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.
The first season finale of Kingdom was pretty much up to the standard of each episode so far, meaning it was beautiful to look at, casually paced, had a few good zombie kills, revealed a secret or two, and set up a new mystery moving forward. And for a minute there, I thought we were gonna get some tiger-fighting action.
Oh well.
This episode brings us the revelation about why Lord Cho has set up a house of pregnant women, and it’s probably exactly what you were thinking. Yeah, that little bit of blood that the Queen had on her gown earlier was a clue. She’s not pregnant and they’re waiting for a boy to be born so they can steal it and claim it’s the new prince.
Whaaaa? I wonder who’s gonna have a boy first? The writers wouldn’t have stuck Moo-young’s wife in there for no reason, after all.
There’s also an interesting exchange between the two as she tests the reins that her father has on her position and power. If that develops into anything, we’ll have to wait for the second season.
Another thing we’ll have to wait on will be any sense of resolution. In a pretty bold move, a large chunk of this episode is spent with the Crown Prince and Lord Ahn fortifying Sangju against an impending attack by a massive horde of zombies. This is after Lord Ahn made his loyalties plain by murdering the soldiers sent to arrest the Crown Prince. It’s a good plan, and our heroes make it through the night without an attack.
Which struck me as a little odd.
The final ten minutes of the show is literally a tense waiting game as we expect a huge, season-ending battle. Instead, we get nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. We get a game-changing plot twist.
That tiger attack I mentioned wanting to see earlier? What I thought might be a tiger, wasn’t.
Seo-bi and Beom-pal not only discover a stash of the resurrection plant, but also figure out why the zombies sleep during the day and only attack at night. It’s not the sun that they’re hiding from, but the temperature. And guess what?
If you said “Winter is coming,” you wouldn’t be wrong.
So instead of a final battle, we get a long wait, followed by the horde of zombies attacking as the sun comes up this time. And then, before they even hit the outer barricades, we cut to the credits.
If you heard a weird noise last night, that was probably me groaning and cursing at the television. Sorry about that. Hope I didn’t wake you.
Overall, Kingdom has been a very enjoyable experience. It’s proof positive that despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth that you get from people declaring that zombie movies and television shows are played out, there’s just no truth to it. Seeing as how we seem to have an endless appetite for cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, and sitcoms about family dynamics, I don’t think zombies are going anywhere.