Series / Sisyphus: The Myth

Sisyphus: The Myth (Korean: 시지프스: the myth; Sijipeuseu: the myth) is a sci-fi South Korean Drama starring Park Shin-hye and Cho Seung-woo. Labelled as JTBC's "10th Anniversary Special Drama", the show premiered on February 17, 2021, with each episode being simultaneously released on Netflix in South Korea and internationally right after the cable broadcast.

Sisyphus revolves around a billionaire genius engineer and CEO named Han Tae-Sul, who tries to uncover the secrets behind the mysterious death of his older brother; and a Badass Normal woman named Gang Seo-Hae, who travels back in time to help him save the world from a Bad Future.

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This show provides examples of:

• Almost Dead Guy: In Episode 4, Hyun-gi has been filled full of bullets by the Control Bureau, but he is still able to make it to Seo-hae and give her the keys before he dies.
• Arc Words: "The girl or the world?"
• Bad Future: The Korean peninsula is pretty much a post-apocalyptic wasteland, following a brief nuclear war between North and South Korea on October 31st 2020. 15 years on, while a lot of vegetation has regrown, the air is still not fully safe to breath, and the radioactive fallout still lingers. Society has completely broken down and most survivors are organized into gangs of scavengers and warlords preying on each other and on the defenceless. We later learn that the wealthy elite of South Korea who were affiliated with Sigma continue to lead relatively comfortable, even opulent, lives in a secret underground bunker.
• Battle Couple: As the series progresses Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae start to become this, though it is Seo-Hae who still does 90% of the actual battling.
• Badass Normal: Gang Seo-Hae. Her years of growing up in post-apocalyptic Korea have shaped her into a one-woman army who can single-handedly take down an entire paramilitary unit.
• Big Bad: Sigma AKA Seo Won-Ju, Han Tae-Sul's classmate in elementary school.
• Big Brother Worship: Han Tae-Sul reveres his brother Tae-San, who raised him after the deaths of their parents, and helped him set up his company Quantum & Time.
• Big Eater: Gang Seo-Hae starts gorging on food the moment she arrives in the past. This is because she has spent most of her life eating tinned food in the post-apocalyptic future, and longs for the fresher and tastier food of her childhood.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the end, the nuclear war is prevented and the Bad Future is erased. But for that to happen, Tae-Sul had to commit suicide to prevent time-travel from being invented, and the adult time-traveling Seo-Hae is erased from existence - though it seems they get to reunite in some kind of afterlife. Also, due to the kidness shown to him by Gang Dong-ki, it seems that Seo Wong-ju is leading a happier life as a freelance artist and will never become Sigma, though The Stinger shows that he still harbors hatred towards Tae-Sul and has access to a notebook with information that could lead to everything starting over again...
• Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: Seo-hae when she is shot in the gut at her wedding to Tae-sul, as shown in her dream in episode 2.
• The Casanova: Han Tae-Sul was one prior to the start of the series. This was apparently the reason for his break-up with Seo-jin. Lampshaded when he meets Seo-Hae and the first thing he asks her is if they ever had a one-night stand!
• Chalk Outline: An outline in tape marks where Bong-sun fell when he was shot by the sniper in episode 3. Subverted in that Bong-sun didn't actually die.
• Close-Enough Timeline: Almost happens in the finale. After Sigma is erased from existence, it seems that the protagonists have won and the war has been prevented - until Eddy Kim shows up, intent on taking Sigma's place. Judging by the fact that Seo-Hae isn't Ret-Gone and the nuclear attack is suddenly about to happen again, it seems that Eddy replacing Sigma would simply lead to a new variation of the Stable Time Loop. Ultimately averted when Tae-Sul shoots himself to prevent time-travel from ever being possible.
• Create Your Own Hero: The protagonists, Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae, both became what they are because of the Big Bad Sigma. Sigma traveled back in time and invested in Tae-Sul's company, helping him become the Rich Genius that he is. Sigma's machinations led to the Bad Future in which Seo-Hae grew up and became a Badass Normal, and Sigma himself lets her use the uploader to go back in time to become his enemy, in order to fulfil the Stable Time Loop around which his plan hinges.
• Create Your Own Villain: The Big Bad Sigma AKA Seo Won-ju was essentially 'created' by Han Tae-Sul. When they were kids, Tae-Sul showed Won-ju a chemistry experiment that the latter used to kill his abusive father. Won-ju idolized Tae-Sul, who rebuffed him, leading him to obsessively hate Tae-Sul and be resentful of his success well into adulthood. Then, after he's nearly Driven to Suicide, Won-ju is held at gunpoint and almost killed by Tae-Sul, which further fuels his hatred towards the latter and drives him to become Sigma, go back in time, and devote his life to destroying Tae-Sul and bringing about a Bad Future for Korea.
  • Tae-Sul makes a habit of this. His best friend and business partner Eddy Kim resents him after years of having to pick up the slack and safeguard the company from his eccentric behavior, not to mention the fact that Tae-Sul 'stole' the woman he loved from him and almost married her. The events of the series drive Eddy further down a darker path, and in the end, he's essentially ready to take Sigma's place and bring about the Bad Future himself if it means a chance to take everything Tae-Sul has.
• Expy: Han Tae-Sul is arguably one for Tony Stark and MacGyver - a Rich Genius with an extreme talent for improvisation.
  • Seo-Hae is one for time-traveling heroes from the Terminator franchise, particularly Kyle Reese and Cameron.
• External Combustion: The co-pilot from the damaged flight is killed when his car explodes after he turns the ignition, at the end of episode 1. It seems like he sees it coming, given how he hesitates to turn the key.
• Forgotten First Meeting: After Sigma asks him "Do you remember me?", Tae-Sul does some digging and realizes that Sigma is in fact Seo Won-ju, his old classmate from elementary school who used to obsessively stalk him.
  • In episode 9 we learn that Seo-Hae had briefly met Tae-Sul before, on her ninth birthday, when he was at the amusement park with her older self. The adult Seo-Hae does not remember this though, and it's never brought up.
• Government Agency of Fiction: Immigration Control Bureau Team 7 (referred to by the characters simply as 'Control Bureau') - a top-secret paramilitary group dedicated to hunting down 'illegal entrants' i.e. time-travelers from the future.
• Government Conspiracy: In episode 14 we learn that the higher echleons of the South Korean government have been thoroughly infiltrated by Sigma's allies, many of whom are time-traveling criminals from the future. This includes the Prime Minister of South Korea.
• Have We Met Yet?: In episode 4, Jung Hyun-gi has already encountered Tae-Sul and Seo-Hae several times in the future from his perspective, while they are meeting him for the first time. In subsequent episodes, they frequently encounter his younger self, who's hunting them as an agent of the Control Bureau.
  • When Seo-Hae first encounters Sigma in 2035, he's already familiar with her. This is because her time-traveling future self tried to kill him back in 2020.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Han Tae-Sul kills himself in the finale in order to prevent the invention of time-travel and save the Korean peninsula from nuclear war.
• The Hero Dies: In the finale, both protagonists, Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae, die. Tae-Sul commits suicide to prevent anyone from being able to use the uploader to time-travel, and Seo-Hae is Ret-Gone after the Bad Future she came from is erased. In Seo-Hae's case though, her younger self lives on and can grow up to lead a happier and more normal life.
• How We Got Here: Seo-Hae's flashbacks to her life in the future over the course of the series lead up to the show's opening moments, where she parts with her father to travel back in time to 2020.
• I Hate Past Me: Park Hyeong-do stalks and despises his wife-abusing past self.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: A small army of Control Bureau agents opening fire on the protagonists fail nine times out of ten to even cause a flesh wound. Possibly justified by the later reveal that the Control Bureau's real goal is to simply preserve the Stable Time Loop.
• Insufferable Genius: Han Tae-Sul. His arrogance and his inflated ego alienate the few people who are close to him, as well as his business associates. This not only leads to him losing control of his company but is also the reason why both Sigma, and later Eddy Kim, become his enemies.
• Intangible Time Travel: This is what happens to people subjected to the Control Bureau's drug - their conciousness bounces across space-time, revisiting their pasts but unable to interact with anyone there. Seo-Hae experiences this after she's injected with the drug by the Control Bureau. Tae-Sul takes the drug as well in an attempt to find her and bring her back. And he learns that his brother Tae-San has been deliberately put in this state to keep him from Sigma's hands.
• Love Triangle: Kim Seo-jin with Han Tae-Sul and Eddy Kim. When the series begins, she has already broken up with Tae-Sul and is in a relationship with Eddy, but that doesn't stop the latter from continuing to harbour jealousy against Tae-Sul for stealing 'his' girl in the first place.
  • Seo-Hae with Tae-Sul and Choi Jae-sun. In this case however, Jae-sun's relationship with Seo-Hae is more a case of unrequited love however, as its made amply clear that she doesn't think of him that way.
• Luke, You Are My Father: Lampshaded by Tae-Sul in episode 4 when he asks Seo-Hae if he's her father.
  • In the finale, Park Hyeong-do learns that his employee Bing Bing is in fact his daughter Lee ji-hun, who, unknown to him, also traveled back in time.
• Married in the Future: It is revealed in episode 2 that Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae are very briefly married in the near-future, as is evident by a wedding photograph from the future. By the end of the series the timeline is altered enough that this never comes to pass.
• Never Shall The Selves Meet: An object or person from the future coming into contact with its past counterpart causes what the characters refer to as a 'time paradox'. Effects include the people gaining memories of their future by coming into contact with their future selves (even if its only their future selves' skeletons), or objects from the future glitching out of existence if they stay in contact with their past counterparts for too long.
• No Peripheral Vision: In the first episode, a bunch of police creep up to the train car that they saw Seo-hae enter. There's a whole circle of cops advancing on the train car, but no one thinks to look up and see her sitting on top of the train car.
• Please Wake Up: A little boy says this to his dead father word-for-word (in Korean, of course) in episode 9, when the war starts with a North Korean rocket attack on Seoul.
• Police Are Useless: Notably averted in the case of Seo-Hae's father, Lieutanant Gang Dong-ki. He meticulously investigates Jung Hyun-gi's disappearance, which leads him to learn about the top-secret Control Bureau Team 7. He would probably have learnt about the time-travel all on his own too, if Tae-Sul hadn't come to him first.
• Promotion to Parent: Han Tae-San is forced to raise his younger brother Tae-Sul on his own after the death of their parents.
• Reset-Button Suicide Mission: Towards the end of the series Seo-Hae comes to view hers and Tae-Sul's mission to stop the war and defeat Sigma as this. Even if they die 'this' time, they might succeed in the next timeline, when Seo-Hae's younger self goes back in time to meet Tae-Sul 'again'.
• Ret-Gone: Happens to Sigma in the finale when his younger self is shown kindness by Seo-Hae's father Dong-ki, which prevents him from becoming the Big Bad.
  • Also happens to Seo-Hae, and everyone else who traveled back from the future (including Park Hyeong-do and his team, Kim Seo-jin, and the rest of Sigma's men) once Tae-Sul kills himself, preventing the uploader from ever being completed.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Seo-Hae's mission is to prevent the nuclear war that leads to her Bad Future by saving Han Tae-Sul's life in 2020 and preventing him from inventing the uploader that makes time-travel possible.
• Stable Time Loop: It soon becomes evident that all the characters are caught in one, doomed to repeat their actions over and over again like the Sisyphus from Greek myth. As we learn later in the series however the loop isn't 100% 'stable', and small details can change with each iteration, opening up the possibility of bigger changes.
  • Seo-Hae only travels to the past because she finds the diary of her future self who traveled to the past and died there in a failed attempt to prevent the war. The diary itself is part of the loop - Han Tae-Sul gifts her an identical diary in 2020 to the one she brought with her from 2035, little realizing its an earlier version of the same diary.
    • Later in the series, we learn that Seo-Hae possibly only survived the nuclear war as a young girl because of the intervention of her time-traveling future self, since the adult Seo-Hae warns her father about the impending war and gives him the location of the bunker where they survive. The bunker itself was built by Tae-Sul, only because Seo-Hae told him about it and he realized that it must have been him who built it all along.
  • The story of cop turned Control Bureau agent Jung Hyun-gi is also one. He travels back to August 2020 from some point in the near-future and helps Tae-Sul and Seo-Hae to atone for what his younger self did to them as a Control Bureau agent. He takes them to his house, where he's with his mother when she dies a natural death. But this leads to the Control Bureau raiding the house, and killing Hyun-gi. Immediately after this, the Control Bureau chief uses the incident to claim that Hyun-gi's mother was killed by Seo-Hae, which enables him to recruit the younger Hyun-gi into the Control Bureau in the first place. However, in episode 15 the loop is seemingly broken when Hyun-gi learns how he was manipulated by the Control Bureau, and resolves not to travel back.
  • Sigma is a product of the loop as well. He is on the verge of committing suicide to a large extent because of his depression and jealously due to his old classmate Tae-Sul's success. But Tae-Sul possibly only became as famous and successful as he did because Sigma's future self traveled back in time and invested in his company. Sigma's suicide attempt is interrupted by Tae-Sul and Seo-Hae tracking him down and wanting to kill him because of what his future self does. His second suicide attempt? Interrupted by the nuclear war that is caused by...his future self. All his actions as Sigma are based largely on records of what his future self did.
  • The uploader is only invented because time-travelers from the future used it to travel to the past and influence its creation. Sigma traveled back in time and invested in Tae-Sul's company, giving them the resources to build the machine, and he is the one who coerces Tae-Sul into providing the coding that makes it operational. Tae-Sul only becomes aware of the uploader's applications as a time machine because the time-traveling Seo-Hae told him so.
  • Park Hyeong-do only survived the nuclear war because he was in police custody for killing a man. He eventually travels back in time as part of Sigma's "advance team". In the days leading up to the war, he starts staking out his younger self's house and seems ready to intervene if his younger self gets violent with his family - the implication being that the man Hyeong-do killed all those years ago was himself. In the end however, the killing does not happen, seemingly breaking the loop.
  • In the finale Tae-Sul engineers a new Stable Time Loop in his bid to change the future. Sigma has Tae-Sul and Seo-Hae cornered in a church, however he starts to suddenly experience Temporal Sickness due to his past being altered, while an unknown sniper kills him. This enables Tae-Sul and Seo-Hae to travel back in time to the previous day, arrange for Seo-Hae's father to intercept the younger Sigma (which affected the older Sigma) and finally be the mysterious snipers in the church who killed older Sigma and saved their younger selves.
• Start of Darkness: Sigma's was when, as a young boy, he uses a chemistry experiment he learnt from Tae-Sul to kill his abusive father.
• Temporal Sickness: Time-travelers experience this for a few days/weeks after their arrival in the past. The main symptom is phasing in and out of existence. The Control Bureau has a drug that amplifies this effect which they use to torture time-travelers which is what happens to Seo-Hae when she is captured by them. In a worst case scenario, this can lead to the traveler phasing out of existence completely.
• Temporal Suicide: It is strongly implied that Park Hyeong-do is destined to be killed by his younger self while attempting to stop the latter from beating up their wife. Due to the intervention of his daughter, this ends up never happening.
• Time Police: The Control Bureau arguably play this role, apprehending time-traveling refugees from the Bad Future.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Most time-travelers exploit their knowledge of the future to get rich by betting on sports games or winning the lottery. Even characters like Seo-Hae or Sigma, who are neither motivated by fun or profit, use their future knowledge to make money to fulfil their other objectives. The head of the Control Bureau even suggests that lotteries were set up by time travelers for just this purpose.
• Time Is Dangerous: Time-traveling through the uploader is extremely risky, with only a 10% chance of survival. Even if travelers successfully make it to the past, they will be unstable for some time and could potentially phase out of existence completely.
• Time-Travel Romance: Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae
• Timey-Wimey Ball: While for most of the series, it seems like Stable Time Loop is firmly in place, we later learn that small changes are possible in each iteration of the loop, leaving open the possibility of bigger changes. In the finale, Han Tae-Sul changes the future by engineering a new simpler Stable Time Loop that enables him to defeat Sigma.
  • The finale makes it unclear whether changing the future simply causes objects and people from that future to vanish or if the impact of their actions in the past too are undone. For instance, missiles fired by North Korea vanish in mid-air once the future changes, even though they are from the present, which suggests that their launch (influenced by time-travelers) was undone due to the future changing. And yet, none of the other events of the series, all of which were influenced by travelers from the now-erased future, seem to have been undone.
• Title Drop: In episode 8, Han Tae-Sul mentions the myth of Sisyphus that the show is named after, when he sees a painting depicting the mythical character in Sigma's apartment.
• Together in Death: In the finale, it seems that Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae get to reunite in some kind of afterlife after their deaths from suicide and being Ret-Gone respectively.
• Write Back to the Future: Seo-Hae writes a diary about her experiences with Han Tae-Sul in 2020 and their efforts to stop the war. This is the same diary that her younger self will pick up in the future, 15 years later, which leads her to travel back in time in the first place.
  • In episode 13 Tae-Sul scratches a message for help, along with the current date and time, into a wall when he and Seo Hae are cornered by the Control Bureau. The message is seen by his bodybuard Bong-suk in the future, who then travels back to rescue them.
  • In episode 15, it is revealed that this is one of the responsibilities of the Control Bureau. They maintain records of present-day events for the benefit of Sigma's younger self, thus helping perptuate the Stable Time Loop.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Most people who are aware of time-travel believe that "the future is the mirror of the present, and can't be changed". The fact that the characters seem to be caught in a Stable Time Loop seems to prove that notion. Seo-Hae and later Tae-Sul become convinced that they can change their fate, which motivates them to keep trying.
  • The trope is arguably zig-zagged by the end of the series. While Tae-Sul and Seo-Hae succeed in preventing the Bad Future and thus change the fate of millions of people for the better, they cannot escape their own fate, as they both end up dying in the same church they did in the previous timelines...albeit under very different circumstances.