Monday-Tuesday K-dramas are often hit or miss, but this month, two unique K-dramas have taken the scene by storm. One is Would You Marry Me, and the other is Ms. Incognito. I think it’s safe to call Ms. Incognito a sleeper hit because nobody expected it to have such good ratings for the days of the week that it airs; however, it’s been steadily rising since it came out. Personally, I found the first two episodes the most engaging, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the sudden shift to comedy-heavy episodes. But I think as we near the end of the show, it’s going to get interesting again. Also, I quite enjoy Jeon Yeo-Bin as an actress, so I like that this show is mainly focused on her, and despite the somewhat romantic angle, it’s still a show about a woman who’s kind of lost. With that said, though, let’s jump straight into the Ms. Incognito episode 1-8 recap.
Spoiler Alert
Why Does Ga Sung-Ho Ask Yeong-Ran To Marry Him?
The show begins with a woman named Yeong-Ran trying to get hired as a bodyguard for the chairman of the ramyeon company Gasung Group. Yeong-Ran is poor and has a bad relationship with her single mother, who doesn’t really care about her. The interview doesn’t go that well, and Yeong-Ran is also older than most of the other candidates, but Ga Sung-Ho thinks she’s the perfect candidate because she’s low on money and high on energy. She’s hired almost immediately despite Sung-Ho’s lawyer, Lee Don’s hesitation. But this is because Sung-Ho has a very elaborate plan that he thinks Yeong-Ran is perfect for.
Turns out he’s terminally ill, and his two stepchildren are after his money. Now, Sung-Ho had a daughter of his own from a previous relationship, but he believes his stepchildren killed this girl, Ye-Rim, specifically his stepdaughter, Seon-Yeong, but because it was 15 years ago, there’s no evidence to prove she did it. Now, Sung-Ho believes the only way he can mess with his stepchildren is not by killing them, but by taking away the one thing they care about: money. For this, he decides to use his bodyguard, i.e., Yeong-Ran, by marrying her and leaving her to inherit his fortune. Already, Seon-Yeong thinks Sang-Ho married her mother to steal from her, so she believes the money doesn’t belong to Sang-Ho in the first place. At first, Yeong-Ran is skeptical about marrying this old man, but ultimately she agrees to do it after her mother calls up to ask for money. Plus, she’s put herself 300,000 USD in debt, a number Attorney Lee tells the chairman is 10 times higher than what it usually takes for the average person to start considering suicide.
Additionally, Yeong-Ran spent 6 months in prison for trying to steal sanitary napkins because she had no one to help her, but fortunately, Sung-Ho doesn’t seem to care and even trusts that she’s a good person who was just desperate. On top of that, when Seon-Yeong visits to investigate what her father’s up to, Yeong-Ran hides in a cupboard, but this gives her flashbacks to her own father trying to kill her when she was young, so despite being qualified to be a bodyguard, she’s had some trauma in her past. 3 months before the company stock meeting, Sang-Ho shoots himself after telling Yeong-Ran to bring him some ramyeon. He tells all his employees that following the recipe to the T is the only way for it to taste the best, so he knows exactly how long it’ll take to bring the noodles back to him, i.e. how much time he has to execute his plan. However, I think he might still be alive and faked his death, because Attorney Lee shut the door after Yeong-Ran saw Sang-Ho’s bloody body on the floor. On the day of the funeral, the driver and butler try to trap Yeong-Ran because Seon-Yeong said she’d pay them, but the other house help, Hye-Ji, believes she’s friends with Yeong-Ran, so she tells her that the driver and the butler are trying to trap her. This is how she manages to escape.
Why Does Attorney Lee Tell Yeong-Ran To Hide In Muchang?
The very first scene of the show features a voiceover from Attorney Lee about how his hometown of Muchang is 4 hours from Seoul by car, has no train station, and is such a small community that everyone knows every intimate detail about their neighbors. This is the perfect place to hide someone, as long as they can assimilate. Any spies or assassins would stick out like a sore thumb, and you could see a threat coming from a mile off. But what excuse would Yeong-Ran have to go there? Well, Attorney Lee’s own sister is the principal of Muchang’s only kindergarten, and they’ve been desperate for a new teacher, having lost 5 of them in the last year (some were bribed to leave, some got bored of the countryside, and one got caught up in a scandalous affair).
This plan runs into an obstacle immediately, as the person meant to pick Yeong-Ran up is Dong-Min, the principal’s cousin. He also happens to be the strawberry farmer who hand-delivered his produce to the chairman, and whom Yeong-Ran had saved from being smacked by his delivery van door once. On that occasion, he’d noticed the scar on her wrist and gotten a good look at her from behind. He doesn’t recognize her immediately, though, but it doesn’t take long for him to figure it out. The principal is excited about receiving an Iseon Women’s University graduate, and is very impressed by her interview, though when she does an in-depth background check, she ends up realizing that the real Bu Se-Mi (her alias) was born in the 70s, not 1994.
Yeong-Ran quickly reveals the whole story to the principal and promises to pay for the land the kindergarten sits on. The local tough guy, Sung-Tae, who happens to be in charge of local development, wants to bulldoze the kindergarten and build an elder care facility. The principal quickly bows down to Yeong-Ran after this generous offer, but Dong-Min stumbles in and starts suspecting something’s up. To further complicate things, Yeong-Ran is lodging in Dong-Min’s property for the duration of her stay, and she bumps into his adorable son, Ju-Won, who reveals his dad said not to give his heart up to the new teacher too quickly.
Meanwhile, back in Seoul, Hye-Jin, who was briefly Yeong-Ran’s roommate, stumbles upon the surveillance (creep) room the chairman had set up. She finds details there about Yeong-Ran’s cover identity as Bu Se-Mi and decides to go visit her as her “friend.” She makes quite the splash when she arrives on the day of a big welcoming party for Yeong-Ran, but the guest of honor almost misses the arrival after she finds herself in an awkward position with Dong-Min, almost kissing him in an attempt to distract him and keep him from noticing the feed from the cameras she’d set up all over town. Curiously, Hye-Jin doesn’t immediately try to blackmail “Bu Se-Mi” for money; instead, she gets her to pretend they’re friends. Given she’s nosy and discovers Bu Se-Mi’s stacks of hidden cash anyway, blackmailing her for money wouldn’t have been very useful, I suppose.
How does Dong-Min figure out Yeong-Ran’s true identity?
Right from the start, Dong-Min’s been a little wary of Yeong-Ran, even when everyone in town was falling over themselves to appease and welcome the new kindergarten teacher. On the first day that she teaches the students of Strawberry Class, he’s appalled by her apparent disregard for proper curriculum or safety measures. Yeong-Ran’s impromptu self-defense class (the only thing she feels qualified to teach as a taekwondo pro) culminates in her jumping on top of the class’ favorite inflatable dinosaur and punching it to the point of deflation. It’s clear from her sheepish demeanor around kids that she’s not quite the pro kindergarten teacher she presents herself as, and Dong-Min doesn’t like it; he only wants what’s best for Ju-Won, and a competent kindergarten teacher is the bare minimum.
Plus, after he notices the scar on her wrist, the cogs start turning, and he suspects her identity. But he remembers how fervently the principal reassured him she’d performed a thorough background check and tries to come to terms with the weird, bumbling yet oddly serious kindergarten teacher. However, catching sight of her putting her hair up in a ponytail puts any doubts to rest. He’d remember that ponytail anywhere, and he accuses her of having tried to seduce him to buy his silence after she realized she couldn’t buy him off with money. She asks what it would take to keep him quiet, and he says he’s not like that, but somehow he can never bring himself to spill her secret. Slowly, Dong-Min starts falling for Yeong-Ran, probably because his son really likes her too.
Things get worse when the village’s most hated resident, Seong-Tae, tries to set up barbed wire around the kindergarten, and Dong-Min and Yeong-Ran get arrested for allegedly trespassing. This brings Attorney Lee racing down to Muchang, because he knows they can’t risk a background check right now. Even Hye-Jin gets involved and causes a distraction so Lee can get there in time to get everyone out of the police station, and somehow Seong-Tae is the one left owing money for causing the kids emotional distress and leaving Yeong-Ran’s very expensive outfit damaged by the barbed wire.
Eventually, though, by tracing the direction Attorney Lee went, Seon-Woo and his men are able to figure out that Yeong-Ran’s probably in Muchang. A gang of them spread through Muchang with a picture of Yeong-Ran, trying to get people to point out where she is. When they do find her, she pulls some crazy taekwondo moves and jumps into Dong-Min’s car. They eventually manage to get away, and when Seon-Woo makes a run for it after cops show up, he ends up driving straight into a tree and losing consciousness.
How Does Yeong-Ran’s Mother Get Involved?
Yeong-Ran’s mother, So-Yeong, has a criminal record herself; she’s a well-known con artist who’s been in prison three times, and that makes it tough to get a job. Somehow, though, she managed to find work at one of Gasung Group’s ramyeon factories, and when Seon-Woo, Seon-Young’s brother, finds out about this, he goes there to find and kidnap her. When he finds out she doesn’t know where her daughter is, he contemplates killing her until she asks, unprompted, how much he’d pay her to bring him Yeong-Ran. One day, in the middle of a parent-observed kindergarten lesson, So-Yeong bursts into the classroom and hugs Yeong-Ran, sobbing, “My daughter!” Everyone’s clearly freaked out by this battered and bruised blonde old lady showing up out of nowhere, so Yeong-Ran drags her back to her place and asks her what her deal is. So-Yeong doesn’t reveal that it’s Seon-Yeong who sent her, but it’s not exactly difficult to figure out. She’s quick to snap pictures of Yeong-Ran with Dong-Min and Ju-Won and send them to Seon-Yeong, even though doing so puts everyone in danger.
Are The People Of Muchang In Danger?
Perhaps the most frightening moment of the show comes when So-Yeong seemingly kidnaps Ju-Won, and the whole town ends up running all over looking for the boy. Yeong-Ran uses her cameras to track him and finds him at the nearest train station, where she jumps into action and rescues him from being run over. Turns out, a strange man had told him he knew where his mother was, and the young boy had climbed into his car. Ju-Won and Yeong-Ran had previously bonded over being angry at their mothers for abandoning them, but that didn’t mean Ju-Won didn’t want to run back to her.
But a more widespread danger comes when a series of strangers dressed all in black start running around destroying the cameras Yeong-Ran had paid to set up around town. Eventually, Yeong-Ran and Dong-Min track one of these men down, and it turns out some of the seasonal workers in town temporarily had been paid off to destroy the cameras and wreak havoc, though one of them had gone so far as to personally attack Yeong-Ran and try to strangle her. This man happens to be a van driver named Ho-Se, whom the principal had hired herself, but Yeong-Ran was immediately suspicious of him. He has a scar on his collarbone, and that’s what Yeong-Ran ends up seeing when he attacks her during one of his CCTV runs that she stumbles upon. He was, of course, hired by Seon-Yeong, and Yeong-Ran tries to dig up stuff on him.
Does Reporter Pyo Have a Larger Role to Play?
Reporter Pyo is a character who gets taken advantage of by pretty much all the other major players in the game. First, Attorney Lee uses her to publish a leaked recording of Seon-Woo’s plan to sell his shares in the company to a Chinese conglomerate, thereby causing a split between the siblings. Next, Seon-Yeong hands her incriminating evidence on all the members of her board of executives, though this ultimately never sees the light of day after Seon-Yeong decides to take the more direct route and blackmail them through their loved ones instead. It seems the only character who’s not been exposed yet is Seon-Yeong, so surely it’s a matter of time till she digs up juicy details on her and tries to get them to the public. Will her bosses let her publish it, though?
What Happens to Seon-Woo?
Seon-Woo spends the entire TV show being disrespected and acting stupidly, driven by his oversized ego. Things really go wrong for him after Lee leaks the audio about the planned sale of the company. From this point, Seon-Woo knows his sister will never really forgive him. On one occasion, he tries to go to the airport to get out of the country, but Seon-Yeong’s men hold him back. After he crashes into a tree in Muchang, he wakes up strapped to a medical bed in a psychiatric institute, and he immediately flashes back to his memories of his dad in the same position. His mother had told him back then that this was what happened to people who didn’t listen to her.
Attorney Lee convinces him that his sister’s the one who had him sent here, but it’s all a ploy; Attorney Lee had him committed to the hospital himself. When Seon-Yeong discovers where he is, she sends her men after him, and he and Lee escape together, though after a while, Seon-Woo beats Lee up and steals his car, but he’s stupid enough to keep his phone. Attorney Lee’s already bugged this phone and tracks him easily to the hotel he’s going to and then eavesdrops on his conversation with his sister. It turns out he’s got blackmail on her: a video of her from the day she killed their stepsister, the former chairman’s only biological child.
Seon-Yeong’s men show up to apprehend him at the hotel, but Lee pulls the fire alarm, and he gets away, but they capture Lee. Eventually, Lee talks his way out of captivity by promising his captors money. Meanwhile, Seon-Woo’s gone to have a fake passport made, and there’s no telling where he’s going to end up.
Is Hye-Ji Dead?
At the end of episode 8 of Ms. Incognito, Hye-Ji finds herself worried sick for Yeong-Ran, who’s suddenly missing. Turns out the van driver, Ho-Se, has trapped her, though she was the one who wanted to trap him. He’s ready to burn her alive with a can of fuel. He ties her up and gets ready to be an arsonist before Hye-Ji arrives and stops him, knocking him out. But unfortunately, she’s not done a good enough job because while she’s trying to free her friend, she ends up getting stabbed by Ho-Se, leaving us wondering if she’s dead at the end of episode 8. It appears Yeong-Ran is perfectly safe in the next episode, but I worry about Hye-Ji, whose wound looked pretty fatal.
