Grand Shining Hotel (2024) K Drama Episode 3

Mar 4, 2024

Episode 3 of Grand Shining Hotel begins with Tae-min and So-jin having a meeting about their extraordinary project – the magical laptop. They deliberate that though real people have entered the narrative of the novel, forgetting their original lives but their skills and habits remain the same. That is, Woo-bin has become a playwright and Hyun-Joo is a jazz singer but a serial killer nonetheless because she’s habituated to killing in her real life.

Meanwhile, Ah-young is flustered after she’s unable to justifying her act of kissing Woo-bin to derail Hyun-joo’s plans. After Hyun-joo finishes her performance, Woo-bin and Hyun-joo leave Ah-young alone in the bar.

At the same time, in the real world, the police receives a missing person report and they reach Rebecca’s villa. One amongst the officers is Moon Myung-Hwan, who recognises Ah-young’s car parked outside the villa. The old lady receives the officers and gives them permission to look around the house. While the officers are searching, she goes into the laptop room and writes both the officers in the novel, making them disappear from the real world.

When Ah-young goes outside the bar, she’s completely flustered to find that Myung-hwan has been written as her husband and they have a child. The family is apparently on a vacation at the Grand Shining Hotel. She leaves the two in a hurry to rush after Woo-bin and Hyun-joo.

Ah-young arrives at a street restaurant where Woo-bin and Hyun-joo have decided to chat. She calls Tae-min from a nearby booth. Tae-min tells her that he and so-jin have been analysing Hyun-joo’s murder patterns. She starts with luring men under the garb of insurance and kills them during intercourse, right when they are about to confess to her.

Realising that she needs to do something to save Woo-bin, she fakes a skirmish with some tough looking men. After a while,. Woo-bin comes to her rescue and all of them are taken to the police station. While everybody’s identity is confirmed, the officer is unable to find Ah-young in their database and asks if she has any family. She reluctantly tells him about her husband, much to the bafflement of Woo-bin. Shortly after, Myung-hwan picks her up.

The next day, she confronts Hyun-joo about her being a murderer. Hyun-joo threatens Ah-young in return. A little while later, Woo-bin is reading by the seaside and meets Hyun-joo.

Meanwhile, Ah-young is on a picnic with Myung-hwan and their son, Minwoo. She tries to tell Myung-hwan about the novel and Hyun-joo, assuming that his character is a police officer but much to her dismay, Myung-hwan is an stay-at-home parent while Ah-young works in a publishing company. She also learns that she’s pregnant with their second child.

While Woo-bin spends time with Hyun-joo by the beach, Ah-young is reluctantly at the swimming pool with her character’s family. She ponders upon the changes in the story of the novel and wonders if Rebecca is back to writing the novel. She realises instances from her personal experiences in the novel – Myung-hwan’s presence in the novel and their son’s name, Minwoo. In a series of brief flashbacks, we learn that Minwoo was the name of the cactus or a species of the succulent plant that Myung-hwan gifted her friend, Ahn Ji-Hye, in the past. The episode ends with Ah-young putting two and two together and realising that Ji-hye is writer Rebecca, the old woman she had met in her real life.

The Episode Review

The show is capitalising on the entire mystery behind the laptop, Ah-young’s past and her relation with Rebecca. The characters of the novel feel two-dimensional and aptly so with only Ah-young feeling more alive as a person.