She gets up in shock and starts repeating “no, no no no….” Joogun calmly notes that she was right, she does shine brightly (to a ghost). As she waits in the corridor while he’s in surgery, a shadow walks up to her and she raises her head to see Joogun.

So at the end of episode 12 – Joogun takes a knife to the back to protect Taeyang and he’s rushed to the hospital. In many respects, this coupling is turning out to be the redux of Hyun Bin and Ha Ji Won in SG – solid but not spectacular chemistry but stuck with very shallowly constructed characters and asked to spit out dialogue that is mostly noise-filler, with all that potential untapped for something truly heartwrenchingly good and not derivative emotional bait. I almost wish I could stick the two of them in room and have them act out a one-act with no script and just the two of them ad-libbing a scene. I still think So Ji Sub and Gong Hyo Jin’s chemistry is stuck at that sweet spot of just very good while their real life interactions seem to hint at the possibility for nuclear strike level heat. I fully understand TMS can be a very entertaining watch for viewers, and my issues are really with the Hong Sisters at this point and nothing else. The end of episode 12 might’ve worked better if it didn’t simultaneously mash together very important turning point plot developments in three other dramas, namely Secret Garden, the Hong Sisters own Best Love, and let’s not forget Who Are You just did it already. But aside from them, TMS feels so empty to me – a sleek shell filled with re-packaged goods that are now stale from sitting too long on the shelf.

I’m sticking with this drama because of So Ji Sub and Gong Hyo Jin, happy for their chance to work together, and pleased their hard work is garnering good ratings. Am I really that easy to sell things to that I’ll be offered a re-packaged same item and happily consume it? When episode 12 of The Master’s Sun ended, that very same feeling came over me. As popcorn entertainment its light years ahead of the dreck written by less talented writers, but as a reader I’m struck by the sense of disillusionment and a feeling of mild manipulation. The man is a talented gripping writer for sure, but he’s sunk to the depths of what I call “milking it”, the shallow tide pool of warm waters and lots of money where he applies the same formula with slightly different ingredients and churns out another carbon copy hit. I don’t know why I bothered, but over the Summer I read Dan Brown’s latest Inferno and it was as painstakingly researched as his prior hits like The Da Vinci Codebut equally as soulless as the follow up to that The Lost Symbol.

The master sun episode 12