Kingdom: A Review

[unspeakablehorror]

I finished watching Kingdom last night.  I'm not a big fan of the horror genre but something about this interested me. I thought this story had a decently well-structured plot.  I think what drew me to this initially was a personal desire to engage with stories about pandemic, though I also had to stop watching this for a while for that same reason (given that I also have a strong desire to see stories that *don't* remind me strongly of real world problems).  

My favorite character was the physician Seo-bi and my favorite aspect of the plot was the medical mystery aspect.  I wasn't really expecting there to be a detailed background about 'how the undead works' in this story, but there was!  Seo-bi is the main character responsible for unravelling this mystery, and I really enjoy how her character develops.

This is a very tightly plotted story.  There aren't many episodes, only six per season, but a lot happens in a very short time period.  I think of each season as a movie in a sort of 'here's what would be possible with a movie if it could be made ridiculously long' kind of way.  

The other thing I really liked about this show was the lavish scenery and costuming.  Obviously there's plenty of gross scenes too but it's contrasted with this beautiful imagery.  Maybe it's shallow but I just like seeing pretty clothes!  Pretty outdoors scenes!  Even the scary flesh-eating dead people get to be aesthetic sometimes!

There's a fair amount of humor interspersed in this story which helps to offset its more grim aspects.  There's also a character who's very clearly a comic relief character, and while I often find such characters annoying, I appreciate the implementation here, and he certainly helps to offset the otherwise deeply somber tone.  There's also a lot of action, unsurprisingly, and I'm a huge sucker for action scenes.

There's a lot of aspects of the narrative where I just accept that 'it's not that deep' haha but there's definitely something more to this story than its surface level features.  I just looked up the work this is based on, The Kingdom of the Gods, and found out that that's a manga.  Also interesting is that while the writer of the manga is Youn In-wan, the idea for the manga was provided by the writer of the television show, Kim Eun-hee.  I've long had an interest in tracing the relationships between an original work and its derivative works, so I might want to see if I can read the manga sometime.  Though for some reason I have difficulty getting into a lot of the comics/manga/graphic novels medium, I definitely have an interest in comparing and contrasting these two works.

Anyway, this was a fun if often grim series and I'd definitely say it was worth watching!