Six Flying Dragons: Episode 15

by HeadsNo2

Though it may not be Moo-hyul’s turn to be introduced as one of the dragons, I’d be a slimy politician’s uncle if I didn’t at least give him points for effort. Reunions abound in an episode that takes the time to set the table for what’s to come, resulting in our long lost siblings getting a chance to hug it out after years of Bang-ji being a jerk just ’cause. But he’s a well-meaning jerk at least, and that counts for something.

Also, apologies for the late recaps this week, there was a family emergency. Six Flying Dragons recaps will resume their normal schedule next week. Thanks for understanding!

SONG OF THE DAY

Huh Gak – “그리워합니다 (Missing You)” [ Download ]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 
EPISODE 15 RECAP

Though Bang-ji draws his sword after sensing murder in the air, he convinces himself he just imagined it, leaving Jung Do-jeon relatively defenseless against the scarred assassin that comes to kill him.

But it’s actually Yeon-hee who arrives first, using an old fashioned smoke bomb as a means to distract the assassin so they can escape. And when the assassin tracks Jung Do-jeon into the forest, Yeon-hee attacks him with a sword.

She manages to hold her own for a hot second before the assassin gets the best of her. Before he can bring down the killing blow, the Viper emerges from the shadows to block his attack. Unfortunately for all of them, more assassins appear and threaten Bang-ji into lowering his sword by holding daggers to Yeon-hee and Jung Do-jeon’s throats.

Yeon-hee uses one of her hairpins as a weapon to buy time, leaving a perfect opening for Moo-hyul to enter the fray. He slashes the first assassin with one fell swoop then takes another one on with ease. The only thing he’s concerned about is learning their names, so he can add them to his resume of defeated foes.

Bang-won and Boon-yi arrive as the two warriors take on the assassins in yet another legitimately cool fight scene, but something clicks in Boon-yi’s mind as she watches Bang-ji fight. Could she recognize her brother in him?

Even though Moo-hyul could have handled the other assassin, Lee Seong-gye and his men arrive in time to shoot the man down so he can be captured alive. Strangely though, Bang-ji notices that there’s no blood on his blade, despite him having slashed the scarred assassin’s throat.

There’s no time to think on that too long though, since Boon-yi approaches him with tears in her eyes. “Could it be?” she asks. “Orabeoni? Ddang-sae orabeoni?” She gets her confirmation when he lets out a strained, “Boon-yi-ya.”

She runs toward him and throws her arms around him, almost unable to believe that it’s really him. Bang-ji closes his eyes against his own onslaught of tears as he embraces his little sister for the first time in years. Aww.

Once they’re alone(-ish, since Yeon-hee watches nearby), Boon-yi wonders how her once weak and delicate brother learned to fight so well. “It’s because of me, isn’t it? It’s because of the childish thing I said to you, isn’t it?” she asks tearfully.

But Bang-ji, still the big brother even after all this time, comforts her by saying it wasn’t her fault. She apologizes anyway, and when they get up, she’s faced with another blast from the past in Yeon-hee. She runs up to hug her, and Yeon-hee awkwardly hugs her back.

After reminiscing over his memories with his sister and Yeon-hee, Bang-ji tells Jung Do-jeon that he’ll be sticking around after all. He’ll want to be put to good use, but lets Jung know all the same that he’ll be watching him very closely.

Since the two women he loves believe in the world Jung Do-jeon wants to create so badly, he’ll try to protect that dream if only for them—even though he doesn’t believe in their cause at all. Jung knows he’s just playing hard to get and is elated that he’s staying.

While Gil Tae-mi finds out that the Viper again meddled with their plans by killing two of their assassins and capturing the third to save Jung Do-jeon (which is a new development), Lee Seong-gye thanks Bang-ji for his service and for committing to their cause.

But when he asks for his name, the humbled warrior replies, “Ddang-sae.” Since that’s not a suitable name for a warrior, Lee Seong-gye says he’ll consider him as a son from now on, which passes on the last name of “Lee” and the first syllable of “Bang,” since all his other son’s names start with that. The final “Ji” comes from the Hanja character also used for “Ddang.” So, Lee Bang-ji it is—and his first task is to be appointed as Jung do-jeon’s personal bodyguard. (Looks like I was jumping the gun in calling him Bang-ji since way before. But to be fair, so were most of the news outlets.)

Later, Yeon-hee tells Boon-yi that while she knows Bang-ji was also a victim, she can’t forgive him for it either. But it still hurts her heart to look at him, which is why she considers fate so cruel, since she’ll have to look at him often now that they’ll be working together.

Boon-yi feels for her, and knows it’ll be difficult. Yeon-hee doesn’t deny it, but says they’ll just have to bear with it—which is when Bang-ji enters to say he doesn’t intend to just live through it. He wants to live a new life and get stronger. To do that, he won’t protect her any longer. Every man for himself, right?

Yeon-hee pretends like that doesn’t affect her by handing him one of their super secret wooden figurines and calling him by the much more dispassionate moniker “Comrade.”

Since this is a lot for Boon-yi to take in, she excuses herself from the emotionally charged room. When Bang-won finds her crying and asks who caused it, she cries existentially, “The world. This country. The dodang.” Bang-won embraces her and promises that he’ll put an end to all that worries her.

Fueled by rage now that he thinks Jung Do-jeon and not Lee In-gyeom was behind Bang-ji’s training, Gil Tae-mi barges into Lee Seong-gye’s house to demand answers from Jung. He gets so riled up that he even draws his sword, but Lee Seong-gye draws an arrow just as quickly.

The two men stare each other down, with Gil Tae-mi confident that he could block the arrow and Lee Seong-gye confident of just the opposite. Jung Do-jeon eggs them into making a bet on it, but in a way that’s meant to point out just how precarious a situation Gil Tae-mi is in for wielding a sword at the great general.

After a long and very charged moment, Gil Tae-mi lowers his sword, but promises to dig deeper into the identity of the man who saved Jung Do-jeon’s life. Just the same, Lee Seong-gye promises to dig deeper into the man behind the assassin, having a good guess that it’s probably the man standing right in front of him.

But before he goes, Gil Tae-mi leaves one lingering thought: Who would have won if they’d actually gone through with their bet? Then he heads over to Minister Hong to remind him that the Haedong Gapjok chose Lee Seong-gye over him, something that Hong doesn’t plan to let go unpunished.

General Choi is happy that Lee Seong-gye’s son is marrying a daughter of such a noble clan, but warns that they have a great amount of sway—it’ll be up to Lee Seong-gye to use his ties as in-law to move them and their power into the political realm.

Cut to the marriage of Bang-won and Da-kyung, which a forlorn-looking Boon-yi and a perpetually goofy Moo-hyul attend. But to give the adorable warrior credit where credit is due, he does pick up on Boon-yi’s mood during the ceremony and asks her about it. (Even though, to her credit, she offered Bang-won a comforting smile during the ceremony.)

It’s even cuter that he knows he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s no idiot either—he knows what he saw. He tries to comfort her by telling her to just consider Bang-won as the rice cooker who provides for them, which gets a smile of Boon-yi. “Lee Bang-won, Rice Cooker,” she chuckles.

She commends Moo-hyul for being so straightforward, though he knows that’s just her nicer way of saying he’s a simpleton. But she means it, and wishes her brother had become a warrior like him who cared for his family. In a way, that makes Moo-hyul normal, and there aren’t enough normal people in Goryeo.

“You’re the hope of Goryeo, Warrior-nim,” she adds. Moo-hyul gets that starry-eyed look he always gets when he’s around her. Boon-yi says that her goal is to make a nation with more people like him, and jokes that “Rice Cooker” Bang-won probably feels the same.

As Boon-yi symbolically removes the shoes Bang-won picked out for her, Bang-won’s new bride emphatically informs him that she won’t be sleeping with him until his family’s success and future is secured. Her family will do their best to make that happen, but should it not, they’ll abandon her.

Bang-won surprises her when he puts up absolutely no resistance, and just goes along with her wishes. He’ll work just as hard as she will to make sure she won’t be abandoned by her family.

Lee Seong-gye and Jung Mong-joo are in for a rude awakening when they ask for Da-kyung’s father’s support going forward, only for him to reply that they’re only bound by marriage—what would his clan know about politics? As he tells his fellow Haedong Gapjok member, if Lee Seong-gye wants his help, he’ll have to earn it. Lee Seong-gye already knows this to be true.

Bang-ji is still marveling over the absence of blood on his blade from his earlier skirmish with the assassins, wondering how he got strong and fast enough to kill without tarnishing his blade. That’s when he remembers his old teacher, Jang Sambong, telling him that he would become as strong as the men he fought.

And since he fought the great Gil Tae-mi, he now knows why he improved. Moo-hyul sighs to himself about how good of a warrior Bang-ji is as he watches him train, shortly before interrupting him on behalf of “his lady Boon-yi.”

He barely gets a chance to get into what he wants to say before Bang-ji gives him a letter to deliver to Gab-boon and an order to retrieve his belongings too. It’s funny how Moo-hyul agrees before realizing he’s been had, and even Bang-ji can’t help but smile at his own trickery.

Moo-hyul delivers the letter as promised, but can’t help himself when he sees Gab-boon pack the signature black robe of the Viper—as soon as he’s out of sight, he helps himself into the clothes. He giggles almost maniacally as he practices a few moves, wondering if the clothes really do make the warrior. Oh, Moo-hyul. I luff you.

He doesn’t even think about the consequences as he struts through town in his borrowed suit, which catches the eye of Gil Tae-mi as he’s being carted through town on a chaise lounge. Assuming Moo-hyul is the Viper, he attacks him instantly, and luckily Moo-hyul is adept enough to fight back.

But he’s not skilled enough to come close to defeating him, and Gil Tae-mi realizes that he’s not the Viper pretty quickly. He tsks about kids these days and their trends before asking Moo-hyul if he’s Master Hong’s student.

Moo-hyul’s almost afraid to ask how the greatest swordsman in Goryeo knows him, and gets the reply he wasn’t expecting: “He was my teacher.” So Master Hong wasn’t lying? Gil Tae-mi acknowledges that Moo-hyul has talent, and encourages him to learn from his old teacher, despite him being a swindler with lousy skills.

So Moo-hyul can’t help but ask why it’s not a commonly known fact that Master Hong was his teacher, only for Gil Tae-mi to reply, “Because it’s embarrassing!” Moo-hyul finds their old teacher in the barracks and demands to know if it’s true that he really trained Gil Tae-mi, his brother, and the assassin who went on to kill King Gongmin.

He can’t seem to believe it when Master Hong acknowledges it, and asks why he didn’t tell him beforehand. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN I DIDN’T TELL YOU?!” Master Hong explodes, considering that’s all he ever says. Moo-hyul drops to his knees and begs his teacher to show him the last four moves of the twenty-four he teaches, so he can defeat Gil Tae-mi and make his name known.

While Jung Do-jeon’s team worries that Minister Hong is becoming drunk with power after his latest antics in confiscating even more land that doesn’t belong to him, Bang-won suspects something more at play.

Cut to Minister Hong, who becomes so enraged at his servant/Yeon-hee’s rapist for telling him that he can’t confiscate the holy and untouchable Haedong Gapjok’s land that he bludgeons him over the head. He has his men take the land by force, and they even beat one of the clan elders, ELDER JO, for resisting. (Anyone else catch the mallet malfunction in this scene? Where it breaks and hits one guy in the head? I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did.)

The issue of whether to impeach Minister Hong for it comes up in the next dodang assembly, with his usual defenders at the ready. At least Gil Tae-mi takes a second to wonder at how far his in-law has gone before he jumps in on the fray, though everyone agrees to hold out until Elder Jo can give his testimony in three days.

Jung Do-jeon sees this as their chance to get rid of Minister Hong, even though Lee Seong-gye is doubtful when they only have thirty people on their side compared to the sixty Hong has in the dodang.

But this vote will be different, since even Hong’s supporters will be wary of angering the Haedong Gapjok. There’s a good chance they’ll get enough swing votes for the motion to pass—there are only three they have to be sure to convince.

In the New Joseon Cave, Bang-won voices his concern about everyone’s assumption that Minister Hong made a mistake in going after Haedong Gapjok’s land because he went mad with power, believing it to instead be a calculated move on his part. He believes this because of what Minister Hong said during all those years he tormented him: “You and I are similar.”

So he thought from Minister Hong’s perspective, and wondered why he’d go so out of bounds. It isn’t arrogance on his part, or madness—Bang-won doesn’t know what Hong is after, but it isn’t an accident. Even if it is all part of some great big plan, Jung Do-jeon returns, it was still a mistake on Hong’s part. They’ll have to act quickly in order to capitalize on it.

While Elder Jo reacts to a break-in by Minister Hong’s men into his ancestral hall, Jung Mong-joo talks to all the possible swing voter ministers who refuse to betray Minister Hong, even with the threat of having Haedong Gapjok as their enemy. Only then does Jung Do-jeon realize something he missed before, and calls himself a fool.

In the wee hours of the morning, Elder Jo and his men storm into Minister Hong’s closest manor to cut down the servant who defaced his ancestor’s tablets—but his plans to go to the king and report every detail of Hong’s brutality are interrupted when he’s surrounded by armed men.

Just as five of Minister Hong’s possible supporters call in sick so as to abstain from voting on his impeachment, Jung Do-jeon chuckles over not thinking of that plan sooner. Why try to get more majority votes when they can just reduce the number of ministers voting, and thus reduce the required votes needed for impeachment? Ah, so that’s what he realized earlier.

Of course, the vote never takes place because Minister Hong storms into the dodang assembly to proclaim that he and his men caught Elder Jo plotting treason. It’s outlandish and all the usual gullible ministers buy into the tall tale of how Elder Jo tried to kill Minister Hong for knowing too much, but killed his servant instead.

And Minister Hong, having barely escaped with his life, conveniently found a letter which proves Elder Jo’s treachery. It’s all lies, and Lee Seong-gye knows it as he bellows for evidence of Minister Hong’s claims to be shown, only for Hong to imply that he might be involved in Elder Jo’s treasonous scheme.

The letter, which no one seems to realize that anyone could have written (and isn’t even the first forged letter the dodang’s encountered recently), calls for men to take up arms and storm the palace. Minister Hong calls for everyone in the Haedong Gapjok to be investigated as a result, since they could all be in on it.

“Teacher, you were wrong and I was right,” Bang-won tells Jung Do-jeon in the New Joseon Cave. “Hong In-bang fabricated the treason plot.”

 
COMMENTS

Somehow I don’t think being wrong is something Jung Do-jeon is all that familiar with, though in this case, he’d be foolish to deny Bang-won’s claims. How this one incident will affect their power dynamic is what interests me most, since it’s not as if Bang-won wants to be right for the one-upmanship, or even to be right over Jung Do-jeon at all because of how much he reveres him.

In this case, his intuition was spot on, as compared to how Jung Do-jeon underestimated Minister Hong. And in a way, it’s hard to blame him for thinking that way, since Minister Hong is letting his new position get to him in more ways than one. But it seemed to be a critical mistake on our great teacher’s part, and one we shouldn’t worry about him finding a way out of. In a show that revels in intellectual foreplay as much as this one, this new conundrum Jung Do-jeon has to deal with is just like being served a hot towel before the meal to come—it’s not inherently satisfying, but you know what’s coming will be.

And while it was a foregone conclusion that Bang-won would take a wife that wasn’t Boon-yi, it still feels like it all happened too fast for our young lovebirds to even register what was going on. Even though both of them knew full well what they were getting themselves into (or out of, as is the case). What Boon-yi said to Bang-won about how he wouldn’t change his plans even if he was concerned for her turned out to be one hundred percent true, since Bang-won heard her declaration of love before the vows were said and theoretically could’ve done something. But knowing that he loved her and that she loved him did nothing to deter him from marrying for political advantage, and that’s part of what makes Bang-won so… well, scary sometimes. But in a good way. (For now.)

Despite all the heavy political strife going around, I’m really loving the way this show handles its lighter moments and the pure comedic gold they have with Moo-hyul and Gil Tae-mi. There’s such a risk involved when it comes to easing up on the serious stuff that it’s become a common pitfall for so many other shows, and sageuk can be one of the worst genre offenders when it comes to that. Even with star examples like Chuno, one of its biggest failings was in dedicating all its comic relief to a separate set of characters in separate scenes who always operated outside the main storyline—so you’d get scenes that were not only unfunny, but were actually a chore to sit through. (I still love you, Chuno!)

And too often, it feels like we have to suffer through the zanily scored slapstick bits to get to the good stuff, but then shows like this come around that know how to utilize their characters to take a breather every now and then. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we’re seeing the best jokes ever put to screen here—but the moments that are supposed to be funny tend to serve a double purpose by not only being charming, but by also working to further endear characters to us. What’s not to love when Moo-hyul has an alternate version of reality where Boon-yi is all aegyo and smiles and sunshine? Or when even the stoically serious Bang-ji utilizes the stars in Moo-hyul’s eyes to punk him for his own amusement? And for those who enjoy the more serious side of things, how about all those times Minister Hong inflicted blunt force head trauma on the less fortunate? Ah, memories.

 
RELATED POSTS

• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 14
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 13
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 12
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 11
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 10
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 9
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 8
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 7
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 6
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 5
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 4
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 3
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 2
• Six Flying Dragons: Episode 1