spindizzy | Reaction Shot: Kingdom episode 3 (or, I swear A LOT in this episode because EAT THE RICH)

Okay. Episode three. Where EVERYTHING IS FINE.

Just to recap – when last we left our Intrepid Heroes, the city was on fire. It was literally that gif from Community but with more corpses.

Seriously though, the credits are amazing and explain exactly what went on with the king in a way that I didn't get until after the first episode, why does Netflix keep telling me to skip them.

Oh god, I cannot imagine hiding under a floor, knowing that right above me someone was being eaten and only luck and my ability to stay quiet was keeping me alive. Or rather, I can, I literally have nightmares like that, good job to everyone involved in creating this nightmare fuel scene!

OH NO ONE OF THE ZOMBIES HIT THE DECK AND SAW THEM, OH NO, OH NO OH NO

They are so lucky that the zombies only know to take the most direct route towards food, oh my god.

I think what makes this entire thing worse is that these are fast zombies, so not only is it "Zombies could pop up at any moment!" it's "Zombies can and will catch you at any moment."

I told you! The prison is literally safest place in the city right now!

STOP DISTRACTING HIM, OH MY GOD THIS IS ENOUGH STRESS

THIS IS WHY KNOCKING THE DOORS OFF ITS HINGES WAS A TERRIBLE PLAN YEONG-SIN, WHAT IS EVEN YOUR LIFE.

Oh god they managed to get the door open and it DIDN'T HELP AUGH

... The guard got bitten, oh no! And one of the prisoners in the next cell got bitten! D:

SEO-BI IS SO GOOD AND SO BRAVE, LOOK AT HER GRABBING THAT SWORD BECAUSE SHE KNOWS WHAT'S COMING

Seo-Bi is scared and so brave, and LOOK AT HER PROTECTING THEM BOTH. LOOK AT HER.

OH GOD THAT MUST BE HELL, being literally strapped to a zombie!

I feel really weird about this, btw, because every scene part of me is going "OH NO AUGH WHAT HELP" and part of me is going "Hmmm, the way they use a first person point of view for the specific shots of the guy and the zombie separated by a board is very effective" or "Hmmmm all of the extras for this show are very talented at the body horror aspects of being a walking corpse" and SELF WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.

Look at that high octane nightmare fuel! Filmed in much the same way as the scenes of everyone at the hospital eating meat! Grim!

Are they really gutsy enough to kill TWO children – oh, no, wait, there we go.

DON'T THROW YOUR SPEAR AWAY YOU IDIOT, THAT'S HOW YOU DIE

Okay, no, he is very smart for hiding on a roof where the zombies can't reach him. (Although I'm pretty sure if enough of them get baited together, they can climb each other? Some of them definitely stabbed themselves on the barricade around the hospital is what I'm saying.)

Yeong-sin rescuing everyone he can, bless him!

Oh no, I see what's going to happen here. As soon as I saw the baby, it's like "Oh, well, RIP young lady."

IF ONE OF YOU HAD HELPED PULL HER UP INSTEAD OF YELLING AT YEONG-SIN ABOUT WHAT HE SHOULD BE DOING, MAYBE SHE WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN BITTEN YOU FUCKMUPPETS.

... On the plus side, I'm glad that they rescued the baby, and that Yeong-Sin DIDN'T immediately drop her as soon as the baby was clear, but also the way that the zombies completely envelope someone they're trying to eat is fucking horrifying.

(Yes I know that horror is more effective when it's left to your imagination, I'm just saying that it WORKED.)

Listen, FUCK THIS SCKMUCK. Literally every time he opens his mouth he makes something worse. And I mean that in the way most complementary to the actor and staff involved – he is an awful person, but a well-done
character, as opposed to the douche in Godzilla who was just awful all over.

SURE. JUST LEAVE THIS ENTIRE TOWN TO DIE YOU EVIL SCUMBAG, ALSO SURE, LEAD THE ZOMBIES TO NEW AND EVEN LESS AWARE PARTS OF TOWN YOU ABSOLUTE CUNTPUFFIN.

"Those peasants are attacking noblemen!" WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DO YOU THINK THAT PEASANTS LOOK AND BEHAVE LIKE IF SLAVERING MONSTERS ARE ONLY REGISTERING BECAUSE OF WHO THEY'RE ATTACKING?!

Look, I'm not saying that Kingdom made me double down on my "Eat the rich" stance, I'm JUST SAYING that a large number of problems in this city could have been solved if the rich had been eaten by zombies first.

THAT ZOMBIE IS ON FIRE AND DIDN'T EVEN SLOW DOWN.

I love that until there are a bunch of people they're just like "This is in fine."

The zombies screeching to a halt at the river is GOOD TO KNOW.

"Stop running, you'll get hungry!" and "Stop fighting. Don't bite him!" are the most on the nose transitional dialogue that I've seen in a while.

Oh that tiny zombie child is horrifying. Especially because there's no fucking around in the poorer quarters of the city – they look at her and they scatter.

I THINK WE FOUND HOW THE CITY CAUGHT FIRE.

Listen, I am not very good at picking up on subtext and metaphors, but I'm JUST SAYING that if someone wanted a great illustration of why we should eat the rich, the fact that the nobles have courtyards, guards, and FUCKING DOORS to protect them from zombies, while the poor have A CURTAIN standing between them and undeath...

Oh no, the herb seller got bit!

... His poor dad is going to go next, bless him.

That eye-open was appropriately creepy.

Deok-i is going to be another example of tiny child who is going to live exactly long enough to a) be traumatised, and b) get the audience emotionally invested in them!

Oh no, small child in a box watching as their family dies. ;_;

Oh, oh she already got bit. Of course she did. Oh no.

SMALL CHILD PLEASE HIDE.

Seriously the first person stuff is REALLY EFFECTIVE.

... Oh no, she found the sister.

Hey, Crown Prince? You are currently the only exemption to the "eat the rich" clause I have about this show, which is impressive seeing as you believe in the mandate of heaven. (I looked this up! It apparently spread to Korea in the Joseon era!)

ZOMBIE ON A BOAT!

Ah, this is set up for later when he knows what repels zombies!

See, he can't be as bad at everything as Beom-il though considering he's staying ahead of the zombies!

Oh bless Mu-yeong, he is so good. And look at the zombies parting to fall off the bridge!

Didn't eat the horse! Went straight for the living human! INTERESTING.

That was a nice roll the prince did there

A-ha! He has figured out what kills zombies, good work Crown Prince!

He sounds so faint and shell-shocked when he tells Mu-yeong that he needs to go for the head, bless him.

And Mu-yeong is just trying to hustle him off somewhere safe. BLESS THIS MAN.

Oh bless them, those poor people trying to flee from the zombies with everything on their back!

LET THEM IN YOU FUCKING COWARDS. LET THEM IN.

LOOK AT ALL OF THESE PEOPLE RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES, LOOK AT IT.

I feel SUCH contempt for all of the people inside the fort who can listen to all of these people screaming for help and not act. Worse – who can pretend that they're not there.

And they all decide to climb the wall!

Wall: *creaks ominously*
Cuntpuffin: Get off the fence at once!
Literally everyone: SOMEONE IS INSIDE!

Like, Cuntpuffin getting eaten wouldn't even bring me satisfaction unless there can be someone standing over him and reciting his every sin so that he understands why he DESERVES to be eaten.

He tells that guard to shoo them away like they're flies. Oh god I hate him so much.

Oh wow, the entire wall just bending under them as they try to get in.

The one person who's just asking for the children to be let in – I know it's a recurring image, but holy hell there are children in that crowd and Cuntpuffin is still turning them away. What an absolute failure of
basic empathy.

I hope the walls break enough that the zombies get in. I hope everyone in that barracks suffers.

IN CASE I FORGOT TO MENTION, I'm writing this on the fifteenth of July. The news about literal actual concentration camps in the US is all over my feed. My tolerance for people being able to watch others suffer
without even trying to stop it is at an all-time low.

They're literally poking people off the walls with spears. I hate them. I hate every single one of them.

OH LOOK, THE ZOMBIES SHOWED UP.

Oh bless those poor people, so many of them aren't going to be able to make it.

I hope Cuntpuffin and every single one of his guards suffers.

Okay. Zombies sink. They don't swim, they sink. GOOD TO KNOW.

Swimming in those costumes must have been an ABSOLUTE bastard.

Like, she stops watching
Listen, I'm trying not to spoil anything for this series but I REALLY DESPERATELY NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAK-JU KNOWS ABOUT HIS IMPENDING GRANDCHILD.

The Queen doesn't acknowledge what's going on, but does look away, and Hak-ju just watches it like it happens every day.

"You must teach him what happens to a powerless king." OH.

What I don't understand is why they're feeding court ladies to the king. They have prisoners who could be quietly disappeared! They have the ability to literally drag people in off the street if they want to! Why are they choosing ACTUAL STAFF. Are they feeding the Crown Prince's staff to zombies? Do these women know too much? Is it literally just "Their lifeless eyes will look more dramatic on film?"

I wonder if the blood on her shoes is significant. HM.

Wow, there are zombies piling up on every side trying to get to those people.

Oh those floorboards are not as joined together as I would want them to be.

NOTE STOIC GRANDMA, SHE MAY BE IMPORTANT LATER.

Seo-bi being tense and watchful while Beom-pal cowers behind her is honestly my kind of het ship (although I don't ship that.)

... Internet, please tell me that someone has already done a fandom filk of "I would do anything for love" where the chorus is "but I won't ship THAT!"

That poor guy has been staggering around trying to keep away from zombies ALL NIGHT, holy shit. Like, I'm half-inclined to say that if he wedged himself into a corner, he might NOT get got by zombies? But I'm with him, I'm not sure I'd take that bet.

And there's dawn, and all of the zombies retreating at the HIGHEST OF SPEEDS!

Oh well, at least the sunrises are as ridiculously fast as the sunsets.

Watching them all cram themselves into the darkest spaces like nightmare spiders is slightly horrifying.

Okay, officially, no one drink that water.

And bless that poor prisoner being dragged by the zombie.

Imagine having to put make-up on a dead king, knowing that your life depends on how well you can do it, and also on you NEVER MENTIONING IT TO ANYONE.

I love how synchronised all the background servants are with each other, it's very visually pleasing.

"My clothes got dirty," she says, like a kid.

"Go for a walk," she says, like this isn't the most suspicious thing.

Like, were those her socks? I couldn't tell properly.

Deok-i! You survived the night! Your mum and your sister are hiding SOMEWHERE but I really hope you don't find them.

"Small child is the only person moving in this destroyed world" is a classic for a reason!

Yeong-sin is the most competent member of that party, and I'm not surprised that he was the one to go down and break the lock off.

FUCK YOU CUNTPUFFIN. FUCK. YOU.

Seriously, I'm not even going to do the "Oh I won't remember his name" and "ctrl+f for the part of it I remember so I can use it" thing that I did with Beom-pal. He is straight up Cuntpuffin forever.

Seo-bi is being allowed out of jail! AS IS RIGHT.

Man, the people who aren't Seo-bi or Yeong-sin must be SO CONFUSED right now.

Beom-pal, I don't blame you for being jumpy, but I do judge every single human on your staff.

If a single one of those guards tries to start with Yeong-sin after he spent the night defending the people they abandoned, I am gonna FLIP MY LID.

Cuntpuffin DESERVES to be yelled at, oh my god.

"I wanted to save you, so I brought all those soldiers!" he says, AFTER THE DANGER IS OVER.

Beom-pal isn't bright, but he deserves better than this schmuck.

OF COURSE CUNTPUFFIN WANTS TO ARREST YEONG-SIN. OF. COURSE.

And Yeong-sin just standing there, like "Seriously?"

"I told you didn't I?" YES YOU DID and the fact that he's more offended that you're glaring at him than at the fact that he literally left half the town to die is why he deserves to be eaten.

BEOM-PAL PLEASE STOP LISTENING TO THE CUNTPUFFIN HE LITERALLY ONLY GIVES YOU BAD ADVICE.

Wow, Seo-bi had the opportunity to drop Yeong-sin in it there, and she didn't! "They could not withstand starvation any longer and ate a corpse." Active voice, makes it sound like a choice, doesn't implicate anyone who is currently living! And look at Yeong-sin's face, that is a man who is EXPECTING the blame to be heaped at his feet (which, let's be real: he DID make an entire hospital full of people into unwitting cannibals.)

I love the way Seo-bi looks at Yeong-sin, okay, especially because OF COURSE somehow two people alone can bury a minimum of forty-two people deep enough that they can't just crawl straight out of their graves when night falls, OH WAIT.

HEY LOOK, I TOLD YOU STOIC GRANDMA WOULD COME UP LATER.

By which I mean, Stoic Grandma, your son LITERALLY IS AN UNDEAD MONSTER EATING PEOPLE, how fucking privileged do you have to be to look at that fact and go "Yes, but he is my son so you can't do anything that would stop him doing that."

EAT THE RICH. EAT THE RICH. EAT THE RICH.

YOU'RE NOT PUNISHING THEM, THEY'RE LITERALLY DEAD.

Who cares about the backlash from the upper classes?! How can you decided that it's 100% fine to burn the bodies of peasants, but the upper classes need to be appeased with proper funerals?

I KNOW THAT THE CLASS HORROR IS PARTIALLY THE POINT OF THE SHOW BUT I SWEAR TO GOD I AM READY TO JOIN THE REVOLUTION.

God I hate Cuntpuffin.

"Someone responsible for the people's safety is this incompetent?"

Oh hey, he found his hat!

Crown Prince: *decks Cuntpuffin*
Me: *ACTUALLY CHEERING OUT LOUD*

MU-YEONG ACING THAT INTIMIDATE CHECK IS CONTENT THAT I AM HERE FOR.

"You are not only incompetent, but also endlessly vile. You locked the doors to the barracks last night, countless innocent people died." YES. READ THAT MAN TO HELL AND BACK.

SOLDIERS ARE LITERALLY PAID TO FACE DANGER YOU GAGGLING BABOON!

See, I am 100% okay with this instance of Lee Chang threatening to annihilate someone's family, because
He doesn't even SAY ANYTHING when Beom-pal asks who he is, he just throws his token on the floor at his feet. That is a power move and I respect it.

Beom-pal: o shit
Cuntpuffin: o shit
Literally everyone in this scene except for the four main characters: WAIT WHAT

I appreciate his common sense in not killing more people when their problem is how many people are dead, but I swear to fuck so many future problems would never happen if he just beheaded that guy right now.

There are only fifty soldiers left alive. Cuntpuffin let so many people die, for the sake of himself and fifty men. I'm honestly disgusted.

See, THIS is the Crown Prince Lee Chang that I like, because he is COMPETENT and he CARES ABOUT PEOPLE and HAS NO TIME FOR YOUR PETTY BULLSHIT, and I always forget that it takes him two episodes of trauma, suspicion, treachery, and narrowly-avoided death for him to get here.

Is this Mu-yeong being proud of him? Is this Seo-bi finally being able to relax?

NOW ALL OF KOREA KNOWS YOU'RE HERE.

At some point I do want to look up the history of signal fires, which I know is such a weirdly tiny interest that it makes no sense to just look that up, but I want to know! What were the circumstances they were lit under! What is their back-up plan if it's raining too hard to light the fire? Is the plan always more about seeing smoke, or does the fire matter too, or does it depend on time of day? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.

"We have something urgent to tell you" is ominous as fuck.

"Lord Cho Hak-ju is hiding it from us." YOU DON'T SAY.

(DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE WAS A DUB OF THIS? I guess for people who can't speak Korean or read subtitles while they're watching the show, I'm just... Always slightly baffled by dubs of things with actual humans in
rather than animations.)

"I know you are one of his men" WELP.

Sir. Sir. If you go to the palace you're going to die.

"We serve His Majesty, not the Queen." is the sort of line that appeals to me, Although now I'm thinking about Black Panther again, which is not helping me focus.

And here is the first mention of Lord Ahn Hyeon, which is going to be important later!

I have a feeling that one of these two lines ("Lord Ahn Hyeon will join us," / "Do you mean the Lord Ahn Hyeon?") said something different in the original Korean, or had an emphasis that I'm not picking up on, because something about that doesn't quite look right.

Okay, Ahn Hyeon is the one that everyone will rally around, IF he chooses to act.

Oh! He can see the signal fires, that's convenient!

... I don't think that Legit Scholar's servant came out of that very well.

Man, that soldier is BRAVE, talking back to Cho Hak-ju.

"Lord Ahn Hyeon can never oppose me. No matter what." THERE IS SUCH DIRT HERE, I AM SO READY FOR IT.

Wait, is he lounging around a) while everyone else is working, and b) still in the robes from last night? Because that looks like blood on his collar.

The first time I watched this, I was watching it with sithe, who saw the introduction to this scene and immediately went into the kitchen to make some food.
Me: All you're missing is a marriage proposal.
Him: I know, that's why I'm not watching it.

Someone please find Seo-bi new clothes, she deserves it.

Oh bless her, she is so upset about the people in the hospital. She so desperately wanted to cure them.

BEOM-PAL WHILE SHE IS UPSET ABOUT EVERYONE SHE KNOWS AND LOVES DYING IS MAYBE NOT THE TIME TO BE BOTHERING HER WITH YOUR PANTS FEELINGS.

Like, it's very sweet that he tries to reassure her, and scrambles to be on her level, but also BEOM-PAL KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS.

"I will keep you by my side" is the creepiest of marriage proposals, don't do that. Like, the repaying her kindness thing? That was about the right level of gratitude, go back to that.

"Do you need a physician?" Man I love her purposeful misunderstanding and turning this into a medical conversation. Also just casually throwing "I think it's gonorrhea" at him was inspired.

Look at that scrabble back to a distance recommended by propriety. Oh dear.

How on earth did ALL of the battle ships get destroyed last night? Did the flaming zombies get to them? Were they left unmanned? Because not gonna lie, my understanding of how boats work when there's civil unrest/zombie apocalypses is that you unmoor and move out of range so your boats DON'T get destroyed.

Like, the thing that gets me about Beom-pal is that he gets halfway to the right idea and then just... Stops, and lets Cuntpuffin fill in the gap. Which would be fine if Cuntpuffin was a decent human being, but he's NOT, which means that Beom-pal is letting the embodiment of his worst, most cowardly instincts run the show! Like, here in this scene, he's going "How can we evacuate all those people with just one cargo ship?" and that's good! He has correctly identified the problem! He knows that the fact that they can't evacuate everyone is going to be a bigger or smaller problem depending on how many of the zombies they've found! He knows that they can't just leave, because the Crown Prince needs them to do their jobs! BUT HE LETS CUNTPUFFIN TALK HIM ROUND ANYWAY.

What do you MEAN you've assigned every available soldier to search for bodies but to no avail? You must have found SOME, they're under every single house!

Oh! They've got back to the hospital! Okay, this makes sense.

I'm not gonna lie, Kingdom does make me think about media literacy. Like, I don't watch a lot of Korean dramas, so I don't have the visual literacy to go "Oh, this is a flashback" without context, that sort of
thing.

Ohhhhh that is a lot of blood. Yeong-sin. Yeong-sin why are you opening the door.

Oh, Unfortunate Nurse's name was Yeong-ju! She deserved better than this too.

Look at Yeong-sin tackling Yeong-ju to stop her eating Seo-bi! And also managing to barricade the survivors inside a shed!

(I do wonder how they managed to survive the night – I guess by staying out of the zombies line of vision, they managed to avoid the mass rush that would have taken the doors down? Because seriously, they were so lucky that the zombies stayed in the hospital, because I don't think the nurses locked the hospital doors after them.)

Physician Lee is so confused by what's happening, because it's not like the other times he's tried to ressurect people! Like, he sounds genuinely shell-shocked as well.

"He was sick for days, and died as a human being. But when those people got bitten, they become the same monster." Okay, he didn't know that the disease was going to mutate and spread, I judge him slightly less for
his part in creating the zombie apocalypse.

(People who I feel are directly responsible for the zombie apocalypse: Yeong-sin, Physician Lee, and Cho Hak-ju. I know that technically Cho Hak-ju hasn't engaged with the zombie apocalypse in a meaningul way, but I BLAME HIM ANYWAY.)

That scream halfway through Physician Lee's speech, and the way that the other two react and he mostly doesn't? Chills, man.

He's so confident that he can fix it, and Yeong-sin is aware enough to see that there's a problem with him.

I don't know if there actually is a traitor, but I would dearly love for it to not be Yeong-sin or Mu-yeong or really truly any of the main characters. Which I know means that if there IS a traitor, it's going to besomeone that I'm very emotionally invested in, but COME ON.

Oh no, oh Seo-bi has to watch her mentor die. ;____;

Beom-il's head is missing! That's bad, that's very bad, ESPECIALLY if Strangely Synchronised Guard whisked it off to Cho Hak-ju.

"You should have talked to him nicely." MU-YEONG, COME ON.

He wasn't going to forgive you anyway, Mu-yeong, you might as well roll with it.

"But now I have justification." Oh bless him, he looks like he's going to cry.

He was ready to rise up against his father, and he still looks heartbroken that his father is dead, that's completely understandable.

CUNTPUFFIN WHAT IS YOUR PLAN NOW.

"Finish up before people flock here" is just making my hate grow stronger.

Wait, they left the prisoner in the plank?!

Saying "Take care" and throwing the keys just out of reach is a bad sign.

That hawk looked pasted on.

I am fucking judging Cuntpuffin forever, because LOOK. LOOK AT THAT. There aren't that many people on the dock! They could have fit on the boat, but no! The nobility must have space to move around and they can't be expected to preserve the lives of the people!

OVERTHROW THE RICH.

"They should do something instead of whining. Why are they so foolish?" OH MY GOD I AM READY TO SPIT ACID, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR DESERVES YOUR INEVITABLE DEATH BY ZOMBIES.

Like, look at how much space there is on that boat! LOOK!

"Is it okay for us to do this?" NO IT FUCKING IS NOT. WHY DO YOU LISTEN TO CUNTPUFFIN HE LITERALLY ONLY EVER GIVES YOU BAD ADVICE.

Q: Susan, what scene increased your radicalisation against the rich?
A: The exact moment that all of those nobles smugly agreed that they are the pillars of Dongnae as they left the people who actually do the work to die.

"You are positive that the Crown Prince left Dongnae safely." My dude, he did not and he is going to avenge everyone in this town.

THEY WENT BACK, BECAUSE HE'S NOT A SCHMUCK LIKE YOU.

He asks about Seo-bi, but he didn't care enough to make sure that she was gone before he snuck off, so his promise isn't worth much is it!

That soldier knows what's up, and Cuntpuffin deserves his death. ... Seriously, you had enough space for fancy food and wine, but not for people. Seriously.

LOOK AT ALL OF THE SPACE IN THE CARGO HOLD THAT THEY'RE USING FOR BOXES AND LIVESTOCK AND WALKWAYS INSTEAD OF PEOPLE. LOOK AT THAT. LOOK AT IT.

Oh hi, Stoic Grandma! Everything's fine down here, right? You've not done anything silly like smuggle a zombie onto the boat, right?

Literally my only satisfaction about this boat thing is knowing that everyone on it is going to die due to their own selfishness and stupidity. (Although sithe made the exceptionally valid point that Beom-pal is probably going to escape to be the comic relief.)