A Gorgeous Waste

The best thing this series has going for it is its visuals. Sweeping and truly cinematic in scope, it is absolutely beautifully photographed with sumptuous costumes, breathtaking landscapes, and impressive action including full-scale battle scenes. Most episodes have fairly ambitious set pieces and the results are glorious to look at, with a level of technical complexity and proficiency not usually seen on TV. They really put money on the screen. Excellent cinematography, excellent SFX. The first episode was well-crafted and effective overall, quickly establishing the characters and the stakes with deft economy and setting up enough intrigue to get you interested without info dumping.

However.

The main character (Hwi) starts out endearingly sweet but is ultimately incredibly boring (the actor’s awkward constipated expression as his only attempt to emote does not help this), the second lead (Seon Ho) is way more interesting and played by a much better actor but his motivations shift so wildly so often that he doesn’t make any sense. I mean, he REALLY doesn't make any sense. The actor's performance is commendable, and he can manage to make you feel for this nonsensical character a few times through sheer grit, but it's pretty thankless work since the script is completely letting him down.

Their friendship is meant to be at the heart of the story and they do have great chemistry together, but there’s so little of the good times to invest in and with no build up at all to the first time they almost kill each other (in the second! episode!!), I don’t understand why or how I’m supposed to care. There’s just no attempt whatsoever to sell a conflict which makes sense, their epic bromance is in the bin less than two hours into the series. Hwi is dim and noble, Seon Ho decides to start fucking him over and being pointlessly cruel to him like a catty Bond villain for no apparent reason, then they randomly oscillate between saving each other and killing each other. The relationship has no weight for either the characters or the audience.

There’s no explanation or fleshing out of anyone’s emotional landscape, it’s just ponderous cryptic dialogue, sword fights, and mood swings. At no point did I ever feel like there was a legitimate or sympathetic reason for the leads to be forced into opposition, nor that they genuinely felt they were doing something correct or necessary in attacking each other even though they loved each other. At no point does it feel like there’s a legitimate reason they’re on opposite sides apart from near the beginning when Hwi is understandably reacting to Seon Ho being a Machiavellian douche who refuses to be honest about anything. Often, they’re NOT on opposite sides of anything and it makes even less sense that they’re acting like deeply ideologically divided enemies. They have the same goals more than they don’t, yet they end up constantly fighting to (what should be) the death.

Which is another thing. This show has at least three Terminators in it, because certain characters survive hilariously fatal strings of injuries with no ill effects whatsoever. One in particular was slashed, stabbed through the gut up to the hilt of the sword, shot twice in the chest with arrows, galloped on a horse while bleeding out, stood around in a burning building for roughly four hundred years having a nice leisurely conversation, and then continued about his day with zero treatment. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen until a few episodes later when there was something even stupider. This gets more egregious as it goes along, too, because some people die of paper cuts while others are dramatically lanced through the torso over and over and walk it off. It, again, just becomes funny.

‘Oh yes, how horrifying, another full-on impalement which will have no apparent lasting effect.’ There’s real comedy in the slow motion and intense music over something that should be a big deal but no longer is because the show has now taught us that the worse an injury looks the less likely it is to matter. After a while you completely stop taking the sword fights seriously, which is a shame because the early battle scenes were absolutely incredible and one of the highlights of the series. The fake outs cheapen every subsequent 'character in peril' moment because the stakes have become so unbelievable. By the time important characters do die, it feels hollow. Not one character death was satisfying or well-executed, they all felt anti-climatic.

The show also has very possibly the most perfunctory romantic subplot of all time. There is absolutely nothing to it and they proceed to spend VAST amounts of screentime on tinkling music and long pauses which rely on you caring about their alleged love and I just do not. I could not care less if I tried. So much is riding on the audience being invested in this and I don’t understand why they couldn’t be bothered establishing some kind of basis for buying it. Hui-jae is a great character and I really liked her, she’s way more engaging than Hwi, but this romance is a millstone around the show's neck. She ends up nearly irrelevant later on with nothing to do but make doe eyes at him and it’s such a waste. In the beginning of the series, she was the most idealistic, driven, ambitious person out of the three of them, the only one who had an actual moral and ideological stance on the country, and probably the smartest, but all of this goes nowhere. She changes from being a major player in the plot with (again, shifting and unexplained) political convictions to a passive accessory.

Hwi’s relationship with his sister, Yeon, gets less time but is by far his best developed and the only one to feel like it has some substance, though it’s mostly just cute vignettes. It worked, it was enough, I got teary over them a couple times. Seon Ho’s relationship with Yeon is also more genuine and touching than anything else he’s got going on. There are early set ups for some good tension because Yeon has a crush on him and could have had her loyalty torn between him and her brother, which would have paid way more dramatic dividends than the nothingness that is the Hwi and Hui-jae ‘romance’, but it completely disappears with no pay off. Organic character conflict is deftly avoided and she is ultimately treated as a glorified plot device in an extremely predictable way.

By the time you get to the middle of the series, you’re literally only watching it for the prince.

Bang-won, who is BY FAR the most compelling character in the entire show, single-handedly saves this mess from becoming unwatchable and kept snatching my attention back right when the irritation and boredom were about to hit critical mass. This is largely because his characterisation is actually consistent and his motivations make sense (unlike everyone else), but probably not a little because Jang Hyuk is just that charismatic even a massively underwritten script won’t prevent him from being fun to watch. On reflection, I suspect this is also why Seon Ho usually remains more engaging than Hwi despite equally poor writing for both. Good actor doing his best vs a bit of wood with scrunched up eyebrows. And here we have a /great/ actor playing an archetype he seems born to play and able to make compelling almost regardless of how thinly the story sketches it.

Bang-won IS genuinely a good character, though. He’s very complicated and he’s one of the few people engaging in sometimes terrible behaviour whose pov is actually coherent and who questions whether he’s doing the right thing. No one else ever seems to feel guilty about or accept responsibility for their choices, no one else ever has any kind of consistent personal ethical standards- he does. He’s tortured by his own ruthlessness and seems to hate himself for it, but he also won’t stop and always falls back on an absolute belief that his actions will eventually be justified when challenged. Being basically the only character the story kind of, sort of holds accountable and definitely the only one who holds himself accountable, I found it much easier to sympathise with him than with the other shitty people. The series tries to have it both ways because they also sometimes pretend he’s some kind of monster (where he’s no worse than Seon Ho or the king, no one has any moral high ground by the end), but there’s always a nod to nuance.

Although, even here, we’re left scratching our head. Why does Hui-jae instantly hate Bang-won so much and declare she’ll kill him several times? When did she stop hating him? Because they’re later working together and appear to be on perfectly fine terms. Like, was this ever important? Why these dramatic declarations that are never mentioned again? It was just random, it had nothing to do with her character or back story or anything. Bang-won is a real historical person so there’s baggage there, but you still need to establish why the fictional characters feel the way about him they do. She has one line about him being a scoundrel according to her info net- okay? And? Why does this exist and why doesn't it go anywhere? The way he’s portrayed, there’s no justification for some of the reactions people have to him. They act like they know what will happen years down the line.

Just… everything about the plot and the character arcs (calling them arcs is being very generous) is so idiotic. I don’t know how you can have this level of production value and just waste it on a vacuous, absurd story which only occasionally pretends it has some kind of theme about values and the meaning of nation, so empty and pat that it gives you second hand embarrassment. The historical backdrop and historical characters are infinitely more interesting than our bland protagonist or his bipolar bestie, but huge swathes of that are merely glossed over and it doesn’t start getting major screentime until very late in the game. I'm inclined to say it's almost worth it for the vivid depiction of a fascinating prince, but there is a LOT of chaff with that wheat. All the amazing talent which clearly went into this show and all of it being in service of such a weak core frustrates me so much. Good writing needs to come first! By the end, I deeply did not care about any of the leads and only wanted to see the wrap ups for Bang-won and Hwi's army buddies.

It’s really such a let down, because I thought the first episode was very good and was so ready to be impressed.

Read More