My Royal Nemesis Episode 9 Review: "That's First Love for You" — the Grand Prince Who Loves in Silence, the Portrait That Names Dan-sim a Villain, and the Wisdom Tooth That Buys a Confession

By Mira Vance · Editor & Lead Reviewer

Episode 9 puts both men in the same trap and lets only one of them out. Three hundred years back, Grand Prince Cheongheon bars Dan-sim from his quarters to keep her alive and calls it a final order; in the present, Se-gye cracks a tooth on her candy, dreams the love poem he never delivered, and learns from a museum portrait that the woman he keeps seeing is remembered by history as its evilest woman. By the time Mun-do lays photos on the table, the show has decided what first love costs when you keep it silent — your heart turns to stone — and Se-gye says the thing the Grand Prince never could.

A Joseon banishment and a modern slip: “never come to my quarters again,” then “Kang Dan-sim”

The cold open is the Grand Prince pushing the one person he wants closest as far away as he can. Confined to his residence, Cheongheon takes the porridge Dan-sim risks her safety to bring and answers her honesty with cruelty — you are quite naive, indeed; this is why you are so easily fooled and used by men — before issuing what he frames as his last command: Kang Dan-sim, never come to my private quarters again. It is protection disguised as rejection, and the episode spends an hour proving the disguise is the problem.

The present picks up E08’s slip mid-sentence. Half-awake, Se-gye asks Seo-ri who are you really, Kang Clan, Dan-sim, then, fully lost: I keep seeing a woman in my sleep. A court lady with no family or friends. She looks exactly like you. Seo-ri buries it — you can’t tell a dream from reality? — and walks off, but her own narration cracks the bit open: maybe he can truly see the past. The pretense that these are only dreams is over; now it is just the characters who don’t know.

The Dynaestie launch puts Seo-ri in front of the Chail chairman — and Mun-do’s buried witness slips her leash

The Dynaestie brand launch is a hit, and it pulls every player into one room. Se-gye’s grandfather, Chairman Cha Dal-su, turns up unannounced; Mo Tae-hee performs the doting fiancée; and Seo-ri, introduced as the ambassador who sold the line out, addresses the chairman as Grandfather outright before Tae-hee cuts her off — you can’t call him grandfather, yet — and Se-gye covers it as method acting, the actress lost in her period role. Tae-hee’s you little wench is the sound of a woman watching her staged engagement get upstaged by a model.

Underneath the party, the real machinery turns. Mun-do has bribed hospital staff to watch over an unconscious nurse — no mistakes can be made with her this time — and then the nurse simply vanishes, gone by taxi from the front entrance. Mun-do’s order is pure panic: find her before she talks to the chairman or to Se-gye. The launch is the noise; the missing witness is the threat, and the episode keeps them in separate frames on purpose.

Se-gye buys onto “Kingdom of Women,” kills the bed scene, and loses a tooth to her candy

The funniest stretch is Se-gye weaponizing money to be near Seo-ri. He greenlights product placement on her drama, Kingdom of Women, purely to get on set — then quietly has her bed-sharing scene cut and forbids any unnecessary physical contact, replacing a rainy-night bedchamber with a Royal Sericulture Ceremony. Cornered by a crew member, he introduces himself with a straight face: I’m Shin Seo-ri’s stalker. The show lets the romance run on exactly the contract-drama beats its own characters keep narrating.

It curdles into the episode’s best gag-with-teeth. A flirty hard-candy handoff — she pushes the sweet from her mouth to his, gross, your saliva — ends with Se-gye crunching one and splitting a wisdom tooth, which a big-hospital dentist says needs surgical extraction under general anesthesia. Seo-ri, who has spent the season insisting she stands alone, is the one who stays: I trust you. Don’t leave. Promise me. The man who buys his way into every room cannot buy the thing he asks her for at the door.

Anesthesia gives him the vow, and she answers it with ice carried in her bare hands

Under the anesthetic, Cheongheon surfaces whole. The Grand Prince recites the vow the present keeps circling — by heaven, now that I have met you, we shall never be torn asunder; when the mountain peaks wear down and the rivers have run dry, when thunder rumbles in winter and snow falls in summer, only then shall we finally part — over a painting he then refuses to deliver: I couldn’t possibly give this to her. Se-gye wakes asking where is she, assumes she left, calls it heartless — and finds she only went for ice, which she carried back in her bare hands because what else would I have used, my head? The Joseon man writes the most extravagant promise on the planet and hides it; the modern woman says nothing and freezes her fingers. The show keeps scoring silent devotion against spoken cowardice and letting you decide which one is love.

When Seo-ri finally asks what the dreams are, Se-gye answers honestly: kind of sad — I get falsely accused, I get locked up, I think I’ll be exiled soon. He is a Grand Prince in them, one who truly yearns for a court lady named Kang Dan-sim, and Seo-ri’s verdict on him doubles as the episode’s diagnosis: you can tell he’s in love with her, like the fool he is. Her grandmother, installed in a bright private room on Seo-ri’s new TV money, supplies the thesis from the other direction — no matter how incredible someone is, they can’t live by themselves; what kind of person goes in alone? You’re withering away until the end — cut hard against Cheongheon’s never come to my quarters again.

The Portrait of a Beauty: a museum names Dan-sim history’s evilest woman, and silent love “rots to stone”

The recontextualizing blow lands at the Seoul Museum of History, under a banner reading Time Travel History Exhibition, 1392–2026. A researcher studying the evilest woman in history greets Seo-ri by the name in her thesis and shows her a half-preserved painting the staff call The Portrait of a Beauty — a woman whose partial face is, in the intern’s word, uncannily Seo-ri’s, paired with the by heaven poem on precious hanji, an extraordinary love, or the end of a love that could not be expressed. The intern even greets Seo-ri by the villain’s name, and the episode lets the inference land on its own: the court lady in Se-gye’s dreams and the woman history filed under villain wear the same face.

The Joseon thread answers what that silence cost. A court matron hands Dan-sim a keepsake and a survival rule — I am the one giving this to you, not the Grand Prince; you can survive here without needing help from anybody — and tells her to bury her feelings to live. Dan-sim’s own ruling is the line the whole hour turns on: to love in silence and never express it just makes your heart rot and turn to stone — how can that be considered love? It is also, unmistakably, the future Seo-ri is trying not to repeat.

Mun-do’s transfer, his blackmail photos, and Se-gye’s “whoever you are, I believe you”

The succession war finally moves. A Chail personnel notice posts Choi Mun-do to the US branch — a transfer that reads as exile dressed up as promotion, the family path conveniently clearing for Se-gye — and the cornered nurse contacts Se-gye to confess what she was paid to hide. At a night meeting, Mun-do counters the only way he knows: photographs, and the threat to tell the chairman Se-gye has thrown himself away on the wrong woman — you know better than anyone after how Uncle treated your mother. His creed is the inverse of everything the timelines are arguing: never give someone something they can use against you; the more things you care about, the weaker you become. The price for silence is dropping out of the firm. Se-gye’s own buried lever is sharper — didn’t you think of Seo-jun? — the son Mun-do brushes off on the phone.

Then the chapter spends its title. Seo-ri comes to him, and Se-gye is wounded that she met Mun-do and made a deal she never disclosed — what more do I have to do, what proof do you need to open your heart? She offers the cheapest version of herself: if you truly don’t feel the same way, then just use me; for you, I’ll happily let myself be used. He refuses the bargain and, after a struggle that nearly breaks both of them, says the thing Cheongheon never did: whoever you are, wherever you came from, I believe you. Forget all the assholes out there, and just focus on me. Please. The Grand Prince hid the painting; Se-gye hands over his whole trust without a single fact to back it. That is the first love of the title — not the flutter, but the decision to say it out loud before it turns to stone.

Tiny details worth clocking

• The vow — when the mountain peaks wear down and the rivers have run dry — plays first as Cheongheon’s anesthetic dream and again when Se-gye recites it awake, the show letting the audience hear the promise twice before either lead admits whose it is.
• The “lucky wood” Dan-sim once gathered for desperate mothers (her father was a potions peddler) rhymes with Se-gye sprinting to buy the rarest and most expensive herbs the instant he decides to stop hiding — both timelines express love as medicine fetched for someone else.
• Se-gye actually searches Court Lady Kang Dan-sim online and gets no search results, then mutters what the hell am I doing — the rational man caught believing the impossible before he’ll say so.
• The grandmother’s you can’t live alone, you’ll wither away is delivered as cozy hospital chatter and then echoed by the closing preview, which puts a helpless old lady in Room 12 squarely in Mun-do’s sights.
• Mun-do’s the more things you care about, the weaker you become is the villain stating the show’s own rule and getting it exactly backwards — the episode keeps proving that the characters who care are the ones who survive each other.

Final verdict

“That’s First Love for You” is the episode where the dual-timeline conceit stops being a clever structure and starts being an argument. Every Joseon beat — the banishment framed as protection, the painting never delivered, Dan-sim’s verdict that silent love rots to stone, the matron teaching a girl to need no one — is set directly against a modern scene that either repeats the mistake or breaks it. The museum reveal is the chapter’s quiet bomb: the court lady Se-gye dreams of wears the same face history filed under villain, which reframes Seo-ri’s whole performance of self-sufficiency as a fate she is consciously trying to outrun.

It is not flawless. The launch party and the product-placement runaround are the loosest stretch, and Mun-do’s US transfer is a lot of corporate plumbing to move one piece off the board. But the comedy isn’t idle: the wisdom-tooth surgery is played for farce and then becomes the scene where Seo-ri can’t make herself leave, and the Mun-do confrontation finally gives the succession plot real menace, photographs and a child both wielded as leverage right beside a threat about Se-gye’s mother.

What makes it land is that it refuses to let the confession be easy or clean. Se-gye doesn’t say I believe you because Seo-ri explained herself; he says it before she can, with a struggle and a please, choosing trust over evidence in the exact place the Grand Prince chose silence over risk. The chapter closes on that choice, and its final preview aims the next threat at the grandmother — the one person whose simple wisdom diagnosed both timelines in a sentence.

Rating: 8.9/10 — the show’s thesis episode, braiding a Joseon banishment, a villain’s portrait, and a wisdom-tooth comedy into the same question about silent love, and answering it with a confession that costs trust instead of asking for proof.

More episodes from My Royal Nemesis — Joseon villainess in modern Seoul, episode by episode. Jump to any episode in the season:

Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.

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