Summary
Gyeongseong Creature Season 2 is a distinct step down from its predecessor, only getting messier and more overstuffed as it goes.
I think we can all admit now that Gyeongseong Creature was a weird show. It aired needlessly in two parts separated by two weeks and spliced a creature feature with a period drama, trying to imbue mindless – but expensive-looking – CGI monster action with poignant metaphors about historical injustices. It was intermittently successful; Part 1 was longwinded but decent, and Part 2 was tighter but nuttier.
Season 2 is a different kind of show. Much ado has been made of the setting, which, as suggested by Season 1’s ending, is eighty years on from the WW2-era narrative. The old cast returns, some playing new characters, and the genre has shifted to a grittier, noir-ish mystery. But it’s so littered with parallels and callbacks to Season 1 that you never forget it’s a continuation of the same story.
Han So-hee and Park Seo-joon are both back for Gyeongseong Creature 2. In Season 1 the former played Yoon Chae-ok, who discovered with the help of a pawnbroker named Tae-sang (Park) that her mother had been turned into a Lovecraftian tentacle monster by the Japanese Army with the help of a parasite called Najin. After swallowing the Najin herself, Chae-ok has survived through the ages right into Season 2, where she still hunts down the missing, albeit under the new alias, “Silverbill”.
Tae-sang has had a slightly different path. Park is now playing Jang Ho-jae, who is ostensibly a new character, but his convenient amnesia and the fact he not only looks exactly like Tae-sang but works out of the same old-fashioned building that used to house the pawn shop, makes one wonder why this plot point is even treated as a mystery at all.
Naturally, Ho-jae and Chae-ok quickly cross paths in a motel, where the former mistakes the latter for the perpetrator of a gruesome murder and is tasked by the police with tracking her down. Meanwhile, Chae-ok is assigned to trace Tae-sang, quickly realizing that he and Ho-jae are one and the same, and the two become embroiled in the hunt for a superpowered killer and a conspiracy involving Jeonseung Biotech, a shadowy research corporation still operating out of the bowels of Onseong Hospital.
Gyeongseong Creature | Image via Netflix
The obvious comparison is Sweet Home, which debuted with a very good first season and then went wildly off the rails in a flawed follow-up and culminated in a thoroughly mediocre final effort. In that case, as with Gyeongseong Creature Season 2, the desire to expand outwards is a death knell, blighting what was previously an imperfect but at least functional story with an overwhelming amount of messy nonsense.
Season 1’s Gyeongseong – the name for Seoul under Japanese colonial rule – had a real personality and sense of place. Modern Seoul doesn’t have the same identity, and its abundance of superpowered people and sinister, shadowy villains and their comic book-y henchmen feels like overkill.
Season 2 of Sweet Home, which tried to double-down on action and horrifying visuals in the same way, often felt like a PS2-era video game cutscene, and this show has a similar vibe. It misses the point of the first season’s appeal, which wasn’t that there was a monster in the basement, but that there were monsters on every floor above it, too. It was about the legacy of colonialism and the collective bravery of the oppressed and disenfranchised. Divorcing Gyeongseong Creature from its original setting strips a lot of potential poignancy from it too.
What’s left thematically is, essentially, a love story. Extricated from the historical context, Chae-ok and Tae-sang still have a romance to sell, but the surrounding chaos prohibits them from doing it justice. Sadly, there isn’t a great deal of chemistry between the leads either. Decades of longing don’t seem to have made the hearts grow any fonder.
Since Season 2 of Gyeongseong Creature has seven episodes – like Part 1 of the first season – and ends with a tease for a continuation, it’s unlikely that the story is over. But where that seemed like an intriguing prospect before, it can’t help but feel like a lamentable one now, and nothing suggests, unfortunately, that the show is liable to get better rather than worse.
