Kingdom (2019-2020) Review
9/10
The king has been dead for some time and the court is pretending otherwise. His son, a crown prince with no faction behind him, is told he can’t see his father, and rides south to find the physician who treated him. What he finds in the south is a village that’s run out of food.
The 9 is for a horror series where every outbreak is traceable to a decision somebody made for a comprehensible political reason. Nothing in it is accidental, nobody is unlucky, and the plague is the result of specific people protecting specific positions. Twelve episodes across two seasons, about fifty minutes each, and it moves faster than almost anything in the form. It pads nothing and builds to its cliffhangers instead of manufacturing them.
Kingdom is the zombie series that makes me angriest at the living. The monsters are good, but what grips me is Cho Hak-ju, the starving villagers and a court that would sooner lose the country than lose its seat. My one complaint is that twelve episodes go by far too fast, and I wanted more of all of it.
The Politics Come First
The Haewon Cho clan controls the court through a queen who’s pregnant, or says she is, and the death of the king would end their position before the child arrives. So they have a physician use a resurrection plant to bring him back, and what comes back isn’t a king. That’s the entire mechanism and it’s a political decision with a supernatural consequence instead of the other way round. The plague exists because a faction needed a body to keep breathing for a few more months.
The spread is the same. A physician’s assistant carries the infected corpse south, a village steward feeds the flesh to starving people because there’s nothing else, and the outbreak begins among the poorest people in the country for reasons of hunger.
That chain is the series’ best writing. Every link is a person doing something reasonable given their position, and the result is a national catastrophe nobody intended and everybody contributed to.
The series also refuses to let it surprise the court.
Cho Hak-ju knows exactly what he started, understands the scale of it, and carries on because the plague is a problem for the provinces and the throne is the only problem that’s ever concerned him. He’s entirely candid about it, and that candor chills me more than any of the dead. Ryu Seung-ryong plays him with a calm I find hard to watch.
Trace a catastrophe back through a chain of individually reasonable decisions and you have a story about a society instead of about an accident. The rule is that no link can be stupid or malicious. Each person must be solving a real problem with the only tool they have. Put the political cause before the supernatural effect. The plant is a tool somebody reached for. That keeps the story about the reaching.
Start the spread among the people with the least power. Who gets infected first is a statement, and the series makes it without a line of commentary.
Hunger Is the Subject
The south has been through war and famine and the series is specific about it. People are eating grass, a magistrate hoards rice, and a village is described as having lost most of its children.
The steward who serves the meat is facing a hall full of people who haven’t eaten in days and a body that is, in the most practical terms available to him, food. The series stages that decision in full and doesn’t let the audience pretend they would have done otherwise. The rice becomes the recurring image. Characters carry it, guard it, steal it, and in one sequence a group of survivors are more interested in a sack of grain than in the corpses coming through the gate.
That’s what separates the series from most of the form. The zombies are a problem and the shortage was a problem first, and the series keeps reminding the audience which one has been killing people for longer.
The Rules Change
The first season establishes that the infected are dormant during daylight and active at night.
That structures every sequence in it. Then the second season shows that this was never the rule. They’re dormant when it’s cold, and the nights were simply colder, and as the season moves south and warms the dead stop stopping.
That’s the best rule change in any work of this kind, and I admire it enormously. Everything the audience learned in the first season still holds, and the second season shows they’d drawn the wrong conclusion from accurate observations. That’s what would really happen, and the show plays fair about it all the way. The characters make the same error and pay for it. A defensive plan built on surviving until dawn stops working, and the sequence where the sun comes up and nothing changes is the series’ strongest moment of dread.
The water is the other discovery, and it works the same way. Something that had appeared to be a boundary turns out not to be one, and both revelations are delivered through somebody watching instead of through an explanation.
The series is disciplined about this throughout. Nobody gives a lecture on infection, nobody produces a theory in a room, and the audience learns every fact through a character noticing something and being wrong about it for a while first.
The strongest rule change is one that doesn’t break the old rule but reframes it. The audience observed correctly and inferred wrongly. That’s how understanding really fails. A rule that’s simply contradicted feels like an author changing their mind. A rule that’s reinterpreted feels like the world being larger than the characters knew. Let the characters build a plan on the wrong inference. The plan failing is the payoff, and it costs them something the reader has been counting on.
Deliver the revelation through observation. Somebody sees the sun rise and the dead keep moving. That’s worth more than any amount of exposition.
It Looks Extraordinary
The production design is the best in the genre and it’s doing real work instead of decoration. Joseon architecture gives the series courtyards, sliding screens, tiled roofs and raised walkways, and every one of those becomes a tactical element during an assault. The hanbok is the other visual decision and it’s used deliberately. The court wears layered silk and enormous hats, the infected move in them, and the contrast between formal dress and physical horror is the series’ signature image.
The fighting is largely bows, spears and short swords. That changes the arithmetic completely. A rifle makes a zombie a problem of ammunition and a bow makes every shot a decision with a retrieval attached.
The nightscapes are lit almost entirely with fire, and the series is disciplined about it. Torches, braziers and lanterns. That means the light moves, the shadows move, and something is always arriving from a direction nobody is illuminating.
The frozen lake sequence in the second season is where all of it comes together. A defensive line on ice, in daylight, with a plan that depends on the dead being dormant, and the audience already knows the plan is built on a mistake. The frozen lake is where the series grabs me hardest. Knowing the plan is built on a mistake and watching the characters commit to it anyway is agony, and I think it’s the best use of dramatic irony in either season.
The Cast
Ju Ji-hoon plays the crown prince as somebody who has never had to be competent and is discovering, slowly and in public, that he’s capable of it.
The arc is well judged because his authority is useless. He can give orders that nobody has any reason to follow, since the court has declared him a traitor, and everything he achieves is through persuasion and physical work.
Bae Doona’s Seo-bi is the physician’s assistant and the series’ most important character, because she’s the only person in it systematically trying to understand the disease instead of fight it. Her observations are what produce both rule changes, and the series gives her the credit. Kim Sang-ho as the prince’s guard is the emotional anchor, and Ryu Seung-ryong’s Cho Hak-ju is the antagonist, a man who has spent decades accumulating position and will burn a country to keep it.
The queen is the more frightening of the two and the series takes its time revealing why. She’s young, entirely alone in a court run by her father, and the lengths she goes to so that she can produce an heir are the darkest material in either season. I think she’s the best villain in the show, and the reveal of what she’s been doing turns my stomach in a way the zombies never manage.
Give your protagonist an authority that doesn’t function. A prince whose orders are ignored has to earn everything. That converts rank into an obstacle instead of a shortcut. The technique works for any inherited advantage. Remove its usefulness and the character has to become worth following.
Assign the understanding to somebody without status. Seo-bi is a woman and an assistant, and she’s the only person in the story doing science. That’s both accurate to the period and the reason her discoveries matter.
An antagonist who’s defending a position he spent decades building will do more damage than one pursuing something new. He’s more to lose and no exit.
Should you watch Kingdom?
Yes, and watch both seasons plus the special. Twelve hours of political horror where the plague begins because a court faction needed a dead king to keep breathing, and spreads because starving people were given the only meat available to them. It’s a 9 because every horror in it has a human cause I can trace, and it misses a 10 only because it ends before I’m ready to leave Joseon.
