Kingdom Season Two is Dropping Just as Coronavirus Hits South Korea Hard
Kingdom. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Kingdom is a popular South Korean historical-zombie drama on Netflix, and the second season will be dropping on Friday, March 13. It’s basically about a plague that turns people into zombies; it starts in the royal palace then migrates to a rural area and begins spreading like wildfire. The authorities take various steps to try and contain or ignore it (including quarantine of an entire infected town) and its spread is accelerated at key junctures by bungled official decision-making. This all plays out against the backdrop of elite plotting and maneuvering by various factions to seize control of the state and eliminate rivals to the throne. Talk about life imitating art!
The remarkable thing about the release of Kingdom Season Two is that it is going to drop in the middle of a real-life pandemic, one in which South Korea has been one of the hardest hit countries. Does South Korea really have more coronavirus cases than other places, or is it just testing better? Who knows. But the Korean peninsula has been on the pointy end of numerous travel bans by worried governments around the world. So a South Korean television drama about the spread of a deadly virus seems almost a bit too on the nose.
The way Season One depicted the response of the imperial government to the initial spread of the zombie virus is also uncannily like what we’ve seen play out with coronavirus in several countries. First, they try to stop it dead in its tracks by locking down an entire town. That fails. Then they try to lock down an entire province (using a wall, no less). That also fails. Incompetent military and government officials all along the way make bone-headed decisions that make things worse, even ignoring expert advice. The elite seem more concerned with using the crisis to benefit themselves than they do with addressing it.
All of this recalls government responses to coronavirus in places like the United States and elsewhere (ironically enough, the South Korean government’s response to the actual coronavirus has been lauded as very competent - guess they learned their lesson during the Joseon zombie outbreak!). There is even a key moment when an infected person gets onto a boat and spreads the zombie bug far and wide - almost exactly like all these quarantined cruise ships sitting off the coasts of various countries recently!
This show was already a well-made blend of historical drama and zombie flick (I particularly liked the attention to detail paid to costuming and production design in Season One). But the fact that Kingdom’s plot has suddenly exploded with contemporary social and political and economic relevance makes you wonder if Netflix really does know something that we don’t.
The zombie genre has seemed like it was running out of steam for a while now. But with coronavirus spreading like it is, and the impact it is having on the global economy and on peoples’ lives, we are reminded once again why the genre has been so resonant with audiences in the first place. It’s because it takes a very real human fear (that of pandemics, and the spread of invisible deadly diseases through social contact) and then magnifies is through the lens of fiction and bombast.
But at their heart, zombie films are about the fear of an uncontrollable disease let loose on the world, and the ways in which we might deal with it. This makes the release of Kingdom Season Two on Friday an especially noteworthy event, and the prescience with which the show’s creators depicted the royal government bungling its attempts to contain the zombie epidemic is more than a little unnerving. Let’s hope that the heroes in Kingdom have some success in beating back the zombies and countering the incompetence of the state in Season Two. Because if they can’t and things keep getting worse, we’d better hope this is the point where life stops imitating art.
