I’ve recently started binging one of the top-rated and most-discussed k-dramas of 2020, The Penthouse: War in Life. What intrigued me about it is how the show got renewed for a second and third season which is almost unheard of in recent scripted Korean television history. This meant that it had to be that good, right?
So I finally put my big guy pants on, got a Viu Premium subscription, and started my journey into the land of the opulent. I thought it was just going to be a mere rehash of Sky Castle, but it ended up being a one-way ticket to a crazy-ass adventure that never once let me breathe! If you’re one of the people who’s just waiting for season three, allow me to recap The Penthouse‘s best moments that made us want to gasp, scream, and everything else in between.
This is part one of an entire series which I plan to do over the course of the following weeks as I am still not done watching it. We are covering the first 8 episodes of season one for this part. And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you’ll know when the next parts of this series come out!
I think I speak for everyone when I say we didn’t know what the hell we were getting into when we were watching the first episode of The Penthouse: War in Life, but this scene set the tone of the entire series. How far are these people willing to go to be number one?
Apparently, very far. The high school feud between Seo-jin and Yoon-hee reached a boiling point when the former won the Cheong-ah Arts Festival trophy because of her connections. When Yoon-hee confronted her in the dressing room about it, Seo-jin pulled off a stunt that would send her rival’s career and life on a downward spiral.
She cut Yoon-hee’s neck wide open, rubbed some of the blood on her own face, and pretended to faint making it look like she was the victim who got attacked. Obviously, they all believed Seo-jin’s side of the story because rich people can’t be crazy.
This was perhaps the most uncomfortable scene of the entire show. We didn’t know much about Min Seol-a’s history at this point, but we knew that she was the only good apple out of the bunch. She got mercilessly bullied by everyone in this episode when her fake identity as college student Anna Lee was exposed.
But the moment that really started a whole witch hunt against her was when she got accepted into the Cheong-ah High School as the top student. When the other kids in Hera Palace found out, they made sure to teach her a lesson by kidnapping her into a van so she could be verbally assaulted and frightened to death. While in retrospect, it didn’t sound too bad, the sadistic behavior from all the kids really sealed its position here in the list of The Penthouse‘s best moments.
These adults have no boundaries! While this episode also featured the death of Min Seol-a that would really be the foundation of the entire season, I thought that the kidnapping part was the more disturbing moment because what in the actual hell?!
Seol-a takes things too far when she threatens to expose Dan-tae and Seo-jin’s scandalous affair, but they actually take it one step further when they kidnap the middle school student in the mechanical room of Hera Palace. They full-on tied her to a chair, put a duct tape on her mouth, and would later physically attack her. Of course, this would lead to an even more violent resolution when Seol-a is pushed to her death, but really?! You’re so threatened by a girl her age that you would kidnap her?
Min Seol-a’s dead body was found in a bizarrely photogenic way on the Hera Palace fountain. With the crew of parents — minus Shim Su-ryeon — having known that Seol-a was kidnapped in the mechanical room before her death, they immediately banded together in a long hilarious sequence to fake the circumstances of her death.
The dark comedy here was so prominent and cemented this as one of The Penthouse‘s best moments. The three men ran into numerous obstacles just so they could plant Seol-a’s body in Bosuk Village. We also saw the posh mothers having to do some *gasp* major cleaning and blood-scrubbing before the lighting ceremony! If only they actually took the time to wipe off the blood in their clothes and hands…
I don’t know if anyone else remembers this scene, but this was one iconic and funny scene that I still laugh about to this day. Despite this episode also focusing on the trial that Yoon-hee had to face in front of the entire Cheong-ah High parent population, I wanted to highlight this gem because it was sooo soapy.
Ha Eun-byeol was feeling pretty frightened for some reason after Seol-a died. When she and all the other mean kids had gone golfing, they encountered terrible weather and eventually lost control of their golf cart that would crash into a tree. This incident was heavily implied to be some sort of haunting by Seol-a’s ghost, and the show never felt more like a telenovela than at that moment.
No matter how WTF that scene was, damn did it make me feel good. It was definitely some sort of karmic intervention after all the unfortunate things Seol-a went through because of those kids.
One of The Penthouse‘s best moments is Su-ryeon’s evolution into a formidable opponent for her husband. When Dan-tae finally instructed his assistant to kill Hye-in — the girl in a coma whom she had been led to believe was her daughter all along — Su-ryeon secretly planned a way for her to survive. She instructed the assistant to inject some type of drug into Hye-in that would lead her heart to stop temporarily just until her funeral was over.
This was the first time we had ever seen Su-ryeon pull off a major scheme which made us rethink her character, who had only been nothing but a naïve emotional wreck until this point in the show.
Let’s go with something a bit more subtle. This was one of the rare moments in the show where I felt some sort of sympathy for one of the dads living in Hera Palace. The flame between Seo-jin and Yoon-cheol might have gone out since forever, but their daughter wanted them to rekindle it.
Yoon-cheol seemed genuinely into that idea when he asked his wife out for some one-on-one time… and Seo-jin even glammed up for their long-awaited date. But right before she entered the bar where they were going to meet up, she received a text from her other lover: Dan-tae, who told her to come to him because he loved her. After some contemplation, she would go running into Dan-tae’s villa because she said it was the first time someone had ever said they loved her.
Meanwhile, Yoon-cheol drank to his broken heart. Poor guy…
Before all their schemes together, Su-ryeon was keeping Yoon-hee as a friend because she saw some potential in using her to destroy Dan-tae. But she would eventually pull the trigger in turning her into a close ally/soldier, so that she could use her name to win an auction over her husband.
Su-ryeon made sure that Yoon-hee would witness Seo-jin and Dan-tae in a hot make-out session so that she would do her bidding (pun intended). And just as Su-ryeon planned, Yoon-hee sympathized so hard with the whole cheating situation because she herself knew what it felt like having a trash husband back in the day. The two would eventually bond over their misfortunes and their alliance to take down Dan-tae was born!
I would say “girl power”, but Su-ryeon was just really taking advantage of Yoon-hee’s friendship here.
And that concludes the first part of this series on The Penthouse‘s best moments! I am still on my way to finishing the entire k-drama, but I just couldn’t wait to write about it. Feel free to leave comments and share what your favorite moments of the entire show have been.
Be updated when the next parts of this listicle series on The Penthouse come out. Just place your e-mail address below, it’s that easy!
We all know how much The Penthouse: War in Life is similar to Sky Castle, so you might want to check out our list of k-dramas that have similar elements to these shows here. Don’t miss out on anything by following us @ZoomersCornerPH on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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