Kingdom (킹덤)

Well, a lot of people filled their boots with the Shipwrecked post, didn’t they?  Learning nothing from that runaway success, this week I’m veering recklessly to the other end of the TV spectrum.  We’ve not chatted about my love for zombies since both The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead (the latter a spin-off of the former) were subjected to my sardonic snarkiness months and months ago.  So, brace yourself for the flesh-eating undead.  But that’s not the only swap we’ve made.  Replace a Pacific Island with the Korean peninsula.  Switch bikini-clab British Millennials for medieval Koreans.  And sub inarticulate youths saying “you know, kind of like” for a violent onslaught from the Korean language, with subtitles straight out of the How To Speak Archaic English textbook and, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got yourself Kingdom.

But, as always, due to a grave inability to take anything seriously, I jest.  Kingdom is literally the best thing I have seen on Netflix in ages.  I’m not even sorry about writing such a weak sentence as that previous one – it doesn’t need dressing up.  I’m still in a state of excitement, and I finished all six episodes about a week ago.  I’m looking at the clock as if it’s going to tell me when series two will come into my life and provide me with equal measures of horror and entertainment.  Let’s be honest, I get both of these in my office, but very little of this comes from historical Koreans, so it’s nice to have a change, isn’t it?

The bit where I tell you what it’s all about will now follow, but again, we’re going for a certain laziness of language, as the rest is verging on highbrow (historical, foreign language) and we need to average things out to keep the majority happy.  So, there’s this prince, right?  His dad, the king, is on his deathbed, yeah, but the prince is being kept away by the new queen, his stepmother.  She’s expecting a baby by the old king, so she needs her husband to survive until the birth in order to secure succession.  She’s part of a clan who are hungry for power, so let’s just say there’s a rather Westerosi approach to this whole throne ownership business.  Her clan’s devious attempts to keep the king alive are what cause the inevitable zombie outbreak, while dismissing a physician back into the countryside is what spreads the pestilence to the peasants beyond the palace.  Meanwhile, our poor old prince also has to flee for his life on a quest to find out the truth.  He’s about to find out it’s not so easy being a prince in zombie-riddle medieval Korea.

What sets this apart, though, is bloody all of it.  But let’s distil from this two of the main TV-viewing features upon which you can feast your eyes.  The first is that every shot is exquisitely cinematic in its beauty.  From ancient palace buildings to dramatic landscapes, the visuals’ lushness is exceeded only by the ancient costumes.  You’ll wonder who ever thought those big hats were practical for soldiers, or question how warm so many layers of silk can be, but you’ll always end up impressed.  Somehow, this aesthetic doesn’t distract from the drama; instead, it becomes the perfect frame for the zombie fare, which often needs further theming to become plausible.  Having been to modern South Korea, I’m not sure the impact would have been the same among the grey buildings of Seoul, evidence of the whole place getting smashed in during the 1950s’ Korean War.

The second main setter-aparter is the incredible dramatic tension.  A zombie origin story is always fraught, as you, the viewer, sprawled on your cushions and shoving snacks in your face, know full well that doom is due while the characters all too slowly put two and two together and come up with some sort of denial of the epidemic chasing them down country lanes (yes, these zombies run, fast).  Skip this bit if you don’t want any spoiler content whatsoever, but one element of the zombie mythology in Kingdom has to be mentioned: the undead are only active in the dark.  Cue limitless possibilities of the sun setting, corpses starting to twitch, silly Korean magistrates being inefficient in their jobs and all hell being unleashed.  Conversely, you know your beloved main characters just have to survive each night before the daytime brings a bit of a breather.  A whole episode got so tense, the build and build to nightfall so domineering, that I had to press pause and pace about the room a bit to restore all sense of perspective to myself.

Alongside all of this, Kingdom finds time to make comparisons between the haves and have nots in society: a sort of socialist message to accompany the consumption of flesh, if you will.  The nobility are repeatedly shown to cock up their handling of an issue of national importance, while our royal hero, the prince, also learns that the peasant fodder bearing the brunt of the infestation don’t actually deserve to be eaten alive.  It’s funny how Brexit bleeds into everything, isn’t it?  (Or is that a bit of a reach this time?)  It seems that any dishonour towards a royal, however, does come with the alarming punishment of one’s whole family being annihilated.  What a great way to target crime.  The next time someone swipes your iPhone on a moped, you can rest assured that they won’t just be found and jailed, they won’t just be executed, but their whole family tree will be erased from the earth.

I’ll finish by saying that I don’t care if you don’t like subtitles.  You should have tried harder at school if you can’t read fast enough.  Stepping outside of the English language into Kingdom allows you to access one of the most compelling additions to the zombie canon in quite a few years.  Sure, it’s based on a comic book, like The Walking Dead etc, but it’s set apart by its uniqueness in the Western TV marketplace.  It’s also endlessly gratifying to watch the various extras really go for it in their performances and energetically give something extra of themselves, become extra extras.  Just remember, don’t come for me when you reach the cliffhanging end of series one, because it was me who opened your tiny mind to the intense tension of Kingdom.

Lost

Let’s go back to some glossy American dross this week.  I’m going to take on Lost, not because I feel I have anything truly valuable to add to the enormous canon of online chatter regarding this show, especially eight years after it ended, but because, in the art of determining what makes a great boxset, we need to acknowledge that Lost was nailing Boxset 101 long before boxset bingeing was really a thing (I’m not sorry I’ve said boxset so many times).  And, hilariously, its strengths in some areas are rendered utterly null by its awful, awful shortcomings in others.

In the UK, Lost premiered on Channel 4 in 2004.  To this day, the beautiful promotional trailers exist in my memory in perfect form.  On a beach setting, shot as if some sort of fragrance advert, a collection of striking people, diverse in skin tone, age, shape and size, stare moodily into the distance while a sea breeze gently caresses their tattered clothing, each character carefully placed among the smoking wreck of a crashed aeroplane, like a disastrous Kardashian Christmas card.  Music plays.  Supers appear on screen: one of these people is a murderer, one of these people is cheating etc.  I think I might have lied about remembering everything, as I honestly can’t recall all the stated facts.  Nevertheless, I was immediately drawn in.  The tension had me.  With all these secrets, the fall out at their inevitable exposition was bound to be epic.

But, a few episodes in, the show just wasn’t doing it for me, and I gave up.  How fickle.  Months later, I was deep in my year abroad in Germany.  Working in a school, I was often done for the day by 11am and had literally nothing else to fill my time with, even after hanging around in a gym for two hours despite the staff mistakenly calling me Roger, or making endless rounds of gluten-free pancakes because they were the only thing I knew how to cook.  One housemate had a large selection of DVDs and I made my way through all of them.  Even unmarked ones.  I didn’t realise how risky this could be, but instead of homemade porn, I found myself in possession of episodes 14 and 15 of Lost’s first season.  With nothing else to do, I eagerly watched both.  And I enjoyed them.

That’s when I got lost in Lost.  I’m gonna say it: series one was a masterpiece.  I loved everything about it.  And that’s because it had everything: the survivors of a plane crash building a new society on a desert island (such societal commentary – how would their old lives play out in this new situation?), unknown threats lurking in the jungle just beyond the beach (wait, is that a polar bear?), each character’s pre-crash backstory getting played out in flashbacks in their own dedicated episode (thrown to with the same sound effect that made everything seem more tense, slowly teasing out details relevant to the current on-island storyline), so much that couldn’t be explained (how come Locke can walk now?) and then each episode climaxing in a cliff-hanger that leaves you unable to live your life until you can find out more.

It also helped that this all played out in tropical sunshine.  It was like being on holiday via the television.  But while the first series was neat and tight, and the second nearly delivered on the promise to build on this epic set up, the later series up to the sixth seemed to suffer from a chronic form of and-thenism, where the writers desperately clutched at straws to try to explain what had come before, resorting to further and further fetched departures from reality until the show could no longer be classified in any genre other than gubbins.  I loved the creepiness of the Dharma Initiative, I wanted to get in the hatch so bad, I was obsessed with the numbers that had to be entered, I couldn’t work out why Hurley never slimmed down on a restricted castaway diet, I couldn’t cope with the excitement and intrigue offered by the Others.  Every time someone tried to get away from the island, nature seemed to thwart them.  I had to know everything about this place.

But with so many questions unanswered, Lost was never able to deliver a resolution.  There was a smoke monster, an invisible man rocking on a chair in a hut, an island that could be moved, key cast members leaving the island and then coming back, flashbacks that became throw-forwards and the constant presence of Ben Linus’s really really annoying face.  And then how did everyone know how to track?  They could follow someone across the whole island based on a few broken twigs and a leaf in the wrong place.  I’m looking at you, Kate and Jack.  What about the other people in the background?  I always wondered what they were up to, though I suppose Rose and Bernard (pronounced Bern-AAARRRD) broke the mould to come forward and say a few incidental lines.  Haemorrhaging fans, Lost limped to a listless conclusion, and, in the process, I lost hours of my life.

However, I gave those hours willingly, and that’s because Lost was a boxset masterclass in stringing the viewer along.  It built a whole world with its own mythology and expanded that out exponentially with a freedom no other show (that I have seen myself) had managed to do.  There was nothing else like it and I think we all loved the braveness.  We weren’t just working out why a prostitute was murdered, we were trying to piece together much more complicated things (while looking at beautiful people on a sunny beach).  All that suspense and tension needed the best pay off ever developed by a team of TV writers.  Lost bottled this so hard that it felt like assault.  This accusation is unfair, as the show was doomed from the start – it could never live up to its own expectations.

So, what have we learned?  Don’t tease out your audience for six series, only to have built up so much mystery that you forget what was going on in the first place.  But let’s commend the ambition.  Lost changed the telly landscape.  If we had lost Lost, it would have been our loss.