Gyeongseong Creature ~ A Monster is a Secret Weapon?

“Gyeongseong Creature” was released in December 2023, Part 1 has 7 episodes, and is currently streaming Only on Netflix. Part 2 with 3 episodes is scheduled to be released in January 2024.

Even though Season 2 was confirmed in November 2022, no additional details are known.  This K-drama series can be categorized as Thriller, Mystery, Horror, Fantasy or Supernatural, and Historical Fiction.

Set during World War II, a medical scientist serving in the Japanese military creates a “queen”. Well! He calls the creature a queen. But anybody who was attacked and lived to tell called his creation a monster! The question is: Can it be destroyed?

♦ If You’re Looking for Your Mistress, Ask Your Wife!

“Gyeongseong Creature” starts with Jang Tae-Sang, the owner of the House of the Golden Treasure, being torturously interrogated by a Japanese official. What had he done? Was he secretly a member of the Korean Independence Movement? Had he stolen money from the Imperial Japanese Army? Nope. Nothing like that. The officer wanted to know if something was going on between Jang Tae-Sang and his wife. Once he got the answer to that question, he told Tae-Sang what he really wanted to know. The official’s mistress had gone missing. Since Jang Tae-Sang was known as the “king of information”, the Japanese officer wanted him to find his mistress.

Jang Tae-Sang sent his people out to gather information. One of them came back with two other people: a father and a daughter team of sleuths. They were people of Joseon who came from Manchuria, and they had a reputation for finding missing people. That’s how Jang Tae-Sang met Yoon Chae-Ok. But even though she and her father had been successful in finding other missing persons, they had not found the one person they were truly searching for, i.e. her mother.

Yoon Chae-Ok and her father agreed to help Jang Tae-Sang find the Japanese officer’s mistress. Based on the information that had been gathered, it was believed that she had been taken to Ongseong Hospital. Yoon Chae-Ok and her father sneaked inside but got trapped in the building. In that particular hospital, there was a scientist performing experiments. Many people who went missing were being imprisoned there and unwillingly became part of his scientific experiment. The wife of the Japanese officer made arrangements to have his mistress taken to that horrible place.

Well duh! Why didn’t Jang Tae-Sang just ask the wife in the first place? When he did get around to asking her, she told him that it was best to leave the matter alone. It was her very polite warning.

♦ What was the Experiment?

Jang Tae-Sang and Yoon Chae-Ok did not set out to find out about a secret experiment being conducted by the Japanese military. They were just searching for missing people. But those people who went missing were either dead or unwilling participants in a cruelly horrific scientific experiment. It begs the question: How far will people go to win a war?

Japanese scientists injected subjects with “Najin”, hoping to create a weapon of war that would ensure the victory of The Empire. What they create is a monster! This horrible fiction sadly mirrors real life.

• “Gyeongseong Creature” is loosely based on the tragic lethal experiments conducted by Unit 731, a unit of the Japanese imperial army that conducted human experiments to create bio-weapons in the 1930s and 1940s.

The fact is that the military in any country might be willing to go very far, and use both people serving in the military and civilians as “test subjects”. (REF: The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments | Live Science)

Main Characters:

• Jang Tae-Sang (played by Park Seo Joon)
• Yoon Chae-Ok (played by Han So Hee, “Abyss”, “100 Days My Prince”)

Where to Watch

Viewership and Rating:

• IMDb: 7.3 out of 10 stars
• My Drama List: 8.4 out of 10 stars
• Dramabeans: 8 out of 10 stars
• Plex.tv: 6.3 out of 10 stars
• Public reviews shared via Google: 4.7 out of 5 stars

My personal rating is 9 out of 10 stars. It’s about a monster so I wasn’t expecting historical accuracy. Although the recreation of the city of Gyeongseong in 1945 was authentic. I can only say that if the Japanese mad scientists had been successful in creating that “secret weapon”, there would be no more invasions and wars because that creature would have killed everybody!

There were lots of criticisms about this series. Everything from the two main characters lacking onscreen chemistry TO inaccurate portrayal of historical events. Nevertheless, I was willing to give a generous rating because “Gyeongseong Creature” made its moral lesson crystal clear. What was that lesson? To quote the lyrics from a popular song by Edwin Starr: ”WAR!! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”

LINKS OF INTEREST:

• The Real History Behind Netflix’s ‘Gyeongseong Creature’ | TIME
• [Herald Review] Monster horror series ‘Gyeongseong Creature’ disappoints | The Korea Herald
• ‘Gyeongseong Creature’ triumphs globally despite harsh criticisms | allkpop
• ‘Gyeongseong Creature’ Netflix Review: Stream It Or Skip It? | Decider

TRAILERS/TEASERS:

Netflix. “Gyeongseong Creature | Official Trailer | Netflix.” YouTube Video. YouTube, December 7, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3YgWMxaq8o.‌