Genie, Make A Wish tells a story that spans 1000s of years and features a genie who grants 3 wishes. While the story is mostly set in the present day, it’s about a mystical being from the heart of Arabia. The show is an exciting mix of fantasy and comedy that incorporates mythical creatures in an original plot. Iblis has many enemies, including his brother, an angel named Ejllael. On the other hand there’s Ka-Young, a young and beautiful woman who just so happens to be a psychopath. She was born antisocial, but her grandmother raised her with a pure heart, making her learn to follow the rules and avoid killing people. How do Iblis and Ka-Young meet? Is he only meant to grant her 3 wishes, or is there a deeper story there? We can find out in this recap of Genie, Make A Wish. To make things easier to understand, I’m going to try and put everything down chronologically, i.e., starting from the war between the genies and angels and then moving on to Ka-Young in the present day.
Spoiler Alert
Why Did The Genies Bow Down To Humans?
The story begins when God found that the genies had become too arrogant and decided to create humans. The genies were meant to submit to the humans made from clay, but they obviously didn’t plan on doing so. God sent the angels to get the genies to submit, but this led to a 300-year war, where many genies died and many others decided to bow down to humans. However, one fought with all his might: Iblis, a genie who vowed never to bow down to mere lumps of clay. Iblis fought with his might, a shiny sword in hand, but he was the only one who never bowed down, while the rest of the genies ended up going into hiding. As the years passed, Iblis became famous in the human world as “Shaytan,” a genie who would grant you three wishes, but at a price. Humans feared him, making him more arrogant, and he told God that he would only bow down to humans when he found a righteous one who didn’t get corrupted by his three wishes. He became the most famous genie and also dated a Jinniya, a female genie, until one day, he was summoned when a little Goryeo girl’s hair grazed his lamp.
This Goryeo girl was Ka-Young, a slave brought from the East. She and her brother were being taken across the desert as cargo when a group of wild hounds attacked them. Afraid for their own lives, the Arab slavers threw the Korean boy, Ka-Young’s brother, Hunbish, straight to the hounds so that they could escape. Desperate, Ka-Young asks the genie, whom she has just summoned with her hair, to save her brother first and then, for her second wish, to make sure that no other kid from Goryeo suffers as she did. Iblis was an evil genie, so he decided to have some fun killing people in the process of saving a few kids. First, almost all the Arabs who had enslaved Ka-Young and Hunbish, and second, by creating a disaster that caused the path between Goryeo and Arabia to disappear, leading to the deaths of many merchants. But unlike what he expected, Ka-Young’s final wish after learning that he had killed people in the process of granting her wishes was to make sure they both got punished for their sins. Iblis watches as the girl dies in front of him, but nothing happens to him for now, leaving him to dread the punishment that is to come.
What Happened When Ka-Young Grew Up?
Ka-Young doesn’t end up dying at the time, though. I suppose her punishment is suffering in that world for the rest of her life. She grows up to be a poor woman who sells dates for a living. At the same time, Iblis’ lamp gets buried deeper in the sand until one day, he is found by Muttalib. Muttalib was a greedy man who had survived Iblis’ first attack when Ka-Young asked him to save her brother. His first wish is for Iblis to make him the richest man in the world and his second is to get everyone who looks down on him dead. While out and about again, Iblis finds Ka-Young, realizing she’s the same girl he watched die. Continuing his tomfoolery, Iblis trips her, then gives her gold coins he stole from a merchant for the dates she dropped. Later, when she tries to buy a camel, she gets beaten up, and her gold is stolen, leaving her back at square one. But despite what life’s thrown her way, she’s continued to be a good human being, she even once gave Muttalib some of her dates despite not having anything for herself. This left Muttalib impressed, so when he became the richest man, he offered her whatever she wished for.
However, the righteous girl that Ka-Young is, she says she doesn’t need any riches, and she’s going to leave for her home country soon anyway. This leaves Muttalib insulted, but for the moment, he doesn’t do anything. At the same time, somehow Ka-Young and Iblis get close to each other. She even wishes to the stars that he remains healthy and eats well, which touches his heart. It seems she’s managed to tug at his heartstrings with how kind and just she is. Soon enough, seeing how much he likes her, Iblis offers to take Ka-Young back to Goryeo. She makes a hanbok to wear when she gets there, but will that ever end up happening?
Muttalib summons Iblis for his final wish, and Iblis is excited to finish up his work and take Ka-Young home. However, Muttalib’s last wish is something Iblis couldn’t have imagined. He asks “that woman” to submit to him and be by his side until he dies. Iblis doesn’t know what woman Muttalib is talking about, though, so he ends up granting the wish, excited to see who this woman is, only to realize what a big mistake he’s made. When Muttalib realizes that Ka-Young and Iblis are in love with each other, he puts a sword through her, saying if he can’t have her, then no one can. Desperate to save her, Iblis asks anybody to rub the lamp and use one of their 3 wishes to save her life. A brave man decides to take the lamp and asks to be richer than Muttalib. But he gets greedier per wish, and Ka-Young ends up dying in Iblis’ arms. By this time, everyone has wished for more gold, so Iblis makes it rain so much gold it drowns the city, but he then takes his sword and kills Muttalib, stabbing it through him into the rock, leaving it there to become a tourist attraction for the next thousand years. Before dying, Ko-Young tells Iblis that in Goryeo, everyone has 4 lives, and she hopes he’ll find her again in one of them.
Who Is Khalid?
It seems there’s no end to Ka-Young’s kindness; she even turns up to help out an ailing boy making carpets, handing him a remedy to soothe his cough. This is no ordinary boy, though; his name is Khalid, and he’s a half-spirit, son of the genie named Shadi. Iblis and Shadi know one another and call themselves brothers, but neither one of them will do anything to help Khalid, who is clearly dying because of some illness. Khalid even begs Iblis to do something to heal him, offering him his special thread in return, which he says has the power to bind any spirit. But it’s all to no avail, and Khalid is left all alone, clearly resentful.
However, when Shadi learns about the Goryeo boy, Hunbish, and how he’s been given an immortal body thanks to his sister’s wish, he decides to take advantage of the situation. Heading to another genie, Zahara, who tends to a gorgeous garden with countless exotic flowers, he has him do a spell that exchanges the souls of Hunbish and Khalid, using two flowers that represent their individual souls. This means Khalid’s soul ends up in Hunbish’s immortal body, and poor Hunbish ends up in an ailing, doomed body. But this is not without its consequences. After Zahara decides to help Shadi, all the flowers in his garden die, and nothing ever grows there again, save for the flower representing Khalid’s soul, a foreign flower that grows and grows until it towers over his domain.
Khalid also shows up when the final confrontation with Muttalib goes down, this time in Hunbish’s body. Ka-Young is briefly delighted to see her brother again, though he’s still a child, but that joy doesn’t last. Khalid decides now’s the right time to demonstrate the power of his thread, and he binds Iblis’ ankle with it, making it so he can’t move. This is what gave Muttalib the opening to stab Ka-Young in the first place.
What Happens In The Present Day?
Ka-Young is born an antisocial child to a woman who doesn’t know what to do with her. She’s the 3rd of 3 daughters, and her mother decides to abandon her, leaving her with her grandmother. Ka-Young grows up believing her entire family is dead except for her grandmother. She’s also a psychopath who tries to kill her grandmother and dissect frogs for fun. But her grandmother gives her a permanent scar to teach her the very important lesson that psychological pain is real, and everybody feels it, unlike her. Ka-Young is brought up by the entire village she grows up in, and she becomes emotionally intelligent through observation rather than actually feeling emotions. She makes one friend in school, Min-Ji, whom she saves from her bullies by threatening to burn them alive. Ka-Young has rules set by her grandmother, so essentially, in the process of being disciplined, she ends up becoming a good person without knowing it. Ka-Young then forces Min-Ji to become a dentist by making sure she does well in her exams, and Ka-Young becomes rich by investing the money that her mother left her (buried in the chili field by her grandmother) in stocks. As an adult, Ka-Young finally goes to find her mother in Dubai, just so she can tell her that she never needed her in the first place, and she’s not as great as she thinks she is just because she has money.
In Dubai, Ka-Young finds the lamp again, and as soon as the genie comes out of it, she tries to sell it for 1 dirham to get rid of him, but this obviously doesn’t work. Now, not only does Ka-Young not remember her past life, but Iblis doesn’t remember 20 years of his life, which were erased from his memory, possibly as punishment. 983 years have passed since he’s been summoned, and he can smell the “lump of clay” on Ka-Young, but he doesn’t know that she’s also the love of his life. Iblis follows Ka-Young back to South Korea, where, over several months, he lives with her and grows fond of her yet again. Ka-Young’s first wish is for him to prove that humans are all selfish and corrupt. They decide to do a best of 5, which means 4 people and a dog get to make 3 wishes each, and if 3 of them are corrupted, then Iblis wins.
While this is happening, Iblis and Ka-Young slowly reconnect. At the same time, Ejllael, the angel and Iblis’ brother, wants to kill the genie because he never bowed down to the humans. It’s also his revenge for what happened during the 300-year war; however, he’s unable to convince psychopath Ka-Young to help him. Ka-Young and Iblis share their first kiss, and Ka-Young becomes obsessed with wanting to kiss the spirit. She then realizes her second wish should be for her grandmother to become as young as her, so she gets a lot more time with her. However, de-aging her only allows her to live like a young person; it doesn’t give her more years to live.
Is Min-Ji In Love With Oh Pan-Geum?
Well, talk about an age gap relationship. In the middle of all of this, when Pan-Geum becomes young, they pretend she’s gone off to Hawaii by herself, and she gets a new name, Lee Mi-Ju. Min-Ji immediately falls for Mi-Ju, having no clue that she’s her best friend’s grandmother. They get really close and spend a lot of time together, but this doesn’t develop into anything further for obvious reasons. Though I still appreciate how there’s no explanation behind Min-Ji being lesbian—we just know, and it’s totally normal.
What Happens With Khalid?
While a lot of the wishes that the 5 people (including the dog) make are selfish, by the time they get to the third wish, they realize they want to go back to being ordinary people. They don’t want to be selfish anymore, and most of them end up making selfless wishes; for example, the YouTuber wishes for his wife’s father to be saved from cancer, and the dog wishes to help his young brother, i.e., the kid whose family he grew up with. Ka-Young even manages to solve a serial killer investigation thanks to one of Iblis’ masters being the murderer himself. The duo sends him to jail, saving a blonde-haired girl. At the same time, they both learn that they’ve lost some memories, and they’ll find out how they’re connected when they regain them. Iblis goes from Jinniya, a female genie, to Shadi to Zahara, all to learn about his past, but Ejllael tries his best to make it so that he doesn’t get all the information. However, ultimately, Iblis learns the whole truth about what happened with Muttalib as well as the immortal flower and Khalid.
On the other hand, Pan-Geum learns from Ejllael that she’s going to die by next spring, when the plums bloom. She prepares everything for Ka-Young beforehand, setting up everything she’ll need when her grandma’s gone. But her death comes even before the plum blossoms do, when she finds the plum blossom hairpin in Iblis’ laundry and pins it to the washing line, accidentally fulfilling the prophecy herself. This is an unexpected twist for Ka-Young, who has everything else planned to make sure that she and Iblis have more time together, as well as the rest of her loved ones. Ka-Young buys Gu Bo-Gyeong’s wish by giving her a ton of money to make sure she can save Iblis from Khalid’s thread. Turns out, she can remove it, while spirits themselves are weighed down by the same thread. Here’s the thing: Ka-Young had always known that if her grandmother died, she’d not waste any more time and “let” herself die too. This is why she’s been going scuba diving, hiking, etc., so that she can make it seem like a freak accident.
Ultimately, Khalid is the big villain of the show because he’s been immortal for so many years and has essentially grown tired of his limping immortal body. Khalid wants to gain control of Iblis and use his three wishes to change the world. He hopes to kill the two precious people to Ka-Young to make sure Iblis submits to him, but the order is messed up when Sade, Iblis’ mystical jaguar, ends up hunting Khalid’s minions and eventually attacks Khalid too. Khalid even kills his own father, Shadi, when he’s got what he needs from him. Khalid uses his thread by turning it into a pointed needle to kill his dad and later Sade too. He uses the same needle to deafen himself so that he doesn’t sleep when he hears his father’s “sleep” song. When Khalid heads out to corner Ka-Young and force her to use her third wish, the earlier wish she’d gotten Gu Bo-Gyeong to make is invoked, and she teleports to Iblis in Khalid’s basement, freeing him. The worst thing in all this is that it was Ejllael who used his beast, Irem, an owl, to hand over Iblis’ lamp to Khalid. So, a freed Iblis heads off to fight Ejllael again, this time cutting straight through his wing, making him a fallen angel, and then following up by destroying Khalid’s immortal flower in Zahara’s garden, killing the boy for good.
What Is Ka-Young’s 3rd And Final Wish?
After all this, Min-Ji walks into Ka-Young’s room and sees her rubbing Iblis’ lamp, and it seems she’s been doing it for hours. Finally, she gets tired of it and books a flight for Dubai, leaving Min-Ji behind, begging her not to leave her alone. When Ka-Young makes it back to Dubai, Iblis finally makes an appearance after all this time. Ka-Young looks him in the eye and tells him she’s ready to make her last wish, her most selfish one. She wishes to feel everything her grandmother felt, everything Min-Ji and everyone else around her felt. She wishes to know the meaning of empathy, just for one day, and when the wish is granted, Iblis disappears, but not before bowing down to the only righteous human being he’s ever respected. This means Ejllael finally wins, getting to slit Iblis’ throat and banish him into solitude.
At the end of Genie, Make A Wish, Ka-Young dies, crying for hours in the desert over the loss of her grandmother and feeling that sadness eat away at her. But just before she’s gone, Irem makes an apology to her, realizing that all her master really wanted was to selfishly win against Iblis; he never really cared about Ka-Young. She returns Ka-Young’s Iblis memories. The show ends with Ka-Young herself turning into a genie, a replacement for Iblis. Min-Ji summons her by touching her urn and makes 3 wishes, the final of which is for Ka-Young to be happy with her genie forever. On the other hand, her dead grandmother harasses Ejllael in the afterlife to make sure God sends Iblis back to Ka-Young so that the psychopath and the genie can make each other happy. Finally, after all that praying, Iblis returns to Ka-Young, and we see the two lovers spend decades together, granting wishes and spreading just a little chaos, but with empathy this time. Min-Ji visits Dubai frequently, even into her old age, to gaze upon the whirling genies in the desert doing the waltz. Sade and Irem return, and finally, everybody gets a happily ever after. I do hope Min-Ji found another love.
