episode 161

[ajk]

I wonder why this one was only a half-length episode. Anybody know? It would have aired around late November 2001. Maybe something important was on the KBS program schedule and it ate up half of WG’s time slot...maybe? This happened once before, way back in episode 12, also half-length, no apparent reason for it. There was a KBS America crawl during the episode but it wasn’t subtitled; not sure if it said anything relevant. Oh well…

Frankly it wasn’t very good. It was odd right from the beginning…Would they really have turned the king loose to flee by himself, without even a bodyguard to go with him? Seems unlikely. And in a white shirt? Okay no camo gear back then, but that white shirt made him easy to spot in the woods. Unlikely…Oh and wait, we saw him wearing a Bekjae military uniform! Where’d he get the nice white shirt? Was it under the uniform? Possibly, and you can understand why he’d want to ditch the military uniform once he was clear of the battlefield…but this should have been explained because it comes off as a continuity error.

And Shin Seungkyum, for a cut off head those eyes were still bright and moist and full of fluid. Okay it’s TV, but the head looked too phony. (Surprised we didn’t see him die. Wasn’t necessary, but with all that’s been invested in so many battle scenes you’d think they’d stage this one at least briefly, to get the drama of his sacrifice.)

And a monk with a prophecy about an important man standing in that spot. This again. Not necessary at all.

“We have been tricked, your majesty…Shin Seungkyum disguised himself as Wang Guhn and sought his own death.” Well geez THAT took long enough. There’s no way this wouldn’t have occurred to them much sooner.

“You have saved my life. I owe you a great deal.” What did that guy do to save WG’s life? Nothing, at least not yet at that moment. If he ends up leading WG to safety, then okay yes WG is somewhat in his debt, but if the enemy army really has cleared out of there, then WG isn’t in any danger.

Kyun-hwon, cracking up laughing: “I cannot hold my laughter when I picture him frantically running away in plain clothes.” Even a problem here, in maybe the best moment of the episode. Choi Seung Woo was trying to kill KH's laughter by soberly reminding him of the missed opportunity. Problem was, we had just seen Choi urging KH to forget about the missed opportunity in the previous scene! Significant mistake there. Sloppy sloppy.

Maybe they didn’t want to put anything of substance in the episode because they didn’t expect many people to see it, for whatever unknown reason. But whatever, let’s not have any more of this please.

[𝔰𝔢𝔞𝔫𝔪𝔞𝔠𝔩𝔞𝔦𝔯]

I think it was heavily cut, but I don't have a copy of the KR broadcasts on hand to confirm. Considering how cut and rearranged AOW was though it's highly plausible...

Confirmed: Episode 161 is the regular 50 minutes, as seen here: vod.kbs.co.kr/index.html?source=episode&sname=vod&stype=vod&program_code=T2000-0112&program_id=PS-0000446981-01-000&section_code=03&broadcast_complete_yn=Y&local_station_code=00

[sageuk]

So it’s a problem with the uploaded video itself

[ajk]

OK this is making more sense now...especially because the more I thought about it, the harder it was to believe that we wouldn't see Shin's death. This series would never just sidestep showing us the death of such an important character.

So essentially what was posted in DailyMotion was the second half of the episode, plus a few seconds at the very beginning and minus a few lines in the second half from a Bekjae officer reporting on what he witnessed about stuff from the aftermath of the first half. And pretty clearly what happened is that KBS America got a hold of the raw episode and hacked it up for some unknown reason to fit in a half-hour slot. Would explain the crawl with their name on it.

My first historical was IYSS so I just missed AOW, but there were plenty of issues in subsequent series with stations here in the USA trimming episodes to fit timeslots. Contemporary dramas too, not just historicals. And the person who put the episode up on DailyMotion obviously was getting their episodes straight off the broadcasts on an American station.

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So having seen the rest of it, I should correct the record on a couple of things. One, WG was not left to flee alone, he just happened to get separated from his escorts because of that random encounter with the Bekjae MPs on the trail. That's plausible (probably not historically accurate but it at least makes sense). And two, the white shirt was underneath the military armor and we saw him and his escorts take off the armor all together when they were on the trail.

Also the way Shin's death was portrayed, we can sort of understand how his head got all the way to KH with nobody realizing. He died at night and his body was mobbed by regular soldiers, all in the dark and nobody could see too well. It's still a little surprising that nobody realized it wasn't WG's head, considering how many officers were staring at WG when WG had to go bow before KH at Jomul Fortress. But it does make more sense with what we saw in the first half of the episode.

The other problems, no they're still there...so this still is one of the weakest episodes, even at full length. But at least we know it wasn't a half-length episode.

Thank you Sean for the link--what a terrific resource that is. I'll have to go back and check out episode 12 when I have time. I even got a bit of closed caption translating into English, watching it on Google Chrome with the translate function turned on. Missed on many, many words but at least you can get a general idea of what's being said.