The Struggles and Pain of Life

(Minimal spoilers ahead)

This was very, very good.

I’ve been watching kdramas since 2013, when I was a very young person. As I’ve grown and matured I’ve become choosy about the shows I watch. Not just kdramas, any type of show. This was the first shows I’ve watched all the way through in months, to give you an idea of how picky I've become.

Just about everything about Gyeongseong Creature Season 2 was compelling. The commentary about human nature at the core of the story, the action, the CGI, the fluidity between this season and the last. The absolute highlights for me though were the acting and the soundtrack.

I’ve been a fan of Park Seo Joon since I watched him years ago in the movie Chronicles of Evil. If you are a fan, it's worth checking out. It came out in 2015, right around the time he had his breakthrough. Although mostly a side characters, he has one scene where I was truly blown away by the emotional range he displayed. I still sometimes go back and rewatch that scene. His ability to evoke raw, profound emotion is underrated, particularly as his comedic sense and timing is so good. In Gyeongseong Creature, I found myself crying along with him just about every episode. Han So Hee measured up to him well. Her acting didn't pack quite the same punch, but he's got a few more years than her in the industry and in life, and I have no doubt that she is going nowhere but up. I'm looking forward to see how her acting matures in future projects. Also, to be fair to her, Tae Sang/Ho Jae was a more fleshed out character than Chae Ok.

And then the soundtrack! The soundtrack added so much depth. Nothing rips me out of my immersion in a show more than a soundtrack not hitting the right notes. But this season's soundtrack did everything right. The composition's were good enough to conjure emotion on their own, but the music in conjunction with the intense action and emotional acting scenes was everything.

The CGI and the action scenes were fantastic. Enough said. As for the rest of the main cast, Claudia Kim was so creepy as Lady Maeda. She embodied the evilness, selfishness, and cruelty of humanity. She was a fantastic villain. The torture she put Ho Jae and Chae Ok (especially Ho Jae) through because she was bored in her position of power? That is a true villain right there. Bae Hyun Seong as Seung Jo flip-flopped well between being insanely psychopathic and somewhat endearing. Lee Moo Saeng as Captain Kuroko was the only character out of the main cast that fell a little flat to me, but I'll chalk it up to his character being written as emotionless and stoic.

One criticism I have seen of this season is that it is a repeat of the first. This, I think, is actually part of the beauty of the show. At its core, Gyeongseong Creature is about human nature, greed, selfishness, the struggle to survive, and life. And life has a strange way of repeating itself. How many actions do we complete, day after day, that are exactly the same as the day before? Part of the struggle of life is learning how to escape this repetitive process of pain, making the same mistakes, and experiencing the the same betrayals and traumas over and over. So many scenes this season were written to intentionally replicate ones in season 1. I felt for the characters, that even after experiencing such heavy hardship, they have to repeat and experience the same pain over and over, year after year.

Another criticism is that the motives of the big bad went largely unexplained. I don't disagree, but I also don't think it detracts from the drama. The executives of Joenseung Pharmaceutical are undergoing unequivocally inhumane experiments. All we really see of their motives this season is a supposed urgency to advance their research for the sake of preserving the human race. But perhaps it is this vagueness, when juxtaposed with the sheer desperation of the protagonists to survive, that makes the emotional impact of this series so strong. Every day in real life powerful people make decisions that once examined seem truly indecipherable. Meanwhile, "average" people struggle to survive, and are harmed or hindered by those inscrutable decisions.

In conclusion, Gyeongseong Creature Season 2 has it all. Park Seo Joon's acting and the soundtrack were stand-out phenomenal in a close to perfect production. If you are on the fence about watching, just watch it. The seven episodes go by so fast that it's really not going to waste much of your time. And hopefully it will evoke some serious emotion for you like it did for me.

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