The Scandal, a K-drama echoing Les Liaisons dangereuses, follows Lady Cho Yun’s cruel bet that her cousin Cho-won seduce virtuous widow Hui-yeon. Set in 18th-century Joseon, the finale shows Hui-yeon faking death, a forged report to the King, and Cho-won’s apparent suicide, leaving Lady Cho isolated, Hui-yeon in social exile, and only the freed servants finding peace.
In 1782, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote a novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, to criticise the moral decay of pre-revolutionary French aristocracy. It’s been adapted and remade countless times (Cruel Intentions being one of these adaptations). This month’s most anticipated Netflix K-drama, The Scandal, is the latest in the long list. Set in 18th century Joseon, we follow the story of a noblewoman's game of seduction that ends the only way this story ever ends: badly. For everyone involved. Here's what happens in the finale.
So here’s what The Scandal is about: the intelligent and ambitious Lady Cho Yun (Son Ye-jin) bets her playboy of a cousin, Cho-won (Ji Chang-wook), that he cannot seduce Hui-yeon (Nana), the virtuous widow who has vowed to stay chaste after her husband's death. Succeed, and Lady Cho will finally sleep with him after years of refusing. Fail, and he has to get So-ok (Shin Yoon-ha), the aspiring concubine of Lady Cho's husband Lord Yoo (Lee Ji-hoon), pregnant instead. It’s supposed to make life a little easier for the noblewoman, of course.
Anyway, Cho-won is ready to take on this challenge, but here’s the problem: Cho-won, over time, falls in love with Hui-yeon, and with Joseon era's strict moral codes in place, the couple must choose between honour and their love. And of course, the schemes of Lady Cho.
At the end of episode seven, Cho-won talks Hui-yeon into disappearing at night, and everyone assumes she drowned herself out of grief. Her mother-in-law (Kang Ji-eun) pushes Lady Cho to petition the King to erect a memorial gate to honour the virtues of the widow. But here’s the twist, the King must have confirmation about Hui-yeon’s death to order a memorial gate. This task he gives to Cho-won: he must now retrieve Hui-yeon’s dead body.
However, Hui-yeon is not only alive, but the Catholic teachings she has picked up in secret has also convinced her that suicide would be a sin. Once she and Cho-won sleep together, she falls head over heels for him and decides she wants to live.
Lady Cho’s solution is simple, they have to get rid of Hui-yeon. But Cho-won won't kill the widow. His feelings for her have become real, so he arranges a ferry with his servant Chil-seong (Kwon Do-gyun) to run away with her instead.
Pause here, because this plan is a mirror of something that already happened many years before. Cho-won and Lady Cho had booked a ferry to elope and escape from her arranged marriage to Lord Yoo. At the last minute, however, Yun overheard her father weeping that her being born a woman meant that she would never be able to realise her ambitions the way a man could.
Out of spite, she decided to stay and married Lord Yoo. Cho-won waited at the dock through the night and into morning, then spent the following years as a casanova looking for the love he was denied.
In the present day, Hui-yeon shows up at Lady Cho's house, afraid Cho-won will be punished for lying to the King (by the way, she doesn’t know about the bet). At the same time, Cho-won shows up, and now Lady Cho tells her about the bet and forces him to choose between the two women. Although heartbroken, Cho-won stays with Lady Cho.
A shattered Hui-yeon leaves without her gat, the traditional hat that let her pass through the city disguised as a man. Cho-won follows her, returns the gat, and admits the truth about the bet. She tells him she'll live just to carry her resentment forward, and they part for good. Lady Cho comes to know about their encounter and is devastated.
The bigger unraveling starts with the fake report on Hui-yeon's death, written by Lady Cho and delivered to the King by Cho-won. In it, a papermaker sees a woman matching Hui-yeon's description jump from a cliff during a storm. It secures the memorial gate, until the King notices that the storm in the report doesn't match his other records for that night. He confronts Cho-won and tells him he's no longer welcome at court.
Was it a mistake? Did Lady Cho deliberately write a wrong letter to trap Cho-won? He doesn’t know, but he spares her the truth in a letter claiming the report moved the King to tears. Pleased, the noblewoman orders in food and drinks to celebrate a win she doesn't know she's already lost.
Cho-won feels he has lost both the women he had loved. He has embittered Hui-yeon to save her life, and Lady Cho will never choose him over her position. He heads to Mapo port, where the ferry meant to carry him, Hui-yeon, Chil-seong, and Eun-sil to Yanjing is waiting. Before the crossing finishes, he jumps into the water. The ferryman searches the dark and finds only his floating gat. Cho-won never resurfaces.
As with the source material, nobody comes out ahead. Lady Cho keeps her position and household but loses the one person who valued her mind. We end the series seeing her alone at her writing desk with nothing but the damage she caused.
Hui-yeon survives but has to practice her faith in hiding, cut off from a society that briefly celebrated her as a martyr. Technically, it’s not too different from death, if you look at it. Social death, if you may.
So-ok, meanwhile, is pregnant, and almost everyone other than Lord Yoo knows that the father is her real partner In-ho (Chani). However, to make matters worse, she is stuck in Lady Cho's household.
The only real win belongs to the servants Chil-seong and Eun-sil, freed by Cho-won before his death and shown, at the end, with a baby and a stable life, a sharp contrast to what privilege did to the people who were supposed to have everything.
Sure, we don’t see Cho-won’s body, and there could be a story out of So-ok and Lady Cho’s stand-off, but The Scandal was built as a self-contained retelling. As of now, there's no confirmed word from Netflix or the production on a follow-up season, so until that changes, this looks like the whole story.