Red Heart: Episodes 5-6
by mistyisles
As our young king’s worst fears come true, he’s faced with an impossible choice: to let harm come to the woman he loves or to let all of his carefully laid plans come crashing down. Meanwhile, the lady in question has to navigate the new identity that has been thrust upon her.
EPISODES 5-6 WEECAP
Tae and Jung are equally devastated to recognize each other in the palace and to realize what this means. For Jung, it’s that the man she’s loved for so long was the crown prince, the son of the man who had her entire family executed – and he never told her.
For Tae, it’s that all his efforts to protect Jung have gone to waste, and now he has to choose between his love for her and his fight against Gye-won.
And that, at least for now, seems to be exactly what Gye-won wants. More than just trying to secure his hold over the throne, he’s testing Tae’s priorities. Will Tae, like his father, do anything and everything in his power to protect his beloved, even if it means sacrificing power? Or will he sacrifice love to maintain control?
Thankfully, Gye-won doesn’t seem to know Jung’s true identity yet, but his scheme of having Jung play the part of his niece is a risky one. And, just as Tae feared, it almost immediately puts her in danger.
A servant woman who practically raised Gye-won’s real niece knows immediately that Jung isn’t her, and her confused protests raise enough questions that Tae is forced to take some kind of action.
While the servant is punished for lying and ultimately takes her own life, it’s undeniable that at least some of what she said was true. And there’s a simple way to check: if Jung is who Gye-won says she is, she’ll have a mole on her stomach.
Gye-won craftily proposes Tae confirm her identity himself, leaving Tae with two choices: he can either expose Jung as an imposter and finally have a concrete reason to oust Gye-won, or he can affirm Jung as Gye-won’s niece, thus saving her life but also solidifying Gye-won’s position.
Tae agonizes over this choice, but in the end, he tells Jung he’s decided to abandon her. By which he means he’ll say she’s Gye-won’s niece, and he’ll treat her exactly as he would if she really were: coldly and cruelly.
And he does. Much to Yeon-hee’s gloating delight, he indulges her and snubs Jung every public chance he gets. Temping as it might be to hate Yeon-hee, though, I mostly feel sorry for her. She has no idea of anything going on behind the scenes, and fully believes that Tae loves her. She’s in for a rude awakening at some point, and I imagine the fallout won’t be pretty.
As much as Tae and Jung try to ignore it or will it to disappear, their love for each other isn’t easy to get over. The turning point comes when Jung learns that Tae had come to her for comfort on the day his father died – proving that his feelings for her were more than just pity or feeling responsible for her life being ruined.
She finds him alone on a bridge that night, and his immediate concern over her tearful face only confirms what she’s guessed. There, she finally agrees to do what he’s been begging her to do since the night they recognized each other: to leave the palace.
With the help of his trusted eunuch, they devise a plan for her escape. During the upcoming feast, she’ll have a veiled stand-in attend in her place while she slips out his secret library tunnel and his eunuch guides her out of the palace.
The plan works beautifully: when they meet with the Queen Dowager to plan the feast, Jung volunteers to oversee fireworks – which will create the perfect distraction – and Tae “grudgingly” agrees but insists she wear a veil so he doesn’t have to look at her.
But there’s one variable no one counted on: Jung’s faithful friend, Ddong-geum, who has gotten herself planted in the palace in an effort to help her escape. As soon as Jung sees her, she realizes that Ddong-geum is the planned decoy and will have to remain behind in direct danger once the switch is discovered.
She can’t let that happen – in fact, her reaction is much the same as Tae’s was when he saw her in the palace – so when Gye-won’s eunuch spy ambushes Tae’s eunuch just outside of palace grounds, he’s flabbergasted to find that the “servant girl” being escorted out is just that.
And when Tae is coerced into lifting Jung’s veil for all to see, he’s dismayed to find Jung herself looking back at him and declaring that she’s determined to survive by becoming queen, after all.
I admit, I never for a moment doubted that it was actually Jung under that veil. So the dramatic buildup to the reveal wasn’t nearly as tense as it seemed to want to be. However, it was satisfying to see Gye-won so unnerved that he was running through the palace, breathless and maybe even frightened, to see for himself if Jung really had escaped.
Until now, Gye-won’s control over the throne has felt so total, so unshakeable, that our leads seemed to have slim chances – if any at all – of ever outsmarting him. But this week presented us with a new view of him, and perhaps some glimmer of hope that he isn’t unbeatable.
His hints of a romance with the Queen Dowager is an interesting layer to his character, and may be one area of weakness for Tae to target later. But I’m also intrigued by his wife, who sometimes appears sympathetic to Jung’s plight and other times seems just as ready to kill for power as her husband.
So while I don’t doubt that Gye-won would sacrifice love for power, I do wonder if, in some capacity, love may yet lead to his eventual downfall.
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Red Heart: Episodes 5-6
Source: Buzz Pinay Daily
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