episode 178

[ajk]

So sorry to have gotten behind on this...two sick parents, Christmas coming, blizzard coming, a leaky pipe in the house, you name it. But I'm watching 178 today and will get to 179 as promptly after that as I can.

[𝔰𝔢𝔞𝔫𝔪𝔞𝔠𝔩𝔞𝔦𝔯]

Hope your parents get better! What bad timing for that leaky pipe.

[ajk]

The strongest part of this one was the effort that the writers made to explain everything so it made sense. First it was the debate in the Bekjae camp over advancing versus going back home. You wouldn’t believe that Shin-guhm could be so stupid yet again, but throwing the Yu Geumpil angle in there made it believable. Then it was the situation with how Yu and his troops were going to resist, explaining the geography and even teasing us about catapults (and how can you not want to see this now!). And giving us that glimpse of the spy ship looking around rather lazily and then leaving, that helped set the stage too. And even the comments from Madame Suin about how water barrels had been placed throughout the palace as fire protection, that at least offered some sort of explanation about how the palace wasn’t completely destroyed. Still kind of surprising that the Bekjae army wasn’t more thorough and did make sure to see it destroyed, but whatever, at least they offered us something. (And of course the Bekjae army was on a strict time clock to get out of there so maybe it does hold up after all.) So that made for a really interesting episode that held your attention and kept you up to speed.

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Wow Yu has really gotten in their heads.

The weakest part was the sequence with Choi Ung and Choi Seung Woo. Sure it’s sad that Choi Ung is dying so early, but do we actually like him enough to care all that much? Yes he’s come up with some very good ideas and has been valuable to WG, but he certainly wasn’t perfect. And the meeting scene, it felt like Choi Seung Woo was about to start gloating about how well his plan worked. Which he wouldn’t do, we know him better than that. The whole thing just had a strange vibe to it—like they were trying to stuff it full of pathos and it wasn’t sticking. Didn’t work very well.

Once again terrific work by the guy playing Kyun-hwon in this one. Give Choi Soo Jong credit too, he’s now in a role that works for him and he did well in this one too.

It’s nice to see Mrs. KH happy for once. She’s spent so much time frustrated or bitter or angry or jealous.

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Nice to see some evidence of what’s going on in the larger country. Way too little of this.

Shin-guhm: “I have granted your request against the Vice Prime Minister’s advice. Let us attack Daewoo Island!” Un-freaking-believable. And now it’s sort of shaping up like Yu Geumpil is Yi Soon Shin before Yi Soon Shin! All the success, then the jealousy from his peers that gets him criminalized and disgraced, and now it looks like he’s going to fight another Myeongnyang against a massively superior force. Of course this sounds like just a water variation of the old stuck-in-the-ravine mistake that Shin-guhm keeps making…but maybe this is getting too far ahead so we shall see.

I’ll do episode 179 in a few days and we’ll get back on track with 180 this weekend.