Sword and Flower: Episode 3

by HeadsNo2

I didn’t know this show had it in it to be cute, but there you have it—underneath all the drop-dead gorgeous visuals (which only get prettier this episode, if you can believe it), there’s a compelling character drama unfolding with a butt-kicking princess who’s honest about being in love. I’m sure that’s not too hard to do when your bodyguard is Uhmforce, though.

 
EPISODE 3 RECAP

Though Mu-young sees Choong alone with General Yeon, she doesn’t make the connection that they’re father and son and merely warns Choong that the man he was speaking to was her father’s enemy.

It’s clear that she’s relieved by the new chief minister being on their side, and sighs that the only thing left is to focus on the crown prince’s succession ceremony. “I know you don’t say much, but now that things have turned out the way we want, can’t you at least say congratulations?” she asks.

Choong looks straight at her and says nothing. Typical.

The meeting hall returns to a sense of normalcy as the chief minister announces that they’ll soon be celebrating the Dongmyeong Festival and a harvest festival, which no one seems all that excited about. (The Dongmyeong festival is in honor of the founding king of Joseon, King Dongmyeong, who you might know him better as Jumong.)

King Young-ryu leads the royal family and all the councilmen in a prayer procession for the coming year’s harvest.

He turns to those assembled to announce that the crown prince’s official installation ceremony will take place fifteen days after the Dongmyeong Festival, and that the prince will showcase his martial arts skills on the last day. The crown prince sweats a bit at this—is he really as weak as everyone keeps saying?

I love that the king doesn’t miss an opportunity to take a dig at General Yeon, all, Btdubbs, when are you heading off to that wall?

General Yeon’s supporters squabble in front of him over the chief minister’s betrayal, while Yeon looks like they wheeled him from one set to the other and just placed him down like a mannequin.

Mu-young spies Choong walking in the palace and times it so that she just so happens to catch his eye, smiling when he calls her. She brings up the fact that he’s got the afternoon off in an effort to try to get invited, but he’s already meeting someone there. Awww. She’s adorable.

Choong buys a book she requested while he’s there and has a run-in with the warrior formerly known as Prince.

His effervescent friend JIN-GU takes him out for a drink to celebrate his new position, while we see the curly-haired warrior meeting with Ohn Sa-moon, one of the councilmen on General Yeon’s side. “Everything is ready,” is all that’s said, and he gets a sack of coins in return.

Jin-gu takes Choong to a gisaeng house, but Choong pauses when he spies the curly-haired warrior inside. Let’s change that to ‘assassin,’ since Choong overhears his conversation prophesying, “On the last day of the festival, when the performance reaches its climax, a raven will soar and the descendants of the sun and river will fall.” I take this to mean that he’s planning to kill the crown prince and Mu-young.

Choong even sees Minister Ohn inside, but he misses the rest of the conversation. The assassin proves his accuracy by blowing a poison dart at a nearby chicken, which prompts the minister to tell him that the perfect time to assassinate the king’s children is on the first day of the harvest festival, when tradition dictates that they’ll dress as commoners for a day to mingle with the people.

Mu-young tries to convince her brother to take martial arts lessons from Choong in preparation for the festival, but it’s clear the crown prince has no interest in fighting, preferring to paint instead. “I know you have the potential to become a good king,” she reasons. “But they all underestimate you.”

The crown prince huffs that they can all think what they want. Choong starts to calmly roll up the prince’s paintings, and matter-of-factly states that the king authorized him to use any means necessary to train the crown prince. And if the prince refused, he’s authorized to burn all his paintings.

Being ordered around is something the crown prince won’t abide by, so he pulls a sword on Choong, who doesn’t even blink. He tells him that martial arts is about protecting what one loves and cherishes—so he hopes that the prince will use it to protect his paintings.

But when he takes the prince’s sword away and offers it back with the paintings, the prince only takes the latter and demands to be left alone.

He softens up later to find Choong reading the book Mu-young had him buy, and we hear why in a voiceover—it’s one of the crown prince’s favorite books. Aww! Did she have him buy it to use as an icebreaker with her brother? That’s too cute that she knows her brother so well.

Choong gives him some words of wisdom about there being more to life than books, but he also mentions how fond the crown prince is of his servants in the palace—and that if he wants to protect those he loves, he must be strong in front of the court.

The crown prince scoffs in defeat, acknowledging that Choong is pretty effective at emotional blackmail.

General Yeon’s minion relays the news that Choong is now the crown prince’s martial arts instructor, so Yeon asks him to convey a letter to his son in person. Curious.

Choong escorts the prince and princess for their mingle-with-the-commoners-night, and notices the shady-looking assassin hovering nearby… but he disappears from sight only to find a new vantage point where the prince and princess are within range of his poison darts. He either doesn’t take the shot or misses it.

The streets are alive with celebration, as our siblings pass fire-breathers and all sorts of cheering people. Mu-young smiles, “Father is right, there must be no war in Goguryeo. If General Yeon saw how happy the people are, he might not oppose my father, right?”

The crown prince gets nabbed by a gisaeng, and I love how he stops his guard from joining him, all, No no, I got this. Even Mu-young offers a cheeky shrug to Choong as if to say that boys will be boys. Ha.

He eventually escapes from the gisaeng and smiles to see his sister having so much fun watching the street performers (is he also noticing how fond she is of Choong?), only it also leaves him wide open for a poison dart attack. The assassin takes aim but misses his chance when the prince’s guard blocks his line of sight, leaving Mu-young open…

Thankfully, Choong unknowingly blocks the assassin’s shot at Mu-young by keeping at her side. Phew.

The crown prince suddenly declares that he’s seen enough for the day, leaving Mu-young practically pouting at the thought of leaving all the fun. She brightens up when he tells her that he’ll go back alone so she can stay… Ah, is her little brother setting her up on a date with Choong? Too cute.

The assassin takes aim, trying to find the perfect opportunity. He takes a shot at the crown prince, but the dart lands in some Save The Day Cargo instead. I’m glad he sucks at his job, because I want Mu-young and Choong to have their date.

They wander near a streetside fortune teller who pulls them aside, outs them as a couple, and insists that he read their future. Mu-young offers a little “Why not?” shrug to Choong, and together they throw the multi-sided dice until it lands on their fortune… if they have sexy times during a full moon, they’ll bear a son! Ha.

Everyone cheers, and Mu-young smiles sheepishly. I’m not sure if they’re aware that cousin Jang is watching them, but he furrows his brow at their closeness.

Then, a little street urchin steals Choong’s sword, causing him to grab Mu-young’s hand so they can chase after him through the crowded streets. It’s actually a really neat (and very pretty) sequence, but the icing on top is how Mu-young is on cloud nine from holding his hand. She’s totally selling this one-sided crush.

They lose track of the boy, and suddenly General Yeon’s minion is there to hand it back to Choong. Jang sees the exchange and is extra perturbed.

Mu-young gets to tour the inn where Choong used to live, and marvels how nice it must have been for him to be able to come and go whenever he pleased.

“Though you’re always smiling, I know that you’re heavily burdened in the palace,” Choong notes. Well, he doesn’t say much, but he clearly pays attention.

She doesn’t mind the burden because it’s for her family, and wonders if he could wander because he doesn’t have family. But he must have once, right? “I have a mother,” Choong replies. I wonder if she’s still alive.

Mu-young notices some Hanja word games scribbled in the wall and attempts to play some with him, by giving him multiple Hanja radicals in order for him to guess the full character. He gets the easier ones, so she ups the difficulty (and plays this one close to the chest): “What about the character where the words inside one’s heart are confined by threads?” (The character means love and yearning.)

Basically, she’s confessing her feelings for him in a poetic way, while framing it in the confines of the game. I think he catches on though, so while he may know the answer, he acts like he doesn’t to avoid an awkward situation. (Does this also mean she got poetically rejected?)

Jang confronts General Yeon’s minion, but he gets no response. What was he expecting?

Choong finds his father’s letter attached to his sword, which warns him against the path he’s taking: “I won’t allow you to bring disgrace to the family.” Oh, so he’s family now?

Jang watches as Choong burns the letter. Ugh, I’ve tried ignoring it, but it’s like someone is playing the trumpet right into the microphone. Too Much Trumpet.

Mu-young comes across him, and he dodges her question about what he burned. She gifts him with a hairpin she bought at the market and thanks him for his help preparing the crown prince for his demonstration. “I feel so much better now that you’re in the palace.”

When they leave, Jang inspects the burnt pieces of the letter. Man, this guy is relentless.

Haha. The crown prince uses a wooden sword to spar with Choong, and just ends up ineffectually hitting him over and over again with no more force than a kid with a twig. By then dodging his blows, Choong teaches him about learning how one’s opponent moves in order to avoid their attacks and overpower them.

As Jang watches the two spar, Choong’s fighting style sparks a memory of the fight he had in the rain with the masked assassin. Is he putting Choong’s identity together?

Mu-young drops by to watch, and it’s so clear that her brother knows she’s crushing on Choong. “When we were little,” the prince says, “Father often joked about how my sister should have been born as the crown prince of Goguryeo. Of course, it’s not a joke—my sister has always been superior in all aspects. But there’s more than meets the eye.”

There’s a flashback through his eyes of Mu-young demonstrating her sword fighting skills in front of her father, his council, and foreign delegates(?). It’s a deadly fight considering that they used actual swords, and she not only held her own against the other warrior, she won, much to her father’s joy.

But when her brother went to visit her later (with flowers, aww) he saw that she was wounded, a fact that she hid in order to put on a brave face for the king and everyone else gathered.

Back in the present, the prince explains that he was supposed to have fought the foreign prince that day, and it wasn’t out of fear but a simple desire not to fight that led his sister to take his place. He recognizes that he’s the spoiled one who never does what he doesn’t want to do, but Mu-young has been selfless in what she’s done for him and his father.

As Choong watches her train, he thinks to himself, “You’re not alone, Princess. I will be by your side.” And then he actually smiles at her. Of course she smiles back.

It’s Festival Day, but the air is anything but as the royal family enters the somber meeting hall filled with councilmen dressed in their Sunday best, and painted performers to lighten the mood. Among them is the poison dart assassin dressed as a crow.

Mu-young gives her brother a supportive nod before he heads to the open stage for his martial arts demonstration, and he actually does surprisingly well. (I guess it’s not surprising at this point but even I’m floored—everything about this scene is gorgeous. It’s like an ultra-modern painting of ancient times, but it works. And it’s just plain cool.)

Then begins a performance by a traditional acting troupe, shown in stunning colors with the players decked in bright green and yellow silk against the red skatepark they’ve turned the meeting hall into.

The man who hired the assassin, Minister Ohn, starts fidgeting nervously. It doesn’t escape Choong’s sharp eye (he saw him plotting at the gisaeng house) as the performance continues, but the characters in the story take on names like ‘Yeon’ and ‘Tang’ as the king glances over at General Yeon to check his reaction. Ha, the king is having this play performed just to get at Yeon.

The assassin readies his poison flute backstage before he’s set to go on and “perform,” only today he fills them with poison pills. Choong sees Minister Ohn with his dad as well as the assassin’s silhouette, and knows something’s up.

It’s like General Yeon’s soul makes a long-awaited comeback as he flashes back to his debate with the king over how to face Tang, but it seems like the king’s warning has stuck with him: “If we’re divided, Goguryeo will fall.” So is he thinking about not going through with the plan?

Choong only now puts together what the assassin meant when he said “the descendants of the sun and river will fall”—the two symbols hearken back to the father and grandfather of Goguryeo’s founders, which makes the prince and princess the descendants.

The assassin drops from the ceiling dressed as a raven and shoots mouthful of poison pills toward the royal siblings’ beverage cups…

But Choong intervenes just in time by blocking the pills with his sword, and in doing so he leaps into the playing space to fight the assassin. He grabs onto one of the dangling skeins of silk used by the performers to fight the assassin in the air, and when the assassin jumps to the ground to try shooting more pills at Mu-young, Choong slices his flute of death in half.

The fight goes back in the air (while they dangle from the silk, it’s kind of hard to describe), with the two trading blows, until the assassin’s blade cuts through Choong’s sleeve. Choong retaliates by cutting the assassin’s silk lifeline so that he falls flat onto the stage.

Mu-young is the first to reach Choong, and he hurries to hide his wound from her. Why does it seem more serious than just a flesh wound? Is he wounded?

No one else really understands what just happened, so the king naturally demands to know why Choong ruined the performance. It’d be so much easier if he were to tell the truth, but he saw the councilman behind the assassination attempt conspiring with his father…

…So he protects his dad by lying that he just misunderstood the situation and thought that there was a threat to the royal family. (Nice to see the dad he’s protecting looking like he’s ready for a nap.)

Mu-young jumps to defend Choong against her father, explaining that it was a mistake he made out of an honest desire to protect them. I’m really not too familiar with Goguryeo, but I feel like if this were Joseon, she wouldn’t even have gotten to see the darn festival so the fact that her father hears her out down to the last word is nifty.

What’s better is that her brother also throws his gat in the ring to defend her and Choong, and the king wins automatic points for taking their advice in order to forgive Choong for wrecking the party.

But it’s cousin Jang who speaks up against this move and slices away more of Choong’s sleeve where the assassin cut him—but that’s because he recognized the wound he inflicted on the masked man who killed their hostage. Which says to him that Choong is the masked man. Convenient, but sure. Why not.

Jang points out for the king and everyone that he inflicted that wound on the man who killed the last survivor of the group who attacked them, and he’s got the Most Unique Sword in the World to prove it.

The king then turns to Choong to ask him if he infiltrated the palace as a spy. Mu-young doesn’t know what to do: “Say that it’s not true,” she pleads with him. Choong just lowers his head, and she brings her hand to her mouth in shock. DUDE. You’re not even going to try to defend yourself?

He’s then asked if General Yeon sent him, and I guess they’re banking on the fact that Yeon never looks like he’s mentally present since he’s kind of standing right there.

Choong replies that he came to the palace as a guard and that he isn’t a spy, but when Mu-young asks him why he has a clear wound from Jang’s sword his only defense is that he had a reason for doing what he did that day.

Tears spring to Mu-young’s eyes at his lame defense: “Who are you?” And then, when she remembers facing off against him in the rain, she realizes that he knew who she was the whole time and pretended not to. “Were you really an assassin sent by General Yeon to kill a man in broad daylight? Do you know what kind of man he is? Do you think that it is for Goguryeo’s interests to work for a man like that?” For the record, Yeon’s still standing a few feet away, all, Now you’re just being hurtful.

Choong denies being a spy, but Jang slams him with the evidence of him meeting with one of General Yeon’s men and burning the letter afterward. What’s his defense? (This is almost like a legitimate interrogation, actually. In any other drama, he’d be three leg screws into a torture taco by now.)

But all Choong can say is: “I am not General Yeon’s spy.” Pause. “General Yeon… is my father.” Oh, crap. Mu-young’s reaction is probably more heartbroken than if he’d admitted to being a spy, but I’m surprised he pulled that out. It doesn’t make General Yeon too happy, but then again, what would?

So the king announces his belief that Choong is a spy, and that he’ll have to be beheaded under the law. I love that he literally asks General Yeon what he thinks of his decision to behead his son, but Yeon finally bothers to shuffle down to the stage where he asks, “Is there any evidence that he infiltrated the palace and acted as a spy?”

The king asks if Choong is or is not his son as if that’s proof enough, and the room goes silent when General Yeon says that he is Choong’s father. Aw, Choong is all happy/sad to hear his father affirm his existence for the first time.

But this only proves that Choong is a spy to the king, since any child of General Yeon’s wouldn’t be relegated to a position as a palace guard. Yeon: “I have nothing to do with him. He is of my blood, but he’s never been part of the Yeon family and is an illegitimate child without a name.”

He and the king go back and forth on Choong’s spy-ness (at least I think so, I feel like I can’t hear them over the sounds of what must be the world’s largest violin), but General Yeon actually defends his son as best he can, even shocking the king a bit in the process by talking back. He knows that the king just wants to kill Choong now for being his son, his crimes don’t matter.

In the end, and even if Choong wasn’t ever a spy, the fact that he killed the last man alive who attacked his children is enough to put him to death.

General Yeon gives up and walks away as the king decrees that Choong will be beheaded in the middle of the capital for everyone to see.

 
COMMENTS

I said this after Equator Man’s premiere, and it (unfortunately) applies here, too: The music is a horror show. It’s not that it’s horrible music, it’s just that it’s horribly applied. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

There’s a good show here, there really is—the visuals are out of this world and wonderfully unique for television. So many moments had me awed and amazed at just the sights… and then a good half of them were ruined by legitimately bad, overbearing music cues. Public Enemy No. 1: The World’s Saddest Violin undercutting the last scene, specifically when Choong heard his father acknowledge him.

It was already a melodramatic moment, so when you add in stupidly loud music that screams “FEEL SAD NOW” it kind of defeats the idea of letting the scene breathe a little. There’s a reason why makjang dramas use music to cue the audience into what they should be feeling, but in an otherwise well-constructed drama, it doesn’t make sense to aurally assault an audience like that. So stop, Sword. Just stop. Replace all the yes-men around the music guy in the editing room with absolutely-no-never-never-ever men, and you’ll be better off for it.

Music aside though, I’m actually really digging this show more and more. Mu-young is a refreshing sageuk heroine so far in that she gets to be (the closest I’ve seen to) a fairytale princess, without most of the “You’re a woman, and that means your opinion is worthless!” diatribe that tends to plague so many of her kind. She’s a legitimate badass, and she doesn’t have to jump through any complicated cross-dressing hoops to do any of the cool stuff she does, like win sword fights or play politics with her dad. Call me crazy, but it’s like she’s getting treated as an equal. (I know!)

And wouldn’t you know, it makes for a really dynamic character. Mu-young gets to be fun and have fun and delight in playing nerdy word games with her crush and hold his hand—okay, so maybe she’s just the fairytale princess I wanted to be when I was little. And maybe it’s all short-lived too, since I honestly wasn’t expecting her to find out Choong’s family ties so soon. It’s an unexpected twist and one I don’t know how our hero will wriggle out of, but I’m looking forward to seeing him try.

Though I’m guessing that the days of Mu-young’s brother playing wingman to her romance are probably over. That’s maybe one of my favorite Princess Perks Mu-young got this episode—zero judgment. Her brother literally gave her his blessings to go have a night on the town with her hot-and-broody bodyguard. Even if this is some weird alternate universe that never existed historically, it’s certainly a colorful one. Count me in.

 
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