Summary
As it nears its ending, My Royal Nemesis gets a bit bogged down in subplots and a little confusing regarding its transmigration hook. Will everything turn out okay?
Everyone is worried about the ending of My Royal Nemesis, and I don’t think Episode 11 is going to assuage any concerns. If you really think about it, “What Lies on the Hidden Path” is both the most ambitious but also arguably the least effective outing of Season 1 thus far, juggling too many subplots and getting a little too complex with its transmigration shenanigans. The core relationship remains compelling, and the desire for a happy climax is very much there, but as we get nearer to it, it’s easy to imagine all the different ways in which it might go wrong.
With a broad view, despite the bits that work, you can see the bits that don’t. Everything involving Tae-hee is, in my view, extremely weak. Se-gye and Dan-sim’s romance doesn’t really benefit from the third wheel involvement, since there has never been a sense that either of them had eyes for anyone else. Obviously, Tae-hee has a different function in the plot, but sometimes it isn’t obvious what that function is supposed to be.
Anyway, unavoidably, this episode picks up where the previous one left off, with Dan-sim and Dal-su both in comas following the car crashing into the restaurant. This sidelines Dan-sim a fair bit and leaves Se-gye to deal with the emotional and scheming business fallout. Needless to say, he’s happy to offend Tae-hee to be by Dan-sim’s side, but Mun-do takes the opportunity to move on Biojei, leaking a report about carcinogens in Dynaestie’s products, and positioning his investment company as a majority shareholder to seize control. An emergency board meeting makes him Chail Group chairman, and he immediately begins getting rid of Se-gye’s loyalists and trying to keep a tight grip on Dal-su’s daughters.
Dal-su isn’t on Mun-do’s side, you see. Despite all the bluster, Dal-su loves Se-gye and sees Mun-do as more of a burden rather than the organ donor golden child. Mun-do’s only potential ally is Tae-hee, who wants to partner with him, and his ray of hope is Se-gye being disgraced by the Dynaestie scandal. But truthfully, he isn’t very bothered. His only concern is Dan-sim, and when she wakes up, he immediately drops everything to be by her side.
My Royal Nemesis is a little confusing with this stuff in Episode 11. Dan-sim seems to wake up in the Joseon era, but she can’t move or speak, and the shaman is adamant that once the comet gets in the right position, she’ll return to her original body permanently. But her dreams also start interspersing with Seo-ri’s memories. When she wakes up back in Seo-ri’s body, the shaman’s words form something of a ticking clock device, as she believes that they will come true and she will, sooner rather than later, disappear from this timeline forever.
This is perhaps why we get a bit more focus on Seo-ri. Through Ji-hyo, who initially isn’t very sympathetic, the point is made that Seo-ri was never the same acting-wise after her accident. It’s only since Dan-sim has been inhabiting her body that the “old” Seo-ri seems to be back. This prompts Ji-hyo to do Seo-ri a solid and postpone the shooting of the drama, but it also feeds into a fan theory that Dan-sim and Seo-ri switched bodies when Seo-ri’s family attempted a group suicide, which was the accident that Seo-ri survived, and then switched back when Dan-sim ingested the poison in the Joseon era. What this would mean, essentially, is that Dan-sim’s legendary reputation as a scheming villainess comes from trained actor Seo-ri’s efforts to get by in the past, divorced from her present-day memories, and the reason why Dan-sim took to acting so well is that she simply slipped back into her original body.
This is a lot, and I’m not sure it stands up to a great deal of scrutiny, but it’s definitely doing the rounds and deserves a mention. There’ll probably be clarity in this regard in the follow-up episode, since a good chunk of this one languishes in Dan-sim’s belief that her departure is imminent while Se-gye tries to bat off attacks from all sides courtesy of Mun-do.
With Mun-do taking over Chail, announcing the Songjin Resort and Tae-hee as a partner, and framing Se-gye for the nurse’s murder, and Dan-sim falling foul of Eun-a, there are attacks from all angles, and they’re all happening against the backdrop of Dan-sim’s imminent disappearance. With all that, is the show going to be able to pull off something resembling a happy ending? I’m pretty confident, but we don’t have to wait long to find out either way.
