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Review | K-drama review – in Netflix’s Sisyphus: The Myth, disappointing and illogical end to time-travel shenanigans
- Time-travel stories need an internal logic to succeed, but the writers of Sisyphus: The Myth abandoned theirs, and got much else wrong besides
- Poor scripts undermined the romance between Han Tae-sool and Kang Seo-hae, major characters disappeared without explanation, and the coda is just lazy
Reading Time:3 minutes
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This article contains spoilers.
1.5/5 stars
Time-travel stories are a double-edged sword. They offer limitless juicy narrative possibilities that can be retroactively rejigged. But because anything can happen and then be changed, keeping the stakes raised for the audience becomes a challenge.
Brainy sci-fi, such as the American indie film Primer, explores the dizzying theories of time paradoxes, while something less demanding, like Avengers: Endgame, will use it for a narrative do-over. Sci-fi-action-romance K-drama Sisyphus: The Myth bets the house on time travel and it’s a gamble that doesn’t even remotely pay off.
Though it burst out of the gate with some ballsy set pieces and lots of technobabble-fuelled derring-do, the show’s initial premise was fairly simple. Han Tae-sool (Cho Seung-woo), a brilliant engineer, will invent a time-travel machine, and the present – before the machine’s invention – becomes a promised land for immigrants from a post-apocalyptic future. One of those immigrants is Kang Seo-hae (Park Shin-hye).
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