‘The Last Empress’…Over the top & ridiculous, this drama is as entertaining as it is enervating.
After watching the first two episodes of The Last Empress, my very first thought was, ‘Is this…a..makjang?’ (For the uninitiated, here is the definition). There was a slight unease I felt, I am not going to lie when I realized this, as I have actively avoided makjangs since I started watching Korean dramas and to stumble across one now, after so many years, caught me completely off guard. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against them. It’s just that they are of a similar template to the soap operas back home (in India), from which I escaped to watch dramas in the first place. But for all my prejudice, I couldn’t keep my eyes and mind off of The Last Empress (at least for half of it). It is so outlandish, so over the top, but so engaging, that the initial episodes just fly by. Already by a couple of episodes, there’s a character who survives a bullet to his brain, a stolen corpse, a cement mixer placed conveniently under the greenhouse to bury your enemies in cement, more kisses and post-coital scenes than most dramas — together combined — manage in their single runtime, and the most unintentionally comical of them all, Tae Hang Ho’s character turning into a tall, fit Choi Jin Hyuk when he undergoes martial arts training and loses weight in an unprecedented amount of time. Boy, am I going to be mad if I don’t come out of this quarantine with abs and a sharp jawline.
You buy all this (you have to if you have strayed this far into the show, otherwise, you wouldn’t have made past the first episode) because the show is quite fast-paced. There are no lingering moments, no big speeches, declarations, just action after reaction after action. No secret is hidden for too long, as they come spilling out every few episodes and all characters are either stark black or stark white.
The plot is quite simple and very reminiscent of many Bollywood movies from the ’80s and ’90s, such as Beta, Aaina, and Dhadkan, where, after (an arranged) marriage, an unassuming woman must rise up to her evil in-laws, or evil sister, or some evil relative who are either attempting to steal her money or her husband. Similarly in The Last Empress, Oh Sunny (Jang Nara) is a musical actress, who marries the Emperor Lee Hyuk (Shin Sung Rok) (the drama is set in an alternate reality where a Korean constitutional monarchy exists), in quite a hasty fashion — which would equate to the arranged marriage in the Indian context, as she knows next to nothing about her husband before marriage — and finds herself in a royal household teeming with secrets and no one to trust.
This ‘battle of the wits’ is a female-oriented genre. In the movies I have mentioned, it has always been between the wife and her sister or her mother-in-law, and in The Last Empress too, this battle occurs between Sunny, her husband’s mistress (Lee Elijah), her mother-in-law (Shin Eun Kyung) and many other women. It can be a captivating watch when done brilliantly, like watching a tennis match, our heads turning from one character to another, in anticipation of who is going to undo the other, and how. But in The Last Empress, all the screaming, the breaking of objects, the evil laughs, the high decibel dialogues just wear you out, and I personally couldn’t make it past the 20th episode. It also didn’t help that Jang Nara’s Oh Sunny took a lot of time to stand up to the villains. She was far too naive and hence inactive for too long. I guess with 52 episodes, it would have happened sometime, but I just didn’t have the patience to stick around.
Explanations, interpretations, nuances don’t figure into these type of shows — you either enjoy these shows, or you don’t, and after reading about how the show ends, I am so glad I didn’t stick around.
