It’s tough to move on from the kiss heard round the world last week, but it seems King the Land has found its method: more kissing (and lots of it). We up the ante on love this week, as our leads move from liking and confessing to vacationing and talking about the future. With so much intimacy and closeness, it’s too bad they’re still hiding their romance from the people they care about most. But luckily, that doesn’t include us — we’ve got a front row seat to all the adorable details.
EPISODES 9-10
Can we just pause and have a moment for all the white pants in these episodes? Junho knows how to put the hurt on some jeans and his stylists are obviously out to kill. Whoever decided to throw him into the pool in those pants clearly wanted me dead.
About the story: we’re over the hump of last week’s padded plot progression and back to the pace we’re used to. And that means the focus is again on our leads and the slo-mo romance that lets us savor every second. We open with a replay of last week’s hot and spicy kiss, just to remind us where we left off — as if it wasn’t already burned into our brains for eternity.
From there, we move into some secret on-the-job dating, which involves handholding in elevators and various cute conflicts about how much to interact at work. The big deal for me is how much smiling is happening this week. Our leads are ecstatic to be together and they couldn’t hide their happiness if they tried. Won may hate fake smiles, but he’s fully adapted to real ones now that Sa-rang is his leading lady.
For someone with Won’s money, though, dating is an extreme sport. The next thing we know he’s whisking Sa-rang, Da-eul, and Pyung-hwa off to Thailand for a quick getaway. This idea gets cooked up when Won is at Sa-rang’s apartment listening to her friends complain about work (ahem, his family’s business) for the bazillionth time. They still don’t know he’s the chairman’s son, and so, they speak freely, thinking he’s a low-level manager.
He hears about how Da-eul was promised a trip with her team if they met their sales goal and how Pyung-hwa was supposed to get a promotion for boosting her team’s ranking. Neither employee got what was promised, and they blame themselves for being naïve enough to believe the bosses would make good on their word. So, behind the scenes (and behind Hwa-ran’s back), Won makes the Thailand trip happen, and rigs it up so that all three women — each the best in their respective departments — can go together.
I was getting a little sick of the mistaken identity joke, wishing Sa-rang and Won would just come clean with who he really is, but then we get a payoff when both Won and Sang-shik go along to Thailand too. Since Won is essentially using Sang-shik’s identity as his alias, he makes Sang-shik pretend to be the one in charge and lead the team’s vacation. Unfortunately, Won back-talks a little too much to make this reversal truly funny (and I ended up feeling a bit bad for Sang-shik), but at least Sang-shik gets to revel in paying back his boss’s poor treatment for a while.
Episode 10 takes place in Thailand and it’s shot like a tourism ad but, honestly, it worked on me. Sign me up! The drama has a few breaks from its shiny convention by introducing handheld cameras in some of the crowded tourist spots, like an outdoor market and a local noodle place, giving it an air of authenticity and making these some of my favorite scenes. Afterward, there are a bunch of magazine-style shots that I could have done without, but all in all, it was worth it to see the sights.
For Won and Sa-rang, the trip is basically one long date, even as they try to hide their feelings from the rest of the group. No one is buying it, but they continue to sneak off to try to be alone together and this is where we get the most intimate moments we’ve seen so far. First, there’s a nighttime scene in the pool at their vacation house, where they both end up in the water, fully dressed, talking (and smiling) in between a series of small kisses.
It’s obvious that they’re deeply comfortable together and I found this sequence more fluttery than the kitchen kiss last week. This feels like a progression in the story as we see their level of closeness developing. And then, well, there’s another long and spicy kiss, which, I’ll put on the record, felt earned this time. Hooray for this not being a one-and-done drama when it comes to the kisses!
On top of all that, we’re getting a second love line! Pyung-hwa has a hoobae at the airline, LEE RO-WOON (Kim Jae-won), who’s got a clear crush on her and this week we finally get enough movement for me to introduce him. He’s been hanging around, subtly trying to make his intentions known, but when he shows up in Thailand during a layover, Pyung-hwa can’t really deny his feelings anymore — and neither can her friends, who tease her mercilessly.
Ro-woon ends up joining the team for dinner and then stays the night with them in their cramped, two-bedroom (one for women, one for men) house. He has to leave early, before anyone else wakes up, but Pyung-hwa has left him breakfast to eat before he goes. I’m happy to see she’s reciprocating after it seemed like she was initially writing him off for being young. He may be her junior in age, but the kid’s got an old soul with wise advise and no qualms about showing his affection.
On the last day of the trip, Won and Sa-rang finally throw caution to the wind and attempt to slither out of the house in order to spend the day alone together. They’re caught, holding hands and sneaking out, but they run away and continue with their plan. By the time they go to dinner that night, Won has worked up the courage to tell Sa-rang about his mother. He relates his backstory, about Hwa-ran being his half-sister and his mom disappearing without a trace when he was young.
Then he tells her why he has an aversion to fake smiles: “In my life, no one showed their genuine emotions.” But Sa-rang came along, being totally authentic, and changed all that for him. When Sa-rang hears that he’s looking for his mother, she says, “Let’s find her together.” And even though Won says it’s not necessary, it’s one of many instances this week where we see these two planning and assuming a future together.
We end our episodes with our leading couple at a fancy rooftop restaurant, dressed in formal wear, discussing their wishes. Sa-rang wants to always be this happy and Won couldn’t ask for anything more. Then they say I love you to each other and send us off with one final kiss.
I was ready to argue that literally nothing happened in these episodes, but actually, away from the forced plot developments that we saw last week, we’ve returned to what this drama does best. The romance is still blooming now that our leads are officially dating. We’re past the point of the early push and pull and going into deeper territory. We see them inching closer to each other, moving toward talk of marriage and how they’ll reconcile their lives in the future. We’ve already seen Sa-rang’s grandma accepting Won — not even knowing who he is or how much he’s worth — and now we’ll need to see how Sa-rang fits into Won’s life.
Also, Won opening up to Sa-rang about his background is a major hurdle for his character (and this story is mostly his). But we also see that maybe he’s letting go of his original goal of finding his mom now that he has love (literally “sarang”) in his life. Although saying “I love you” felt a little fast to me — especially considering Grandma told Won to get to know each other better first — I feel like the words are there to cement all the action we witnessed in these episodes. These two are solidly crazy for each other, which makes me very afraid of next week and how all this perfection might be blown to bits.