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Knight Flower: Episodes 5-6
by Unit
As if our 15-year-old murder mystery wasn’t enough, our moonlighting tale hits us with another sudden death as we get to the halfway mark. But for what it’s worth, this death sheds more light on the previous mystery, and it serves to unmask another member of the villain squad.
EPISODES 5-6
Yeo-hwa’s snooping around at the Pil inn pays off when she finds the storehouse where the kidnapped children are kept. I have no doubt that she could have handled the thugs guarding the place all on her own, but a worried Soo-ho swoops in to be of service, and four fighting hands are always better than two. Their teamwork is amazing, and as always, it’s fight first, argue later. The cause of the argument: what to do with the released children.
To Yeo-hwa, closing the case is rescuing the children and taking them somewhere safe. But to Soo-ho, taking the children to the Capital Defense office as witnesses to aid the investigation and bringing Pil-jik to justice is his definition of closure. Yeo-hwa doesn’t trust the justice system, and at some point, she challenges Soo-ho to arrest her if he wants to. But of course he doesn’t… or he can’t because he’s too stupefied to come up with any comebacks for her arguments. I mean, what is logic when you’re standing in front of the most intriguing and amazing person you have ever met?
To clear his head, Soo-ho has a drink with Yoon-hak, but the conversation goes from his trauma-induced partial amnesia about his tragic backstory to drunk ramblings about Yeo-hwa. “I’m dying to know what kind of person she is,” Soo-ho prattles on to everyone who cares to listen. My man is so smitten! But he’s not the only one travelling down the crush lane. Yeo-hwa also loses sleep while thinking — and blushing — about her interactions with Soo-ho. Lol.
I was still marinating in the cuteness of our OTP’s crush on each other when word comes in that Minister Yeom has been murdered… and I’m like what? So suddenly? I won’t miss him, but still. Soo-ho and the Capital Defense team arrive at the crime scene, and their boss is miffed to hear that the Police Bureau is conducting the investigation. It’s like the Joseon version of the FBI and Police Department jurisdiction wars. Lol. Lady Yoo and the Minister of Personnel’s wife arrive next, and the rivals almost tear Lady Oh apart as they also get into a condolence war.
One of the servants at the Yeom household is apprehended as the culprit, and the evidence is a ring found in his possession. The servant claims the ring is his, but Lady Oh claims it’s her husband’s. As for the servant’s alibi for the time of the murder, well, he was out to meet his lover — who turns out to be the Minister of Personnel’s widowed daughter-in-law, LADY BAEK. But he can’t get her into trouble by naming her as a witness.
But Lady Baek gets into trouble all the same because her mother-in-law recognizes the servant’s ring as Baek’s “missing” ring, and immediately clocks in on the affair. But wait, if the ring is actually Lady Baek’s, then why did Lady Oh claim that it’s her husband’s, and insist that the servant be arrested for the murder?
Yeo-hwa can also confirm the servant’s alibi because she spotted the lovers at the watermill when she was returning from Pil-jik’s the previous night. Unfortunately, she can’t risk exposing her midnight activities by becoming a witness, so she turns to Yeon-seon for advice. Her HILARIOUS reenactment of the watermill scene was one of my highlight scenes this week! Honey Lee is such a riot as Yeo-hwa!
Unlike their rival mother-in-laws, Yeo-hwa is worried about Lady Baek — and rightly so because the Minister of Personnel’s wife (seriously, I need this woman to have a name so I can stop typing her title in full) confronts and beats up Lady Baek for having an affair and bringing shame to the family. She locks Baek up in the shed and instructs her to kill herself or else. Great! LADY VICIOUS, it is.
Under the guise of wanting to learn virtuousness, Yeo-hwa visits the Minister of Personnel’s house to see Lady Baek. But Lady Vicious proudly announces that her daughter-in-law can’t attend to Yeo-hwa at the moment because she is on her way to becoming the perfect model for all widows. Translation: she’s about to unalive herself. That’s all Yeo-hwa needs to hear, and she returns at night to rescue Lady Baek. Yeo-hwa takes her to Myeongdo inn, but Lady Baek refuses to escape further without the servant she loves.
Minister Yeom’s autopsy reveals the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head, but it turns out that Lady Oh actually poisoned her husband with, wait for it… the suspicious petals found in the tiger painting! Whoa! It’s the season of ministers’ wives killing their sorry excuses for husbands, and I can’t say I feel sorry for said husbands. Lord Seok raises a brow when he sees that the autopsy report mentioned the discovery of purple spots in Yeom’s mouth, and he visits Lady Oh to subtly inform her that he knows what she did and how she did it. Hmmm.
Lord Seok also hurries the king to close Minister Yeom’s case by beheading the servant. And as to why he’s so invested in the case, a flashback reveals that the previous king had the same purple spots in his mouth when he died. The then crown prince — who’s the current king — saw the spots and requested to look into it further, but he was silenced after the queen — who’s now the dowager — scolded him. Back then, Lord Seok called the king’s observation nonsense, but as we can see, the king was definitely on to something.
It turns out that Lady Oh is the dowager’s niece, and they’re both in cahoots with Lord Seok. Ha! Now it makes sense as to how the poisoned petals got to the palace in the first place, why the dowager supports Oh’s charity outreaches, and how Pil-jik is tied up in all of this. Jeez! We haven’t even seen the dowager yet, but we sure can feel her presence as the center of all the chaos going around.
At the crime scene, Soo-ho also saw the purple spots, and perceived a sweet smell from Yeom’s mouth. His investigation into the smell leads him to the petals he scooped up while returning the painting, and after an accidental chemistry experiment, he deduces that the petals are poisonous. Soo-ho starts to doubt that the servant in custody is the culprit, and to get to the bottom of the murder, he visits Lady Oh with questions that are uncomfortably close to the truth.
On questioning the other servants at the house, Soo-ho learns that the servant was having an affair with a beautiful widow, and his mind goes straight to Yeo-hwa. Don’t worry, it’s not your crush. Lol. Soo-ho is visibly relieved to hear that Yeo-hwa is not the widow in question, but his relief doesn’t last because he knows she will put herself in danger to save the servant if he doesn’t act fast.
True to Soo-ho’s thoughts, Yeo-hwa visits the prison to drop off a drug for the servant which makes him pass out with symptoms of the plague. For fear that the plague will spread, the wardens dump the servant in the forest — where Yeo-hwa’s people are on ground to pick him up. The servant is reunited with Lady Baek, and the lovers are finally free to run away and live happily ever after.
Aside from her normal anti-oppression crusade, Yeo-hwa’s motivation to rescue Lady Baek stemmed from a shared understanding of the unreasonable societal and moral demands placed on widows. Right now, Yeo-hwa is stuck in her current life and she has no plans of escaping because she’s waiting for her brother to return. But in the meantime, she chooses to find satisfaction in saving others, and helping them escape to live a better life.
Lady Baek’s parting wish for Yeo-hwa to survive and live the life she wants resonated with me because I also want the same for Yeo-hwa — and there’s a number of us in the Freedom For Yeo-hwa Association. Yeon-seon is the association’s chair, and as the one person that is truly on Yeo-hwa’s side at home, she can only leave when Yeo-hwa is happy. Yeon-seon shares her concern with Yoon-hak when they run into each other again, and Yoon-hak can relate with the sentiment because he’s the only one the king and Soo-ho have in their corner, and he can only be at peace when those two are happy.
Soo-ho is also a member of the association, and he confronts Yeo-hwa for helping the servant escape. To him, it’s to hell with her concern for others over her own safety. “What about your own life?” he asks, and I can’t blame him because if not for his intervention at the prison, she could have been unmasked! Soo-ho addresses Yeo-hwa as “my lady” during the confrontation, and it finally dawns on her that he knows exactly who she is.
It raises suspicion that a condemned prisoner suddenly died from the plague and his body went missing from where it was dumped. So Soo-ho asks Yoon-hak for help to cover up the missing body issue. Yoon-hak is reluctant to use his secretarial powers for personal favors until Soo-ho shows him the autopsy report. The purple spots and sweet smell grabs Yoon-hak’s attention, and he takes the petals to the king. The king confirms that the fragrance was what he smelled on his late father, and there’s finally a clue to unraveling the mystery surrounding his father’s death.
In the course of their investigation into the late king’s death, Yoon-hak and the king zeroed in on Yeo-hwa’s brother, CHO SUNG-HOO, as a key figure to finding out the truth about what happened that day. And looking into Sung-hoo, Yoon-hak eventually learns that Lord Seok’s daughter-in-law, Yeo-hwa, is Sung-hoo’s sister.
The week ends with Yeo-hwa and Soo-ho meeting at Myeongdo inn, and since he already knows who she is, Yeo-hwa unmasks herself and tells him her name. I like that the show didn’t drag this out, and now that this identity thingy is out in the open, I’m looking forward to their interactions going forward. I enjoy their budding crush on each other, especially Soo-ho’s uncontrollable blushing whenever So-woon teases him about Yeo-hwa. But we’re already halfway through the drama, and I’d like to see more progress in their romance department.
One of my favorite things this week was Yeo-hwa capitalizing on her mother-in-law’s teachings as an excuse to leave the house for research purposes. A virtuous widow should learn from a more virtuous widow. Cue: a visit to the Minister of Personnel’s house to scope out the situation with Lady Baek. And I just about died from laughter at the epilogue where Lady Yoo insisted that Yeo-hwa should show as much devotion as Lady Baek, and all Yeo-hwa could think about was Lady Baek’s affair with the servant. “I should be like her?” Yes, please! Lool.
Although things got a bit serious with Minister Yeom’s death, Knight Flower continues to do a fine job in keeping things fun and not allowing the serious parts overshadow its light-hearted tone. Maybe that’s why the show has its main villain putting up such a calm and goody two shoes front, and speaking with a sing-song voice. It’s quite unfortunate that Yeo-hwa has a good relationship with her father-in-law, and she’s grateful to him for caring about her and allowing her to visit the temple once a year to pray for her brother.
Lord Seok tells Yeo-hwa to give up on waiting for her brother, and he’s quite sure Sung-hoo won’t be returning because he’s the one who ordered Pil-jik to find and eliminate Sung-hoo back then. Ha! And Seok had the audacity to take Yeo-hwa in as a daughter-in-law afterwards. Tsk. This is one betrayal that will sting so bad when Yeo-hwa finds out the truth.
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