Season two opens at the 28th Cheong-a Arts Festival, as Seo-jin is about the announce the winner of the Grand Prize, but before she has does so the ceremony is interrupted – a young woman in a white gown, likely one of the main contestants, has been found on the steps outside, covered in blood.

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The show then jumps back a few months, with Seo-jin and Joo Dan-tae (Um Ki-joon) now an official item following the death of Dan-tae’s wife, Shim Su-ryeon (Lee Ji-ah). Their engagement has gone public, as has news of a merger in the offing between her Cheong-a Group and his JK Holdings.

Lee Kyu-jin (Bong Tae-gyu) is now a representative for Gangnam in the National Assembly. We see him staging a hunger strike outside the assembly as he tries to change some real estate laws, no doubt for his own gain. He “faints” from hunger and is carted off to his tent, filled with a feast fit for a king.

Seo-jin puts on a concert in New York where she bumps into ex-husband Ha Yoon-cheol (Yoon Jong-hoon), who has been living in exile in America. A drunk Seo-jin falls into bed with him, but somehow Dan-tae has caught wind of the dalliance and after she leaves, some thugs cart off Yoon-cheol and toss him into the bay.

Back in Seoul, Yoon-hee’s daughter Bae Ro-na (Kim Hyun-soo) is still mercilessly bullied at school and even by adults outside, since she has been branded the daughter of a murderer.

In Dan-tae’s penthouse, Seo-jin has been getting threatening messages and it doesn’t take long for Dan-tae to figure out that they’re from Ms Yang (Kim So-ra), his housekeeper, who has been in love with him for 20 years and has now gone utterly cuckoo.

Fired, Ms Yang retreats to her home and soon her body is discovered there. She has committed suicide and fingered Dan-tae for his wife’s murder. Yoon-hee, who had been on the run, suddenly turns herself in.

Dan-tae finds a way to shift the suspicion from himself, and the dead Ms Yang now becomes the murderess, leaving Yoon-hee free of all charges.

A few months later, Seo-jin and Dan-tae stage a swanky outdoor engagement party, but a party crasher makes a grand helicopter entrance, blowing the event’s trimmings and guests into the grass.

The mysterious guest turns out to be a dapper and extremely confident Yoon-cheol, but the capper is that he’s not alone, he’s comes with his new wife in tow – a purple-haired Yoon-hee.

This wonderfully overblown entrance, with Édith Piaf’s La vie en rose providing the soundtrack, is the finale of the opening episode. While one episode can’t speak for the rest of the season, this new iteration of The Penthouse is moving just as furiously, as it rounds wickedly fun turns while seldom dropping a beat.

With only 12 episodes to fill this season (though we know a third is on the way), this bodes well, as one of the minor gripes of season one is that it occasionally started to spin its wheels.

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Beyond the opening, we’re introduced to a new power dynamic, as Yoon-cheol, who had formerly been Seo-jin’s gloomy puppet, has reinvented himself as a powerful CEO with enough money to play at Dan-tae’s level, while also buying his and Yoon-hee’s way back into Hera Palace. In a sense, he’s filling the role of Logan (Park Eun-seok) last season, who so far has been a smaller presence.

During its first two weeks, the only weak point of the show has been Ro-na, as she goes from being victimised and leaving for America to stubbornly return to school. She is naively thwarted by bullies at every turn, not to mention their parents and her teachers. She never has a plan.

Of course, her mother, Yoon-hee does have a plan, and as we find out what it is, the next four weeks will hopefully make for brisk and addictive viewing.

The Penthouse season two is streaming on Viu.