The Blade and Petal eps 2 and 3

I find the characters and the relationships and the bloody politics of Blade and Petal interesting, but the main reason I am so smitten by it are the out-of-this-world visuals. Many Korean dramas are prettily shot, but I have never seen anything approaching the ‘movies would kill for this’ look of B&P. Every frame is a painting.

The dialogue continues sparse - this is, above all, a mood piece (to that effect, I love the ever-present musical score - people either love or hate it, and I am in the former camp because it really adds to the feeling of this being a visual poem).

The acting continues across-the-board stellar (if Uhm Tae Woong brought 1/10th of this silent, wounded fierceness to his last period drama, Queen Seon Deok would have been quite different) but my heart continues to belong to Choi Min Soo, who is wiping the floor with everyone else as the future dictator Yun Gae So Moon. He conveys more with a flicker of his eyelids than most actors do with their full body and ten pages of dialogue. In fact, he is so magnetic in the role, that I find myself helplessly and hopelessly rooting for him even as he is gunning for the royal family who we are supposed to (and I do) like. Any time he gets outmaneuvered, I feel irrationally unhappy, even though he is not a good person (though an amazing BAMF).