The First Night with the Duke: Episodes 5-6 » Dramabeans
The First Night with the Duke: Episodes 5-6
by DaebakGrits
Now that our transmigrated protagonist has decided to become the leading lady of her favorite novel, she finds herself competing head-to-head with the story’s cheating villain — and its former heroine — in a fiercely competitive battle for the prince’s hand in marriage.
EPISODES 5-6
When we last saw Seon-chaek, she was still recovering from her suspiciously timed illness, but despite her weakened state, she mustered up the energy to run back to town before it was too late for her to sign up for the royal marriage selection. Thanks to the extremely tight deadline, it was an actual race against the clock — er, sundial — and without a modern timepiece on hand to accurately relay the time, Seon-chaek relied heavily on minor, insignificant details from the novel, such as a merchant’s delivery schedule, to help her gauge how much time was remaining before gates would close and prevent her from throwing her metaphorical hat into the marriage ring. Instead of a hat, though, it was her shoe — which she kicked through the gates at the last possible second — that bought her enough minutes to submit her name and officially enter the competition.
After her success, Seon-chaek returns to an empty plague house and is momentarily concerned by Yi Beon’s absence, but she needn’t worry about the ominously large puddle of blood on the ground because he was off hunting a wild boar for dinner. Turns out, Yi Beon is not just an angsty prince with a pretty face, he’s a provider who’s gonna make sure his woman eats, and he’s relieved to see that she showed up in time for dinner. If she hadn’t, well, he would have assumed she’d taken the opportunity to run off (again).
Seon-chaek explains her absence by showing Yi Beon the flyer advertising his marriage selection, and while he’s incensed that the queen mother initiated a formal search for his bride-to-be, he’s more focused on Seon-chaek’s sudden change of heart and decision to enter the selection process. After all, prior to this moment, he was fairly certain, based on her words and behaviors, that she disliked him — which is a mighty big red flag, if you think about it, given how fiercely he pursued her — but Seon-chaek admits that she never hated him. She was simply afraid of repeating the past.
Without revealing that she’s from another world where he’s a fictional character in a web novel, she explains the circumstances that eventually led her to becoming a recluse, but Yi Beon — logical man that he is — doesn’t understand why she places the blame for that situation on herself. It’s not her fault that her friend’s man fell for her “without [her] consent,” and even more baffling is why she feels her past has anything to do with their relationship in the present. It’s at this point that Seon-chaek explains to Yi Beon — again, without mentioning he’s a fictional novel character — that he’s predestined to be with someone else, and she interfered with his destiny. Yi Beon, however, doesn’t believe much in this destiny she speaks of, not when he has feelings for her. If he’s the supposed “male lead,” as she called him, then shouldn’t his choice to love her indicate that he’s picked her as his female lead? The man makes a point, and Seon-chaek sees no reason to argue when the leading man himself just gave her the green light to live out her romantic fantasy.
However, while Yi Beon is confident that he picked the perfect leading lady for himself, he’s wary of Seon-chaek’s decision to be a part of the selection process. The queen mother is obviously up to something, which means the competition will be fierce, but Seon-chaek is determined to become his wife through the official channels — even if it will be difficult. “Easy isn’t fun,” though, not according to Seon-chaek, and she faces the trials with an assuredness of a newly minted leading lady decked out in protective plot armor.
Given all the hype for the selection process — not to mention Yi Beon’s worries that something bad might happen to Seon-chaek — I had high expectations for the trials put forth by the queen mother, but I personally found the competition to be rather meh. Predictably, Hwa-seon cheated her way through the first round of physical tests in a way that was comically obvious to anyone with two eyes, but I was disappointed that Seon-chaek’s past life knowledge and abilities didn’t have a larger role in her ability to pass the tests. Instead, she passed the shot put round through a questionable knowledge of physics that somehow compensated for her lack of skill and physical strength (Weak Hero this is not), and she won the archery competition thanks to the trickster spirit’s interference. In round one, the only sign that Seon-chaek’s past life gave her any sort of advantage was when her former job as a waitress helped her balance a serving tray.
It’s such a staple of the isekai genre for the transmigrated protagonist’s skills and knowledge from their past life to make them uniquely overpowered in their new universe, so when the first found of tests turned out to be of the track-and-field variety, I half expected Seon-chaek to have been an athlete in her past life. In my opinion, this would have been an excellent opportunity to reveal more about her backstory — besides the fact that she had a crappy best friend and an extreme fondness for alcohol — and demonstrate how she is worthy of being the new leading lady.
Round two of the competition, however, is slightly more in line with my expectations. The queen mother gives the remaining group of women 10 Nyang and instructs them to increase its worth in two days. This time around, despite the queen mother’s obvious bias, Seon-chaek comes in first place thanks to random knowledge she gleaned from one of her college professors. Apparently, when natural enemies catfish and loaches are introduced to the same rice paddy, they naturally reproduce more and get stronger, so she bought and resold catfish and loaches to paddy fields with poor harvests in order to turn a profit. While her net gains are impressive, it was her ability to find a profitable solution to the current drought that earned her the highest score among the three finalists — the other two being Hwa-seon and Eun-ae, of course.
If I was in Seon-chaek’s shoes, I’d be a bit wary about having the novel’s former leading lady as my competition, but Seon-chaek is not threatened or fearful that the story might somehow revert to the original plot. Perhaps this is because, at the start of the competition, she received Eun-ae’s assurances that she only signed up for the marriage selection because her father insisted — a fact that Seon-chaek has to later relay to Soo-gyeom, who is downright distraught to learn that his love interest is competing to marry his best friend.
Despite Seon-chaek also advising the lovelorn Soo-gyeom to play it cool and not rush into confessing to Eun-ae and flustering her, he does exactly that — except he needn’t verbally confess for her to figure out his feelings. No, apparently having a young bachelor showing up on her doorstep in the middle of the night is enough to clue Eun-ae to the nature of Soo-gyeom’s visit, and she scolds him for his behavior. He should know better than to have a clandestine meeting with a woman competing in the prince’s marriage selection.
Eun-ae choses this moment to cash in the wish Soo-gyeom owed her after she drank for him at the Seonmun Club meeting, and, while gently grabbing his sleeve, she asks him to stay away from her for “a little while.” I can’t be the only one who finds her behavior suspicious, right? Part of me thinks she likes him back — despite there being no evidence to support this theory — because it would align with the idea that all of the novel’s characters have the freewill to deviate from the original plot and find their own desired happiness, like Yi Beon. Buuuuuut the more cynical part of me still thinks she has her own nefarious agenda.
And speaking of nefarious agendas, Hwa-seon decides to use round three of the marriage selection as the stage to publicly discredit Seon-chaek and eliminate her from the competition. What starts off as a simple Q&A over tea intended to measure the ladies’ virtue turns into quite the spectacle when Hwa-seon accuses Seon-chaek of having an illicit relationship with a Westerner. What Hwa-seon doesn’t know, though, is that Yi Beon has been tracing Mark and the poison he gave Seon-chaek back to Hwa-seon and her family. He went so far as to feign interest in Hwa-seon in order to gain access to her family’s stash of foreign goods and find the evidence he needed to connect the dots. (LOL at Yi Beon burning the clothes that Hwa-seon touched. Pfft! So dramatic.)
So, of course, once Yi Beon can prove that the Do family had dealings with Mark and had some of his poison in their possession, he shows up at the maximally dramatic moment to put a stop to the sham marriage selection. Tossing a bloodied and beaten Mark on the floor, Yi Beon exposes Hwa-seon and the queen mother for their misdeeds and gives the queen mother an ultimatum: end the marriage selection or I reveal what you’ve done. Knowing what’s best for her, the queen mother pretends to faint, and the marriage selection process is stopped.
Once they’re alone, Seon-chaek expresses her disbelief that Mark was dangerous, and Yi Beon responds like the stereotypical protective male lead that he is and declares that he will never let her go anywhere without him. Seon-chaek scoffs at his promise because he’s been avoiding her and locking arms with Hwa-seon while he was chasing down Mark, and charmed by her jealousy, Yi Beon responds by kissing her pouting mouth in front of the sunset. It’s cute and romantic, but they’re interrupted when Yi Beon is summoned by the king.
So, despite Yi Beon’s vow to never leave her unattended, he does, in fact, leave her by herself, and even though he promises to return quickly to her, she’s still waiting where he left her after the sun sets. And because she is alone, someone uses her solitude and the cover of darkness to push her into a pond. As Seon-chaek sinks deeper into the water, she wonders if dying in the novel’s world will return her to the real world, where it appears she’s still alive and passed out on her floor. But, lest we forget, Seon-chaek is now the leading lady, and the leading lady is always rescued by her leading man. On cue, Yi Beon dives into the pond, embraces her, and gives her underwater mouth-to-mouth kisses her.
Welp, we’re half-way through this drama, and I think my opinion has officially fallen to “cute but mostly meh.” I went into this drama expecting what I’ve seen in other similar isekai stories: a protagonist who expertly uses her real world skills and knowledge of the source material to manipulate the fictional world she transmigrated into. And, I can’t get over the letdown. In my opinion, the drama is not effectively conveying the fact that this world is supposed to be a fictional Joseon from a novel, and now that Seon-cahek has become Yi Beon’s love interest and the original plot is a thing of the past, there’s not much differentiating her from a time traveler falling in love with a historical prince. Yes, she knows details about other characters because she’s read their backstories, but how is that any different than her reading a history book and traveling back in time?
What this drama lacks most is self-awareness. This is supposed to be the world of a romance novel, and while there have certainly been a lot of classic tropes depicted in the plot, they aren’t being called out or — aside from the falling cherry blossoms that were part of Seon-chake’s plot to reunite the novel’s original leads — being manipulated to Seon-chaek’s advantage. Not to mention, the fact that Seon-chaek hasn’t pointed them out when she, as the new leading lady, has unexpectedly on the receiving end of them is a massive character oversight for someone who’s supposed to be an avid romance reader. Where’s the cheeky commentary? Why isn’t Seon-chaek snickering at Yi Beon’s occasionally tropey dialogue whenever he tries to coax her into having their “second night,” and why isn’t she questioning why she finds red flag behaviors in a fictional man acceptable when she’d never put up with them in the real world? Seon-chaek slept with the male lead, and and you mean to tell me there’s not at least one quip about the size of his manhood and how it compares to the novel’s ridiculously unrealistic description? If you ask me, the drama’s writers should have spent time browsing #booktok before writing this script.
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