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, 2018, and 2019.
Here there be spoilers.
Kingdom slows down a little bit tonight, catching its breath before heading into the final two episodes and spending some time in Hanyang with the Queen (Hye-jun Kim), Lord Cho (Seung-ryong Ryu), and Seo-bi (Doona Bae). I’ve been trying to avoid too many spoilers when writing about this show, but it’s gotten harder and harder to do so as the season develops. So now, as we head into the final episodes, all bets are off.
You have been warned.
This episode begins with a flashback to the night that Moo Young (Sang-ho Kim) swore his loyalty to Prince Chang (Ji-Hoon Ju) and it’s as emotional and touching as you might imagine. This is the sort of scene that on another show would have been the start of the previous episode and would have made it obvious that Moo Young was going to die. Instead, airing as it does here, the emotional impact is enormous when we cut back to Prince Chang holding Moo’s body and crying.
Bae’s work as Seo-bi moves to the forefront this episode, as, after that gut punch, we move to Hanyang where she saves Lord Cho’s life with some quick thinking and slight drowning. Using logic to arrive at a theory for why the zombies avoid water leads to one of the more disturbing moments in the series as a number of nasty little worms slither out of Cho’s face wound as they hold him underwater.
We still don’t have a cure, but you can bet something awful will be required. While pondering that problem, she is tasked by Prince Chang to get information about the legitimacy of the Queen’s newly announced son. Unfortunately, that puts her directly between the Queen and Lord Cho – who, we discover, has NO IDEA that she’s been faking her pregnancy and baby snatching!
And this is where we discover that the Queen is operating in Circe-Mode, and when Cho discovers that the baby isn’t hers, and is, in fact, low born, he goes ape-shit, threatening to murder the baby, the nurses, Seo-bi, and anybody who might know the truth.
Things look super grim until it becomes clear that this episode’s Major Death is going to be Lord Cho himself. Bad luck, that. Surviving a zombie bite only to be poisoned by your own daughter is a tough way to go. On the plus side, it means that Seo-bi is safe for the moment.
Of course, safe, in this case, means thrown in a dungeon cell, surrounded by caged zombies, and tasked by the Queen to find a cure so she can use the living dead to secure her power and rule the entire kingdom. Things are going to get bad before they get better, from the looks of things.