6 Moments We Loved & Wanted More Of In Episodes 11-12 Of “Knight Flower”

The end is here for “Knight Flower”! This show has been a zany, cozy blast over the past six weekends, so it’s sad to see it end. This is one of the rare dramas that could have done with an extension purely because of how much unexplored potential there was in the world it had created. Ends are tied up, some ends are left loose, and yet others are only teased. Here’s everything we loved and wanted to know more of in the finale!

Warning: spoilers for episodes 11-12 below.

1. Seok Jeong

Seok Jeong (Oh Eui Sik) is a really decent guy and an intelligent one too. It doesn’t take him long to put two and two together at this point to realize that his strangely suspicious wife Jo Yeo Hwa (Honey Lee) is the masked vigilante do-gooder running around the city. He isn’t threatened by that or by the fact that she’s the lady that Park Soo Ho (Lee Jong Won) has been pining after for a while now. Rather, he takes great enjoyment in helping her defy societal rules and uses hilarious excuses like wanting sweets to send her out at night on “errands” just so she doesn’t have to sneak around. He thinks she’s pretty cool. She thinks he’s an odd egg but a likable one. It’s unfortunate that we don’t know what happened to his elopement or why he came back. But he may not get to stay for long. His father has no issue with killing him first.

2. Everyone plotting to ruin Ji Sang

It’s a shame we couldn’t have Seok Ji Sang (Kim Sang Joong) unveiled as the villain earlier because the bulk of this week’s episodes is spent on him coming out of the shadows as the big bad. First, we’ve a failed plan by King Yi So (Heo Jung Do) and Park Yoon Hak (Lee Ki Woo) to take him down. The king comes up with a plan that under any other circumstances would be sound. They pretend that Lady Oh Nan Kyeong (Seo Yi Sook), Ji Sang’s co-conspirator in the murder of Yi So’s father, has gone missing. While Ji Sang is fretting as to Nan Kyeong’s whereabouts, the king throws him for a loop by inviting his entire family to tea, including his recently-returned-from-the-dead son Seok Jeong.

The Seok family heads out for what they believe is an honor, only to be surprised when the king unveils Nan Kyeong, who apologizes for her crimes profusely and begs to serve everyone the same tea she did the former king as a sign of her repentance. Ji Sang knows good and well that this is the poisoned tea they used to get rid of the former king. Yi So offers the first cup to Seok Jeong to celebrate his return from the dead and is so certain that Ji Sang will react and stop this, thereby proving that he’s aware of what the tea is and his guilt in the former king’s murder. Only, Ji Sang does nothing. This is, after all, the same guy who pretended that his son was dead. So he’s fully prepared to let his son die if it meant keeping his position. Yi So is horrified at Ji Sang’s cruelty and calls the plan off, unwilling to have innocent Seok Jeong die. Nan Kyeong knows she’s about to be arrested and drinks the tea instead to prove that it was poison. She dies, but not before informing Yeo Hwa that her brother’s been dead for over a decade at Ji Sang’s hand. Horrified, Yeo Hwa breaks down in horror before everyone, while an anguished Soo Ho watches.

3. Merchant Jang

Head Merchant and entrepreneurial queen Jang So Woon (Yoon Sa Bong) has been Yeo Hwa’s most loyal ally. It’s a shame that we haven’t gotten to know her better beyond her being Yeo Hwa’s confidant, along with Yeo Hwa’s maid Yeon Sun (Park Se Hyun).

Kang Pil Jik (Jo Jae Yoon), Ji Sang’s righthand man, has always had something against Merchant Jang, though it’s never revealed why, only that Yeo Hwa rescued her. After the King and Yoon Hak’s failed plan, he kidnaps Merchant Jang to lure out Soo Ho and Yeo Hwa. It works, but the tables are quickly turned on him, and he ends up locked in the Capital Defense Guard’s cells where Soo Ho happily threatens him with all manner of death until he spills the beans on everything. It turns out that Yeo Hwa’s brother died a year after the late King, a year into Yeo Hwa’s life in the Seok household. He’d come to see her and reveal himself but was quickly accosted by Pil Jik and his goons and murdered with Ji Sang present—the same Ji Sang who went home to Yeo Hwa and pretended that he was still searching for her brother.

Yeo Hwa completely loses it upon finding the truth and races out all masked up to kill her father-in-law. She nearly does, but Soo Ho intervenes and pleads with her not to act rashly. It isn’t what her brother would have wanted. That brings her back to rationality. And when she and Soo Ho sit down with the last belonging her brother left her (a sword), they find exactly what Ji Sang’s been hoping no one would find: the former king’s letter to Yi So prior to succumbing to poison that Ji Sang was behind his death.

Armed with this knowledge, Yeo Hwa presents the letter to Yi So but not without admonishing him. While he spent all these years searching for justice for his father’s murder, people were dying, being shunted aside, and forced to adhere to foolish laws made by those like Ji Sang—people like her, living under the foolish strictures dictated for widows. The King acknowledges that he was too caught up in himself to consider others, and this is what encourages Yeo Hwa to give him the letter. The next day, she is brought in before every minister and Ji Sang to formally accuse him of the murders of her brother, the former king, and Soo Ho’s family. The King’s letter is unveiled as proof, and Ji Sang goes down like a sack of bricks when Yeo Hwa puts on her mask and reveals that she was the vigilante that nearly killed him last night.

The fact that he was outwitted by a woman doesn’t haunt him though as he maintains that he did what he did because equality was evil. Only the wealthy and educated should lead the country and bestow their titles to their children. To have everyone educated would allow even commoners to aspire to political positions (gasp, the horror). He’s exiled, and Yi So ensures that only he bears the punishment of his actions, making an exemption under the law that would have punished his entire family, including Yeo Hwa. But it isn’t time yet for a happy ending.

4. The rest of the Seok family

Yeo Hwa is still technically married. Seok Jeong is a pretty cool guy, but Yeo Hwa doesn’t feel anything for him, and she cannot bring herself to still live in a home that was always meant to keep her hostage under Ji Sang’s design. But divorcing her would cause its own problems as Joseon society was even more unkind to divorcees than to widows. The former were seen as useless because they were discarded by their husbands due to some flaw, the latter were seen as useless because their husbands were dead. What a hard life women led in the past.

Merchant Jang, Yeon Sun, Yoon Hak (who is besotted with Yeon Sun at this point), and Seok Jeong himself mourn Yeo Hwa’s lack of options until bright-eyed Kkotnim (Jung Ye Na) points out that Yeo Hwa’s marriage isn’t legal because she never saw her husband’s face. That’s all it takes for Seok Jeong to cause a ruckus outside the palace saying that she was never legally married to him because he eloped to Qing and has a wife there. The truth of this is highly uncertain because we don’t know why he came back without said wife! If only we knew more! The king happily annuls Yeo Ha’s marriage, and it’s adorable how happy Merchant Jang and Yeon Sun are.

Soo Ho dashes to her, and the poor guy is literally ready to propose, but she’s gone.

5. Yeo Hwa finding her own path

We’ve seen that Yeo Hwa has a lot of trouble putting herself first. She’s held on for years, hoping for news of her brother and helped those she could because she can’t bear injustice. But to have all hope cut from her and to know that her brother isn’t going to come back has left her rudderless. She doesn’t know what she wants for herself or who she is outside of this double-life. It’s time for her to find it, so she does some soul-searching for a year after a tearful goodbye with her mother-in-law Yoo Geum Ok (Kim Mi Kyung), who really did care for her and just wanted to keep her safe, even if by the patriarchal rules of their society. They both agree to continue to call each other family, mother and daughter. It’s a pity that the fantastic Kim Mi Kyung was criminally underused here.

Yeo Hwa also bids farewell to Seok Jeong, who seems oddly moved by her for reasons we may never know. We don’t know what conclusions Yeo Hwa came to as a woman who’s been trapped behind society’s walls for a long time and has found only one outlet to break the rules for others and herself: vigilantism. There’s so much she hasn’t experienced and seen, and it’s a pity we don’t get to follow her as her world expands.

6. Yeo Hwa and Soo Ho flirting and Yeon Sun and Yoon Hak flirting

For a drama that gave us abs in episode 3, we’ve had a real dearth of romance and a whole lot of pining. Yoon Hak proposes to Yeon Sun the second he’s released from service as the Royal Secretary and plans to have a nice boring life as a scholar without any conspiratorial shenanigans. She happily accepts. When Yeo Hwa returns to the capital at very end, back in her vigilante business (which seems to have been her conclusion after all her soul-searching), Soo Ho is waiting and dials up the charm to max as he repeats the warning he once gave her, not to leave his sight. She flirts back that she’ll let him catch her this once, and he pulls her into an embrace. And it ends right as he’s about to kiss her.

Aww, that’s just not fair. You can’t give us Lee Jong Won making heart eyes and puppy eyes and looking besotted for 12 episodes and not even give us a kiss. It does feel like a fitting send off in some ways though because these two have always been about acts of service and great chemistry. But this is a good problem to have rather than a drama that drags its feet. So a fond farewell to “Knight Flower” and its assortment of amusing people, all of whom leave us with one message: to do all we can to help those amongst us bloom.

 

 cr: Soompi