all the ways we see Min Hyuk and Jin Gyeom as foils of each other here. Both interrogation scenes in this episodewere brilliant because even as they laid out all the differences between the characters in the dialogue, they do also reveal a telling similarity: that they'd both lost the person they loved most in the world and both are now motivated by that loss. Add that they're unknowingly referring to the exact same person, and...yeah. Definitely foils.

Finally, I do want to switch to something a bit more lighthearted and talk about the growing friendship between Jin Gyeom and Tae Yi (2020). They both clearly have each other's backs and are influenced by each other in these imperceptible, everyday ways: e.g. Jin Gyeom never bothering to delete Tae Yi's playlist from his car, Tae Yi teaching Jin Gyeom about quantum mechanics, etc. About that talk, actually, it's funny that the concepts were all so basic for her that she was completely baffled that Jin Gyeom didn't know them - like, girl, he's a detective, not a physicist! And I also noticed that despite now believing that Tae Yi and his mother are two different people, Jin Gyeom hadstill picked up on enough similarities in their tastes and mannerisms that he usedwhat he knewof his mother to choose what Tae Yi would like at the bakery.

That said, do I think either of them have romantic feelings for each other? Probably not. Maybe on Tae Yi's part, but given what she knows (i.e. that she looks like his mother but isn't his mother) and the fact that he literally saved her life, I'm not surprised that she's starting to think along those lines. But again, I think she may be asking too much of Park Jin Gyeom here: plenty of people can't tell that someone's developed feelings for them, even without alexithymia, so clearly, it's gonna take him a whileHowever, I still doubt that Jin Gyeom would reciprocate those feelings anytime soon - although I also can't say what she means to him yet, either.