Look idk what I expected from a story about a modern girl going back in time to charm 8 cute princes but it sure wasn't a brutal Shakespearean tragedy about power corrupting even the truest love.

THE PREMISE
A near-death experience during a solar eclipse transports our girl back in time to 10th century Goryeo, where she awakes in the body of Hae Soo, a noblewoman at the royal court. She arrives in the royal bathhouse, which contains seven cute princes and their perfect abs. An eighth, played by Lee Joon Gi, gallops moodily in on his horse. He has swooping emo bangs and a little face mask that makes him look like a cross between Zuko and the Phantom of the Opera. For now this tells you everything you need to know.

These two are about to fall in love across a sweeping backdrop of deadly political intrigue, family trauma and royal corruption - all complicated by Hae Soo's knowledge that although the eight princes of Goryeo may live charmed lives, one of them is destined to slaughter his brothers and seize the throne...

THE PLOT
I often find kdramas a little soft on plot, but this one was a twisty, eventful tale which ultimately acquires a sense of steadily-ratcheting suspense and dread. I was impressed not just by how the emotional spotlight always remained on the main couple, but also by how every character in the large supporting cast had a meaningful part to play before the end. This is a complex story, spanning the better part of a decade, and it's beautifully constructed.

THE CHARACTERS
HAE SOO is our female lead, and while I could wish for a little more context about her 21st century life, to tell us what sort of family she came from and what kind of peace she'll find after her sojourn in Goryeo, her role is one of my favourites in all of kdrama. If Wang So reminds one of AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER'S Zuko, Hae Soo began by reminding me of TILL THE END OF THE MOON's Li Susu. Both transmigrate into the body of a noblewoman centuries in the past and must adapt to a new life; both attempt to stop the bloody rise of a future tyrant by restoring a sense of love and humanity to a traumatised youth; both find themselves falling in love with him. But there the similarities end. Hae Soo isn't a fearless, empowered martial artist; life in Goryeo quickly weakens and threatens to destroy her. In a world of ruthless politics, Hae Soo holds no power at all; she mediates between people who do, and speaks prophetic truth to them, usually to her own cost. While TTEOTM ultimately could find little use for Li Susu in the final act, throughout SCARLET HEART RYEO Hae Soo remains a ray of light illuminating the dark world into which she has been plunged. In the end, despite her different predicament, the character Hae Soo most resembles is Daisy Ridley's Ophelia in the film of the same name. Like Ophelia, Hae Soo is an outsider to politics, partly because her sex and rank disqualify her but mostly because she comes from the future and believes that all people are equal. This sets her at variance with the world of Goryeo. Accustomed to western media, I'm used to seeing a facile take on this sort of story, where the modern heroine is rude to everyone and saves the day. Accustomed to kdrama, a friend of mine predicted the opposite - that the modern woman would be demeaned in the name of historical accuracy. Neither of those things happened in this story. Hae Soo is a tragic Cassandra figure, whose egalitarian values, historical insights and skills as a beauty therapist quickly gain her a reputation for wisdom beyond her years but are not enough to destroy the corrupt systemic injustices of medieval Goryeo. Her arc is a deeply painful one: she starts out full of life, standing up to the royals for their ruthless disdain for those below them and their desire to climb the greasy pole of power at court, but years of trauma take their toll and she becomes quiet, grave, and frail; IU's tiny frame is constantly bowed beneath the terror and grief that beset her character. Where OPHELIA gives its heroine a bittersweet ending, losing the man she loves but managing to find peace and happiness raising their daughter, Hae Soo wakes in the real world to no lover, no daughter, and only painful memories and regrets. My headcanon is that our girl now has a chance to move on and find happiness, knowing that although she was unable to redeem ancient Goryeo she did, after all, influence its king to do a limited amount of good. But I'm not sorry that they chose to end Hae Soo's arc in this way. She's one of my favourite character types, the one who has almost no agency but continually has the courage to wield what she has in the few ways she can. Throughout the series, she continues to do just this, and it's beautiful.

WANG SO is our male lead. Don't let the bangs and the Zuko mask fool you - he's so much more than a tormented bad-boy love interest trope. I got to know this actor through his role in FLOWER OF EVIL, and I'm delighted to note that SHR allows him to display all his considerable acting chops. In SHR Lee Joon Gi doesn't just get to flex his action skills - he also imparts a real desperation, gentleness and vulnerability to So that helps to sell the romance. Then he brings the crazy, the paranoia, and the unhinged grief to the final act. It's the perfect match of actor and role.

One complaint is that So’s facial scarring is a huge issue for him in the first half of the story, but after our girl uses her cosmetics skills to cover them up they disappear almost entirely from the story. For instance, the scars are completely missing in the scene where the two of them become lovers, even though Wang So has been knocked out with a fever and probably hasn't had the chance to apply perfect makeup. It felt as though the show wasn't bold enough to mess up its hero's pretty, pretty face at the romantic climax, and therefore undermined its own point about beauty standards.

Although I often feared the show was going to let Wang So get away with bad behaviour, I was thoroughly impressed that they didn't. Wang So gets a sort of arc that I think is incredibly rare - a disillusionment arc. So is someone who's been treated as lesser all his life: his scars and his mother's resentment make him less politically valuable than his brothers, so he's raised as, fundamentally, the Crown Prince's Evil Henchman. He and Hae Soo connect because she is one of the few people who actually values him as a person, and it's thanks to her giving him the means to conceal his scars that he's able to gain any power at all. He knows, far better than any of the other princes, what it's like to be an underdog in this world and how power corrupts, and he wants nothing to do with it. But then he begins to see power as a way to protect the people he loves. So falls for the lie that he can play the same game as his father and all his brothers, without going down the same path of tyranny, insanity, and blood. The final act is his disillusionment: he learns that he was wrong, and even does some good for Goryeo under the influence of Hae Soo's ideas, but he's lost her forever, together with everything that might once have made him a good person.

WANG WOOK is the second male lead, a gentle and scholarly prince who is the biggest flaming egotist in the whole story, which is saying a lot. I hated him with the fire of a thousand suns, but all the horrible decisions he makes through the middle of the story are actually just foreshadowing for the path Wang So goes down later. Where So is a kicked puppy, Wook has only ever been loved and supported by everyone around him. Yet, when faced with the decision to make a bid for the throne or lose the people he loves, Wook turns coat without blinking. Cunning, cowardly, and selfish, Wook unhesitatingly sacrifices the woman he loves for the throne, all while complaining about what a toll it takes on HIM. This makes it really hard to watch when So ultimately makes all the same decisions, and then begins to speak with the same egotism. In the end, Wook is able to give up his ambitions, stop talking about himself, and actually manipulate So into letting Hae Soo leave the palace to die in peace. This is painfully maddening. Congratulations, So: you outdid the worst man in the entire show.

THE ROMANCE
There was so much about the romance that stole my heart. The way So silently, happily waits for Soo to return his love and initiate their second kiss; the way he chooses to trust her, with the words "I am yours", when she first offers to cover up his scars; their standoff outside her bedroom door when he knows she's hiding his brother Jung inside, and she threatens to kill herself if he intrudes; the way the two of them talk through their misunderstandings afterward and he actually APOLOGISES; the way Soo tries to give him unconditional trust, even as he tears it down…it was SO GOOD.

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t elements that made me groan – a forced kiss, declarations of ownership, that moment where he Breaks Her Heart To Save Her. That said, in hindsight I can see how all these things fit very well into So’s character arc and the larger thematic picture. Take the moment where he Breaks Her Heart To Save her, for instance. Much as I dislike this trope, it was extremely well played. For one thing, it wasn't overplayed the way it usually is, and for another, this is the very first decision Wang So makes after deciding to take the throne. From the moment it happens, this is clearly the first step down the long path in which So will lose more and more of what makes him a decent person and allow the throne to come between himself and Soo.

Ultimately, Soo only wants to escape the tyrant So has become, and she is only able to do so when Wook reveals that Soo had once promised to marry him. This enrages So, who never quite stopped claiming Soo as belonging to him and has only done so more insistently since claiming the throne. It’s this that finally makes him cast her aside in rage. It was never romantic: it was only ever the seed of the relationship’s destruction.

THE THEMES
The show's thesis statement is delivered by Wook and Yeon Hwa's mother, the not-so-evil-(but-still-moderately-rubbish)-queen: to gain the throne, one must throw away love.

A monarchy, see, is fundamentally an unequal system. Even the most liberal, constitutional monarchy today is still fundamentally corrupt. In medieval Goryeo, or in the version of it depicted in the show, things are even worse. The king has conquered multiple kingdoms and enslaved the inhabitants. He strives to keep power by marrying dozens of women from noble families. He fathers large numbers of sons, wielding absolute power over their lives. They murder each other for the chance to succeed him, terrified that if they refuse to play the game they will in turn be murdered by their brothers. Women can gain power only through proximity to the throne and to powerful families. The whole system preys upon those enmeshed within it, and it's almost impossible to leave, because everyone else you know and love is trapped inside it.

There was a point, I think in episodes 12-13, when I got quite angry at the show because I didn't realise how nuanced it was being. I thought the horrible King Taejo was being let off the hook for presiding over this corrupt system while the show blamed all the problems on scheming women. When Taejo dies I was ready to gut the showrunners for giving him a misty-eyed recap of his love for Lady Oh, the court lady he treated like dirt and finally executed as a scapegoat for a crime she didn't commit. I still feel that Taejo was treated more gently than he really deserved. In hindsight, though, maybe that wasn't so much pulling punches as recognising that the system makes victims of everyone, even the ones at the top, even those who genuinely want to change it (which is something I’ve also seen in history). In short, the antagonist of this show isn't so much the kings who benefit from the system as it is the system itself, which is upheld by the entirety of society.

The drama pulls no punches when showing how the systemic injustice of this society poisons absolutely everything. It isn't just the bad female characters: they are sidelined for long periods while the men go on playing the game and upholding the system. This is driven home mercilessly when So decides to play the game, expecting a different result because of his pure motivations. But the game is the game, and if you play it, you have to follow the rules.

The whole show, I was on tenterhooks to see how things would go down. Hae Soo is clearly an Ophelia-esque figure, who consistently desires to opt out of the game altogether and find happiness in a humble life outside it. I've seen murmurs online that some people think she should have showed more ambition, had more agency, and become a queen who could support So, but this overlooks everything the show is telling us thematically about what the game does. Power is a devil's bargain that you take in order to protect what you love, but which takes your love anyway in the end. The only way to win is not to play at all. Soo does not have the power to play the game, but neither does she leave when she gets the opportunity, because she wants to save the people she loves. As a mediator, she refuses to inflict violence on others, instead following in Lady Oh's footsteps and absorbing the violence into herself: she cuts herself to make herself unfit as a wife for the king, she threatens herself to protect Jung from So; she refuses to marry So when he asks her, throwing herself aside so that he doesn't have to. This has no salvific power: ultimately, it kills her.

The princes, meanwhile, especially Yo, So, and Wook, fall one by one to the temptation to play the game because they are fitted by birth and disposition to play it and do it well. When So does decide to play the game, I hoped he would find a way to do it without being corrupted. Having been used ruthlessly himself, he identifies with the underprivileged. (Just as he did with his child niece, and let me say right away that I never dreamed this show would actually make me OK with a grown man marrying his underage niece, but it is very careful to establish that So actually follows through on giving her as much freedom as he can in this context - he immediately sends her off to live without him and she becomes a Buddhist nun). So justifies his ambitions by telling Hae Soo that he believes he can make things better, not just for himself and the people he loves, but for all of Goryeo. Unlike Yo or Wook, he actually has an unselfish motivation: but can he redeem the game?

THE ENDING
The answer is that no, you can't play the game of power and remain a good person. The final quarter is what makes this show so horribly painful. So can take the throne quite easily, but in order to hold onto it he is forced to give up one piece of his humanity after another. Soo loves the person he used to be, which is what keeps her in the palace, a pawn in the game, absorbing its violence and dying by inches, until it's too late for her. Unlike Daisy Ridley's OPHELIA, she doesn't flee soon enough to save her life; perhaps she never could. Perhaps her choice to act as a mediator, to absorb the game's violence, was the dramatic choice that doomed her all the way back in the first act. Certainly, just like in any tragedy, So's dramatic choice occurs at the end of the second act, when he decides to take the throne. That's the thing that seals HIS fate, and the rest of the story is simply the unspooling consequences.

There are many who wished the ending to be different - who hold out for a second season or want to see the deleted scene in which So makes his way from Goryeo to the modern world and finds Soo there. I would actually have been horribly disappointed if that scene had made it in. Once So kills Chae Ryung he and Soo were over for me - I would have been wildly upset if the show had tried to put them together again or soften the consequences in any way. Chae Ryung is the embodiment of Soo's ethics - that even a slave girl is as important as a prince - and by killing her, So ceases to be someone whom Soo can have a relationship with at all.

I was SO IMPRESSED that they didn't try to soften this, that they let it be the tragedy the whole show was set up to be. Of course they do this in a distinctively kdrama way. Soo leaves partly because she wants to be alone with the So she remembers, the So she loves, rather than staying until her love turns entirely into disgust and hatred. She softens enough to call him to her bedside as she is dying, and when she awakes in the modern world, she's left sobbing that she's sorry. I didn't mind this too much, however, because it didn't come across as the show trying to tell me that Soo was wrong to leave. I could imagine someone like Soo feeling regret that she couldn't save the people she loved. What counts for me is that the show itself justifies Soo's actions: So is now so proud and angry that he misses her letters simply because they have Jung’s handwriting on them.

I would call the ending bittersweet rather than a tragedy. So becomes a slightly better king and a better person, not just because Soo loved him, but because she had the moral courage to leave him. I could have done with more hope for Soo, too, but obviously the only way they could think of to make the ending better would actually have made it worse, and so I am content with the way it stands.

MOON LOVERS: SCARLET HEART RYEO is one of the most mature dramas I've ever seen and one I'll be thinking over for a very long time. 10/10, practically perfect.