TV Review: Gyeongseong Creature Season 1

We’ve recently finished watching Season 1 of Netflix’s Korean horror sci-fi TV series Gyeongseong Creature (2023/24), and we felt it deserved a more detailed review that the ones we posted on social media. So, here it is. All the names were carefully copied from the subtitles, so if there are any mistakes, blame Netflix. Warning: SPOILERS.

Gyeongseong Creature takes place in 1945, during the Japanese occupation of South Korea (referred to as Joseon), and uses this oppressive setting and the horrifying experiments of the infamous Unit 731 to craft a story featuring brutal violence, courage, patriotism, human weakness, and romance. We see all this mainly from the perspective of Jang Tae-sung, the wealthy, well-connected owner of pawnshop The House of Golden Treasure, who risks losing everything he worked for if he can’t find Myeong-ja, the missing pregnant mistress of Police Commissioner Ishikawa, in time. Tae-sung considers himself a survivor first and foremost, having refused several invitations of his friend Jun-taek to join the resistance at the Patriotic Society. However, everything changes when he meets Yoon Chae-ok, a woman travelling with her father, Jung-won. They’re looking for a Japanese painter, Sashimoto, who they believe may know what happened to Chae-ok’s mother, who disappeared 10 years ago. Turns out both searches lead to the Ongseong Hospital and the experiments of Lieutenant Kato, who’s managed to create something very dangerous and very deadly he hopes will be the beginning of a new world. What they learn makes it impossible for Tae-sung to keep doing nothing, which puts him in conflict with Ishikawa’s powerful wife Lady Maeda, who not only has feelings for him but has been secretly funding the less outlandish but equally horrifying medical experiments of the hospital’s director Dr Ichiro. For Chae-ok it all becomes a lot more personal when she finds out her missing mother was one of Kato’s subjects. But it’s not all doom and gloom in Gyeongseong Creature - there’s also time for Tae-sung and Chae-ok to fall in love, a few uplifting scenes where the heroes manage to thwart the enemy, and some touching moments showing the enduring bonds of friendship and family.

In a way, the titular monster serves as a metaphor for the effects of the Japanese occupation - they’ve tortured their subjects to the point where they’re not even human anymore and are forced to turn against each other. Of course, it’s also a big, deadly creature with tendrils that it uses to suck people’s brains, so there are several very bloody scenes in which scores of Japanese soldiers and also the occasional Korean get tossed around, impaled, and de-brained. The fact that it releases anthrax spores when it’s knocked out with hydrogen gas adds some more ghastly scenes whenever an unfortunate soul comes into contact with them. The creature’s origins, and not just who it mutated from, allow some interesting developments - a parasite, Najin, which takes over a human host, discovered by accident on a test subject during an experiment, and mutated into a big, hulking beast with the help of an anthrax serum. Adding to this sci-fi horror are more reality-based scenes. The series begins with Kato and the rest of the Japanese army leaving Manchuria and moving to Gyeongseong (future Seoul), an exit that involves destroying everything they’re not taking with them, including the surviving prisoners, and leads to the first scene of scores of dead bodies being dumped like trash. The same will happen later at the Ongseong Hospital when the sleeping creature is transported near the prisoners/guinea pigs cells and most touch the anthrax spores. After everything that came before, the lab with shelves filled with jars containing severed human heads and limbs, brains, and fetuses, where Chae-ok finds the child prisoners in episode 3, Signal, doesn’t look that far-fetched. Of course, the obvious comparison is with the better known Nazi experiments. When hiring Sashimoto to document his experiments, Ichiro even mentions German science manuals. And what is Ichiro doing? The lab with the jars and the child prisoners are his, but the only experiment we get to see, and which marks the beginning of Sashimoto’s career as the reluctant go-to sketch artist for scientific atrocities, is a vivisection performed on a conscious victim. The show focuses more on Kato, who, with his cold, inhuman demeanour, manages to be scarier than his creation. When Lady Maeda trades Ichiro’s work for his, they’re a match made in creepy heaven. The hospital basement, where he sets up base after being forced to leave Manchuria, is a nightmarish deathtrap that easily generates a sense of dread when our heroes find themselves in it.

To these more fantastical horrors, the show also adds the ever-present dangers of living under military occupation. The Koreans know they can be arrested at any moment for no reason, are openly insulted, forced to adopt Japanese names, and even the seemingly wealthy and privileged among them are at the mercy of their oppressors, who can take everything they have. And while there’s a lot of heroism and self-sacrifice on display, the series offers a more nuanced view of life under a dictatorship. At one point, Mrs Nawol, who’s been with Tae-sung since he was a child and works at The House of Golden Treasure, enumerates several torture methods to Mr Gu, who also works for Tae-sung, and outright tells him not to be a hero and just tell his interrogators what they want to know. She’s talking from experience, of course. She and young Tae-sung met outside the jail where she’d been interrogated. He, meanwhile, was waiting for his mother who had been arrested as a rebel - she never returned. The show is also very critical towards the traditional resistance, which is accused of forgetting the very people they are supposed to be fighting for. There’s a lot of patriotism on display, of course, but while that would be expected in this kind of setting, the show overdoes it. So we get more than one speech with inspirational music swelling in the background, either between the heroes or against the bad guys. The problem is not what’s being said, but rather how it’s being said. It’s all too didactic, repetitive, and heavy-handed, as if the series doesn’t trust its audience to get it.

As for the characters themselves, the standout is Tae-sung and not in a good way. At first, it looked like he might be an interesting protagonist. Here is a self-proclaimed survivor, the owner of a pawnshop, which is a traditionally predatory, unsympathetic occupation, someone who trades in information, and uses his connections with his people’s oppressor to maintain a privileged lifestyle. His character arc was clear - he was going to learn how to care about others and risk everything to do the right thing for the first time in his life, and all because he fell in love. Sure, it’s obvious, unoriginal, and a bit corny, but it’s worked many times before and could’ve worked again if done right. However, the series not only goes about it in a very frustrating way, but it also keeps adding stuff and pushing him centre stage until Tae-sung crosses the line into Mary Sue territory. So, besides having a network of informants and connections, he’s also an expert fighter and sharp shooter capable of killing professional armed soldiers with a single shot even while wounded. The height of absurdity when it comes to Tae-sung’s abilities was him pulling a rickshaw containing 2 grown men across town after having been beaten and stabbed by the samurai gang. Oh, and he’s also willing to martyr himself, of course. It’s just too much. And then the show botches his character arc with some weird choices. The moment Jun-taek realized how truly helpless he was made sense - he’s been caught in a secluded place by the army, and not just any army unit, but one helping 2 mad scientists conduct horrible experiments. This isn’t the police, which would be more easily impressed by his father’s position and with whom he’d been dealing all his life. There’s a change in setting that he’s totally unprepared for and which provides a harsh dose of reality. Tae-sung, however, has that same realization when a police officer refuses to stop the samurai gang from attacking him. This was ridiculous. Even more ridiculous, the officers following him just watch. Tae-sung, like Jun-taek’s father, is useful to the Japanese, and at the time this happened he was doing Ishikawa’s bidding and looking for Myeong-ja. Those samurai are exactly the type of people he should’ve been protected from and who would’ve been eagerly awaiting his fall from grace so they could treat him like any other Korean. It felt forced. Something that felt even more forced was his argument with Chae-ok about helping the child prisoners. If it had been adult prisoners, it might’ve worked, but children? And children who were being used as guinea pigs in crazy medical experiments at that? Come on, there’s no way he would’ve refused to help them! Then, after this token display of Tae-sung’s less altruistic nature, the show rushes through his character development and has him not just immediately cave in, but also take charge, even though he just got there. This isn’t enough, though. In one of several instances where the traditional resistance gets berated for their narrow-mindedness, Mrs Nawa, who in the first episode had complained about Mr Gu always paying more than the objects were worth, points out how Tae-sung had been helping everyone all along - in fact, he helped his people more than anyone. Even the flashback of his mother telling him to be a survivor felt like an odd attempt to soften the character. Surely just seeing her be taken away because of her association with the rebels and spending his whole life under a brutal occupation regime would’ve been enough to make him want to look after himself and the ones closest to him first. But no, instead he’s just following his mother’s instructions… So, there was no development? Well, there’s that bit near the end of the series where he decides not to hide his commitment to his people anymore and finally ends his connection with Lady Maeda thus losing her protection, which will lead to the loss of all his money and belongings in the future. That counts, right? He also starts to feel a little superfluous after finding Myeong-ja. Well, maybe not superfluous, but certainly not worthy of all that screentime, especially that montage of all the times he declared himself a survivor. Honestly, we kept watching the series in spite of Tae-sung.

The other characters get to stick to their areas of expertise with more evenly distributed screentime and better structured storylines + character development, which had much better results. Chae-ok’s fighting and parkour skills were impressive and we liked of how connected she and her father were to the hospital plot. Not just because of Seishin, but also for having already seen some of what happened in Manchuria. In a way, there was no need for Tae-sung after their original agreement to find Myeong-ja and Sashimoto was fulfilled, as there was even a connection to Lady Maeda who turns out to have sent Chae-ok's mother to Ichiro just like she did with Myeong-ja. By the way we really want to know more about that past friendship with Chae-ok’s mother. What was the betrayal? She didn’t even know that she had a family so how close could they possibly have been? And how was she even friends with a Korean in the first place? Or is it the opposite of Myeong-ja/Akiko and Seishin was actually a Japanese woman who got herself a Korean name? Lady Maeda was a good villain, even if much of her villainous doings happened offscreen. We weren’t happy with the addition of jealousy over Tae-sung to her motivation - it’s such a lame choice for a female character - but at least she got to unleash an army of ninjas on him and Chae-ok. We wish we could’ve seen more of her partnership with Kato, though that was too much creepy in one room. Kato himself was a great main villain and we wouldn’t be surprised if his fascination with his creation sparked one or two fanfics in dark corners of the Internet. Ichiro had the lab, but apart from his attempt at playing Pavlov with the creature and Sashimoto’s flashback, he didn’t do much as an actual scientist/doctor. Ishikawa was a good mid-level villain, and he ended up getting the bloodiest ending, which, when you think about it, was almost a collaboration between his mistress and his wife. Poor Myeong-ja couldn’t catch a break. First locked in the hospital and then taken over by a parasite. Sure, we got more gory scenes, but still. And of course, the only guy around when she goes into labour is an evil scientist… We also liked Mrs Nawa, her motherly relationship with Tae-sung and her more realistic perspective.

We very much preferred the non-romantic connections between characters to Tae-sung/Chae-ok’s romance. Tae-sung’s friendship with Jun-taek unfortunately got short shrift. What’s the point of spending screentime to establish it, and then reduce Jun-taek’s admission of betrayal to a brief flashback scene where he apologizes with barely any reaction from Tae-sung? It’s a shame the series decided to focus so much on the Tae-sung/Chae-ok pairing. With each episode lasting over an hour it’s not as if there wasn’t room for anything else. It didn’t help that their chemistry wasn’t great, and neither did the way their interactions were written. They were a little too awkward and most of it was coming from Tae-sung, which was weird. We get that the series wanted to emphasize how this was the first time he fell in love, but we would’ve expected it more from Chae-ok, who likely had had very little opportunities for romance until then. The only way that relationship worked for us was as a representation of the normal life she wanted to have and could’ve had but rejected in favour of getting some sort of revenge. Apart from that, it just got in the way. It was really annoying to see the 2 have a Moment in the midst of a dangerous situation. There are enemy soldiers looking for them and a brain-sucking creature running around and they stop to gaze into each other’s eyes? Really? And it happened more than once! Another instance of the romance taking precedence when it really shouldn't have was when Chae-ok didn't tell her father what she had found out about her mother in the 4 days she spent desperately awaiting Tae-sung’s return, because, apparently, sitting outside The House of Golden Treasure was more important. And then father and daughter barely talk about it because Tae-sung is back and the series would rather spend time recreating his and Chae-ok’s first encounter.

We had some issues with the way the show was structured. There were several unnecessary flashbacks. For instance, we didn’t need to see exactly how the prisoners got out of the truck without anyone noticing - it was obvious the street party was to give them cover if anyone followed them from the hospital and that was all that was needed. The only situation where this kind of reveal worked was when we were shown why Jun-taek really wanted to go with Tae-sung to the hospital and it connected with something that had happened in the first episode. The flashback to how Mrs Nawol and young Tae-sung met outside the jail was good, and so was the one about Sashimoto being hired. The flashback showing how Tae-sung was given the rickshaw driver’s jacket and hat on the other hand was very much not. Most events could’ve been shown in chronological order, and the tendency to move back and forth can become confusing and even undermine some scenes. For instance, it’s difficult to fear for Chae-ok’s life during her and Kato’s second meeting when you know that the creature is going to eventually jump through the bars in the cell’s ceiling and put a stop to it. Other confusing, non flashback-related moments, were Kato apparently giving Chae-ok a cup with a Najin only not really - though later someone does drink from that cup and there’s a little suspense around who it was - and when it seems Chae-ok was killed after attacking Ichiro. It did look like she’d been shot on the head, but then she turns out to be alive and with no gunshot wounds. This made the second death fakeout in the season finale pretty annoying.

The ending certainly leaves a lot of room for a second season, though we’re not sure what to think about the time jump to the present. It feels like a very bad idea, but maybe it’s not our present but a future changed by the Najin? Or maybe the characters that took the parasite are still alive? Did Sashimoto perhaps turn his sketches into a manga everyone thinks is fiction but someone decides to investigate decades later? Well, at least the flashbacks will be needed and useful this time.

VERDICT

While it has some issues, Gyeongseong Creature is mostly good, starting with the opening credits that essentially show the story of Patient 0. Personally, we preferred the hospital segments, which also contained their dose of patriotism, and found the dealing with the wider aspects of occupation segments better in smaller doses. The central romance is pretty meh, the series can sometimes be a little too melodramatic, and Tae-sung becomes ever more annoying as the series progresses. However, the other characters, like Chae-ok and Kato, compensate for it, as do the horror and sci-fi elements.