UGH! Episode 38 will apparently NOT air in Chicago

[ajk]

After the mistake last Sunday, WOCH aired episode 37 on Monday. Which was wonderful. Of course you'd expect them to resume the proper sequence with 38 tonight. But no. They skipped ahead to 39. So it looks like they're not going to air 38 at all. Sheesh.

Eventually the episode will show up on one of the drama websites and I'll post a summary when it does. For now, though, I can only skip ahead and summarize 39, which I will do this week.

The one saving piece of good news is that halfway through 39, where I am as I post this, the story doesn't seem to have moved ahead at all in 38. An envoy has arrived from Ming, but we're still where we were with the crown prince and apparently everything else. So it doesn't appear that anybody watching the series will be too confused going forward.

[truth]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wi_5LDmKhk

Voices are little weird, but has full English subtitles.

[ajk]

Wow--somebody has been busy! That person has been posting episodes all along but the subtitles weren't there initially, or at least they working for me before. Just tried it now, though, and they're working fine. (You have to click on the little "cc" box below the screen to get them.) Great catch, truth, thanks!

This is going to be a real busy week for me at work but I will do my best to get episodes 38-40 summarized and posted as quickly as I can. But at least now everybody has an outlet for seeing 38 with somebody's English subtitles added.

[ajk]

And now tonight (Monday night) WOCH is showing 39 again! The same episode they showed last night. Good heavens.

So okay, two summaries will be posted this week, for 38 and 39. Presumably next weekend we will get 40 and 41.

[wrangler]

I believe that it was Monday afternoon 7/27 that they showed 38 and 39 back-to-back. I may have the timing wrong, but I do remember going through the weekend and thinking that I missed, or they skipped, 38. And then I saw it later broadcast.

I watch on Comcast 391, and check the cable box guide. I have learned the hard way that their schedule can't be trusted. It's wrong way too often.

So I've learned the hard way that if I want to see a show, I set a VCR to run for the 6 hours I can get on a tape, and then scan through to see what's there. More than once I've set my two VCRs to work together to cover 12 hours.

[ajk]

Hi, wrangler--thank you VERY much for posting and sharing that. One of these days I'm going to go over to the station and introduce myself and talk to the people there. This is just the kind of thing I can tell them, about how hard people are trying to watch these series. It shouldn't be this difficult.

So you saw 38? Okay, thanks, I'll update the viewing schedule to indicate that it did air but we're not sure when. Maybe 42 also aired then. Who knows. Ugh.

Have to say, you must be a heck of a fan to do so much to watch this show!

[wrangler]

A few button presses, and a few minutes to scan a tape -- no big deal. It's more a bulldog attitude than fan dedication, I think.

I was out of town the weekend 42 was due, so I don't know about that one. I caught 41 before I left, and watched 42 online.

And now I've seen 43, 44, 45 & 46 broadcast over the last 3 days. Three-card monte, anyone?

[ajk]

Well I do know, now that I've gotten an actual schedule from the station, that they're rebroadcasting episodes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. So it would make sense that you could have seen 43 and 44 rebroadcast and then the first runs of 45 and 46, all on the same weekend.

Not sure when they started the weekend rebroadcasts; it must be recently because they weren't doing it when they first got KBS back, early in the series. But yeah, at least we got 45 and 46 correctly Sunday night and last night. So hopefully they've got it all sorted out now.

Glad you joined us; hope you can find some useful things here. Lots of info on past historicals.

[wrangler]

I think it's been over 4 weeks with the Saturday and Sunday morning broadcasts. At one time they also did Thursday and Friday mornings, but it might have been just a short while.  Lately it's just Friday. I've been watching this show only a couple months. It wasn't that long ago that I noticed that they had discontinued Arirang.

I learned even before Arirang that this station often doesn't follow the schedule on the cable box, and that even when it does, program starting times seem to be written in mud, or even water -- never stone.

[ajk]

Oh yeah, that goes way back with them. Start times have always been approximate.

The thing I've never understood--and I'm not criticizing them, I just don't understand it--is that they could easily just carry the standard KBS World feed and save themselves a lot of work. They do have a newscast of their own that they air; maybe you're not allowed to sub other stuff in if you carry the feed? Will have to ask them about it sometime.

[wrangler]

Maybe there's a reason, maybe not. I find their business sense suspect in general. Publishing a reliable schedule should increase viewership and therefore ad revenue, but they still don't do it, after all these years.

[ajk]

Agree completely. They do publish a schedule in the local Korean newspaper, but nothing in English. The good news is that I think they get it now. They're putting a new website together and it will include a schedule in English, and hopefully they'll keep it updated when it's up. The station manager said they get a lot of calls from English-speaking viewers so hopefully those have made an impact.

[wrangler]

I don't see how a schedule in a Korean newspaper would help their advertisers whose commercials are 100% English. They'll want to see a schedule out there for English speakers. And some of them have been advertising for quite a while.

We'll see what happens.

[ajk]

Oh I agree with you 100 percent...I'm not sure how they get their English-language ads but certainly those advertisers would be happy with anything that draws more English speakers to the station. Hope they get that website up soon.