"Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" Episode 21 recap

I don't really feel that bad for Hee-ji considering how often he manages to get embroiled in life-or-death situations, and then proceeds to enravel all the nearby characters in those same crises. Aside from how generally dangerous Hee-ji is as a friend, he has this bad habit of sucking the oxygen out of the room with his own mostly irrelevant storylines. There's a great montage here that's pretty much a greatest hits collection of Hee-ji either being a jerk or being interrupted by a conspiracy whenever he tries to act a little more senxible for a change.
Yeong-sil? Well, he's a friend to Hee-ji, and it's admirable the extent to which Yeong-sil is willing to stand up for Hee-ji. Sure, we should always be skeptical when a friend has a large visible gash and claims it's just a shaving cut. But when people start waving swords at Hee-ji it's usually because they've been stymied from brandishing their weapons at someone else. Although maybe I'm discussing this point a little too much. Post timeskip Hee-ji is nowhere to be seen and has presumably stopped interrupting the story. Maybe. I'm not making any promises.
So, onward to the next great scientific cause. In the immediate sense, though, Yeong-sil continues to just focus on science and the learning curve involved. I rather wish that "Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" had gotten to discuss its astronomy more in-depth because it's often hard to grasp why the next stage of the conflict ends up being more difficult when the last stage seemed to have been solved by a random scientific insight. Earlier episodes addressed a lot of this by showing that Yeong-sil was keeping complicated records of his empirical observations.
But now, at this late date? I can still appreciate the stronger points of "Jang Yeong-sil - Drama". The musical beats are excellent. It's very easy to tell when a scene is dramatic, or how dramatic it is, when the score starts getting tense. Additionally, the bagpipe music is still great because it's become a sort of symbolic leitmotif of the greater importance of Yeong-sil's endeavors and why he's such a committed scholar.
Yet so much engaging material remains just beyond the periphery. The development of the Korean alphabet is thrown in here practically as an afterthought. This is somewhat sensible, given that Yeong-sil didn't have much to do with that particular initiative. Then again, most of Yeong-sil's activities throughout this drama have had a tangential relationship with his actual accomplishments, so logic here isn't much of a defense.
Review by William Schwartz

"Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" is directed by Kim Yeong-jo, written by Lee Myeong-hee, Ma Chang-joon and features Song Il-gook, Kim Sang-kyeong, Kim Young-cheol, Park Seon-yeong, Kim Do-hyun, Son Byeong-ho,...

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