"My Sassy Girl - Drama" Episodes 25-26 recap

Yoon Se-ah is very good as Queen Jungjeon. She's striking a very difficult balance- Yoon Se-ah is playing someone who is being a very fundamentally bad actor. Queen Jungjeon isn't using to anyone talking back to her, and is in constant panic mode, for all her bravado, that someone is going to find out that she is a fraud. Queen Jungjeon does manage to slow Princess Hyemyeong down a little bit with some key revelations, but we can tell just from the nervous way her haughty noblewoman laugh sounds that internally, Queen Jungjeon is freaking out.
That's a bit of an off thing for me to focus on, considering Queen Jungjeon doesn't even have that many scenes. But then, there's not much of anything to focus on because "My Sassy Girl - Drama" is moving incredibly slowly considering that we should be at the climax by now. Both these episodes just involve characters pondering the revelations of the mysterious masked archer, the only character who is currently making a proactive contribution to the story.
Unmasking the archer is not as thrilling a prospect as could be hoped, since there are only really two plausible suspects. And even that gets whittled down to one by the end of the episode, when one of them appears in the archer's general vicinity. Incidentally, the entire logistics of that scene were nonsensical. Yes, everyone knows by that point that the archer is using the lanterns to spread the messages incognito. But how could one person, let alone two, accurately guess the archer's position when he could literally be anywhere in the entire forest?
Although the more meaty plot point to criticize is that Woo and Princess Hyemhyeong's mysterious dreams are finally explained. And I have to say, the revelations we get are...uninspiring. I'd go so far as to even call them pointlessly clichéd. Well, from the romantic angle anyway. Having information from the memories be relevant to explaining the modern conspiracy is potentially interesting.
However, what we learn seems specifically designed to derive angst from Woo and Princess Hyemhyeong's relationship and honestly, I thought we were past that point by now. The issue of whether Woo and Princess Hyemhyeong can be together and the issue of whether the conspiracy might ruin that by killing one or both of them are completely separate issues, with separate dangers. I don't like how "My Sassy Girl - Drama" is blurring the lines between them.
Review by William Schwartz
"My Sassy Girl - Drama" is directed by Oh Jin-seok, written by Yoon Hyo-je and features Joo Won, Oh Yeon-seo, Lee Jung-shin, Kim Yoon-hye, Son Chang-min, and Yoon Se-ah.

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