Ron Does Stuff

Ok, I think I am up to date with this K-drama now? Like I know it airs two episodes every weekend. I know that the chemistry between the two leads isn’t as good as they’d want it to be. I know that poor unfortunate Seo Yool is the second lead and that he won’t end up with the lead girl. That’s it right?

Anyway, let’s go ahead and recap episode seven!

At the end of episode six, Naksu got sucked into a fucking mirror. A magical mirror! Which plays into Cho-yeon’s — Daeho’s resident Regina George, apparently — plan to get Naksu into trouble with her family and get her away from Jang Wook. Cho-yeon, honey, there’s nothing to worry about. Naksu and Jang Wook have little to no chemistry.

But we begin with a flashback about the great drought that struck the country, a drought so devastating that the country’s mages had to work together to end it. Along with the end of the drought, the mages also ended up with a magical hailstone that produced a black powder that it’s now revealed to be the ~Soul Ejector~, used for the alchemy of souls.

And it wasn’t just a ~Soul Ejector~ either. It was ~Soul Ejectors~ for everyone, so you had mages left and right just switching souls, stealing souls, practicing necromancy, the works. It wasn’t until Seo Gyeong, the founder of Songrim, that the whole shebang was stopped.

That whole flashback was to set up all the magical items in the Jin household, like the mirror that just sucked Naksu in. And all of those things are just waiting to get out, apparently!

From the looks of it, this mirror or whatever’s in it is trying to get out into the world by capitalizing on the longing all the three possible leads are feeling for Naksu. The crown prince is up first, with faux Naksu appearing to him as he’s drinking cinnamon and ginger wine. Fortunately, whatever that thing was did not think things through because it wasn’t charmingly antagonistic towards the crown prince, enabling him to see through its ruse.

The crown prince heads to the Jin household because that’s where he heard Naksu is, and pretty soon he’s followed by Seo Yool and Dang-gu, because Seo Yool was also visited by the mirror spirit or whatever it is. Jang Wook also shows up, but it’s not shown yet whether he’s been visited by the spirit as well.

Back in Songrim, Park Jin and Heo Yeom discuss the possibility of the magical hailstone being dug up from wherever it was sealed, since more and more people seem to be able to shift souls without having mastered Hwansu. They decide that they have to find the stone to avoid the same disaster the country faced more than two centuries ago.

This leads us to Jin Mu, who’s just been handed 10 of the stones that have enabled Naksu and Geon/Jang Gang to shift souls previously. Are they made from the ice stone? Seems like it! But who’s giving Jin Mu these stones? And what’s this it seems Jin Mu’s minion doesn’t entirely agree with his plans?

In the Jin household, Jang Wook apologizes for Naksu’s ~thievery~ and then asks for permission to stay on the property to search for and punish Naksu himself. The Jin matriarch agrees, which Jang Wook then uses to get permission to enter the vault where they keep the magical artifacts and the mirror that sucked Naksu in.

Seo Yool, the crown prince, and Jang Wook all go into the vault, and of course once they’re inside they walk past the mirror holding Naksu hostage. And what’s inside the mirror looks to be another world and I am interested in the magical explanation for this!

The show also provides the answers as to why Naksu was even in the vault in the first place, since only members of the Jin family can open it. She’s able to make Cho-yeon admit that she’s the one who broke the yin-yang jade and not her, and Cho-yeon locks her up in a room that, of course, she promptly escapes from. As she tries to get out of the Jin property, she ends up at the entrance to the vault, which she somehow manages to open. Is she related to Cho-yeon and the Jin family? Either way, Cho-yeon finds her there and locks her in, hoping that she might end up dead there. My goodness.

Fortunately, the boys figure out that the mirror sucked Naksu in after they compared their experiences with the faux Naksu, and after telling the Jin matriarch about this they are told that the mirror is the Mirror of Longing, which shows people what they long for as the name implies. Seo Yool asks the matriarch to take it out so that they can spellcraft Naksu out of it, but she’s a boss bitch and will not do so because the mirror sucked in a human. She doesn’t even take any crap from the crown prince.

She also says she’ll close the door to the vault once the time she gave them is over, which is not how Cho-yeon thought all of this was going to end up because Jang Wook refuses to leave until they get Naksu out of the mirror. Cho-yeon, sweetie, you shouldn’t have been threatened by them, they have no chemistry!

Inside the vault, there’s a whole Mirror of Erised — sorry I know this is a transphobe’s creation but this is the easiest reference I could think of — conversation between the mirror and Jang Wook, with the mirror telling him that he’ll turn him into the most perfect version of himself. But Jang Wook points out that his reflection is still needed and that the mirror is useless if it doesn’t have that to work from, and he covers the mirror up.

Covering the mirror finally allows Naksu and Jang Wook to hear and talk to each other, without the mirror’s interference. There’s a conversation about them being lost without each other and about Jang Wook missing Naksu, but once again, the chemistry isn’t there. I’m really sorry, it just isn’t there! They did all the requisite steps to make them ending up together believable but it really isn’t a matter of plotting or even acting from the cast it’s just that the two actors just don’t have that chemistry that makes it magical.

Either way, it’s enough to get Naksu out of the mirror. But what’s even more interesting is that as Naksu is about to get out, all the artifacts inside the vault start talking about how Mu-deok — the blind girl whose body Naksu switched into — is the magical hailstone. What???

Back in the Jang household as Naksu recuperates, Jang Wook and Park Jin finally have a confrontation. Park Jin does that expected father figure thing of “all of it was to make sure you were safe” but Jang Wook is now more determined than ever to find out who he really is since the mirror made him realize that whatever he does will not be enough for Park Jin. SEE? SEE? This is what you end up with when you insist on all that bullshit. Resentment and rebellion.

Jang Wook is also pushing back against the marriage to Cho-yeon, making her mother think that there’s a risk in having him marry her daughter because he might be illegitimate and therefore not actually from a powerful family.

But the more interesting confrontation is the one between Jin Mu and the family matriarch. The Jin family is matriarchal, with the surname only passed on through the mothers, and Jin Mu is an illegitimate member of the family. He wants Cho-yeon to marry the crown prince instead. And oh boy that is even more dangerous for you Cho-yeon because at least the crown prince and Naksu have chemistry. He tempts the Jin matriarch about how Cho-yeon could be the queen and her missing eldest daughter could become the head of the Jin family and I admit I have no idea what the end goal is here.

And you know who else has chemistry? Naksu and Seo Yool, especially now that Seo Yool has figured out that Mu-deok actually has Naksu’s soul inside her, after a really roundabout scene of Naksu playing the bird whistle that he gave to her when they were young. Also, again, has Minhyun’s voice always been this deep?

But Naksu has got bigger problems, like Jin Mu’s minion blackmailing her into bringing Jang Wook into an abandoned temple so that the minion can shift souls with him. But Naksu does the loyal thing and tells Jang Wook that she’s leaving him and that it’s for his own good and good god we just had this whole thing with Park Jin this is not going to end well.

Seo Yool, at least, is doing the smart thing and is asking Heo Yeom about what really happened to Naksu’s father all those years ago. Turns out that Naksu’s father was also a soul shifter, and the reason that the four families had to kill him was because he was already running wild and had killed other family members. But of course, Naksu doesn’t know that.

Park Jin also has questions to ask Jin Mu about Naksu’s father. He’s figured out that Jin Mu took Naksu in and trained her to be an assassin, and that he wanted Naksu’s first body disposed of immediately so that nobody would discover her connections to him. BUT Jin Mu does an Uno reverse card and tells him that he already knows that Jang Wook is the real heir to the throne and if Park Jin wants everything to stay the way it was he’d keep his mouth shut about his connection to Naksu.

Back to Naksu and Jang Wook, it looks like Naksu did the right thing after all and tell him exactly what was going to happen at that abandoned temple. Not only does Jang Wook manage to keep Naksu from getting killed, he also manages to perform Tansu!

But the happiness is short-lived because the minion still ends up doing what he intended to do — shift souls with Jang Wook. Dun dun DUN!