[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" Episode 24 Final

Throughout all his trials and tribulations, Yeong-sil has remained a surprisingly good sport. There's good reason for this. As bad as jail might be, Yeong-sil at least has his sketchbook, which gives him a chance to think over matters of science. That's always good for a nice matter of calm, even if this time, Yeong-sil's friends can't help him. There's just disgrace and corporal punishment, while Yeong-sil sulks and starts to hate the world.

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Once more there are multiple timeskips. In this, the final episode of all places. We even manage to go over multiple kings while mostly ignoring King Sejong's death except for a brief reminder about how great the Korean alphabet is. All this detail leads me to believe that, whatever create liberties were taken with the rest of Yeong-sil's life, he really did face a sort of political inquisition and it did in fact require a complete change of the guard for Yeong-sil to regain his rightful reputation.

I think about that and end up feeling more disappointed about the overall direction of "Jang Yeong-sil - Drama". Whatever the real-life motivatin was for Yeong-sil's persecutors, I very much doubt it was all that personal. Short-sighted, overly ambitious administrators of average ability can always be trusted to sabotage an organization for dubious reasons, and I rather expect they were finally removed from power for mismanagement that went far deeper than just a mistrust of Yeong-sil's clock designs.

That's another point of disappointment. Never mind how the extent to which Yeong-sil's clocks provoked geopolitical crises was just plain absurd. As the epilogue demonstrates, Yeong-sil invented lots of objects besides clocks that no doubt had very interesting scientific and practical explanations and yet...time and again writers Lee Myeong-hee and Ma Chang-joon found ways to steer the story into the same persecution complex again and again.

Although really, presentation is the issue as much as anything else. "Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" is the rare historical project that might have come off more accurate if it had been produced by one of the mainline commercial networks. Is it improbable that Yeong-sil the low-born scientist would strike up a romance with a bastard princess? Yeah, but we can't prove that it didn't happen. And besides, So-hyeon's presence in the story as written just ended up being very superfluous. If Yeong-sil's greates memories in life are doing science with his friends, we really should have got a lot more of that and a lot less uninspired scheming from the antagonists. In these ways and more, "Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" has been a major disappointment.

Review by William Schwartz

"Jang Yeong-sil - Drama" is directed by Kim Yeong-jo, written by Lee Myeong-hee, Ma Chang-joon and features Song Il-kook, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Young-chul, Park Sun-young, Kim Do-hyun, Son Byung-ho,...