Episodes 1-4
Original Broadcast: 29 September – 4 November 2025
Written by Hyun Gyu-ri, Directed by Park Yoo-young
Starring Jeon Yeo-bin, Jinyoung, Seo Hyun-woo, Jang Yoon-ju
Oh, this show is delicious. Intrigue, secrets, betrayals; all the ingredients of a howling melodrama, but arranged neatly in an understated package. Ms. Incognito is a rare sort of genre mash-up: the cozy thriller? Even before we move to the idyllic small town, where a mountain range sits in each kitchen window like a painting, there’s such a comfortable atmosphere that pulls ever so gently inward. Even the old abrasive favorites like a deadbeat mom and flashbacks to an abusive father only pause the warm feelings. It’s the product of at least two things: the lush, cinematic style, and the story premise, which is just about my favorite thing in the world – a badass woman who’s pretending to not be a badass. She carries the aura of violence, an unheeded threat or even an invitation to instant karma.
Our lead, Kim Young-ran, is a young woman looking to free herself of debt by landing a bodyguard gig for the chairman of a ramen company. Could there possibly be a more Korean sentence than that? Sorry – ramyeon. The chairman does her one better, though, and marries her in order to keep control of the company out of his two children’s murderous hands. Young-ran then has to hide out in a remote village, Muchang, posing as a kindergarten teacher. I sure hope there’s no handsome young man there who keeps running into her!
As for the technical qualities, Ms. Incognito is gorgeous, starting with the steady, gliding camera whose deliberate movement feels like an extension of Young-ran herself. She navigates spaces carefully, either as a put-upon wage-ape or an overnight princess in sudden danger. In fact, when we’re introduced to the kindergarten’s principal, who’s more animated than everyone else, the camera actually dips and bobs uncertainly to keep up with her. The early interactions with this character (played by Na Hee-do’s mom, Seo Jae-hee), lay bare the fruits of this premise, too. At the end of the third episode, Young-ran manages to barely intercept the principal as she pokes holes in the cover story, and subsequently learns the new teacher’s true, awesome identity. Within a short sequence, Seo Jae-hee toggles from polite professionalism during the job interview to shaking with fear at this menacing stranger to wide-eyed supplication with the promise of a financial reward for silence. It’s a whirlwind acting exercise.
The “hidden badass” is dramatic irony, the same which powered so much of prestige American television in the late 2000s – Dexter, Breaking Bad, Mad Men – and it’s a promise. At some point, and maybe at several, Young-ran’s secret will come out, and there will be consequences. There may be violence, or there may be the acting gymnastics of the scene cited above. Ms. Incognito is a romance, too. Before the departure for Muchang, Young-ran’s ally Lee Don warns her against dating, and not five minutes later is she face-to-face with the male lead in a slow-motion wide shot against the twinkling daylight rain. The trick is that he may or may not have seen Young-ran during her time as a bodyguard on the estate, and so the love interest is the one guy who could potentially blow her cover. That’s so exciting! Visions of her pinning him against a wall, tearful, torn between silencing him and following her heart…
That said, my big surprise with the show is that Young-ran is not, as yet, a badass of the unassailable sort. With only the half-remembered trailer and a deep fondness for Caution, Hazardous Wife and Baby Assassins, I assumed she’d have special secret-agent training, but aside from references to black belts in taekwondo and hapkido, she’s pretty much a regular joe. It appears she’s more intuitive than necessarily practiced in the killing arts, and maybe that’s the difference: I don’t think she’s ever killed anyone. By the time she splashes Butler Choi with a cup of hot, spiked coffee, I was genuinely surprised by the violence. She then proceeds to beat up her former bodyguard colleague Cheol-su with ease, and later on, will run down a suspected thief in Muchang. It’s good, but still inconclusive. Maybe the writer, the mysterious Hyun Gyu-ri, doesn’t feel the need to constantly prove how badass Young-ran is, but it’s also a story pitched more toward suspense than the gonzo comedy of the two above-mentioned Japanese titles. I mean, of course I want to see Young-ran greet everyone she meets with a throat punch, but she has a good win-loss ratio so far. I’m optimistic, and even a little excited for the tension of an assailable badass against hit men with chaebol cash.
I also appreciate that Lee Don, the chairman, and Young-ran prepared meticulously in the weeks between the proposal and the plan’s execution, from weapons training to rehearsing the cover story and bribing people, but at the end of all the clandestine travel logistics, Young-ran finally arrives in the classroom and has no idea what to do. I, too, assumed she’d naturally know how to teach kindergarten. I also didn’t expect the surgeon to be the boy’s mother. She adapts quickly, though, breaking up a fight by punching through several layers of brick stand-ins, which sets the young children to cheering. Rolling with what seems to work, she decides that the day’s lesson will be about self-defense, but takes it too far when her judo demonstration pops an inflatable dinosaur – “Dino-ping.” Two of the crying kids perform CPR on it as she stands there, dumbfounded. And the love interest, Jeon Dong-min, rushes in, still suspicious of this stranger who’s so standoffish – only because she’s paranoid that he recognizes her.
While the broad strokes of the story set up killer moments like a confrontation at the chairman’s funeral when his would-be heiress demands of Young-ran, “Who are you?” poking a finger into her chest, for Young-ran to reply, “I’m your mother,” an equal strength lies in the moment-to-moment narrative discipline. Our first arc is the relationship between Young-ran and the chairman, which uses a lot of visual storytelling to communicate a deepening trust and mutual respect. There’s a long sequence in the first episode where Young-ran, who’s stayed behind at the estate after the other staff had gone on holiday, has a late-night rendezvous with the chairman who was half-expecting her. He cooks her ramen in the way only a ramen CEO would consider best – follow the instructions on the package – and her enjoyment of the meal reminds him of his late daughter. That part is made textual, but when the jilted heiress, Ga Sun-young, arrives at the estate, what follows is a largely wordless but highly expressive sequence.
Sun-young can tell that the chairman, sitting alone, isn’t actually alone, and goes around searching. Young-ran’s hiding triggers a traumatic flashback to when she’d hide from her drunken father, and breaks down in silent tears. After Sun-young leaves, the chairman recognizes that something’s wrong, but doesn’t ask her to relive or share what’s so obviously painful. They conclude their quiet night together basically as equals, despite the angry CEO act he’d been doing during the vetting process. Throughout the series so far, there’s a seedling of capitalist critique, with the thin line between those who have money and those who don’t. Money can turn an enemy into a friend, or make an inconvenience disappear, but as Dong-min notes, its power as a problem solver forfeits actual human interaction. Still, this is not a lesson the formerly impoverished Young-ran needs to hear. It also occurs to me that the chairman’s plan is pretty much the plot of Audition, though it ends much better for him. I mean, I know he shoots himself, but, well, if you know, you know. (And as commenters online note, we never saw a body).
It was not my intention to jump from one K-Drama Report directly into another. I’m careening into a busy week – the busy week of my year, I should say – and I’m also glued to The Resurrected on Netflix, which is rocky but rewarding. Unfortunately, Ms. Incognito was instantly captivating, and I needed to work out why. It’s also over, so what else am I gonna do? I mean, there will be more episodes, but this is the first time in a while that I’m current with a K-drama, and it’s terrifying. Suddenly, those cliffhangers are gonna be torture, and the previously cozy scenes lingering on side characters will have me all “Where’s Poochie?” It’s my first experience with lead actress Jeon Yeo-bin, and she makes a strong impression with that piercing gaze. It’s funny, because the story calls for her character to be so raggedy, that she wears a tattered, almost oversized suit and half-clops along with a broken high heel, but the story also calls for her to be menacing at times, and she turns it on in a snap – very persuasively.
With Eyes East 