Jeon Woo-chi: Episode 6

by girlfriday

Cute, cute, cute. We get secret identity hijinks, flirty sweetness with more than one girl (no one said wizards weren’t naughty), and a big face-off that changes the game. Woo-chi finally makes his way to his beloved, but things don’t turn out exactly as he planned.

 
EPISODE 6 RECAP

Woo-chi follows the eunuchs on their scroll hunt, which leads him right to Ma Sook’s house. Well that’s more like it. He watches from the rooftop as the double agent eunuch slips in first, not to do recon like he said, but to warn the bad guys.

Inside, Ma Sook orders Mu-yeon to reveal the map’s secrets, and she starts, “This map…” but gets cut off before she can finish. No sooner does the eunuch warn them that trouble is here, that Woo-chi blasts the doors open to make his grand entrance.

Ma Sook looks agape, and turns to Kang-rim, “You killed him in Yuldo…” Yeah… about that…

Woo-chi calls out for Mu-yeon, saying that he’s here to save her, only she doesn’t so much look like she wants to be saved. Kang-rim tells his uncle to hurry and get Mu-yeon to safety, while he and his men fight Woo-chi off.

They attack, and while Woo-chi fights off the minions, Kang-rim orders the house burnt to the ground to cover their tracks. Ma Sook opens a secret passageway behind him, and prepares to take Mu-yeon away.

Woo-chi sees them and throws a burst of wind at Ma Sook…

But Mu-yeon jumps in front of him to block it, taking the hit herself. It knocks her down. Hard.

Ouch, the look on poor Woo-chi’s face—both the shock of her jumping in to save the baddie, and then her wincing in pain from his attack.

Kang-rim lights up in fury that he’d hurt Mu-yeon (Hello pot, meet kettle!) and tells the minions to back off so he can fight Woo-chi himself.

They fight, but Woo-chi is more anxious to chase after Mu-yeon, and so he runs into the secret passageway the first chance he gets. Curiously, Kang-rim doesn’t try to stop him. Hm, I don’t like the looks of this.

Woo-chi runs into the maze-like tunnel, and hits a dead end. Suddenly, the walls start to close in on him, and they seem impervious to his powers. Oh crap. He’s about to be wizard pancakes, and the house is burning down around him.

Thankfully the eunuchs storm the place just in time, giving Woo-chi an exit. Except, of course, as soon as he leaps out from the fire, he’s surrounded by pointy swords.

He doesn’t even have a chance to explain before the double-crosser runs up to say that this is the man who stole the scroll. Arg, now he has to contend with being a fugitive?

With no choice and no time to explain, Woo-chi flies up into the air and disappears, before their very eyes.

Meanwhile, Bong-gu is trying his best to fly under the radar while posing as Lee Chi, but his colleagues keep running up to ask for help, like how to finish this sentence, or how to spell a difficult word.

I know it’s a super obvious joke that the illiterate Bong-gu keeps holding and pasting scrolls upside down, but I die laughing every time. He panics, calls them dumb for not knowing such simple things, and then remembers the bathroom excuse and runs off.

He doesn’t get very far though, because Editor Oh Kyu drags him off to do a special assignment (he’s basically pawning off his own homework) and he wants Lee Chi to do it right here, right now.

Bong-gu nervously starts in on the bathroom excuse again, but Oh Kyu picks up on his strange accent and asks why he’s suddenly talking differently. Bong-gu’s like, What accent? Omg, does he not know that he has one? HA.

In his best attempt to speak without one (which only results in speaking slowly with the exact same dialect), he answers, “I. Have never. Once. Had. An accent.” Pffft. Can we have Bong-gu playing Lee Chi at least once every episode? I could watch Cha Tae-hyun doing Sung Dong-il impressions all day.

Bong-gu sits at the desk, nervously flexing and un-flexing his index finger, muttering over and over to himself that he doesn’t know how to read or write. Woo-chi finally returns to the palace, but Bong-gu isn’t at the outhouse like he’s supposed to be.

Suddenly Bong-gu changes back to his own body (a risky move, given that he could’ve been standing in front of Oh Kyu) and he scrambles under the desk to keep from being seen.

He provides a distraction long enough for Lee Chi to zoom past them and get to his desk, but he’s too angry to deal with office shenanigans, and orders everyone out.

He sits there, looking down at his trembling hands, thinking of how he hurt Mu-yeon.

The eunuchs return to the palace as well, and report that there was nothing left at the house to salvage for clues. Shifty double agent swears he saw Woo-chi take the scroll, and guesses that they haven’t figured out the map’s secret.

The head eunuch, So-chil, asks what the picture was, and Shifty lies and says it was of a flower. That seems to ping So-chil’s radar, though he doesn’t let on if he can tell it’s a lie.

He reports to the young king, who asks why the silver mine was kept hidden, if it was so massive that it could make the entire nation of Joseon wealthy. So-chil says the kings before him feared the inevitable war that would break out over the riches, and chose to keep it a secret until absolutely necessary.

So-chil says he’s got one lead to follow up on, and seems genuinely contrite. I totally expected this guy to be completely evil, but it’s so much more interesting that he’s neither extreme—he’s more like the morally gray badass keeper of the scroll. And so far, seems to have allegiance to past kings over anyone else.

Once he leaves, the king tells Eun-woo to come out, and she comes out from her hiding place after listening to their entire conversation. The king asks what she thinks, because he still doesn’t trust anything the eunuch says.

Oh Kyu runs home to his father Minister Oh with news of Ma Sook’s house fire. He says that eunuchs were seen tossing the place looking for something, and that it all seems suspicious.

A court lady arrives to give Minister Oh a message from the palace, though we don’t hear what it is.

The baddies have relocated, and Kang-rim paces back and forth in worry as Ma Sook tends to the wounded Mu-yeon. His day just gets worse when he gets word that Woo-chi escaped with his life after all.

Woo-chi is still sitting at his desk by morning, not having moved a muscle. He thinks back to his dying teacher’s words that once under Ma Sook’s spell, Mu-yeon would be gone forever.

It’s only after a full night of brooding that he remembers the shifty eunuch’s shifty behavior last night, and storms out. Oh Kyu stops him asking for the report, and Lee Chi glares, “And why do I have to do it?” Oooh them’s fightin’ words. Oh Kyu is left sputtering in his wake.

Ma Sook asks why Kang-rim didn’t tell him that Jeon Woo-chi was still alive, and he hangs his head like a child, confessing that he wanted to take care of it himself. Ma Sook says he’s risked everything now—seeing Woo-chi has shaken Mu-yeon, and she’s back to fighting off the spell.

He warns that if she can recover any of her memories, she’ll never give up the map’s secret. “If Woo-chi and Mu-yeon meet again, I don’t know what will happen.”

Kang-rim says he’ll make sure it won’t, and vows to kill Woo-chi himself. Ma Sook chides that he doesn’t even know where Woo-chi is, but Kang-rim says he can make him come here of his own accord.

Lee Chi goes to his wall to add shifty eunuch Doong-gae’s name to the baddie network. He tasks Bong-gu with finding out more about him, and Bong-gu says he actually knew him before, when he was a slave.

They apparently worked together in the stables—picking up horse poop as he so eloquently puts it—but one day he suddenly got promoted out of nowhere, and was no longer a slave.

At the same time, Doong-gae gives his boss the drawing of Jeon Woo-chi as their prime suspect, and So-chil tells him to proceed with the investigation… and then has him knocked out. Aww yeah.

Doong-gae wakes up tied to the trusty ol’ eunuch’s torture table, with a knife to his throat. So-chil asks where Ma Sook and the scroll are, and when Doong-gae plays dumb, the head eunuch asks calmly, “Did you think I wouldn’t know that you’re in collusion with Ma Sook?”

Doong-gae swears up and down that he’s not, so So-chil nods to the other eunuch to begin the torture.

Lee Chi comes home and remembers that he ought to check in with Hye-ryung, and finds her still getting ready in the morning, with her hair down. Aw, I love how flustered he gets. I’m gonna love these two.

She’s happy to see him, and asks him to braid her hair like the old days, which just gets him all tongue-tied, and he quickly makes an excuse to leave. But she pulls him back in, so he nervously reaches up to touch his not-a-sister’s hair.

As he starts to braid it, he flashes back to happier days, sitting by the river in Yuldo and combing Mu-yeon’s hair. He says that the irises smell nice, and Mu-yeon says it’s nothing compared to his scent.

Woo-chi: “My scent? I have a scent?” Mu-yeon: “Yes a nice one. One that only I can smell.” Flirty smiles all around. They’re so cute.

By the time he comes out of the flashback, he’s done braiding Hye-ryung’s hair.

She asks about the man who killed their father, and wonders why he hasn’t found out more than she has. “I’ve only barely found out his name: Ma Sook.”

That stops him cold, “Ma Sook?” She asks if he knows him, and he covers up his reaction. She doesn’t know where he lives, but vows to catch him, and Lee Chi says with purpose, “I’ll catch him for you.”

Myung-gi the apothecary bursts in, noting how pretty Hye-ryung looks dressed like that, and Lee Chi gets all huffy at him for bursting into a lady’s room unannounced. Hee. It’s cute both ways, because he’s suddenly acting as her oppa, and also so very much not her oppa.

Kang-rim sits by Mu-yeon’s bedside (against his uncle’s orders), and she finally stirs in her fitful sleep, calling out, “Woo-chi… Woo-chi… Jeon Woo-chi…”

He flips out and tries to wake her out of it, and his minion drags him out before Uncle sees.

The proprietor of the gambling den comes to pay Bong-gu a visit, mostly because Lee Chi hasn’t been stopping by lately, which means he hasn’t been providing important news.

He’s willing to grease the wheels to have Bong-gu be his new informant, and Bong-gu takes full advantage at the gisaeng house. Love Hands is happy to have customers with deep pockets, and Bong-gu pointedly orders course after course and bottle after bottle.

But when he steps out, he sees Kang-rim walking by, and instantly recognizes him: “The bull!” He flees.

Meanwhile, royal guard Chan-hwi inspects the library one more time, and discovers that the ground beneath him is hollow. He takes out his knife and starts to pry open the floorboards.

Bong-gu races back home in a fit, screaming for Lee Chi. Hye-ryung is the only one there, and though she only catches a few of Bong-gu’s rambling words as he zooms past, they’re enough: “found the man he’s been looking for,” which to her means Ma Sook. She takes off running after him.

Lee Chi goes searching for Doong-gae, confused that the guy who was tailing him so closely is suddenly gone. But Bong-gu races up with more urgent news—he saw the bull-man.

Kang-rim sits calmly at the gisaeng house, waiting for someone. Woo-chi? Love Hands tries to pour him a drink, but he grabs her hand away and she trembles at the touch, later telling her madam that she’s never felt a touch so cold, “like he wasn’t a person.”

Chan-hwi doggedly tears through the library floor. (I love that other people use magic and he just takes a knife to wood, slow and steady, obstinate and stalwart.) He gasps to find a complex system of gears hidden underneath. He’s about to go report it when Eun-woo shows up, and draws her sword. Er?

She looks ready to slice his throat, and he understandably mistakes her for one of the bad guys… until the king walks in behind her.

Chan-hwi bows immediately, and Eun-woo says he discovered the secret. The king notes his prowess, but asks—whom does he serve? Chan-hwi says he already swore to serve the king. Looks like he’s about to join the inner circle.

Later, So-chil finally breaks the double-crossing eunuch, who promises to lead them to the scroll.

Woo-chi goes to the gisaeng house, where Kang-rim chuckles to see him, “Ah, you are as predictable as I thought.” He’s been waiting for him, and offers up a drink.

Woo-chi just asks with concern how Mu-yeon is doing, knowing that she must be badly hurt. Kang-rim drops the pleasant façade and says that she’s recovering. Woo-chi sits down and they share as civil a moment as these two can muster.

He asks for Mu-yeon: “Only I can save her.” Kang-rim doesn’t even seem opposed to the idea, if only he believed she could be saved—no one can break Ma Sook’s spell and they know it.

But Woo-chi lies (at least I think it’s a lie because it contradicts what we saw) and says that their teacher discovered a way to break the spell in his final moments. He swears he can save Mu-yeon.

Kang-rim warns him to leave Joseon. If he stops chasing them, he’ll spare Woo-chi’s life. He confesses that he doesn’t want to end things badly, adding that killing him in Yuldo… it was the only way for Kang-rim to make it out alive.

You mean, as opposed to the other time you left him for dead in the secret passageway, not 48 hours ago?? Dude. Are you forgetful or just shameless?

I do believe him when he pleads with Woo-chi to leave things alone so that they don’t have to come to blows anymore. But obviously Woo-chi isn’t about to back off. Kang-rim warns that he won’t be responsible for anything that happens from here on out, and Woo-chi vows to come after them, even Mu-yeon, if he has to.

They head out together, perhaps to take the fight elsewhere?

Hye-ryung finds out from Bong-gu where Lee Chi is, and runs toward the bad guys. Oh no, what are you doing?

She runs past Woo-chi and Kang-rim without recognizing them, but Kang-rim’s head minion is another story. She recognizes him instantly—as the guy who attacked Lee Chi that night their father died. She follows.

They sure do journey far—what’re they, at the ocean? They turn to face each other, the air tense. They stretch their fingers like a pair of duelists at high noon, and then Woo-chi asks one last time if they really need to do this.

He says that if they joined forces, they could save Mu-yeon together, but Kang-rim uses the old I’m-already-too-far-down-this-path excuse.

Woo-chi says it isn’t too late, and asks if he’s really going to ruin Mu-yeon over whatever his uncle intends to do. He asks what he thinks his uncle will do to her as soon as he gets his map, and Kang-rim starts to tremble.

But he digs his stubborn heels in, insisting that he’ll be the one to take care of Mu-yeon. “Whether she lives or dies, I’LL be the one to do it! Me, Ma Kang-rim!”

Woo-chi sighs, “I believed, in the very least, that you’d protect Mu-yeon. I’m mad at myself for believing in you.”

He raises up his wind power, when suddenly, Kang-rim’s ninjas fly up from under the sand. How’d they get down there? I dunno, but it looks really cool.

They’re armed with chains that block magic, and chain Woo-chi up from limb to limb, spinning around him like a choreographed dance. It looks really pretty, yunno, for being a death trap and all.

Woo-chi is brought to his knees before Kang-rim, who says he’ll use his powers well. “Go well, friend.”

And then he opens up his hand and draws Woo-chi’s powers into himself. It seems to affect him—whether it’s his own emotion or Woo-chi’s, we don’t know.

Woo-chi struggles from the pain, screaming Kang-rim’s name. Up in the sky, the moon starts to wane rapidly.

And then, Mu-yeon opens her eyes. Fully awake, she says aloud, “Jeon Woo-chi. Woo-chi-ya!” Is this the thing that wakes her? His death?

Whatever Kang-rim is doing, it’s breaking her spell. She shakes and her eyes fill with tears, “Woo-chi-ya, Jeon Woo-chi…”

And at that moment, Woo-chi falls to the ground, dead.

 
COMMENTS

I mean, he can’t be dead dead. Just a little dead. Like out to lunch and long enough to fool the baddies, yeah? I wonder what it is that keeps him alive though—his teacher died the first time in order to save him, so he’s either going to need another teacher, or have some contingency plan in place. Is there such a thing as a backup ki?

The whole Kang-rim/Woo-chi battle is already starting to go ’round in circles plotwise, so I’m really looking forward to what Mu-yeon will bring to change things up. If she’s awake and battling Ma Sook’s spell consciously, it changes the game, and the boys won’t be standing around arguing over who’s going to protect her best. I’m much more interested when she’s involved directly, whether for better or worse, because two boys standing around fighting over her gets tired pretty damn fast. Not to mention kinda whiny. Right now I sort of want her to wake up and just be Destruct-o Girl with everyone and everything, and be a free agent even if she’s battling evil within herself. And if she has to be evil to tell Kang-rim to go zap himself, then by all means, let’s be evil for a while.

I do of course want her to be with Woo-chi in the end. Their flashbacks are so sweet, and I want him to have his happiness. But right now his scope is rather small—he only cares about his own problems, and about saving Mu-yeon. He doesn’t give a lick about saving Joseon, keeping the scroll from falling into the wrong hands, or about Hye-ryung’s vendetta. He only uses it insofar as it coincides with his own agenda: same baddie, same goal. I want him to see more and care about more, and if that means suffering for a while or even being powerless as a result of this latest fight, I’m onboard.

I’m really liking where they’re going with Hye-ryung, not only because she and Woo-chi are so cute together, but because she’ll challenge him and give him a connection to a cause other than his own. I love the idea that in acting as her oppa, he’ll sort of gain a makeshift family, and then on the flipside, his awkwardness at being close to a woman he doesn’t actually know is just so adorable. She’s obviously not going to be the great love of his life like Mu-yeon is, but I think it can be sweet and touching all the same. Especially if she ends up falling for Jeon Woo-chi the hero, not knowing that he’s the same oraboni who comes home and braids her hair. It has more of the makings of a Lois-and-Clark type of relationship, which already makes me swoon.

 
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• Jeon Woo-chi: Episode 4
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• Jeon Woo-chi: Episode 2
• Jeon Woo-chi: Episode 1
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