It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
We have a fairly quiet opening this episode, as the Crown Prince (Ju Ji-hoon) and Moo-young (Kim Sang-ho) camp out in a zombie-free zone and lament having to leave behind the peasants they were trying to save. Seo-bi (Bae Doo-na) is gathering herbs, and Yeong-shin (Kim Sung-gyu) is scouting, making sure that the army isn’t following them. Into this group stumbles lovesick Magistrate Beom-pal (Jeon Seok-ho), bloodied and panicked, the last survivor from the ship that abandoned the villagers at the end of episode 3.
Which means that a boatload of zombies is floating toward Sangju, and if the plague spreads from there, the entire empire could fall.
Luckily for everyone involved, local war hero Lord Ahn Hyeun (Heo Joon-ho) hears the rumors of the disease and comes down from his mountain refuge with a complement of warriors at his command. This allows both for a nicely choreographed battle scene as they arrive on the scene just as the Crown Prince and company are nearly overrun.
Does this mean that Lord Ahn Hyeun is going to be a strong ally to the Crown Prince as he tries to take power or is there something mysterious going on? Seo-bi is suspicious, since Lord Ahn and his men already knew how to kill the zombies and didn’t miss a beat in doing so. There’s definitely more to Lord Ahn’s story that hopefully will come out this season (Netflix confirmed a Season 2 is in the works!!). Since the Five Armies are on their way to arrest the Crown Prince, I get the feeling that the finale should clear up some of these questions.
Meanwhile, back in Hanyang, Lord Cho (Ryu Seung-ryong) has gathered pretty much every pregnant widow from all of the surrounding villages, offering food and shelter for reasons nobody can guess. Moo-young’s wife is among them, at her husband’s suggestion, in order to be safe while he’s gone. I’m not sure that’s going to work out, since, as if things couldn’t get any worse, the Queen (Kim Hye-jun) names herself Regent, ruling in her undead husband’s stead, giving Lord Cho the power he’s been craving all along.
This episode was a bit of a return to the slow burn of the opening chapters but does a good job maintaining and building tension while also laying out new mysteries to unravel. I have to admit, though, the mystery I’m most interested in doesn’t have anything to do with politics or zombies. I want to know if Yeong-shin really is a crazy-dangerous tiger hunting Chakho soldier!