TV Review: Gyeongseong Creature Season 2

Netflix’s horror K-drama Gyeongseong Creature is back for a second season and we already watched all of it. Season 2 is shorter - only 7 episodes - and takes place in 2024, so nearly a century after the events of Season 1 (reviewed here). The time jump should’ve meant a big change, but unfortunately, the show doesn’t seem interested in actually changing things. This is our review, and needless to say, there will be SPOILERS.

Thanks to the Najin inside her, Chae-ok is alive and hasn’t aged a day. She’s still working as a sleuth, but a new case puts her on a collision course with Seung-jo, a killer with abilities similar to her own, and Ho-jae, another PI who looks exactly like her lost love, Jang Tae-sung. There’s also a shady company, Jeonseung Biotech, that carried on with Kato’s experiments with the Najin, and an old enemy whose thirst for vengeance will never end.

Despite the time jump, there were some characters we were expecting to see again because of the Najin: Chae-ok, Akiko’s son, and possibly Lady Maeda. There was also the possibility that, like any good mad scientist, Kato could have experimented on himself. However, someone who had no business still being alive was Jang Tae-sung. A descendant looking exactly like him, as descendants are wont to in movies/TV? Sure; but not that same character. Since he and his romance with Chae-ok were our least favourite bits of Season 1, we were eagerly awaiting for a Tae-sung-less season. The people behind this had other plans, though. Not only did Ho-jae turn out to be Tae-sung, but he also quickly became the centre of the show with everything and everyone taking a backseat to his story and his and Chae-ok’s romance… including Chae-ok herself.

The reason for how Jang Tae-sung could possibly still be around was as convoluted as you’d expect, and screwed over what could’ve been a great villain. Lady Maeda naturally chose to take the Najin Kato offered her at the end of the previous season, and was not only healed from her injuries, but also stopped ageing. She and Kato founded Jeonseung Biotech, and she brought up Akiko’s son in the cold, demanding manner you’d expect. Eternal life hasn’t made her any nicer, and getting everything she wanted made her even more destructive. However, while she’s granted a couple of musings, like what happens when there’s no one to remember you, the show isn’t interested in her character beyond her role as a plot device to keep Tae-sung. So, poor Lady Maeda must remain on Scorned Woman mode. After the end of the war, she had her ninjas beat up Tae-sung, destroy the pawnshop, kill Mr Gu and Beom-o, and beat Mrs Nawol. Then, she gave Tae-sung a Najin and left him with an injured Mrs Nawol (Episode 5). The flashback was painful, but it didn’t make our feelings towards Tae-sung any less negative. That the show actually had her give him permission to kill her didn’t help. In fact, it was as if the show went out of its way to avoid any of the nastier consequences of the Najin when it came to Tae-sung. When he gets reinfected, even though he had just remembered his life as a Najin-carrier and had his injuries healed by the parasite, he just goes straight to fighting, defeating a bunch of human and Najin-infected fighters, with no tendril in sight. Compare this to the flashback in Episode 2 in which the recently infected Chae-ok realizes she massacred a whole village, and her struggle with the Najin’s hunger in Episode 3 which involves drugs and was after she had been living with it for nearly a century. But back to Lady Maeda’s devious revenge plan that conveniently allowed the show to keep a character that should’ve already been dead or close to it. Well, we didn’t see much of it, but apparently it involved allowing Tae-sung to maintain his connections with his still living friends and their descendants, including those in the police, gain enough influence over Akiko’s son to turn him against his adoptive mother, and learn of Jeonseung Biotech’s nefarious experiments. Oh, but see, she hates him so much that after she found out he had been planning to blow up all the secret labs, she had him captured and his Najin removed, which caused amnesia, and later… agreed to let him out again and live freely as Ho-jae under the care of Yong-gil, who’s the grandson of Jun-taek, Tae-sung’s rebel friend. Seriously? Seriously? We don’t add emojis to this type of post, but if we did, there’d be eye-rolling ones EVERYWHERE. She can’t even shoot him in the end, FFS. Pathetic. Oh, and no, at no point do we learn what exactly happened between her and Chae-ok’s mother.

Chae-ok starts well, though we found it hard to believe that she wouldn’t have noticed that a biotech company was built in the exact same spot as where the Ongseong Hospital used to be. She’s still a good fighter, but not invincible, and with the Najin side effects, it’s clear that her superhuman abilities come with a steep price. But there’s more than just physical changes - for her, the inability to die means loneliness. She still thinks fondly of her time with Tae-sung, and if their romance had been limited to flashbacks we would’ve been fine with it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The problem with their love story and Tae-sung himself isn’t just that we don’t like the character - it’s that they basically take over everything. So, while on one hand, Chae-ok can kick a lot of ass, on the other hand, she must also be severely injured and captured more than once to allow Tae-sung to play hero. By contrast, he can fall off a second floor onto the hard pavement below, with no long-lasting consequences even without the Najin. By the way, the scene of Chae-ok pushing him out of the window for his own safety was hilarious. As his importance increases, hers decreases and in the season finale, she’s reduced to a damsel in distress. After being captured and taken to Jeonseung Biotech, she has the Najin forced out of her, which leaves her powerless and amnesiac. Yes, she wanted a normal life, but she didn’t get the chance to choose, which would’ve actually made for an interesting dilemma - get rid of the parasite and all its benefits and downsides, but lose her sweet memories of Tae-sung, or keep on living like that? It would’ve also made for a good contrast to Tae-sung’s insistence on the importance of not forgetting all the evils that had been done. Later, we see her put on makeup to go out, have breakfast with Tae-sung’s elderly informant, who may or may not be related to the barmaid from the Moonlight Bar from Season 1 (framed photos were shown, but we didn’t look closely enough and honestly didn’t feel like re-watching any part of this), and leave to go to ‘school’, which we’re guessing means university. The only memory fragment she retained? The ghost of a man she chases in her dreams. After she thinks this, she locks eyes with Tae-sung. We didn’t think it was possible for this romance to get more annoying, but it did.

Akiko’s son, Seung-jo, who would’ve been the obvious candidate for new male lead if the show hadn’t decided to keep the old one, spends most of the season following Tae-sung around, trying to jog his memories. He’s also been killing people, including Chae-ok’s friend/assistant, but for some reason, Tae-sung doesn’t seem to care. His motivation is as dumb as Lady Maeda’s. He turned to Tae-sung for the affection and support he couldn’t get from his adoptive mother, but then started hating him because he realized he’s a sociopath and will never be able to live the normal life he was shown. However, he still tries to kill Chae-ok so Tae-sung won’t have to kill her like Lady Maeda had planned. He also helps them escape the first time they’re captured by Jeonseung Biotech. Are we supposed to think all of this was part of an intricate plan? Because it just looks like a mess. What little we see of Seung-jo and Lady Maeda’s relationship looks far more interesting than Tae-sung and Chae-ok’s love story, but the show waits until Episode 6 to give the audience some flashbacks. This lack of screentime undermines their confrontation in Episode 7, which should’ve been a lot more meaningful.

The other new characters don’t do much. Jeonseung Biotech created Najin-infected fighters called Kuroko, and the main one, Kuroko 1, oversees the nefarious happenings at the company. He was created by Kato specifically to protect it and its mission, and for most of the show, we see him do just that. He even threatens the Chairman, Kato’s son, and is willing to kill Lady Maeda for messing things up with her Tae-sung obsession. Seung-jo also accuses him of having a plan, so it looks like there may be a little purge in the future. And then, in the end of Episode 6, there’s a flashback that shows him with a paralyzed woman he promises to heal with a Najin, and later we see that same woman waiting, staring at one of water tanks where the transplants occur. To make matters worse, Kuroko 1 just leaves after Tae-sung disappears with Chae-ok a second time. What was that? Is the show incapable of coming up with non romantic motivations for the characters? The Chairman may be Kato’s son, but he doesn’t do anything and is pretty much useless. The police detectives, Captain Yuh and Noh Ji-su, were pointless, and Yong-gil is a mess. First he’s Ho-jae’s friend, then it looks like he’s spying on him for Lady Maeda and lets Chae-ok be taken, and finally, he turns out to really be Tae-sung’s friend who is helping the bad guys so they’ll leave him alone. The show could’ve at least have them talk about it, but didn’t. Honestly, it felt like the show just needed someone for Tae-sung to interact with, and then didn’t really know what to do with him. There’s also the elderly informant’s grandson, Jong-hyeok, who takes part in an experiment at Jeonseung Biotech, gets infected with a Najin, is released by Seung-jo, and ends up going on an off-screen rampage. The show clearly expects the audience to care about him because of his leg and the doting grandmother, but it was all so obvious that it didn’t work on us. We also didn’t like how he barely had any reaction to the news that he had killed 3 people apart from worrying about going to jail. Really, the problem is that none of these characters is properly developed, so it’s hard to care about them.

Season 2 does that same thing Season 1 did, in which things are shown out of chronological order in situations where there was no need for it. However, since the plot is a lot simpler here, there are only a couple of opportunities for that. One of the times this happened, it was pretty confusing. Chae-ok shows up at Ho-jae’s place to say she agrees to work with him, but in the next episode, we see her still dealing with the Najin, who’s pretty hungry after healing her. We first wondered if there were clones now, but then realized it was just an unnecessary structural flourish. Another time, was when Chae-ok and Tae-sung were trying to escape Jeonseung Biotech and Seung-jo found them. This cut to Kuroko 1 finding him injured and being told where the 2 fugitives had gone. It was so obvious Seung-jo was lying that there was no need to show the 3 coming up with a plan. Yet, that was exactly what happened. There were also a few unnecessary flashbacks to stuff that had occurred recently because the show seems to have zero trust in its audience’s memory. The level of gore and violence was disappointingly low when compared to Season 1. Thanks to the Kuroko, Tae-sung and Chae-ok get an army of faceless opponents to punch, kick, and stab in several fights, but none of these is particularly memorable.

VERDICT

To say that the second season of Gyeongseong Creature was not as good as the first one would be an understatement. Where Season 1 had multiple plots and well developed characters, Season 2 reduced everything to The Jang Tae-sung Show. We had already complained about his prominence in our other review, but Season 2 went further, with the added bonus of a convoluted explanation for him still being around. Everything about the character was ridiculous and made no sense; and unlike Season 1, there was nothing to balance it all out. Lady Maeda being an embarrassment as a villain would have been easier to accept if there’d been another Kato, but neither Seung-jo, whose motivation also involved Tae-sung, nor Kuroko 1, much less the barely there Chairman managed to fill that role. The good guys didn’t fare any better. There was no equivalent of the The House of Golden Treasure family, Jun-taek, or the tragedies of Chae-ok’s family and Akiko. Despite her screentime, Chae-ok herself felt too much like an outsider in a story that should’ve been hers as well, and while she got to kick some ass, her role was mainly being Tae-sung’s love interest. The ending upped the stakes for a third season, if it’s ever made, but Season 2 made it perfectly clear what the priorities are and we won’t be coming back.