The Secret Romantic Guesthouse: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by mistyisles

The first episode of The Secret Romantic Guesthouse breezes by, introducing us to our major players in familiar and fun fusion sageuk form. It kind of feels like K-drama comfort food: easy and enjoyable to watch, even though (or because?) the ingredients aren’t really anything we haven’t seen before.

Editor’s note: Continued drama coverage is pending based on Beanie feedback.
 
EPISODE 1

We start off with two tiny orphaned children bonding over their shared grief. She’s the daughter and sole mourner of a now-deceased scholar; he’s LEE SEOL, the son of the newly deposed prince — and, as such, he’s being hunted by palace soldiers. After the girl hides him from said soldiers, he promises that next time they meet, he’ll tell her his name. Judging by the swell of romantic music, these two will most certainly meet again as adults.

Then we jump ahead thirteen years, where our leading lady, YOON DAN-OH (Shin Ye-eun), runs the inn Ihwawon (meaning “Flower Garden”) out of her late father’s old house. Whether Ihwawon is a guarantor of scholarly success or a haunted house depends on whether you ask Dan-oh or… pretty much anyone else. Still, Dan-oh throws herself wholeheartedly into trying to lure new customers in.

So far, she has two: YOOK YOOK-HO (In Gyo-jin), a perpetual student who’s been trying to pass the civil service exam for upwards of ten years now, and JUNG YOO-HA (Jung Geon-joo), the noble, studious type of “Flower Scholar” with a very obvious crush on Dan-oh.

While Dan-oh is out drumming up business, she encounters two new Flower Scholars. First is the flirty and carefree KIM SHI-YEOL (Kang Hoon), who blissfully wakes up in a gibang only to be tossed out on his head for failing to pay for last night’s drinks.

He steps in to save Dan-oh from an unwanted suitor, but she ends up doing some of the saving for him since he’s not very good in a fistfight. (He is, however, good at making distractions and then running away.) He’s promptly dragged away to pay his unsettled debts, but turns up at Ihwawon that night, hair tussled and face scuffed, but cheery grin firmly in place.

Our final Flower Scholar isn’t actually a scholar at all, but a *mysterious* warrior who carries a wooden sword. His name is KANG SAN (Ryeoun), and when he’s pressured into hiring an armed escort through dangerous territory, he beats off the neighborhood thugs himself and gets his money back from the useless “bodyguards.”

San isn’t swayed by Dan-oh’s attempts to win him as a customer, but she seizes an opportunity to swipe his pack when he leaves it unattended (trying to stay out of sight from approaching soldiers), forcing him to come to Ihwawon to get it back. It’s already curfew by this point, so Dan-oh gleefully points out he has no choice but to stay for at least one night — and to pay her jacked-up price.

San grudgingly agrees, and both he and Shi-yeol get the rundown of how Ihwawon works. Rule #1: Stay out of the annex. Rumor has it that’s where the ghost lives, but Dan-oh doesn’t confirm or deny.

While the three Flower Scholars plus Dan-oh make an unlikely and prone-to-bickering foursome (Dan-oh and San especially use bickering as their primary mode of communication), they’re soon united as a team by an urgent plea for help: a young mother’s infant child has been stolen. The woman is a former servant of Yoo-ha’s household, and her child was taken into a nearby inn as collateral against her husband’s debt.

The four fan out to surreptitiously search the inn. Yoo-ha is the first to catch a glimpse of the back room where the baby is being kept under guard, but he’s caught and kicked out before he can fully investigate. Dan-oh follows up after him and is able to take the baby and run, but she doesn’t get far before the guards catch on and give chase.

Just as they’re closing in on her, a masked San appears. Despite getting his wooden sword chopped in half, he fights off the guards and shields Dan-oh and the baby from a toppling shelf. Operation: Rescue the Baby proceeds without further incident, and after reuniting the child with his mother, our four heroes walk off into the sunset, enjoying the rush of victory and tossing playful gibes at each other.

When they return to Ihwawon, however, they’re greeted by a violent crew of creditors come to collect on Dan-oh’s father’s outstanding debt — a debt so high she’ll have to sell the house to even begin paying it off. The boys jump to her defense, both sides squaring off for a fight.

Unbeknownst to them all, however, they’re about to have even more company. See, there’s a bigger political drama at play, and our little team may have already gotten themselves unintentionally involved. The king’s consort (Gil Eun-hye) is on the verge of giving birth and desperate for a son — so desperate, in fact, that she’s got a backup plan in case her child isn’t a boy. (Which is certainly convenient timing for a servant woman’s baby to be quietly kidnapped, isn’t it?)

As for the king (Hyun Woo), he learns from a blind shaman that a son isn’t in his future — but complete destruction is if he doesn’t stop searching for a certain person. Does he stop? Apparently not, because as soon as he learns that Lee Seol has been spotted amongst the scholars in town, he sets his men on the chase.

The hunt is led by one JANG TAE-HWA (Oh Man-seok), who bears a wicked-looking scar on his face and a deeply personal investment in finding Lee Seol, though what exactly that is remains a mystery. Tae-hwa and his men search through every inn, confident they’ll recognize Lee Seol when they see him. After their search turns up zero results, they’re left with one last place to look: Ihwawon.

If there’s one complaint I have about this first episode, it’s that the characters feel more like character types than real people. It makes it easy to follow the action and know who we’re supposed to root for, because we’re treading familiar territory even though the story itself is new, but I also don’t necessarily feel like I know any of these people just yet. But it is only the first episode, so I’m hopeful that now that we’ve gotten the setup out of the way, we’ll start to dig a little deeper into the characterization.

In spite of that one small complaint, however, The Secret Romantic Guesthouse is so far hitting all the right buttons for me. It’s pretty, it’s fun, and it’s just a little bit mysterious. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing where we go from here!

 
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