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Pierce Conran

1.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Han So-hee, Park Seo-joon, Lee Mu-saeng, Bae Hyeon-seong
After battling a dangerous monster engineered by the Japanese army at the tail end of World War II, Han So-hee and Park Seo-joon return eight decades later to duel with a panoply of new villains in the second season of Netflix’s big-budget, low-logic series Gyeongseong Creature.
In season one, the crafty seeker Yoon Chae-ok, played by Han, and the debonair pawnbroker Jang Tae-sang, played by Park, teamed up to rescue a woman from the bowels of a hospital in Gyeongseong – the name for Seoul under Japanese colonial rule – only to find themselves going up against a tentacled monster as well as the Japanese army.


After it was revealed that the creature was none other than her mother, Chae-ok swallowed a nanjin at the end of season one, which gave her some of the properties of the monster and has allowed her to live on, ageless, through the years.
In the present, Han once again plays Chae-ok, who still searches for people though she now operates under the name “Silverbill”.
Park this time plays Jang Ho-jae, a wily young man who works as a private investigator. Ho-jae is the spitting image of Tae-sang and is working in the same building that served as Tae-sang’s pawn shop, the old-fashioned design of which now sticks out in modern-day Seoul.
Owing to an accident he was involved in a year earlier, Ho-jae has no memories of who he was before that time. The trouble is, before we are even introduced to Ho-jae, we witness this “accident”, which involves him superpowered and engaged in a nighttime CGI battle with dozens of black-hooded assailants on a bridge.
The show makes almost no effort to hide the fact that Ho-jae is actually Tae-sang, who also ingested a nanjin monster bug back in the 1940s. So much for mystery.

The fated pair cross paths once more while looking for different people in the same dank motel.
Ho-jae enters the wrong room and stumbles upon the gruesome scene of a body with an eye missing and its brains sucked out. He then tussles with a mysterious cloaked figure – Chae-ok – who he misidentifies as the killer before she disappears out of the window and into the night.
Subsequently, Ho-jae is tasked by the police with tracking down Chae-ok to avoid being fingered as a suspect in the murder, while Chae-ok is asked to track down another target and sent an old black-and-white picture of Tae-sang.
When the pair meet again, Chae-ok now recognises Ho-jae as Tae-sang. Together, they become embroiled in a gruesome string of murders that appear to be connected to Seung-jo, played by Bae Hyeon-seong, a dangerous young man with special powers.
They are also tracked down by a man who works for the Jeonseung Biotech corporation, played by Lee Mu-saeng, which operates out of the same laboratory where the tentacled monster was first developed by the Japanese army and employs a group of blade-wielding elite agents covered from head-to-toe in black known as the Kurokos.

The first season of Gyeongseong Creature was not without its issues, but it benefited from a clear storyline that mostly took place in the same location, as a group of misfits banded together to achieve a common goal.
By jumping forward to the present, setting the story across all of modern Seoul, giving its protagonists superpowers and broadening the range of villains, season two feels massively overstuffed.
Both narratively and visually it is reminiscent of the stark drop in quality that occurred between the first and second seasons of Sweet Home.
Given the powers their protagonists possess, Han and Park have even more action scenes this time around, but thanks to choppy editing, an over-reliance on CGI and some first-person camera angles lifted straight out of The Villainess, these feel like cut scenes in a second-rate action-horror video game.
Putting aside the confounding narrative and visual busyness, what about the central romance between Chae-ok and Tae-sang? After all, they are supposed to be the heart of the series.

You would think that decades of romantic longing, endless sacrifice, snowy embraces and a case of amnesia would provide enough K-drama romance catnip to distract us from the show’s other problems, but in this case the chasm is too broad to bridge.
Gyeongseong Creature season two tries to hook us with aching romance, but try as they might, Han and Park fail to sell it. Instead, they find themselves marooned in muddled proceedings, bouncing around between the blurred blows of CGI bad guys.
The show ends with a tease of a continuation, but do we really need to be subjected to another Sweet Home season 3?
Gyeongseong Creature is streaming on Netflix.


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Han So-hee (left) as seeker Yoon Chae-ok and Park Seo-jun as private investigator Jang Ho-jae in a still from the Korean drama Gyeongseong Creature season 2. Photo: Netflix

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Han So-hee and Park Seo-joon return in season two of Gyeongseong Creature, but Netflix’s new Korean drama series fails in many ways


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Review | Netflix K-drama Gyeongseong Creature season 2 review: awful follow-up is a big step down

Han So-hee and Park Seo-joon return in season two of Gyeongseong Creature, but Netflix’s new Korean drama series fails in many ways