My Royal Nemesis Episode 10 Review: "Hope, Despair, and Longing" — the Trial Period Ends, Mun-do Buys a Grandmother's Restaurant Out From Under Her, and the Date That Curdles Into a Collapse
What happens — the short version (spoilers)
- The trial period ends — 'day one' — and Seo-ri vows she's 'no longer a Joseon woman' and will give freely, flooding Se-gye with herbal medicine and a crate of apples his staff mistake for a bomb.
- Chairman Cha Dal-su ships Mun-do to the US and notarizes a will favoring Se-gye, who storms a Chail board meeting and takes the scornful executives apart one by one.
- On a mundane-joys date — bakery, Namsan cable car — Se-gye refuses a love latch and admits he's lonely, and Seo-ri promises she'll never let him be alone.
- Mun-do tricks Seo-ri's failing grandmother, Nam Ok-sun, into signing her restaurant over to Chail E&C; in Joseon, the King recognizes Dan-sim and asks her to stand among his subjects.
- Se-gye and Seo-ri rupture when his 'whatever it takes to protect you' lands as condescension, and the chairman quietly tells her grandmother that Seo-ri is too lonely to be the wife he wants for Se-gye.
- After unanswered apology calls, Se-gye bursts in to find Seo-ri collapsed; a closing montage teases carcinogens in Dynaestie, Mun-do as chairman, a body with planted evidence, and a Joseon voice asking 'have I truly returned here?'
Episode 10 spends its first half letting Se-gye and Seo-ri finally be a couple — trial period over, secrets banned, a cable-car date built out of mundane joys — and its second half taking it all back. Mun-do, exiled to the US, refuses to go quietly, and his parting move is the cruelest the show has played: tricking Seo-ri's failing grandmother into signing away her restaurant. By the time the chairman tells that same grandmother her granddaughter isn't enough for Se-gye, the hour's title has delivered all three of its nouns, and the last minute hands you a collapse and a question across three hundred years.
The trial period ends and Seo-ri swears off silence, while a crate of frozen apples reads as a bomb
The cold open frames the whole hour through a comet — the Star of the Temptress, visible since a total eclipse three months ago, the kind of thing that can disappear without warning at any moment. Then the show cashes in E09’s confession. Se-gye, fully on board now, lays it out plainly: I’m the Grand Prince that was exiled, and you’re the court lady… I’m seeing visions of our past lives. He floats a doctor’s visit in case they’ve both lost their minds, agrees the trial period no longer makes sense, and lets Seo-ri name what comes next — day one from today — as the two set the rule the episode will spend its back half breaking: no secrets between us ever.
What lands hardest is Seo-ri’s vow to herself. I’m no longer a Joseon woman. From now on, I won’t be stingy with my heart or suffer in silence. I’ll open up and give freely. It is the direct reversal of E09’s love kept silent rots to stone, and the show plays it for comedy first — she floods Se-gye with herbal medicine and a crate of discount honey apples, which his staff treat as a probable bomb (a crate of apples is well known to mean conspiracy, corruption, and collusion) before he clocks it as her second clumsy gift of care.
The chairman ships Mun-do to the US, and Se-gye storms a Chail board meeting to gut the executives one by one
Chairman Cha Dal-su makes his move on the succession war with surgical contempt, posting Choi Mun-do to the US to spend some time with Seo-jun, as his dad and reminding him that no salaried employee works that hard for their firm unless he mistook the company for his own. Se-gye’s price for coming home is calling off the Mochang engagement; the chairman, quietly notarizing a will that leaves Se-gye everything, hears him out but keeps the Mochang match alive — later hosting Mo Tae-hee’s mother while Se-gye walks out of the lunch.
Mun-do does not go quietly. He flips from wait and see to the best offense is a preemptive strike and walks back into headquarters, and so does Se-gye — into a board meeting he has no appointment to attend. The scene is the season’s most purely satisfying power flex: Se-gye dismantles each executive by name, the Distribution CEO whose sales fell 31 percent, the Bio CEO who punished employees for parental leave, the Chemicals CEO who married for convenience and now sneers about bloodlines. Merit over bloodline, Mun-do offers, and Se-gye throws it back — try making money before running your mouth. The gratitude that kept Se-gye quiet for years (Mun-do once saved the chairman’s life) is spent: come at me with all you got… ex-CEO Choi Mun-do.
A bakery, a cable car, and a love latch Se-gye won’t hang — the date where he admits he’s lonely
Their first real date is the hour’s tender center, built on Seo-ri’s insistence on the unremarkable. Against Se-gye’s pitch for fireworks or at least a yacht party, she drags him to a famous ring-bread bakery and the Namsan cable car, citing K-drama dating lore chapter and verse, because it’s the mundane thing that everyone does, but it’s special because we are together.
The show plants two quiet aches inside the fun. Se-gye refuses to hang a love latch — they say it’s for eternal love, but these don’t stay here forever; if we come back and find ours gone, I’ll be sad — a man too scarred to trust permanence, rhyming with the comet that vanishes without warning. And he admits the thing he never says: fine, it’s because I’m lonely… I am not immune to loneliness. Seo-ri’s answer is the promise the whole series has been withholding from him. I will not let you be alone. You can trust me. He calls it a promise and tells her it is too late to back out.
Mun-do tricks Grandma Nam Ok-sun into signing away her restaurant, and the King recognizes Dan-sim
Then the despair. Grandma Nam Ok-sun, whose mind has been coming and going, slips out of her hospital room and comes back hiding a document: a land-purchase agreement, seller Nam Ok-sun, buyer Chail E&C, signed off by Choi Mun-do. He has talked a confused old woman into selling the restaurant she built, and means to demolish it. Seo-ri confronts him and he refuses the word threat — she stamped the agreement on her own accord — and she names him for what he is: you have the tongue of a serpent that beguiles and deceives.
His reply collapses the timelines. I have been away too long, haven’t I? So it was you. Kang clan, Dan-sim. The Joseon thread underneath confirms it: at his late brother’s pavilion, the King who once persecuted the Grand Prince speaks of wanting to be a king worthy of his subjects and asks the court lady, will you stand among my subjects then? Mun-do isn’t just a corporate rival reborn; he is the throne that took everything the first time, recognizing the woman who got away.
Se-gye and Seo-ri rupture over the word “protect,” and the chairman tells her grandmother she isn’t enough
Se-gye arrives, threatens to jail Mun-do (this piece of paper means nothing), and turns on Seo-ri for going to him alone — breaking the no-secrets pact on day one. Whatever it takes to protect you, I’ll do it, he says, and it is exactly the wrong thing. Seo-ri rounds on him: who do you think you are? Are you already my husband?… You’re worse than he is. You hurt me more by treating me like an idiot, pretending to take care of me. It is the same wound as the Joseon banishment in reverse — there a man’s protection silenced a woman, here a woman refuses to be protected into smallness — and she leaves him in the street.
The chairman lands the quieter, crueler blow. In a scene with Seo-ri’s grandmother, he opens up about hitting young Se-gye, regretting it, knowing the boy was lonely without a mom — and then gently rules Seo-ri out. I don’t want him to be with a person just as lonely as he is… I want him with a woman who has enough to give and plenty left over for her, a big warm family with in-laws he can lean on. Nam Ok-sun’s own plea to Se-gye sits right beside it — a child mature for their age is carrying pain… just don’t abandon her — two grandparents loving the same two kids straight into an impasse.
“Have I truly returned here?”: Seo-ri collapses, and the timelines bleed
The hour closes in genuine dread. After a string of unanswered apology calls — I’m sorry, okay? Can you pick up? I’ll wait until you get here — Se-gye crashes into a room shouting Shin Seo-ri, wake up over a collapsed Seo-ri as medics call for help. The closing montage stacks the despair the title promised: a news chyron naming Chairman Choi Mun-do amid carcinogens detected in Dynaestie products, a report that a woman was found dead under suspicious circumstances with planted items, and the Joseon track breaking all the way through — Your Highness, can you hear me? Bring the physician — and a court lady’s voice asking the question the whole season has been driving toward: have I truly returned here?
Tiny details worth clocking
- The comet that opens the hour — appears in silence, vanishes without warning — is the love-latch conversation in disguise, and the show pays it off when the closing minutes threaten to make Seo-ri exactly that kind of disappearance.
- Seo-ri’s give freely manifesto turns her into a one-woman apple distributor, and the running poison-and-conspiracy jokes (a crate of apples reads as corruption; the staff fear a bomb) keep undercutting the warmth right up until the warmth is what gets weaponized.
- Mun-do’s coldness to his injured son Seo-jun — I’m your boss, not Seo-jun — is set against a later beat where he actually shows up for the boy, the show refusing to flatten him into a pure villain even as he robs a grandmother.
- The chairman’s soft spot for Se-gye traces to the late Jin-woo; his confession that he used to hit the boy and wishes he’d embraced and nurtured him makes his veto of Seo-ri land as love, not snobbery, which is what makes it hurt.
- Both grandparents independently diagnose the same thing — that these two are lonely people who raised themselves — and reach opposite verdicts about whether that makes them right or wrong for each other.
Final verdict
“Hope, Despair, and Longing” is the most structurally ambitious episode the show has run, and it mostly earns the reach. The first half is a victory lap — the couple official, the date sweet and specific, the boardroom showdown delivering the cathartic beat of Se-gye finally throwing his weight around — and the show is smart enough to know a victory lap is a setup. Mun-do’s move against Nam Ok-sun is genuinely upsetting in a way the corporate sparring never is, because it targets the one person Seo-ri can’t strategize her way into protecting, and it converts the season’s give freely thesis into a liability: the woman who opens her heart now has a heart that can be reached.
It is doing a lot at once, and the seams show. The succession plot leans on a crowd of interchangeable executives, the Gwang-nam and rival-actress comedy sits well off to the side, and the closing montage moves so fast — collapse, carcinogen scandal, a body, a chairmanship, a timeline bleed — that it trades coherence for momentum. But the two grandparent scenes are the best the show has written, and the rupture works precisely because Se-gye is right to be scared and wrong in how he says it. The episode ends on the title’s despair with the longing right behind it, Seo-ri unconscious and a Joseon voice asking whether it has all come back around. As a tenth-of-the-season escalation, it lands.
Rating: 9.0/10 — a high-wire hour that pairs the show’s sweetest date with its cruelest scheme, anchored by two grandparents loving the same lonely kids into a stalemate, and a closing collapse that finally lets the past break through into the present.
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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.