Big Mouth|Sejong National Arboretum — She Asked the Mayor Among the Trees

Episode 4 sends Go Mi-ho south of Seoul to ask a man who already owns a city. Choi Do-ha, the mayor of fictional Gucheon, receives her at Sejong National Arboretum, sixty-five hectares of glasshouses and Korean gardens laid into the administrative capital in 2020. The plants are catalogued. The conversation is not.

She needs him to pull her husband out of a frame that was built to hold. He walks as if the greenhouse humidity were a private climate. Visitors pay five thousand won, park in the same lot the cameras used, and file into the four-season glasshouse that is still the largest plant display of its kind in the country. The drama borrows the scale. A woman who cooks for a living has to speak the language of a man who treats rescue as a favor that will come due.

The arboretum sits on Sumokwon-ro in Yeongi, about twenty minutes from Osong Station. Closed Mondays. The paths are wide enough that two people can look as if they are only discussing trees. When you reach the water drawn from the Geum, remember that Mi-ho did not come for the bonsai. She came because every legal door in Gucheon had already been locked from the other side, and the only remaining key was standing in a public garden pretending to prune power.