Efrain Jorge
Spain
This review may contain spoilers
A perfect Work condemned by its Ending.
This comment is going to be full of spoilers, so people who haven't seen the drama are better off not reading it until after watching. Mr. Queen is one of the best Korean dramas I have seen in my life (and I have already seen dozens) and one of the two or three that have involved me the most emotionally.
There are no words to describe how wonderful and excellent this story is. It is a series that makes you laugh, excites you, keeps you interested at all times, and deeply moves you. The writing is perfect for most of the plot (I'll talk about that later), the direction is ideal, the production is impeccable. The work of all the actors in the cast is sublime, unsurpassed. Especially extraordinary is the work of the actress Shin Hye-sun as the female lead, she plays Queen Cheorin in an impressive way, achieving through body and verbal language to split into two different people depending on if the soul of Jang Bong- hwan is inside of Cheorin's body, or not. She deserves all the awards for that amazing work.
The overall plot is incredibly intense and gripping, with that mix of real Korean history, and fiction, combining romance, fantasy, drama, comedy, action, and suspense. But without a doubt, the fundamental factor is related to that experience of the soul of chef Jang Bong-hwan within the body of Queen Cheorin, the comedy of that situation and her passionate and morbid romance with Cheoljong. The whole story is based on that funny, crazy and horny love between a man and the soul of another man inside the body of a woman. Curiously, it is one of the best Korean drama couples I have seen, with chemistry so hot that it melts the Sun. Throughout the series, this couple's romance evolves from more comical to more lovely, dramatic and moving. But precisely there is the big problem of this drama.
The series is perfect, worthy of a 10 rating ... until we hit the 18th minute of the last episode. In that minute when the writers made Jang Bong-hwan leave Cheorin's body forever and wake up in his own body, the end of the story was ruined for me. The creative decision to kill So Bong (the being formed by Cheorin's body and Jang Bong-hwan's soul mixed with Kim So-yong's memories) and to make the original soul of Kim So-yong, in the end, left next to Cheoljong was a disaster.
The next 48 minutes of the final episode were a contradictory, absurd, and irritating attempt to make the real Kim So-yong the female lead and minimize So Bong/Jang Bong-hwan to a mediocre and irrelevant role. I'm sorry, but they didn't convince me. For me, the real female lead was So Bong, not Kim So-yong (whom I even consider boring). Throughout the whole story, it was evident that Cheoljong fell in love with So Bong (of the soul of Jang Bong-hwan) and in the last minutes, they try to convince us that he is in love with Kim So-yong, and apparently that even he does not notice the change of personality. Worse still is the ambiguity-induced theory at the end, that Jang Bong-hwan was always a puppet of Kim So-yong, something that would degrade Jang Bong-hwan's role and his feelings for Cheoljong, a theory that I don't believe nor support.
Jang Bong-hwan had the worst possible ending, returning to his current life to live alone, without all the people he loved. And after falling in love with a man and even having sex with him, how could he go back to living as a heterosexual man? I think that would be traumatic for him. With the memories of his life as Queen Cheorin, could one day go back to being 'normal' and forget about his love for Cheoljong to fall in love with a woman?... How can he bear the fact that he is no longer pregnant with the child he has learned to love? The fact that he is not depicted as very traumatized and tormented is another stupid mistake by the writers. And as for Cheoljong, he fell in love with Jang Bong-hwan's soul, not So-yong's soul, so in the end, he didn't stay with the woman he loved, but with a very different one. How long would it take for him to realize that she is not the same person that he fell in love with? Seeing that she is no longer the crazy, reckless, bad-tempered, rude-mannered, eccentric or weird woman who conquered his heart.
It was the worst way to ruin a story at the end, and I don't understand how they can say it's a happy ending. I think they should have at least made an alternate ending to have the right and fair ending with the Cheoljong and So Bong couple, but they left us with only that disappointing and implausible ending. For me, those last 48 minutes deserve a rating of 3, however, I prefer to stay with the memories of the previous 19 episodes (and the first 18 minutes of that final episode) and for the joy and passion they generated in me, I give it a rating of 9.5 for the series overall, and it will always have a place in my heart as one of the series that has most brightened my life.
There are no words to describe how wonderful and excellent this story is. It is a series that makes you laugh, excites you, keeps you interested at all times, and deeply moves you. The writing is perfect for most of the plot (I'll talk about that later), the direction is ideal, the production is impeccable. The work of all the actors in the cast is sublime, unsurpassed. Especially extraordinary is the work of the actress Shin Hye-sun as the female lead, she plays Queen Cheorin in an impressive way, achieving through body and verbal language to split into two different people depending on if the soul of Jang Bong- hwan is inside of Cheorin's body, or not. She deserves all the awards for that amazing work.
The overall plot is incredibly intense and gripping, with that mix of real Korean history, and fiction, combining romance, fantasy, drama, comedy, action, and suspense. But without a doubt, the fundamental factor is related to that experience of the soul of chef Jang Bong-hwan within the body of Queen Cheorin, the comedy of that situation and her passionate and morbid romance with Cheoljong. The whole story is based on that funny, crazy and horny love between a man and the soul of another man inside the body of a woman. Curiously, it is one of the best Korean drama couples I have seen, with chemistry so hot that it melts the Sun. Throughout the series, this couple's romance evolves from more comical to more lovely, dramatic and moving. But precisely there is the big problem of this drama.
The series is perfect, worthy of a 10 rating ... until we hit the 18th minute of the last episode. In that minute when the writers made Jang Bong-hwan leave Cheorin's body forever and wake up in his own body, the end of the story was ruined for me. The creative decision to kill So Bong (the being formed by Cheorin's body and Jang Bong-hwan's soul mixed with Kim So-yong's memories) and to make the original soul of Kim So-yong, in the end, left next to Cheoljong was a disaster.
The next 48 minutes of the final episode were a contradictory, absurd, and irritating attempt to make the real Kim So-yong the female lead and minimize So Bong/Jang Bong-hwan to a mediocre and irrelevant role. I'm sorry, but they didn't convince me. For me, the real female lead was So Bong, not Kim So-yong (whom I even consider boring). Throughout the whole story, it was evident that Cheoljong fell in love with So Bong (of the soul of Jang Bong-hwan) and in the last minutes, they try to convince us that he is in love with Kim So-yong, and apparently that even he does not notice the change of personality. Worse still is the ambiguity-induced theory at the end, that Jang Bong-hwan was always a puppet of Kim So-yong, something that would degrade Jang Bong-hwan's role and his feelings for Cheoljong, a theory that I don't believe nor support.
Jang Bong-hwan had the worst possible ending, returning to his current life to live alone, without all the people he loved. And after falling in love with a man and even having sex with him, how could he go back to living as a heterosexual man? I think that would be traumatic for him. With the memories of his life as Queen Cheorin, could one day go back to being 'normal' and forget about his love for Cheoljong to fall in love with a woman?... How can he bear the fact that he is no longer pregnant with the child he has learned to love? The fact that he is not depicted as very traumatized and tormented is another stupid mistake by the writers. And as for Cheoljong, he fell in love with Jang Bong-hwan's soul, not So-yong's soul, so in the end, he didn't stay with the woman he loved, but with a very different one. How long would it take for him to realize that she is not the same person that he fell in love with? Seeing that she is no longer the crazy, reckless, bad-tempered, rude-mannered, eccentric or weird woman who conquered his heart.
It was the worst way to ruin a story at the end, and I don't understand how they can say it's a happy ending. I think they should have at least made an alternate ending to have the right and fair ending with the Cheoljong and So Bong couple, but they left us with only that disappointing and implausible ending. For me, those last 48 minutes deserve a rating of 3, however, I prefer to stay with the memories of the previous 19 episodes (and the first 18 minutes of that final episode) and for the joy and passion they generated in me, I give it a rating of 9.5 for the series overall, and it will always have a place in my heart as one of the series that has most brightened my life.
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