Kokdu: Season of Deity (Review)
Kokdu: Season of Deity is yet another fantasy (or urban fantasy) romcom which aired this year. That’s a very popular genre, where a typical romcom is accompanied by some fantasy elements, to make it more attractive. And yet, this is a very hard genre to execute, so it doesn’t look cheesy and silly, which was the case, for example, with The Heavenly Idol, and unfortunately to some extent also with Kokdu.
From the start, it is clear that Kokdu: Season of Deity suffered from the same budgetary constraints as The Heavenly Idol. The show looks very cheap, especially sequences set up in the modern world (which comprise most of the show). And yet, the creators of Kokdu dealt with that problem in a bit more intelligent way than the creators of The Heavenly Idol. The supernatural elements (and vfx) are limited just to the main male lead Kokdu/Do Jin-woo/Oh-hyeon (Kim Jung-hyun), and are quite low-key, so it doesn’t look so bad as in The Heavenly Idol where multiple characters had magical powers and the budget didn’t allow for real magical fights.
The premise of Kokdu is also quite similar: instead in a fantasy world, we start in the Korean past, in Goryeo period (918–1393), which is a period rarely depicted in K-Dramas, unlike the usual Joseon era (I guess they keep reusing Joseon costumes and sets in K-Dramas, so it makes things easier). Oh-hyeon (Kim Jung-hyun) and Seol-hee (Im Soo-hyang) are entangled in a romance which can lead to a war, since Seol-hee was promised to a foreign ruler. In short, the romance ends badly for all involved, Oh-hyeon, Seol-hee, and a bunch of other people ended up dying, and cursed for an eternity to return in the next reincarnations whose fates will be yet again intertwined (a well-known trope, often also reused K-Dramas, like, e.g., in Bulgasal: Immortal Souls). Oh-hyeon is additionally cursed by becoming Kokdu, a deity of death, who is set to return every 99 years in a body of a human, and search for a present reincarnation of Seol-hee. The vicious cycle will only end when Seol-hee will fall in love in him again, accepting him as Kokdu, the harbinger of death.
In modern times we meet Seol-hee again, this time as Han Gye-jeol (Im Soo-hyang), a rather unlucky female ER doctor who changes jobs all too often because she graduated from some obscure university. In one of the jobs, she meets Do Jin-woo (Kim Jung-hyun), a very successful surgeon. When Do Jin-woo suddenly dies, Gye-jeol witnesses his resurrection, this time, as she would learn later, as god Kokdu, the main character of the show. Both are accidentally entangled in a regular (and boring) K-Drama corruption conspiracy, behind which is the antagonist of the show, chairman Kim Pil-soo (Choi Kwang-il).
The main plot follows the renewed romance between Kokdu and Han Gye-jeol who is unaware that she is really Seol-hee. We have also second leads, Kim Da-som as Tae Jeong-won (Gye-jeol’s estranged friend) and Ahn Woo-yeon as Han Cheol (Gye-jeol’s brother), who are involved in a secondary romance arc. All of the leads are involved in the effort to thwart the conspiracy and bring people responsible to justice, which gets increasingly convoluted over time. We have also a pair of comedic relief actors Kim In-kwon and Cha Chung-hwa who essentially repeat their shtick from Mr. Queen, this time as Kokdu’s supernatural helpers (both shows have also many other similarities, like the same male lead and an entire body swap trope, etc.).
The main leads of the show constitute, unfortunately, the main weakness of the show. Kim Jung-hyun is as uninteresting as Kokdu, as he is as Cheoljong in Mr. Queen. He is stiff as an actor, lacks charisma, and switches between a comedic mode, and regular detached performance mode. He is supposed to portray several different characters (Kokdu/Do Jin-woo/Oh-hyeon), but he has trouble doing that consistently. So, he resorts to mostly comedic performance for Kokdu, and regular performance for anything else. I have also difficulty understanding why Oh-hyeon and Kokdu are supposed to have different personalities, as they’re one and the same person, and why suddenly Kokdu is a trickster god in a way he behaves (as opposed to the god of death he is supposed to be), while Oh-hyeon had none of these features. (And why they keep casting Kim Jung-hyun as a main male lead in anything is beyond me).
While Im Soo-hyang as Han Gye-jeol has a definitely greater acting range than Kim Jung-hyun (she actually can show some emotions, while Jung-hyun is mostly emotionless in his performance), the way her character is written doesn’t provide her with many opportunities. In the end, Gye-jeol is either a modest and subdued woman, or she is in despair and cries: it seems that writers think that a female lead can do only those two things in a K-Drama. Gye-jeol entirely lacks agency as a character, everything just happens to her, she is being mistreated, assaulted, fired, or rejected from jobs, and even in her romance with Kokdu she remains entirely passive. It’s even unfair to compare Im Soo-hyang’s performance to a charismatic and versatile performance by Shin Hye-sun in Mr. Queen, since she wasn’t given the same quality of material to work with.
In addition, Kokdu: Season of Deity has a problem with its structure: the first half of the show, focused on Gye-jeol’s troubles and the conspiracy plot, together beginnings of the romance with Kokdu, is entirely boring and predictable. The second part of the show is more interesting, especially in later episodes. We are getting more flashbacks to the Goryeo period, more information on intertwined fates, as well as some new supernatural characters responsible for those fates: all of that was almost entirely missing from the first part of the show to its detriment. Either the show should’ve been restructured, or shortened to 12 episodes, because what we got doesn’t work. The finale of the show is staged through several last episodes, with several pseudo-finales along the way, this too should’ve been avoided: it would be enough to have a single climax for the show and epilogue episode, as usual for K-Dramas.
In the end, Kokdu: Season of Deity is an uneven experience: the first part of the show is disappointing, it picks up pace later, but that might be too late. The writing, especially the way characters are written, is not very good, so the actors didn’t have much to work with.
Kokdu: Season of Deity on Wikipedia and MyDramaList
