Kingdom: review

front L to R: Bae Doona as Seo-bi, Ju Ji-hoon as Yi Chang, Ryu Seung-ryong as Cho Hak-ju

The 2019 Korean horror-drama series Kingdom straddles categories by combining the Korean historical-drama genre, called sageuk/사극 (at a guess from the final syllables of 역사/yeoksa/history and 연극/yeongeuk/theater), with the zombie-horror genre that has become an obsession in Korea with films like Train to Busan and youth-oriented series like All of Us Are Dead. 

Here's a bit of background on zombies—their history and popularization. The notion of a zombie comes primarily out of Haiti and can be thought of as a metaphor for slavery, i.e., a life that is basically a living death characterized by suffering, endless and useless toil, and radical unfreedom. The notion of masses of zombies was popularized by director George Romero and his ...Dead movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, etc.), which gave us the idea of zombies as a massive, shambling, inevitable horde that washes over the populace like a tidal wave. The source of "zombiism" has, depending on the story we're following, been linked to anything from a curse, to science gone wrong, to naturally occurring viruses and plagues. Later on in film history, thanks to landmark works like 28 Days Later, zombies evolved from "shamblers" to feral "runners," fleet and ferocious but still mindless in their driving hunger for living human flesh and brains. Part of the mythology is that, as with vampirism, a bite from a zombie is enough to turn a regular human into a zombie and this is, in fact, how zombies reproduce. This mythology creates a bit of a muddle, though, because it makes the population of victims into both a "food" supply as well as a source of "progeny." More food, less progeny, and vice versa. There's probably a biological reason why most animals don't eat their own offspring, and I'm not sure whether zombie movies and shows have quite worked this out. Usually, most zombie movies don't delve into the question at all, simply presenting zombies as a brute, massive, disruptive, and sudden reality that leaves people with no time to ask why or how. As the Zombieland movies have taught us, the important things during a zombie apocalypse are cardio, double-tapping, checking dark and abandoned places, and never staying anywhere alone. The question of whether zombies are alive, dead, or somewhere in between is dealt with differently in different stories. It's generally agreed either that zombie nervous systems are somehow active or that some sort of evil animating force has entered the zombie's body. Either way, the solution to killing a shambler or a runner is to lop off its head. In many stories, there's a sort of analogical logic at play: most zombies crave your brain, and zombies are defeated by either cutting their brains away from their bodies or by destroying their brains through some other means (sledgehammer, grenade, tank treads, etc.). 

Kingdom tries to be a bit different in its portrayal of zombies: Yes, the zombies are still mindless and vicious (in this show, they're of the "runner" variety), but their origin seems to be from something called a "resurrection herb," or saengsa-cho in Korean (생사초/生死草, or literally a "life-death herb"). As it turns out, it's not so much the plant itself that's the problem: it's the tiny eggs underneath the plant's leaves that hatch little worms—not so different from hookworms, pinworms, or Ascaris roundworms—that infect a host and turn him or her into a zombie. Once infected, this person has only to bite others to infect them, and a "turning" can happen in anywhere from seconds to a minute. The zombies in Kingdom are also less affected by sunlight than they are by temperature: on a cold winter's day, they can still run freely about the land, piling up in crowds against fortress walls and gates, eventually brute-forcing their way into every sort of protection available to 17th-century Koreans. However, the worms inside of and powering the zombies are averse to water, which can apparently drown them, and which is why the zombies seem unwilling to cross watercourses or swim in rivers and lakes. This is a fairly demythologized take on zombiism that manages to avoid the usual viral and curse-related etiologies.

Kingdom, based on a webtoon called Kingdom of the Gods, takes place at the beginning of the 1600s and just after the conclusion of a real period in Korean history called the Imjin War, in which the Japanese invaded the peninsula and moved against the Joseon (also called Yi/Lee) Dynasty. The main character of the series is Yi Chang (Ju Ji-hoon), son of the current king and of an unmarried mother, which reduces his ability to succeed his father since the father is currently married to the young and scheming queen consort, a Cho of the Cho Haewon clan (Kim Hye-jun) who is supposedly pregnant with a son. This son, when born, will be a more direct successor to the king; the Cho clan, from the king's chief councilor Cho Hak-ju (Ryu Seung-ryong) on down, is scheming to take over all of Korea from the Yi Dynasty. Yi Chang's father the king is reportedly sick with smallpox, which allows Cho Hak-ju and his clan to rule unimpeded. A treatment with a plant called the "resurrection herb" has however, turned the king into a zombie, and the king's inner circle is sworn to secrecy about his condition. The Cho clan does what it can to sully Yi Chang's good name and have him either exiled or killed. Meanwhile, the rabid king bites a servant, whose body is taken back to a village (presumably his home village), where the starving peasants greedily consume a meaty stew made from the servant's flesh. The entire village is infected, and the zombie apocalypse begins in earnest, affecting cities from Sangju and Mungyeong-Saejae all the way up to Hanyang (the old name for Seoul). A traveling nurse from Dongnae named Seo-bi (Bae Doona) does what she can to discover the cause of the outbreak and to find ways to combat it; Prince Yi and his faithful guard Mu-yeong (Kim Sang-ho) do what they can to rally the people and keep them safe from the zombie scourge, a task that proves nearly impossible. Prince Yi and Mu-yeong are joined by the cowardly Cho Beom-pal, the black sheep of the Cho family who is torn between obedience to his fearsome uncle Cho Hak-ju and his desire to help the people beat this horrific plague. Beom-pal is attracted to Seo-bi the nurse, but she has little respect for him given his repeated demonstrations of cowardice. She has a lot more respect for Prince Yi, who starts off seeming to be casually selfish, arrogant, and dismissive, but who changes as he learns firsthand about the postwar suffering of his people. Prince Yi changes so much, in fact, that he reaches a point where he refuses to abandon his subjects even if that means dying for them. Yi receives other help, though, from unexpected corners: First is the tiger hunter Yeong-shin (Kim Sung-gyu), a tracker, rifleman, and fighter who at first can't stand Prince Yi and whose family had suffered a terrible fate. But Yeong-shin eventually becomes one of Prince Yi's most faithful and capable followers. Also offering help is Lord Ah-hyeon, a popular veteran of the Imjin War who has just come out of secluded mourning to help Prince Yi. Ah-hyeon knows more about the plague than he initially lets on. Meanwhile, back in Hanyang, Season 1 ends with the queen consort's revelation that she is, in fact, not pregnant at all, and that her plan is to steal a male baby to pass off as her own. 

So Kingdom is a lot like Game of Thrones in its combination of petty human politics and an inhuman zombie apocalypse. But there is one major difference: In Game of Thrones, the zombies (called White Walkers or "the army of the dead" on the show, as opposed to just The Others, as they're called in George RR Martin's novels) take their sweet time marching toward the great, magical wall that divides the frozen north from the rest of Westeros. In fact, in that series, it's often hard to know just how fast the dead are marching and/or how close to the Wall they are. In Kingdom, by contrast, the zombie disaster explodes in the midst of the people, showing no regard for social class and no patience with the idea of a slow-walking doom. One quick scene shows a map of the Korean peninsula being rapidly consumed by a spreading blackness as the zombie plague extends its reach, destroying fortresses and villages alike. We discover that Ah-hyeon has dealt with the zombies before: chief councilor Cho Hak-ju had weaponized zombies against Japanese soldiers toward the end of the Imjin War after showing Ah-hyeon what the zombies were capable of in terms of their strength, seed, and ferocity. Ah-hyeon had done nothing to stop the zombies then; part of what motivates him now is a desire to atone for his earlier inaction, and a burning anger against the Cho clan. He is firmly in Prince Yi's camp. Will our heroes be able to stop the plague, stop the plotting of the vile Cho clan, and restore peace to the peninsula?

I've never been a fan of Korean dramas, which all tend to be melodramatic weep-and-scream orgies that rely on the same lame tropes over and over again—memory loss, the older relative with a terminal illness who passes on some crucial wisdom, the lower-class female office worker who falls for the upper-class son of the CEO, blubbering expressions of regret accented by flowing tears and running snot, blah, blah, blah. Most of these dramas are sappy treacle; they linger too long on dramatic moments and come saddled with cornily awful, cheaply produced, similar-sounding musical soundtracks (not that the soundtracks of American TV series are much better—the raunchy comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall actually contains some hilarious lines spoofing American TV series music). How K-dramas ever gained international popularity is beyond me.* But I think I might have a softer spot in my soul for Korean historical dramas, the sageuk mentioned at the beginning of this review. Years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed a series that had been playing during my mom's brain cancer. It was called Great Queen Seondeok (Seondeok yeowang/선덕여왕, lit. Queen Seondeok), and I was hooked, watching the series's 50-some episodes with subtitles and marveling at the ambitiousness of the production, which often felt like a massive stage play using the entire country as a stage. Great Queen Seondeok predisposed me to like Kingdom.

But Kingdom is sometimes hard to like because, despite its somewhat original take on zombies, much of the world-building just doesn't make sense. So the zombie plague isn't so much from a plant as from the tiny, vicious worms clustered under the plant's leaves? Then how did the worms survive being crushed in mortars and pestles (by Chinese-medicine doctors) to infect their unwitting victims? And if the worms hate water so much (to the point of fleeing it or being killed by it), what are they doing swimming around in human bloodstreams, which are mostly water? And why is it that some people, when bitten, just die (like the king's servant) while others turn into zombies (I think an explanation was given, but it was vague)? Why does Patient Zero have to be infected by the worms, then everyone else gets infected by zombie bites? How and why would something like the resurrection herb even evolve? And what was all about how how the zombies have been changing over time? The entire zombie-apocalypse side of this drama made very little sense to me. 

The other side of Kingdom, though, was the political drama as the exiled Prince Yi contends with the Cho clan for the throne even as he deals with the zombie apocalypse. I enjoyed the politics, as well as the depictions of the relationships between the nobles and the peasants, the discussions about a noble's duty to the people, and about the people's duty to the land and the country. Along with the political drama, another aspect that made the series more personal to me was its evocation of so many cities that I know from my long walks, especially along the Nakdong River. I've been through Mungyeong and Sangju; I've probably swung vaguely by Dongnae without even knowing it: it's part of modern Busan, a short distance from the Four Rivers trail. Character interactions were also a major plus for the drama: I kept rooting for Seo-bi and Prince Yi to get together; I liked watching Prince Yi's relationship with his guard Mu-yeong deepen. By the end of Season 2, the prince and the nurse are working together as a pair to learn the real root cause of the zombiism (predictably, it's a foreign culture), but there's little evidence of a romantic spark between them. East Asian dramas aren't as beholden to the romantic Western idea that a man and a woman, if they spend enough time together, must inevitably fall for each other, whereas we Westerners are hyper-alert for that trope.

I have to give special praise to Ryu Seung-ryong and Kim Hye-jun as, respectively, Cho Hak-ju, head of the Cho clan; and the scheming queen consort Cho, the equally evil, pregnancy-faking daughter of Cho Hak-ju. Also of note is Kim Sang-ho as Prince Yi's faithful guard Mu-yeong; the actor plays the role with competence and feeling. Mu-yeong is sometimes used for comic relief, but never at the expense of his expertise, humility, common sense, toughness and, ultimately, his loyalty unto the end. Some online commentators have compared Mu-yeong to Samwise Gamgee. At the beginning of the series, Prince Yi is casually abusive toward Mu-yeong, flippantly threatening to annihilate his guard's entire family for perceived misdeeds, but by the end of Season 2, we know that Mu-yeong is not only the prince's best and only real friend but also an important key to the problem of who should take the throne. We find out that Mu-yeong is laboring under a threat by the Cho clan to harm his pregnant wife (which may explain his sensitivity to Prince Yi's morbid jokes); the Cho clan has tasked Mu-yeong with sending back reports of the prince's location. It's a betrayal that weighs heavily on Mu-yeong's conscience.

The zombies themselves deserve praise, despite their confusing and nonsensical properties and origins, for being utterly relentless throughout the entire series. I recall watching Starship Troopers in 1997, and there was a moment when the human soldiers were on Planet P, and all of the Bugs came boiling out of the ground in their hundreds of thousands, all bearing down on the tiny human fortification of Whiskey Outpost. I remember the feeling of utter, bleak hopelessness while watching that scene, and there are moments in Kingdom that evoke similar emotions: desolation in the face of overwhelming odds. While it took only an episode or two to establish who had plot armor, there were still plenty of likable side characters and not-quite-main characters who ended up as zombie fodder, thus adding to the sense of loss.

I can imagine that some viewers won't be happy with the series's constant cutting away to flashbacks of the recent past. As narrative techniques go, this one is arguably a little overused. For me, though, the flashbacks aren't nearly as damaging to the narrative as the confusing and possibly contradictory world-building going on with the zombies, which—if you'll forgive the language—ought to have been fleshed out more coherently. The political drama, by contrast, is much more coherent.

It's also noteworthy that Kingdom came out just in time for the COVID pandemic to take hold. I haven't read any critical commentary from the time, but it's not hard to guess that many critics might have seen parallels between a zombie horde sweeping through a country and a pandemic sweeping over the world. A friend also suggested that the zombies of Kingdom could be seen as an allegory (see above re: slavery). Given zombies' traditional association with death, irrational hunger, and decay, I'd surmise that the zombies of Kingdom might serve as an allegory for governmental corruption and the plight of the people. If so, this is a good use of what is basically a Western (or Western-Haitian) trope in the service of a Korean story.

All in all, I found Kingdom to be watchable and well acted. Certain story elements, like the dirty politics and the character interactions, made me care about the plot. The zombie side of the story, though, struck me as weak and in dire need of some logical shoring-up. I recommend this series to anyone looking for a K-drama that's not just a bunch of weeping and screaming, but people in search of a more airtight story might have to look elsewhere.

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*Well, it's not entirely beyond me. I've heard that, in certain Western conservative circles, K-dramas fill a void because they depict relatively healthy, functional families that prioritize familial relationships and traditional values like respect for one's elders (as opposed to the "my Dad is also my best friend" or "shut the fuck up, old man" rhetoric so often found in the postmodern, egalitarian West), respect for society, hard work, disciplined focus, etc. In these dramas, the Korean men might seem a bit effeminate and overly weepy by American standards, but at least the men are men and the women are women, unburdened by all of the Western bullshit regarding identity, equality, and sexual orientation. K-dramas are also generally not filled with lots of guns, drugs, sex, and racial animosity. And while I think the Korean landscape is changing on all of the above points, I don't think Western conservatives are entirely wrong to perceive what they're perceiving. Then again, I only ever see bits and pieces of K-dramas whenever I'm in a place with a TV, like a waiting room or a hospital. I have a TV at home, but I almost never use it except once in a blue moon to watch DVDs and Blu-rays. So I'm definitely not any kind of expert on this sort of entertainment.