'East of the Palace' Ending Explained: Does Gu-cheon Die? Will there be a Season 2?

WARNING: Spoilers for East of the Palace ahead!

The fantasy k-drama East of the Palace arrived on Netflix with the aura of a major prestige production, following the story of Gu-cheon (Nam Joo-hyuk) and Saeng-gang (Roh Yoon-seo), two individuals with supernatural abilities who are ordered by a cruel king (Cho Seung-woo) to drive out all the many spirits haunting the palace.

With eight episodes in total, the k-drama also arrived packed with twists and turns, and it ends with the door open for a possible second season. Here’s a full breakdown below.

Who is the lake spirit in East of the Palace?

The main ghost troubling the king in the k-drama is known by the palace staff as the “lake spirit,” whose identity is revealed midway through the season: a court lady, the king’s lover, who was executed 30 years before the start of the series after it was discovered that she was having an affair with a guard and carrying his child. 

Before dying, the woman placed a curse on the palace, promising that she would wipe out the king’s family until no one was left to inherit the throne. That’s what happened soon afterward, when all of the current king’s brothers (he himself being a bastard son born to a concubine) died, and it’s what seems to be happening again now with his own sons.

The thing is, even after our heroes Gu-cheon and Saeng-gang identify and defeat the lake spirit, the king’s last surviving son — the young Prince Yeongan — dies. So who really is behind this curse?

What is the big twist in East of the Palace?

In the season’s third act, we discover that the current king’s mother is the true culprit behind the deaths that took place 30 years earlier. Aiming to secure her son’s rise to the throne, she used the curse cast by the court lady in her final moments as the perfect alibi, poisoning each of the former king’s legitimate sons and blaming it all on the dead woman.

Decades later, the current king’s third son (Kwak Dong-yeon) uncovered all the filth behind his father’s rise to the throne. Instead of being horrified, however, the prince saw an opportunity: copying his grandmother’s method, he poisoned his older brothers and blamed the curse, making himself the heir to the throne.

But when the king discovered all of this, he had a crisis of conscience and ordered the prince — his own son — to be killed, preventing another bloodstained monarch from taking the throne after him. It is this prince who, upon dying, transforms into the evil spirit ak-gwi and begins tormenting young Yeongan until he finally succeeds in killing him.

Does Gu-cheon die at the end of East of the Palace?

No. The final battle between Gu-cheon and the ak-gwi takes up much of the series’ last episode, with Gu-cheon eventually sacrificing his soul in order to defeat the villain. The bargain he makes with the primordial gwi-mae, a powerful spiritual entity, seems final: in exchange for a weapon capable of killing the ak-gwi, Gu-cheon himself will become one.

However, once it is all over, our hero wakes up... in the real world. Unable to explain what happened, Gu-cheon and Saeng-gang decide to leave the palace together, with the king’s blessing — but the series’ final shot suggests that this fight is far from over.

Will East of the Palace get a second season?

Nothing has been confirmed by Netflix so far, but in the final moments of episode eight, we see that even if Gu-cheon and Saeng-gang don’t realize it, his soul remains connected to the spirit world by a chain leading directly to the primordial gwi-mae. It’s a debt that could be called in at any moment.