We’re just done watching the two seasons of this South Korean television series and naturally we’re only watching a Korean show because it’s really a zombie show. Setting a zombie outbreak in a period Korean setting is just an inspired decision and I especially appreciated how this is a relatively grounded show in which the characters actually try to understand the nature of the plague. It seems likely that there will be more but the first two seasons already tell a complete story, so no worries about this being a show with no end in sight.

The king of the Joseon Dynasty is ill and has not been in public for some time. Suspicious, the current heir and prince Lee Chang tries to get answers from the last physician who treated him, pursuing him to his clinic in Gyeongsang with his loyal bodyguard in tow. In reality the king is dead and turned into a zombie with a strange flower by the Chief State Councillor Cho Hak-ju. His daughter is the Queen and he wants to keep the king’s death a secret until she gives birth to a new heir. At the doctor’s clinic, all of the patients are starving as the whole kingdom is going through hard times. One of the patients, a former soldier named Yeong-shin, makes a meat stew for everyone, but uses the corpse of an assistant who has been bitten by the king. All those who eat the stew die and become zombies and Lee Chang arrives just in time to witness a full blown zombie epidemic. One of the physician’s assistants Seo-bi survives and so she and Yeong-shin joins the Prince’s entourage to confront the crisis while the Cho clain acts to oppose them.

With its lavish sets, expansive setting and plentiful action scenes, it is immediately apparent why this show has been such a success. It does cheat a little in that they use more wide shots at the beginning to set the scene, but try to save more money near the end with tighter locations and even shortened episodes. Still between the costumes, sword fighting and intrigue this is plenty entertaining. As I said, I really like how the plot keeps moving at a decent pace towards a clear conclusion as Seo-bi finds out more about the mysterious plant. Even though there are twists in the zombies’ behavior, I love how they act and behave within clear constraints and there are reasonable explanations for how they work, whether or not it’s scientifically plausible. Most of all, the show properly recognizes that as the zombies are mindless, they can never be the true antagonists. Horrific as they are, the zombies are actually easily dealt with provided the humans work together under competent leadership. As we see here again and again, the real problem comes from people who are willing to deploy them as weapons to achieve their aims.

While this is a decently good show, it’s interesting to note that it is deficient in at least one way in which American shows excel at. This is the way that Lee Chang is the one and only protagonist and so while supporting characters have relationships with him, they don’t have much of a relationship with each other. Similarly Lee Chang gets to have character development but the others don’t. The fact that Yeong-shin is the one who kicks off the zombie outbreak by feeding the corpse to the other patient is never brought up and he himself never seems to evince any guilt. Everyone treats Seo-bi as their pocket doctor for her expertise and she is appropriately kindly and merciful but she never seems to have much of an opinion of her own. The most interesting supporting character is the somewhat incompetent magistrate Jeon Seok-ho who clearly likes Seo-bi but is resigned to the fact that she keeps sticking to the prince. US shows understand how important it is to develop the supporting characters so it feels better rounded and of course that helps pad out the length as well. This series is captivating because it keeps the plot moving along at a good clip but at the same time it feels shallow because it doesn’t give the characters space to properly react to events beyond the urgency of the immediate crisis.

Anyway as fun as this was to watch, I doubt that we’ll watch the sequels. It’s clever of them to bait the next series using the origin of the mysterious flower but that’s not terribly interesting to me. Without deeper development, we don’t feel any strong emotional attachment to any of the characters and there’s only so far that zombie fight scenes can take you. I’d also like the show to be more subversive, by having a character who is explicitly anti-monarchy for example, but that doesn’t seem to be on the cards. As one point, Lee Chang is exasperated by the aristocrats who refuse to have the bodies of their relatives cremated, but that’s as far as it goes. This is a show that knows its limits and wants to stay within them.