It's been a long time since I've seen a drama fall over its own feet as hard as Alice did. Well, not that long. Eternal Monarch also did a spectacular job at that. But while both shows suffered from lazy writing and poor decisions, Alice is fresh in my mind and the disappointment hurts the most.

Alice is a time travel sci-fi with a unique twist and an interesting set-up, and while my bitterness leaves me feeling like it has no redeeming qualities, it does. The first half of the drama was good with a solid cast, well-shot opening episodes, and a unique twist to an over-saturated genre that left it feeling new and exciting even when it wasn't. Time travel is a tool in literature and film that you have to take with a grain of salt. There's no known real way to time travel, and the possibility of it is low to nil, so we have to rely on our own imaginations to interpret how it would function and what would happen if a person went from one time period to another, so when writing a story with time travel there are always going to be inconsistencies. Sometimes they're more noticeable than others, but there's always something. Relying on the multiverse theory or the butterfly effect can minimize those, but they're not quick fixes and they can only help solidify the concept of time in a story if the writers, well... follow through. And boy does this drama not do that.

Before I get into that mess, I really do think there was something here, and I really liked a lot of the characters for most of the drama. Oddly, my favourite character in all of this wasn't one of the leads, but PJG's father, Min Hyuk. He may not have been the most likeable person throughout the series but his character reflected the role of the estranged father perfectly. There was conflict and regret in his actions and emotions and I could believe everything that the story was telling me that he felt. PJG himself, while likeable, didn't make a lot of sense to me. A core part of his character background was his alexithymia, which seemed to be a non-issue less than halfway through the series as he quite easily expressed and seemed to understand his emotions, even more so than other characters. I didn't really hold that against the show, though, because characters with traits like that often don't show much of them the further they progress through the story, and I could chalk it up to him getting better with time, which the show also mentioned. He was enjoyable to watch and his awkward behaviour was endearing. I wasn't fond of his childhood friend as she was just a bit annoying every time she showed up, and both past and present Tae Yi were just okay.

The show starts with one glaring issue: the prophecy. That book and everything about it is a stupid, nonsensical plot point that doesn't make any sense if you think about it for a bit. It opens with Tae Yi going back to 1992 to get the book and specifically see the last page, but they get there too late. But they can time travel. Why not time travel to the day before and confront Tae Yi's father then to get the book? Or a week before? A year? There are also alternate dimensions, an infinite number of them, many likely also containing the book. If the book was so important, they could have gotten their hands on it. There's no excuse. The prophecy held no place in the story except as an anchor to direct it, so it really should have been left out.

Now we get to the ending spoilers, so be warned!

The first half of the series was pretty decent, but it declined fast at that halfway point. The writers proceeded to break every rule that they set until they turned the ending into a mushy pile of goo. They say that their world works off of the multiverse theory, so the past can't be changed because any changes will cause it to break off into another timeline, but they decide that if one version of PJG disappears, they all do, because for some reason killing him resets all of time and he's a product of time travel. But then they decide that only the versions of him who traveled through time, i.e. his future self and the present self that we've been following, will disappear. The high school version of him, though? Well, he gets to avoid non-existence because plot. That's all well and good for a happy ending... but it really doesn't make any sense. Even less sense that this version of him gets the memories of the original version!

Let's focus on this one rule: killing PJG will end time travel, and will reset the world to how it was before time travel. Why does this happen? I don't know. Doesn't matter. Let's say he's become a god or something, who knows? I could let that non-logic go if the story followed through with it. But who are the time travelers? Well, him of course. All of Alice. We saw them disappear, so that's fine... except for the fact that the chief was also a time traveler from another time/dimension, who is alive and well and in that same time period at the end of the story. Well, it's another dimension! Probably. Maybe. The show isn't 100% clear on that. So maybe it works differently because it's another world, not another time. Okay, that's fair. But because every attempt to change the past results in another timeline, that goes for every time traveler. All of them. That includes PJG, who was born after being exposed to a wormhole and time traveling from the future. That includes his parents, specifically his mother who, despite time resetting, is still left in 1992 with her son. That is not her original time. She should have been magicked back to the future where she belonged. Then, there's the father. We don't even know what time he was originally from because it wasn't mentioned in the story. Likely he isn't from the same time as Tae Yi, so PJG shouldn't exist at all. But let's say he is. Well, then he and Tae Yi should have met in their time, and PJG should have been born after that. But somehow, someway, PJG grows up with his mother in this terrible attempt at a fix-it.

There is one way to explain this, which I think it's possible the writers could have been going for: killing the future PJG and saving the mother meant that they branched off into another timeline, so all of the time travelers were left where they were. The only one erased being the original PJG. But that goes against was his mother told present-day Tae Yi, that all of the effects of time travel would be erased if they stopped time travel, and that time would be reset. That was a rule that they created for their story. So either they decided they didn't care about that rule anymore, or they didn't bother to think through what resetting time would mean for all of their characters. Either way, it's half-assed writing.

Normally, a drama's ending doesn't affect my enjoyment overall. If a drama has a bad ending, the journey was still worth it. If the ending was good, I love it all-the-more. But the ending they gave this drama, and honestly the plot reveals over the entire second half of the series, make me feel like I wasted 16h of my life on something that pretended to be good until it wasn't when I could have been putting that time towards a drama that was better written, or funny, or even some wild and crazy makjang that might not make a lot of sense, but is so ridiculous that I wouldn't care.

But this is the year of time travel and there's always more to come. Let's hope Kairos can wash away the bad taste that Alice left behind.