Kingdom – Season 1 Review

When Kingdom brings zombies into Korea during the Joseon dynasty, the first impression is that of an unusual experiment: historical drama, political intrigue and apocalyptic horror combined within the same series. It takes only a few episodes, however, to understand that the zombies are not an extra element added to an existing story, but the mechanism that allows every other conflict to explode.

The first season consists of six episodes and follows Crown Prince Lee Chang, played by Ju Ji-hoon, as he tries to discover what has happened to his father, the king, who has been kept away from the court under the pretext of a serious illness. Political interests, succession struggles and the powerful Cho clan surround the sovereign, while far from the palace something begins to spread among the population.

The result is one of the most distinctive interpretations of the modern television zombie, because Kingdom uses familiar elements of the genre without ever feeling like a Korean version of something we have already seen.

A King No One Is Allowed to See

The story begins inside the royal palace, long before the zombies become the centre of the action.

Rumours circulate about the king’s death, but Prince Lee Chang is unable to see him. The young queen and her father, Cho Hak-ju, control access to the sovereign’s chambers and block every attempt to uncover the truth, while Chang’s own position becomes more fragile.

The prince is the king’s son, but his mother was a concubine. The queen’s pregnancy could therefore produce a new heir capable of removing his claim to the throne, turning the king’s illness into a political issue before it becomes a personal one.

Kingdom therefore establishes its first conflict without relying on zombies.

Power is already sick before the outbreak begins, the court lives on secrets and political survival depends on controlling what others are allowed to know. When Lee Chang leaves the palace to find the doctor who treated his father, he enters a world where that same logic has far more immediate consequences.

From Hanyang to Jiyulheon

The journey takes Chang and his bodyguard Mu-yeong to the Jiyulheon clinic, where the situation is very different from what they imagined at court.

The place has been devastated and bodies are piling up, while Seo-bi, one of the few survivors, tries to understand what happened. Through her, the series begins to connect the king’s mysterious illness with something far larger.

Taking the protagonist out of the palace is a crucial choice, because it allows Kingdom to show two different Koreas.

On one side are the court, the nobles, the guards and the struggles for succession; on the other are starving villages, abandoned sick people and men and women whose main concern is finding enough food to survive another day.

The outbreak crosses both worlds, but it strikes those with fewer means of defence with much greater force.

The Zombies Come with the Night

The first real explosion of horror comes after sunset.

During the day the corpses appear motionless, but when night falls they rise and attack anyone they encounter. The series handles this transition well because the audience has already seen enough to anticipate what is coming, while many of the characters still interpret those bodies according to rules that belong to the old world.

Once the zombies begin to move, Kingdom changes pace.

The creatures run, throw themselves at their victims, pile against gates and walls and turn every enclosed space into a trap. They lack the slowness of Romero’s zombies, and their aggression recalls the energy of modern infected, but the historical setting changes the effect completely.

There are no cars, automatic weapons or instant communications here. A city has to be defended with gates, spears, bows and swords, while news can take hours or days to reach those expected to respond.

That technological distance makes situations that modern zombie cinema has explored dozens of times feel dangerous again.

Lee Chang and the Birth of a Leader

At the beginning, Lee Chang is mainly a prince trying to defend his right to the succession.

The journey changes the meaning of his position.

Once he sees what is happening beyond the capital, the question of the throne begins to merge with a much wider responsibility. Being Crown Prince also means deciding what to do when faced with people no one else appears willing to protect.

Ju Ji-hoon builds Chang without turning him into a perfect hero from the start. The character has to learn, makes mistakes and continues to carry the weight of his origins and the political struggle, but his contact with the population gives him a different kind of stature.

The series therefore places two possible forms of power side by side.

Cho Hak-ju uses the kingdom to preserve his family’s influence, while Chang begins to understand that a title has meaning only if there is still a country left to rule.

Seo-bi and the Search for an Explanation

Seo-bi represents the other major narrative line of the season.

While most of the characters are focused on survival, she observes the disease and tries to understand how it works. Her role allows the series to introduce the rules of the outbreak step by step without relying on lengthy explanations.

Bae Doona plays a character from a very different social position from the prince, yet her knowledge becomes just as important as the military abilities of the fighters around her.

Seo-bi studies the bodies, connects events and searches for a cause while fear, superstition and immediate needs dominate the people around her.

The investigation into the disease therefore becomes one of the main engines of the story, because Kingdom presents the zombies as a threat governed by rules that can be studied. Understanding those rules means improving the chances of survival.

Hunger Before the Zombies

One of the most interesting elements of the first season is that hunger already exists before the outbreak.

The population is suffering, resources are concentrated in the hands of a few and entire communities live close to starvation. The zombies arrive in a society already divided by deep fractures, so the disaster does not create every inequality: it makes them impossible to ignore.

This is where the horror and the political dimension connect most effectively.

Privilege allows some characters to escape, close gates or sacrifice others to buy time, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy pay the highest price.

Kingdom avoids stopping the narrative to explain its social commentary. Famine, corruption and class divisions enter the story through the decisions characters make and through the way each community responds to the crisis.

The zombies therefore become a force moving through a system that was already compromised.

Cho Hak-ju and the True Face of Power

If the dead represent the most immediate danger, Cho Hak-ju soon proves that the human threat carries just as much weight.

His goal is to control the succession and secure the future of his clan, even when the price threatens the entire kingdom.

Ryu Seung-ryong gives him a presence capable of dominating many scenes without excess. Cho Hak-ju follows a logic in which power can justify almost any sacrifice, including the use of the outbreak itself.

He is an effective antagonist for Kingdom because he belongs to the same story as the zombies without depending on them.

Even if the outbreak disappeared, the political conflict would remain. And while the dead attack because they are driven by hunger, human beings can make far worse decisions in full awareness of the consequences.

A Beautiful and Hostile Korea

Visually, Kingdom uses its historical setting as an essential part of its identity.

Palaces, mountains, villages, fortifications and court clothing create a world far removed from the urban imagery that dominates much of Western zombie fiction. The series can move from political intrigue inside the royal palace to a chase through the woods or a siege against a mass of the dead without losing coherence.

The contrast between locations also matters.

The court appears ordered, wealthy and governed by ceremony, while the regions touched by the outbreak show hunger, mud and corpses. As these two worlds begin to move closer together, the sense grows that the disaster is destroying the very distances on which power had built its security.

The zombies are even more effective in this setting because they seem to belong to a world in which no one would ever have imagined encountering them.

Six Episodes Without Wasted Space

The first season contains only six episodes, generally running between forty and sixty minutes.

That choice helps the pacing considerably.

Kingdom contains political intrigue, several groups of characters, a mythology that needs to be established and numerous action sequences, but it has little room for detours without purpose. Almost every episode adds something to what we know about the outbreak or changes the balance of the struggle for power.

Even when the series slows down, it usually does so to prepare a confrontation or introduce new information.

The result is a compact season that ends just as the conflict is expanding, leaving several storylines open without making the six episodes feel like a mere introduction.

The Rule That Changes Everything

For most of the season, the characters believe they have understood a simple pattern: the zombies move at night and become inactive during daylight.

That belief shapes travel, strategies and defensive plans.

In the finale, however, something begins to challenge what the survivors think they know. The season ends by introducing a new variable just as the prince is preparing Sangju to resist the approaching mass of the dead.

It is an effective way to close the story, because it changes a rule that both the characters and the audience had begun to trust.

The threat has not yet been fully understood.

A Zombie Drama with an Identity of Its Own

The strength of Kingdom’s first season comes from its ability to combine elements that could easily have felt incompatible.

It is a historical drama about succession to the throne, a story of political corruption, a narrative about hunger and social division and, at the same time, a violent zombie series built around survival.

None of these components feels like decoration.

The Joseon setting changes the practical rules of the apocalypse, politics shapes the response to the outbreak and the zombies expose the weaknesses of a society already close to crisis.

Above all, the first season succeeds because it takes one of the most heavily used monsters in modern horror and places it in a context that makes it unpredictable again.

After decades of abandoned cities, blocked motorways and supermarkets turned into shelters, watching a Korean prince cross a collapsing kingdom pursued by hordes of the dead proves that the zombie still had new territory left to conquer.