‘Kingdom’ on Netflix Season Finale Recap: Delayed Zombification

The running time was the first tipoff. Take away the lovely opening credits and the very-long-by-American-standards closing credits, and the season finale of Kingdom clocks in at under 40 minutes. That’s shorter than a commercial network drama episode, and closer to sitcoms than to your average Netflix/HBO hour-plus effort. And normally that would be good, right? Bloat is a big problem for these series, and while I think it’s churlish and picayune to complain when a show actually has a lot to say…well, this is swords vs. zombies and that’s about it. Something brisk is surely called for.

Unless you were hoping for, y’know, a climax to the six episodes of derring-do against the undead you’ve been watching. In that case—well, to paraphrase jingoistic dipshit country singer Neal McCoy, “Final Confrontation, My Ass (I Won’t Have a Final Confrontation).”

Sorry, Your Highness, but there’s no big assault on the fortified sanctuary by the teeming zombie hordes. There’s no desperate Spartan last stand at the two choke points that could stop the infected incursion from spreading. The booby traps, the gunboats, the bamboo spears, the alliance of government guards and enlightened warriors in cool white outfits—they don’t do shit.

There’s no showdown between the forces vying for control of the throne, either. Lord Cho Hak-Ju travels to face Prince Lee Chang one on one, but doesn’t. Chang doesn’t even know he’s there yet.

We learn that Cho has a mole among Chang’s traveling companions. Is it Physician Seo-bi? Royal Guard Mu-yeong? Magistrate Cho Beom-pal? Mysterious pseudonymous warrior Yeong-sin? Or could it all be a ruse by Lord Ahn Hyeon to distract Chang from his own double dealings? Sorry, tune in next season!

Writer Kim Eunhee and director Kim Seong-hun serve up a couple of solid surprises, at least, though you might have been able to suss one of them out already. You know that weird maternity ward Mu-yeong sent his wife to, where it’s mostly lower-class widows amazed at their good fortune? It’s a baby factory designed to produce a fake male heir to the throne, because the evil queen has miscarried. The baby girl delivered during first birth is murdered off-screen, which on this show comes as a surprise in itself, but yeah, that’s what’s happening.

Then there’s the big season-ending revelation, which Seo-bi and the magistrate discover when they find the Frozen Valley where the resurrection plant that caused the whole mess grows, and which everyone else is about to find out the hard way. The zombies don’t hide in dark places during the day because they’re afraid of the sunlight—they hide in cool places during the day because they can’t take the heat. Now that it’s colder out, they can advance en masse 24/7. Zombies advancing in cold weather. I wonder where they came up with that?

Here’s the real issue, though. If you’re going to show all the preparation and buildup and tension prior to a siege, you have to follow through to pay off that tension. All the great Game of Thrones battle episodes did this: “Blackwater,” “The Watchers on the Walls,” “Hardhome” and so on. The Lord of the Rings did it at Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers and Minas Tirith in The Return of the King. Seven Samurai, from which Kingdom seems to have swiped the whole “here are the entrances to the populated area and here’s how we’ll defend them” element outright, does it too.

Postponing that catharsis by splitting it up with a cliffhanger deflates whatever tension you’d generated. Are you gonna have that same on-edge feeling when you just start up the second season and it opens with the battle rather than builds to it?

Kingdom is based on a webcomic, Kingdom of the Gods, and it’s times like these when it shows. The rampant fanservice for Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings people is self-evident. But building up to something and then doing it in the next installment rather than as a self-contained story unit is very, very serialized fantastic-fiction adventure comic. It’s the whole model on which Marvel and DC comics (though not their movies) are built. In comics, it at least makes some sense: A comic book runs about two dozen pages long, and a webcomic update is usually even smaller. The storytelling economy demands setup and payoff be separated, kinda like the 1966 Batman TV show.

But with Kingdom, no one is tuning in tomorrow, same Chang-time, same Chang-channel. Gratification must be delayed until Season 2. And while the show is to be commended for steering the genre away from The Walking Dead‘s reactionary “us against them” politics in favor of a story where the real heroes are those who risk their own safety and comfort to defend the lives of the less fortunate, what are you really gonna get in the second go-round besides a mashup of your favorite genre franchises but with very nice robes. In the end, that’s Kingdom for you. Decent politics and lovely wide shots aside, it never delivers more than the minimum it needs to.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Kingdom Season 1 finale on Netflix