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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Scholar Who Walks the Night" Episode 6

Gwi very quickly seems to forget that the reason he captured all the booksellers wasn't to spread a message of anti-literacy- Gwi's goal was in fact to get more information about Yang-seon. And he quickly gives that up to just do more obviously evil stuff that serves little apparent purpose except to force cover-ups and make people like Gwi even less than they already do. By the end of the episode Gwi isn't doing much better. He's once again easily bamboozled by Seong-yeol and manages to forget to take precautions against his most glaring weakness.

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For all this, I still like Gwi as a character because his stupidity isn't really contrived. Gwi genuinely just isn't as smart as he thinks he is. This has been a pretty clearly defined character trait from the very beginning. The dramatic tension isn't really about the serious risk of Gwi succeeding- he's more like an unstoppable serial killer. Except literally in this case, because no one's sure how to kill him.

Elsewhere, this episode mostly follows the same train of thought as the last one. Yang-seol makes incremental progress in locating the book mostly because she keeps getting distracted with romantic subplots. I can't help but feel like I'm too fixated on the book-locating aspect of the story. Of course the historical vampire action series is going to focus more on romance than searching for antiquities. Even so, that's the main essential aspect of the plot at this point.

For the sake of contrast, I'm still not sure what's going on with Hye-ryeong. Literally I know who Hye-ryeong is and why she's important, but the woman seems to making a pointed effort not to contribute to the storyline in any way. A chance encounter on the street almost turns interesting, but Hye-ryeong just decides to act rude to everyone instead of actually doing something. I do hope there's more planned for her than to just be a hostage for Gwi at some point.

That's just a guess on my part. There's not really too much to speculate on here, and that's probably the main reason I'm starting to lose patience with "Scholar Who Walks the Night". This drama can be very incredibly cute when that's what it wants to do, and maybe that's enough. But there's so many potentially interesting elements here that really aren't being that well explored, and honestly, I'd just like to get some serious synergy here.

Review by William Schwartz

"Scholar Who Walks the Night" is directed by Lee Seong-joon, written by Jang Hyeon-joo and features Lee Joon-gi, Lee Yu-bi, Changmin, Lee Soo-hyuk, Kim So-eun, Lee Hyun-woo and more.

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