Summary
Bon Appetit, Your Majesty finally brings the cooking contest arc to a close in Episode 9, but it’s hard not to be concerned about whether the show will have enough time left to satisfyingly tie everything together.
For a while now, I’ve been complaining about Bon Appetit, Your Majesty wasting time on this damn cooking competition. In Episode 9, which finally concludes the mini-arc, it finally dawned on me why it was rubbing me the wrong way. There are only three episodes left! Even though they’re basically a movie apiece, that doesn’t seem like much time to conclude the actual meat and potatoes of this narrative, which isn’t just what’s going on with Ji-young and Yi Heon, but also the small matter of history itself potentially being rewritten as we go. With that in mind, it seems even more egregious for the cooking competition to have taken as long as it has.
Nevertheless, here we are. As set up in the previous episode, it’s finally time for the final round, with Joseon’s reputation versus the Ming Dynasty very much at stake. Remember, the outcome of the second round wasn’t revealed and served as a cliffhanger, so that’s the first order of business here. Predictably, it ends up being a tie, though in the most annoyingly convoluted circumstances possible. This kind of pointless toing and froing – it was obviously going to be a tie, even midway through the previous episode – is a big part of what eats up the runtime and bogs down the pacing.
It’s worth remembering that this competition is supposed to be historically important. These kinds of trade deals – it’s all about ginseng, remember – have momentous implications. Sometimes, that’s easy to lose sight of when the whole thing is reduced to a cooking contest, especially with one side having been so consistently and elaborately sabotaged, but just try and keep this in mind. It makes everything a bit easier to swallow (no pun intended.)
Speaking of ginseng, that’s the theme of the third round. (Side note: I think I laid out the competition rules already, if you need a refresher.) All the preparation is complete, so it’s time for Chun-saeng to fly in heroically with a pressure cooker lid and get this party started. I’m 35 and I still find pressure cookers pretty impressive, so I can kind of understand the vibe here, although it doesn’t make actually judging the final round any easier. The king wants the teams to score each other, and that predictably almost ends up in another tie, which, as the previous episode clarified, would be bad news for Joseon. However, Joseon end up winning by a point, thanks to Ji-young getting to a Ming chef’s heart by presenting the food in a rustic, thrown-together flavour-first manner that reminds him of his grandmother.
With this all done with, more or less, the political and historical elements begin to surge back to the forefront in Bon Appetit, Your Majesty Episode 9. Yu Kun is fuming about losing and ends up getting himself headbutted, which is politically suboptimal, and Mok-ju plans on using Jinmyeong’s – the king’s half-brother – desire to taste the food as an opportunity to poison him and get rid of Ji-young. As far as the plans against Ji-young have gone, this among the best, since it does seem to work. Jinmyeong is bedridden immediately after eating the food, putting Ji-young in the crosshairs of his mother.
I’ll grant you that it’s a bit of a swerve to go straight from fun-filled cooking competition to torture, but here we are. There’s little doubt in my mind that Yi Heon will come to Ji-young’s rescue, but at what cost? Given his historical reputation as a crazy tyrant and the whole purge deal, which is due to happen sometime in the near future, we’re entering what seems to be a more serious place, politically. I’ll be interested to see if the show commits to that, or if love somehow manages to win out over everything else, which is often the K-Drama way. It won’t take us much longer to find out.
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