'My Royal Nemesis' Episodes 1-4 Recap: How Does Se-Gye Fall In Love With Seo-Ri?

When K-drama fans get tired of straight-up period dramas, the trusty isekai storyline often rears its head to add a little bit of variety, introducing a modern-day protagonist to an unfamiliar world. My Royal Nemesis, on the other hand, is a slightly rarer treat, a reverse isekai, where our protagonist, Kang Dan-Sim, a royal consort from Joseon-era Korea, is transported into the body of a former child actress in modern-day Korea, Shin Seo-Ri. Throw in the stereotypical “I’m cold-hearted to the rest of the world but tender with you” chaebol heir, and you’ve got the makings of a pretty stock standard K-drama. But despite being unsurprising, it manages to turn some tropes around and give us something fun to watch at least. Lim Si-Yeon is especially fun to watch in this role, particularly when she’s taking on a horde of bad guys with no problem. It’s certainly very different from what we’re used to seeing her as.  You have to expect a certain quota of cringe, along the lines of “Oh my, look at these horseless palanquins” and “Wow, television has the power to touch your heart,” but hey, it’s reminiscent of old-school K-dramas in a way. Without any further ado, let’s get into what happens in the first 4 episodes.

Spoiler Alert

How Did Dan-Sim End Up In Modern Day Korea?

My Royal Nemesis opens with the execution of Kang Dan-Sim, a royal concubine, who is being blamed for the recent period of famine and plague, since the accusation is that she brought it on by engaging in adultery and attempting to assassinate Prince Gyeong. When she’s brought out, Dan-Sim rejects the charges and spills the poison she is supposed to drink, so a number of guards have to hold her in place while the poison is forced down her throat. Suddenly, a total solar eclipse happens, and everyone scatters, but Dan-Sim’s on the floor, coughing up blood. Obviously, we imagine she’s dead. But then, the stars start to swirl, and the sun is out again, except it’s actually an electric spotlight, not the sun. She’s on a television set, dressed in Joseon clothing, but nothing around her makes sense, so she naturally freaks out. Eventually, she figures out that she’s in the body of a basically insignificant actress named Shin Seo-Ri, and this body came pre-loaded with a rival, actress Yoon Ji-Hyo, who is much more successful than her, and makes her do body double roles.

After a fight with both Ji-Hyo and their mutual manager, Bu-Sun, because she “improvised” a little too much, Dan-Sim runs out into the street and almost gets hit by the car of a young chaebol heir-turned-startup CEO named Cha Se-Gye. When Se-Gye tries to pay her off, she gets so annoyed she starts whacking him with a flower arrangement she pulls out of a passing florist’s truck. After Se-Gye notices a crowd forming, he walks away, giving Dan-Sim his card. Walking around town, Dan-Sim ends up at a museum, where she’s heartbroken after learning she’s basically remembered only as a villainess who died during the Gyeongsul Political Purge. Even the painting she did has been attributed to the king. Eventually, she ends up being found by a shaman lady, Jeong-Ah, who explains to her that she’s jumped into the future and is occupying someone else’s body. Later, we see a flashback of Dan-Sim’s shaman from back in the day (who looks identical to Jeong-Ah) extracting some blood from her for a ritual that would protect her, after she finds out that her mistress’ name has appeared on King Anjong’s purge list.

What Makes Se-Gye Fall For Seo-Ri? 

After realizing that life’s still worth living, Dan-Sim decides to go to the address on Se-Gye’s card, the Biojei Cosmetics office, and since she’s still in Joseon attire, the receptionist assumes she’s here to audition to be the face of their new Dynastie line of products. This line is being produced in collaboration with a foreign firm called Kaiserman, so it’s very important to Se-Gye that it goes well. Naturally, this leaves him shaken when he walks into the model interview room and sees Seo-Ri (the name she’s given for the interview, and the one he’ll come to know her by) in there. When he tries to walk away from her and leave the building, Seo-Ri’s spider-senses tingle, and she pulls him back, saving him last minute from a mannequin that plunges from the top of the building and crushes the car Se-Gye was about to get into. 

This feels like too much of a coincidence for him, and he has his assistant, Son Jae-Han, drop her to her home, despite her offer to become his bodyguard, and tells him to look into her. Given Seo-Ri’s led an uneventful life, besides being a child actress back in the day, Son’s report is awfully barebones. Meanwhile, Seo-Ri’s met her grandmother for the first time (well, the first time for Dan-Sim), and as you’d expect, she is plied with food and love and a little bit of pocket money. Her living condition is pathetic though, with walls thin enough to hear people burping through, and a window that opens directly onto a wall. She immediately gets everybody to like her when she catches the neighborhood pervert without a second thought, throwing her clothes washing stick directly at him. She ends up making an almost-enemy of her next-door neighbor, Gwang-Nam, busting him for stealing food out of the communal fridge and just generally putting him in his place. She does manage to secure a job by tagging along with him to a TV recording where they need mukbang participants, and she manages to impress the producers and the audience with her very enthusiastic eating, which secures record-high sales for the product. Who’d have thought “Sold Out On You” wouldn’t be the only telemarketing-focused show I’d see this week? 

Simultaneously, a junior crew member stages a one-man protest after the director smacks him a little, and as part of his evidence that junior members of production are mistreated, he releases the video of a stand-in giving a much better performance than the lead. This stand-in happens to be Seo-Ri, and the video goes viral, so Biojei’s marketing team decides they need her to be the face of Dynastie. So Se-Gye goes looking for her, but she’s still in the recording studio, because the producers have realized what they’ve got on their hands: Seo-Ri’s already being called the mukbang queen. However, when she’s instructed to sell a black goat extract, it reminds her of the poison that killed her, so she spills it, causing chaos as the production staff start chasing her around. This is when she bumps into Se-Gye, who rescues her and takes her to the roof. But Se-Gye’s uncle, Mun-Do, shows up, and Seo-Ri panics, hugging Se-Gye until the guy leaves. We find out this is because he looks exactly like King Anjong, the man who ordered her execution, and she doesn’t trust him one bit. This entire time, her behavior with Se-Gye is very unlike anything he’s used to, and he is, in particular, very upset any time she tries to describe him as being “concerned” for her. Se-Gye is a man who takes great pride in having never cared about anyone in any way, ever, something Son pokes fun at him about sometimes. When he’s driving Seo-Ri home, she gets nauseous, so he even stops at the gas station and gets a bottle of nausea medication, but by the time he’s back, she’s walked off with his credit card (which he left behind at the gas station shop). She proceeds to go on a massive spending spree, buying sweet treat after sweet treat, but instead of just cancelling the card, Se-Gye drives directly to her place, making Son raise an eyebrow. By this point, the schemer Mun-Do has already started spreading rumors that Se-Gye is dating someone. After he takes the card back, Seo-Ri guilts him into buying her dinner, and he jokes about how she basically ate a whole cow. By this point, he’s definitely thinking about her differently than he ever has about a woman, and it’s because everything she does is so unpredictable. There isn’t the slightest bit of bashfulness about her, and because she expects all this from him, he just seems to go along uncontrollably.

Ultimately, when Se-Gye decides to pick Seo-Ri for the Dynastie campaign, her management company decides to raise a fuss, because her contract’s still active, so she technically doesn’t have the freedom to go around booking jobs without their approval, and Bu-Sun and Ji-Hyo show up at Biojei offices. Ji-Hyo and Seo-Ri even get into a slapfight, but Se-Gye steps in and fixes the situation by literally buying Doran Entertainment and starting Biojei Entertainment as a company. Later, he says to himself that he doesn’t know why he did that, but Son starts having his suspicions. At the same time, we start seeing flashbacks where a scarred prince who covers his eye like the 4th prince in “Scarlet Heart Ryeo” rescues Seo-Ri from a hazing at the palace. This is the Ghost Prince, who looks suspiciously like Se-Gye, though Seo-Ri can’t tell that yet. She later gets assigned to serve him personally after she saves his life, though it’s basically the king wanting her to spy on him. 

In the ending of episode 4, Seo-Ri gets the idea that Se-Gye’s her “fan,” which would explain why he’s acting so helpful towards her, and she decides to write him a letter in classical Chinese as a token of appreciation. She also hands him a scruffy dog who won’t stop following her. The dog gives him allergies, and the letter gives him butterflies. He does later end up giving the dog away after Son makes an online post and tracks down its original owner. Later, in Songjin, where Seo-Rin’s grandmother lives, Se-Gye says, in front of his own grandfather, Cha Dal-Su, that he’s not a fan of hers; he was doing it out of pity. This starts a bit of a spat between them, but it’s resolved at the end of episode 4, when Se-Gye comes to the roof of Seo-Rin’s house, where she’s destroying the doghouse she’d built and crying miserably. When he sits down next to her, Seo-Rin tells him to stop looking at her with pity in his eyes. He asks her to test if it’s pity or yearning, and when she tests his heartbeat but feels no fluttering, he pulls her into a tight hug instead, calling it the only real test.

Does Seo-Ri’s Grandma Figure Out What’s Happening? 

Seo-Ri’s grandma, Ok-Sun, raised her pretty much singlehandedly, though we don’t know what happened to Seo-Ri’s parents yet. But we do know that Ok-Sun has been supportive of her little girl since “the accident,” and when she says she’s proud of her, she means it. When Seo-Ri gets signed on for the Dynastie project, she finds out she needs to go on talk shows and describe her difficult upbringing, so she decides to go to Songjin, her hometown, and fish for stories from Ok-Sun. Simultaneously, Se-Gye’s grandad’s corporation, Chail, is building a resort there, and the only holdout is Ok-Sun. When Mun-Do insults Se-Gye’s mother at an event commemorating the construction, he full-on decks his uncle and walks away. At Ok-Sun’s place, meanwhile, Mun-Do seems to have sent some thugs to intimidate her, but Seo-Ri handles them easily. Later at night, when she tells Ok-Sun to call on her if she’s ever needed, her recent behavior, in combination with the fact that she can’t seem to remember her childhood struggles at all, convinces Ok-Sun that she’s not talking to someone else. Or maybe it’s dementia, and she’s just not recognized her. Who can tell with K-dramas? She simply looks at her with knowing eyes and asks who she is. Dan-Sim has never known pure, unconditional love before, and when she’d experienced it from this old woman, it touched her in a way she didn’t expect. 

What’s The Deal With Mun-Do’s Scheming?

Mun-Do’s schemed to turn his uncle, Mr. Cha, against Se-Gye since they were kids, all the way back to framing him for stealing some cookies. Also, in the present day, Son and Se-Gye find out that Kaiserman isn’t a foreign company after all; it’s owned and operated by Mun-Do, who also heads Chail. He intends to use Kaiserman to take control of Biojei if their stock price drops to 50,000 won, leaving Se-Gye with nothing. As if that weren’t enough, Mun-Do also meddles in his nephew’s private life by trying to figure out what’s going on between him and Seo-Rin. After the attack on Ok-Sun, he has a talk with Seo-Ri, where he tells her that if she gets close to Se-Gye, he’ll make sure she and her grandma are set for life. This is an eerie parallel to her past life, where King Anjong had basically told her to do the exact same thing with the Ghost Prince. The man’s a born schemer with a friendly face, but it remains to be seen if he manages to play his uncle against his nephew and ruin Biojei, establishing himself as the ultimate corporate baddie (no, not in the girlboss way).

...