[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Scholar Who Walks the Night" Episode 7

In the aftermath of a major battle recovery is slow- well, not that slow given that Seong-yeol and Gwi are vampires, but this definitely appears to be a cycle that repeats fairly frequently. Seong-yeol is only able to outsmart Gwi enough to force another stalemate- they both live to fight another day. Which as far as Seong-yeol is concerned is a loss, because another day as a vampire is another day he has to suck blood from the living and, well, Seong-yeol doesn't like doing that.

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Yang-seon is comparatively a bit slow on the up-and-up. It seems weird that Yang-seon is completely incapable of hiding her gender yet Seong-yeol does excellent work hiding his vampiric identity. Of course, Seong-yeol has had a lot more practice, and people can see him during the daytime, so that helps his case somewhat. Gwi is the bigger mystery in the secrets department- I don't think he appreciates how much work his collaborators have to do to keep all these murders covered up.

Gwi does almost manage to come up with a smart plan this episode, but this is foiled mainly by Hye-ryeong's consistent unwillingness to get involved in the story. She really is a perplexing character- one one level I can understand hesitance to jump into vampirism antics, given how most of the people Gwi runs into end up dead sooner rather than later. All the same Hye-ryeong is so standoffish it's hard to really get into her character all that much.

Yang-seon, by contrast, is bubbly and throws herself into everything, even pretending to be a woman. All right yes technically she is a woman but Yang-seon is so bad at disguises it's a wonder nobody sees through to her actual day-by-day identity. It's logic I'm hesitant to attack that much, because Lee Yu-bi looks just so darn cute. The costuming and makeup department in general is quite capable in "Scholar Who Walks the Night", and director Lee Seong-joon is even magnaminous enough to give us a nice long look at Lee Soo-hyuk's manly, manly chest.

As far as the story goes...well, it's the same old really. The amount of plot progress seems completely disproportionate to the time spent building up character relationships. Which isn't exactly a bad thing- the production merits in "Scholar Who Walks the Night" are strong enough that this is a genuinely fun drama just to look at, and the interactions are just inventive enough that they never really get old. Although I do hope the whole book issue is resolved sooner rather than later.

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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