Korean 110 Cultural post #3

[Jenna Lee]

I watched a Netflix series called “Kingdom”, which is a show about the contamination of the zombie disease during the Joseon dynasty. The crown prince, played by Ji-Hoon Joo, is frustrated about how he couldn’t see the King, his father, but what he didn’t know was that the government workers were hiding the King from others because he became a zombie. And because he became a zombie, he couldn’t rule the kingdom, so the government workers used the King as a puppet to rule the kingdom however they wanted to. However, it becomes a major problem when an infected body has been leaked to the starving citizens at the hospital, and one of the characters end up making soup for everybody with the infected body and causing anybody that consumed the soup to become zombies. Now with the majority of the citizens becoming zombies, the crown prince and a few others have to stop the disease from spreading to the rest of the Kingdom. Although the show only has 6 episodes so far, it is a very interesting story plot filled with irony and implication of the messy social construct of the Joseon dynasty. I recommend this to anybody that likes historical Korean dramas, and anybody that enjoyed “Train to Busan”, which was a zombie movie that was a big hit in Korea in 2016.