My Love from the Star | Korean Folk Village — Where He Landed in 1609

Before the penthouse and the four hundred years of waiting, there is a thatched roof, a scholar's coat, and a girl called Seo Yi-hwa. The Joseon sequences — Do Min-joon's arrival on Earth and the first love he fails to save — were shot at the Korean Folk Village.

한국민속촌 at 민속촌로 90 in Giheung-gu, Yongin, is not a preserved village. It opened in 1974 as a constructed one: around 270 houses relocated or reconstructed from across the peninsula and arranged by province, with working blacksmiths, potters, farmhouse kitchens and a performance ground for tightrope walking and farmers' band music. It is a paid theme park with a full events calendar, and it is entirely honest about being an assembly rather than a survival.

Which makes it an unusually good match for this drama. A man who has spent four centuries rebuilding a life out of borrowed pieces gets a backstory filmed in a village made the same way.

Skip the performance ground once you have seen it and walk to the far northern end, to the commoners' houses. Dirt floor, a door you have to duck through, one room where a family cooked, slept and sat out the winter, with the heated flue running under the floor.

That is the century he actually landed in. Not the one the costume department drew.