Kingdom - Netflix Series

Kingdom | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Netflix

Another series about Korean royalty a thousand years ago, but this time with zombies. We started watching this once before, but the zombie business turned us off. Since then we have watched The Last of Us, which acclimated us to the whole zombie edifice, so now we are more accepting of weird tales.

It all starts when the royal physician attempts to bring the recently deceased king back to life using an acupuncture needle dipped in a potion derived from the 'resurrection plant'. It brings him back to life, but as a crazed monster craving human flesh. The monster king attacks the physician's assistant and kills him. The physician puts his assistant in a coffin and carries him back to his clinic. All the people at the clinic are slowly starving to death due to the general famine. One wise guy gets the idea to cut up the dead body and make soup to feed all the people. The female doctor and her assistant are out in the woods gathering herbs, so they don't get any of the soup. They get back to the compound just in time to see all the people turn into monsters. Evidently the wise guy doesn't eat any of the soup because he doesn't turn into a monster.

So now the disease is spreading, a nearby town is destroyed and the monsters are running loose across the countryside. The only saving grace is that they become comatose during the daylight hours.

The show is full of reminders of how bad things used to be. Besides plague and famine we also have slavery, torture and psychopathic idiots in charge. Okay, that last one is still with us. I imagine there could have been an epidemic of rabies a thousand years ago and it might look a whole lot like a plague of zombies.

The show has several scenes with hordes of zombies running amok and it struck me that it looked just like a modern day riot, which says something about rioters.

P. S. The setting is more like 500 years ago, not 1,000. Besides the usual Samurai swords, bows, arrows and spears, some of the soldiers had matchlock rifles.

The whole point of reviving the King was to keep him alive until the Queen gave birth to what she hoped would be a boy. If she could also dispose of the Crown Prince (her step son), she would be the acting ruler of the kingdom until her son came of age. Actually, she would be a puppet for her father.

But the Queen has a miscarriage. She conceals the miscarriage and collects half a dozen pregnant women and sequesters them in some spare room in her personal palace. Her plan is to wait until the women give birth and collect a boy baby (surely with that many women at least one will give birth to a boy) and claim him as her own. Once that happened, all the other women and babies were executed. Seems unbelievable that someone could be so vile, but if history has taught us anything it's that there is no limit to human depravity.