Welcome to Season 9 of K Drama Chat! In this season, we’ll be recapping and analyzing Kingdom, the zombie historical from 2019. Kingdom is the first original series K Drama on Netflix, produced by AStory. Kingdom stars Ju Ji-hoon as Crown Prince Yi Chang, Bae Doona as Seo-bi, Ryu Seung-ryon as Cho Hak ju, Kim Sang-ho as Mou Young, Kim Sung-kyu as Yeong shin, and Kim Hye-jun as the Queen Consort. We discuss:

• Our enduring love for Crash Landing On You, and how we’re finding it tough to move on.
• How we can’t seem to find much information on the music composer from Kingdom, Mok Yeong Jin.
• How Kingdom is set at the start of the 17th century, three years after the end of the Imjin War against Japan. Although Kingdom is entirely fictional, the Sunjo Annals describe a plague that swept through Korea in the early 1800s. Other annals report on a famine between 1670 and 1671 that resulted in mass famine.
• The main characters: Crown Prince Lee Chang, physician Seo-bi, Chief State Councilor Cho Hak ju, the Crown Prince’s body Mu Young, the mysterious peasant Young shin, and the Queen Consort.
• The mystery behind the king’s illness and disappearance from public life.
• Court hierarchy and how the Crown Prince, as the son of a concubine, is in danger because the Queen Consort is pregnant. If she bears a son, that son will be the Crown Prince, unless the king dies before the child is born.
• The Crown Prince’s audacious decision to leave the palace, search for physician Lee Seung hui, and travel the great distance to Dong Nae.
• The Crown Prince’s confession to Mu Young that it was HE who committed treason by writing the letter and getting the other scholars to sign it.
• Young shin’s decision to take Dan I and turn him into soup, which ultimately leads all of the patients at the clinic to turn into monsters.

References

• Is Kingdom historically accurate? 
• The smallpox epidemic in the US during the 1700s
• ASTORY website
• Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty - Wikipedia