Spoilers for both seasons of Kingdom and Kingdom: Ashin of the North.
The Tease Was Enough
When Kingdom was first teased as a Korean period zombie drama, I did not need a long explanation. Joseon court politics, dynastic paranoia and a plague moving through a hungry countryside made an immediately convincing combination. I was already interested in the setting; the promise of the dead running through it settled the matter.
I watched both seasons during their original run, and I still remember the pleasure of discovering that the pitch could sustain a proper drama. The period setting shaped who held power, who was believed and how far anyone could travel before nightfall. Even the elaborate hats, which acquired their own following, belonged to a world whose social divisions the story made painfully clear. What might have been a novelty turned out to have considerable weight.
Season one arrived in January 2019, season two followed on 13 March 2020, and the feature-length special Kingdom: Ashin of the North arrived on 23 July 2021. The wait since then needs a little precision. Checked on 25 September 2026, Netflix’s catalogue still lists two seasons; I could find no official third-season announcement, release date or formal cancellation notice. A February 2025 report discussing Ju Ji-hoon’s comments offered hope, but an actor’s interest is not a production order. The uncertainty is real, even if the reasons for it are less clear than the confident headlines suggest.
That is the part that still irritates me. I am too old and too tired to shout at a streaming platform as though it were a faulty kettle, but there is a nagging frustration in loving a show that has plainly prepared another chapter and then being left waiting for it. I can describe that as Netflix leaving the story in the dark without pretending to know what happened in its commissioning meetings.
A Royal Corpse Behind the Screen
The premise begins with a king nobody is allowed to see. The court says he is ill, Crown Prince Lee Chang is kept away from his father, and rumours travel through Hanyang more freely than reliable information. Beneath the silk, rank and carefully controlled palace language, the royal household is concealing something it cannot afford to acknowledge.
The opening works because the king’s condition is immediately useful to the people surrounding him. The Cho clan, led by Lord Cho Hak-ju, needs his authority to continue while ensuring that he cannot exercise it himself. The queen’s supposed pregnancy offers the prospect of an heir who could displace Lee Chang, the king’s son by a concubine. Chang has a recognised claim, but the possibility of a queen’s son makes that position precarious. His exclusion from the sickroom is part of a struggle over who will control the succession.
That is where Kingdom separates itself from lesser zombie stories. The plague does not simply arrive from nowhere and ruin a stable society. It exposes a society already arranged like dry timber. Hunger is everywhere. Class cruelty is everywhere. Officials are more afraid of losing status than losing people. The disease does not create the moral collapse. It gives the moral collapse a face.
The infected are frightening partly because their movements seem to outrun any remaining connection to the people they were. They twitch, stumble and accelerate, pouring through doors and over one another with a momentum that makes a crowded room feel suddenly much smaller. There is little room for negotiation or theatrical menace. Once the movement begins, the practical question is how long a door, wall or human body can hold.
The first season’s shift from palace suspicion to full rural nightmare is beautifully handled. The discovery at Jiyulheon, the bodies, the medical confusion, Seo-bi trying to understand what has happened, the awful realisation that the dead are not staying dead — it all has the horrible clarity of a nightmare that has just worked out its own rules. The eventual discovery that temperature, rather than daylight alone, governs their activity makes those early assumptions dangerous. The characters have survived long enough to form a theory, only to discover how much that theory has missed.
Hunger Was Always the Real Monster
Kim Eun-hee’s background idea for Kingdom matters because it gives the series its spine. She has spoken about finding the zombie image sad as well as frightening: living beings reduced to appetite. She connected that with the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty and periods of famine, imagining a society where hunger itself becomes monstrous. In the same interview, she described how difficult the project had once seemed within the Korean TV industry, before Netflix and the post-Train to Busan appetite for Korean zombie storytelling made it more possible. (Korean Film Council)
Kim Eun-hee’s writing also benefits from direction that takes the period drama seriously. Kim Seong-hun established the first season’s visual world, and Park In-je joined the second season’s directing team. The series’ principal creative credits bring together those three names. The resulting tension comes as much from a controlled exchange inside a room as from what happens when that room can no longer be secured.
Kingdom is direct about hunger, and the outbreak at Jiyulheon gives that theme its most distressing expression. Starving patients are unknowingly fed infected human flesh because Yeong-shin is desperate to give them something to eat. The infection already has a history involving the resurrection plant and abuses of power; this particular catastrophe spreads through a population whose deprivation makes it vulnerable. The meal intended to keep people alive becomes another consequence of the kingdom’s neglect.
This is where the series feels closest to the older social tradition of horror. The monster is not only outside the gate. The monster is also the gate, the law, the tax, the court order, the family registry, the guarded storehouse, the man in clean robes deciding who gets to live long enough to matter.
Lee Chang’s arc works because he learns kingship from the underside. He begins as a prince with a claim and a grievance. He becomes something more interesting by being forced to move through the country his court has failed. He sees bodies, hunger, loyalty, cowardice, sacrifice, and the difference between ruling people and being responsible for them. It is not a sentimental education. The dead make poor tutors.
Lee Chang: The Prince Who Has to Earn the Frame
Ju Ji-hoon gives Lee Chang the right combination of arrogance, decency, fear, and growing moral seriousness. He looks the part immediately: composed, sharp, framed beautifully in court dress and later in rougher travelling clothes. But the performance works because Lee Chang is not simply noble from the start. He has to be knocked out of princely abstraction.
At first, Chang’s crisis is personal and political: he wants to see his father, discover what the Cho clan is hiding and survive the accusation of treason forming around him. The journey south forces him to confront a country that cannot be understood from the palace. Dongnae, the clinic and the people he meets there make his claim to rule feel increasingly inseparable from the obligation to help.
By season two, Lee Chang is much closer to the leader he should be, and the show does not cheapen that by making him purely heroic. He is still trapped inside dynastic logic. Bloodline matters. Legitimacy matters. The court will not suddenly become decent because the prince has had a difficult week. But he begins to understand that power without obligation is just a better-dressed form of predation.
His decision to step away from the throne is one of the show’s sharpest choices. The child he permits to become king is Mu-yeong’s son, whom the queen has passed off as her own. Chang refuses to secure his position by killing an innocent baby and accepts his own disappearance from the official account of events. The resulting stability rests on a false royal bloodline, which gives the ending a more uncomfortable texture than the straightforward restoration of a rightful heir.
He survives with a different purpose, pursuing the origins of the plague alongside Seo-bi and Yeong-shin. I find that a convincing destination for someone whose education has taken place beyond the palace walls, even if the invitation to a further season has become frustrating with time. The northern investigation feels like the beginning of another story because that is precisely how the ending presents it.
Seo-bi and the Value of Paying Attention
Bae Doona’s Seo-bi is one of the reasons Kingdom works as well as it does. In a lesser version, the physician character would exist to explain symptoms, look worried over bodies, and occasionally provide emotional softness around the male hero. Seo-bi is more important than that. She is the show’s intelligence made practical.
Seo-bi’s great strength is her attention. While men of rank issue orders, conceal evidence and accuse one another, she studies wounds, changes in temperature, plants, water and the behaviour of the infected. Her work gradually gives the survivors something more useful than rumour. In a society that routinely overlooks her, she is the person making the observations on which everyone else’s survival depends.
I like that the show gives her courage without turning her into an action figure. She is brave because she keeps working in conditions that would make most people run until their lungs gave up. She stays with the sick. She tests ideas. She survives not through invulnerability but through persistence.
Her relationship with Lee Chang is also wisely handled. There is respect, urgency, and shared purpose without the show suddenly deciding that what this plague-ridden political nightmare really needs is a romance subplot. Thank you, everyone involved. Sometimes the best chemistry is two competent people trying not to be eaten.
Seo-bi also represents the show’s resistance to fatalism. Kingdom is full of people who accept hierarchy as nature and suffering as background noise. Seo-bi does not have the luxury of remaking the world, but she insists that knowledge matters. The resurrection plant is not magic in the airy, mystical sense. It has properties. It has a mechanism. It can be misunderstood, misused, weaponised. That makes the horror more interesting, because it sits somewhere between folklore and epidemiology.
The worm reveal in season two, with the infection’s behaviour connected to temperature, water, and parasitic life, could have been clumsy. Instead, it expands the rules without draining the fear. The monster becomes more knowable, but not less dangerous. Anyone who has ever fixed one problem only to discover three worse ones will recognise the mood.
Yeong-shin, Mu-yeong, and the People Outside the Palace
Kim Sung-kyu’s Yeong-shin is one of the show’s most useful characters because he carries the damage of the wider world into the main story. He is not courtly. He is not polished. He is suspicious, capable, angry, and shaped by war and hunger. He knows what the ruling class can do because he has lived near the consequences.
Yeong-shin’s decision to feed the patients at Jiyulheon is especially painful because it arises from an immediate need he recognises all too well. He does not understand the infection he is passing on. Kim Sung-kyu lets that desperation remain part of the character even as his practical skills make him indispensable to the group. His usefulness with a weapon never quite separates him from the damage that brought him there.
Mu-yeong, played by Kim Sang-ho, brings a different weight. He is loyal, warm, funny when the show needs a human crack in the dread, and ultimately tragic. His betrayal is not born from grand villainy but from pressure, family, and fear. That makes it hurt more. Kingdom is good at showing how corruption travels through ordinary needs. People do not always betray because they are evil. Sometimes they betray because someone more powerful has found the one thing they cannot risk losing.
Cho Beom-pal also deserves mention because he could easily have been useless comic relief. He is cowardly, privileged, and frequently ridiculous. But Jeon Seok-ho gives him enough softness and confusion to keep him human. His attachment to Seo-bi, his terror, and his gradual stumbling into decency make him one of the show’s sly pleasures. Not everyone can be a hero. Sometimes survival begins with a man realising, very late, that the people beneath him are not furniture.
Lord Cho, the Queen, and the Rot in Fine Clothing
Ryu Seung-ryong’s Lord Cho Hak-ju is a magnificent political predator. He never needs to froth. He understands that the most frightening people in power are often calm because the room has already been arranged for their benefit. He treats the king’s infected body as a tool, his daughter’s pregnancy as dynastic leverage, and the suffering of commoners as an administrative inconvenience.
The frightening thing about Cho Hak-ju is not that he wants power. It is that he sees no meaningful distinction between power and order. He is the kind of man who can justify any horror if it preserves the structure that keeps him at the centre. In that sense, the zombie king behind the screen is the perfect image of his politics: dead authority animated just enough to keep everyone kneeling.
Kim Hye-jun’s Queen Cho is a different sort of threat. She begins as a young woman whose power appears derivative: daughter of Cho Hak-ju, wife of the king, potential mother of an heir. But she becomes increasingly chilling because she learns the machinery around her and then uses it with a coldness that almost outpaces her father. The false pregnancy, the stolen baby, the murder of mothers and infants — these are not merely melodramatic twists. They are the logic of bloodline politics stripped of decoration.
Season two’s palace climax, where the queen unleashes the infected inside the royal residence rather than surrender power, is beautifully grotesque. The court spends the series treating the plague as something that happens elsewhere, to peasants and provincial bodies. Then the dead crash into the centre of authority. Silk, rank, and ritual do not matter much when the floor is full of teeth.
Hats, Blood, Snow, and the Pleasure of Texture
A large part of Kingdom’s appeal is the weight and texture of its world. Mud clings to clothing, paper screens filter light, and the polish of the palace sits uneasily beside crowded clinics and exhausted bodies. The production can be handsome without feeling scrubbed clean. Even a quiet composition seems to contain evidence of how somebody lives.
The production design understands contrast. The palace is controlled, symmetrical, and suffocating. The countryside is open but unsafe. The infected bodies break both spaces. A zombie in a field is frightening because it can run. A zombie in the palace is frightening because the architecture suddenly becomes a trap.
The global fascination with the gat became one of those unexpected streaming-era side effects: a piece of historical Korean dress turning into international visual shorthand because a zombie drama made it look impossibly cool. Ju Ji-hoon discussed how non-Korean viewers became fascinated with tangible costume elements such as the gat and dopo, while Korean viewers were also responding to the drama’s use of historical dialect. Costume designer Kwon Yoo-jin has said the goal was to emphasise Korean beauty and colour while also showing common people’s lives as full of struggle and sweat. (Korean Culture)
The costumes help organise the story before anyone speaks. Rank and labour are visible in the cut, condition and silhouette of the clothing, while the imposing shapes worn by the elite make the exhaustion of everyone else harder to ignore. As a designer, I appreciate how much information the frame carries through these ordinary material differences. The visual system holds together even when the people inside it begin to panic.
The zombies themselves are also designed with discipline. The body movement is vicious, folded, snapping, almost insect-like at times. Their speed gives the action a dreadful urgency, but it is the mass behaviour that stays with me: bodies stacking, pressing, tumbling, a wave of hunger turning human architecture into kindling.
The Sound of Something Coming
The music and sound design of Kingdom do not announce themselves in the way some fantasy scores do. There is no big theme I find myself humming while making tea. That is not a criticism. The show’s sound works more like pressure in the walls.
The drums, strings, groaning textures, and sudden silences create the sense that something is always about to break through. Often, what I remember is not melody but rhythm: feet, breath, doors, distant screams, bodies moving just beyond the frame. The show uses quiet well, especially before the infected wake. Those pauses matter. Horror needs silence the way design needs negative space. Without it, everything becomes noise.
The action scenes also have a strong physical rhythm. The night attacks in Dongnae, the barricade sequences, the desperate movement through courtyards and rooftops, the chaos around the frozen palace — they all work because the editing keeps geography mostly legible. You understand where people are, where danger is coming from, and why a bad decision will cost lives. That sounds basic, but plenty of expensive genre television forgets it.
The Ending That Opened North
Season two gives the central political conflict substantial closure while deliberately leaving the wider story unsettled. The palace outbreak destroys the Cho clan’s hold on the throne, Chang withdraws from the official succession, and Mu-yeong’s child survives under an invented royal identity. Seven years later, the kingdom appears to have recovered. The glimpse of a parasite beneath the young king’s skin, however, makes that recovery less secure than it looks.
The investigation then moves north, where the circulation of the resurrection plant suggests a threat extending beyond the palace conspiracy. Ashin’s appearance, played by Jun Ji-hyun, gives the final moments their sense of dread and possibility. Someone else understands the plant, and the series is preparing to ask what that knowledge means in the hands of a person with little reason to protect Joseon.
Kingdom: Ashin of the North steps backwards to explore that history. It is slower, colder and more tragic than the main series, and I admire it more than I love it. Jun Ji-hyun gives Ashin a wounded stillness that makes her actions feel rooted in what has happened to her and her community. After the momentum of season two, though, the change of direction is difficult to separate from the wait for a continuation. I wanted to follow the investigation; the special asked me to understand the person waiting at its end.
The special does deepen the world. In a July 2021 interview with Yonhap, Kim Eun-hee connected Ashin’s story to political suffering, marginalisation and han, a deeply held mixture of sorrow and resentment. She discussed the special as preparation for a possible third season centred more closely on people denied power. That creative intention helps explain why the film feels like an opening, but it should not be mistaken for confirmation that another season was commissioned.
Source Material, or the Bones Beneath the Body
Kingdom is connected to the comic The Kingdom of the Gods, though the relationship is looser than some people might expect. VIZ describes the comic as the work that inspired the Netflix zombie series, crediting it as created by In-Wan Youn, story by Eun-hee Kim, and art by Kyung-Il Yang. The comic premise also involves a war-and-famine-ravaged Joseon, a young prince, a dangerous journey, and the horrifying discovery that humans are not the only threat. (Viz)
The television series builds a dense political and medical investigation around that broad combination of famine, royalty and the undead. I would not treat the comic and the series as interchangeable accounts of the same events: even the publisher’s synopsis names a different prince and travelling companion. The connection is useful background, while the court conspiracy, Seo-bi’s research and the northern storyline need to be considered on the terms the screen version establishes.
What interests me about that relationship is the room it leaves for expansion. A dangerous journey through a hungry kingdom can support different characters and different dramatic emphases. The series gives its setting enough social detail that the plague feels embedded in the country’s existing wounds, rather than simply laid over an attractive historical backdrop.
Why It Worked So Well
What I loved was how closely the different parts of the series worked together. The political manoeuvring affected the response to the outbreak, the design made social divisions legible, and the rules of infection gave the action practical consequences. Across two six-episode seasons, there was usually enough movement to sustain the tension without making the characters feel like passengers between set pieces.
It is also one of the rare zombie stories that found a fresh visual grammar without pretending to reinvent the entire genre. Zombies are old machinery now. We know the beats: infection, denial, outbreak, barricade, betrayal, sacrifice, grim lesson about humanity. Kingdom knows them too, but the Joseon setting changes the movement. Guns are limited. Roads matter. Messages travel slowly. Class hierarchy affects who is believed and who is abandoned. The architecture of palaces, clinics, villages, and fortresses shapes survival.
The show also understands that zombie horror becomes dull when everyone is equally doomed. Kingdom keeps shifting the balance between knowledge and panic. Seo-bi learns. Lee Chang adapts. Yeong-shin acts. The villains hide information until the hiding becomes more dangerous than the plague. Each new piece of knowledge changes the story’s practical possibilities. That gradual improvement in their understanding gives the fear a useful counterweight: I can worry about these people while still believing that paying attention might help them.
What Did Not Work, or Worked Less Cleanly
The same economy occasionally costs the drama something. Certain supporting characters arrive, matter and disappear before their losses have much room to settle. I sometimes wanted the series to remain with grief for a little longer, especially because it is otherwise so attentive to the political value placed on different lives. The pace is compelling, but it can move on before the people left behind have caught up.
The queen’s scheme is compelling, but there are moments when the baby-switching machinery feels more melodramatic than the surrounding material. It works because the performances and pacing carry it, but it is one of the few places where I can feel the plot gears clicking.
The position of Ashin of the North has become another complication. Its expansion of the mythology would probably feel different with a continuation beside it. As the only substantial follow-up so far, it asks the audience to invest in another beginning while the earlier one remains unresolved. That is less a failure of the special itself than a consequence of how the available work now sits together.
Kingdom in the Age of Korean Global Television
Watching Kingdom now, it sits at an interesting point in the global spread of Korean screen culture. It arrived before Squid Game became the unavoidable reference point for Netflix Korean originals, and after Train to Busan had already shown international audiences how forcefully Korean zombie storytelling could move. Kim Eun-hee herself linked the changed industry mood around zombie projects to the success of Train to Busan. (Korean Film Council)
Kingdom felt like a sign of things shifting. Not because Korean drama suddenly needed validation from Netflix or Western viewers — that would be a lazy way to frame it — but because the streaming platform made a historical Korean political horror series instantly available to viewers who might previously have stumbled into it only through niche DVD shelves, festival buzz, piracy, or the recommendations of one very determined friend.
It also arrived in that strange period just before and at the beginning of the pandemic. Season two dropped in March 2020, just as much of the world was beginning to understand disease, quarantine, state response, misinformation, and social fragility in less theoretical ways. I do not want to overstate that connection, because Kingdom was not made as a COVID allegory. But timing changes reception. A show about a ruling class mishandling an outbreak while ordinary people suffer was always going to hit differently in 2020. The overlap belongs to the viewing experience, rather than proving that the writers somehow anticipated the particular crisis outside our windows.
The Nostalgia of Something Recent
It feels odd to talk about nostalgia for a show from 2019 and 2020, but streaming culture ages things strangely. Kingdom already feels like it belongs to a slightly different Netflix era: fewer Korean global megahits in the mainstream conversation, less certainty about what international streaming success looked like, and more surprise when something this specific travelled so well.
My nostalgia for it is not childhood nostalgia, obviously. It is not VHS shelves, late-night television, or half-remembered horror films taped off the telly. It is a newer kind of media memory: the memory of being excited by a streaming show before streaming fatigue made every new release feel like another appointment in an endless calendar.
I miss the feeling of Kingdom arriving with such a clear sense of what it wanted to do. Six episodes gave the first season its shape, and the next six developed the consequences without demanding years of preparatory viewing. By the time the world began to widen towards Ashin and the north, I had a reason to follow. The invitation had been earned.
That is what makes the silence awkward. I was ready for Lee Chang and Seo-bi to pursue the origins of the plague, and for Ashin’s history to complicate what they thought they knew. The existing episodes had made those possibilities specific enough to care about. I can still enjoy them, but I cannot quite watch that final turn north as though it were only an atmospheric farewell.
The Thing Still Breathing
I still love Kingdom. The absence of a third season has changed the aftertaste without spoiling the two we have. Season two resolves enough of the central conflict for the series to remain worth returning to, even as it leaves substantial questions beyond the palace. Recommending it now means acknowledging both the satisfaction of that resolution and the uncertainty attached to what follows.
There is an accidental resemblance between the unfinished series and its subject: both are full of things that have been concealed without being settled. I would hesitate to turn that into a defence of the long wait. The story’s unresolved business is interesting because of the people and histories involved, and I would still like to see what the writers intended to do with them.
What remains is a horror drama in which political decisions have a physical cost. Its most memorable images depend as much on where people stand in the social order as on where the infected are approaching from. That is why the setting continues to matter after the initial pleasure of the premise has passed.
The image I return to is the king concealed behind screens, his authority preserved because too many people benefit from the arrangement. Everyone outside must continue to behave as though the office and the body still belong together. Years after watching it, I remember the room almost as clearly as the thing moving inside.
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