SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

The King: Eternal Monarch
(더 킹: 영원의 군주 / Deo King: Yeong-wonui Gunju)
MyDramaList rating: 10/10

Hello everyone! It’s been two weeks since my previous review, but I’m already back with a new one! #thelifeofadramaddict
Even though it’s only been two weeks, I did take my time with this drama, starting with only one episode a day since the episodes are quite lengthy and the content is very dramatic and intense.
I put this on my to-watch list because I saw it on Netflix and was surprised I never heard anything about it, even though it had a pretty well-known main cast. Reading the summary I didn’t really understand but I saw time travel and fantasy so I thought I’d check it out, since I don’t usually watch a lot of scifi/fantasy K-Drama. Let me tell you: it exceeded my expectations. It blew me away. It’s one of the best series I’ve watched in a long time. I actually rated it with a 10 on MyDramaList. And I have no idea how to write a review about this, because it’s so incredibly complicated to explain with just words. So I’m going to refrain from too many details, stick to the main story, pick out the most important characters (mostly the ones on the poster) and then just list every single thing I loved about it. Let’s go.

Okay, so first of all, let me start with the basics. The King: Eternal Monarch is a Netflix K-Drama with 16 episodes, each episode lasting about 1 hour and 10 minutes. It deals with the theme of parallel worlds. First of all, there is this magical/legendary bamboo flute called the Manpasikjeok, which according to legend has the power to open up portals to other worlds. This flute has been in the possession of the Royal Family that resides in the Kingdom of Corea. In this world, Korea has remained a monarchy, the North and South were never divided, and it’s basically a maelstrom of both traditional historical and modern Western influences. The Royal Family still lives in a palace, their most traditional staff still wears traditional garments, etc.
The story starts in 1994, when Imperial Prince Geum, real name Lee Lim (played by Lee Jung Jin) commits a coup against his brother, the King, in order to steal the Manpasikjeok. Just as he kills his brother, his little nephew the Crown Prince comes in. The little boy manages to cut the Manpasikjeok in half before his uncle attempts to strangle him. Before Lee Lim is able to kill the boy he is obstructed by a mysterious figure, dressed all in black, who enters the room and starts shooting at them. Wounded, Lee Lim is able to escape, and the mysterious figure kneels down at the little Crown Prince. Just as he gets up to leave, he drops something and the little Prince grabs a hold of it.
The object he drops is a police ID card issued in 2019, which belongs to a female police lieutenant.
25 years later, the Crown Prince is now King Lee Gon (played by Lee Min Ho) and he is still searching for the woman on the police ID, but she doesn’t seem to exist in the Kingdom. Apart from that, he is busy enough with running his Kingdom, including a necessary partnership with Prime Minister Goo Seo Ryung (played by Jung Eun Chae), who makes it obvious she’s interested in more than just being his Prime Minister. The people he is closest with are Head Court Lady Noh Ok Nam (played by Kim Young Ok) and his most faithful friend and bodyguard Jo Yeong (played by Woo Do Hwan). Yeong has been by his side ever since they were kids, they met right after Gon was crowned King when he was 8 years old.
Some time after the coup, Lee Lim’s body was found, and he has been pronounced dead since then.

However, nothing is less true. Lee Lim managed to escape the coup and stumbled upon a portal formed by two obelisks in a bamboo forest. Amazed by how the stories about the Manpasikjeok must be true, he goes through the portal and finds himself in a parallel world: the Republic of Korea (aka South-Korea as we know it in real life). Shortly after entering, he meets a man with the exact same face as his brother, whom he just killed in the Kingdom. Realizing this must be the parallel version of his family, he goes and kills his brother’s entire family, including his 8-year old song (Gon’s parallel), and himself – Lee Lim’s parallel in the Republic is in a wheelchair, unable to move by himself. He ends up using his parallel self to fake his death back in the Kingdom.
He only keeps his brother’s wife alive, Song Jeong Hye, the parallel of Gon’s mother. To use her in his future plans, he keeps her as a hostage, and she always has someone keep an eye on her. She attempts to kill herself multiple times, but Lee Lim is determined to keep her alive for some reason – this becomes apparent at the end of the series.
Lee Lim then continues to travel between the two worlds and starts creating an ‘army’ of parallel versions that all become interested in taking over their counterparts’ lives. He starts smuggling people from one world to another as children, he manipulates and blackmails people into killing their own parallels. All the while, even though 25 years have passed, he hasn’t aged at all due to the power of Manpasikjeok, and he wishes to remain immortal like this.

Lee Gon eventually ends up in the bamboo forest as well, following a strange, flute-like sound only he can hear. He finds the obelisks and goes through them, ending up in the Republic. And the first person he meets there is the woman he’s been looking for, the female police lieutenant Jeong Tae Eul (played by Kim Go Eun). He’s ecstatic to have finally found her, but she has no idea who he is. And so their love story begins. Since Lee Gon’s parallel was killed by Lee Lim when he was 8, his identity is not registered in the Republic and he’s initially locked up by Tae Eul, allthewhile trying to convince her he’s the King of the Kingdom of Corea. He even meets Yeong’s parallel, Jo Eun Sup (also Woo Do Hwan), but he doesn’t know him either.
It takes a while for Tae Eul to get used to Gon, but as she keeps discovering things about him that just don’t add up, she slowly starts opening her mind to the fact that he really might be something special. After a while, Gon is able to take her with him to the Kingdom and she’s able to see for herself. As they finally come to see eye to eye, their romance blossoms quite smoothly.
But, as Lee Gon quickly realizes Tae Eul couldn’t be the one who saved him as a child herself, he wants to find out who dropped her ID card from the future in his past – and as more and more people seem to be tied to Lee Lim in one way or another, he becomes more determined to stop his uncle from whatever he’s trying to do.

Okay, so I’ll go this far for the summary. If you’ve watched it you’ll understand how difficult it is to explain in words the intricateness of the story, since almost all characters have parallel counterparts. The drama strings it all together so brilliantly, but to write out everything in the same detail is just impossible. I really hope that I can convey the greatness of this drama properly, even if it means having to omit some minor details. Because mind you: literally EVERYTHING is important. Every single person that appears, however minor, every single person strung along by Lee Lim in this drama is important. Every single person manipulated into taking over his/her counterpart’s life, every child swapped with their parallel without being aware of what was happening; every single character in this drama is important and relevant. I’ve never seen a drama before where every single character was this important to the story. Because it really illustrated Lee Lim’s strategy. He took away seemingly insignificant people from around more significant people. He managed to convince people to give up their parenthood in order for their kids to get a better life in the other world, even if that meant being separated from them. And that is how dangerous Lee Lim was. That is how he was the ultimate bad guy, for committing the worst crime of all: literal identity theft. He violated every single rule in existence regarding identity and people’s private lives by just literally taking people out of their own lives and planting them in a different one, in a different world. Sometimes he would only correspond with one counterpart and the other one would just be killed or kidnapped or swapped into another life (the one of their parallel) without knowing anything that’s going on.
I remember especially feeling this when this pregnant lady, one of the Prime Minister’s ‘friends’, went through this. In the Republic, she was living in poverty with an abusive husband, and it didn’t take long for Lee Lim to convince her to take her parallel’s place in the Kingdom, where she was the daughter of rich pharmaceutical company’s owner or something and lived a glamorous life. In return, the rich version of her was dropped in her counterpart’s life of poverty without a single warning – she literally wakes up one day in a shabby house, wearing shabby clothes, the world around her nothing like the one she knew. That is some scary shit and no one should have the power to be able to do something like that.

As it turns out, Tae Eul does have a parallel in the Kingdom, however, as fate has it, her counterpart is a criminal who’s also terminally ill. Lee Lim gets this criminal parallel, Luna, to take over Tae Eul’s life in the Republic where she has a father and a better life. In the Republic, Luna even attempts to murder Tae Eul, but luckily she’s saved before it gets life threatening.

The love story between Gon and Tae Eul is very turbulent. Gon regularly has to travel between worlds, and their goodbyes are always hard on both of them, especially when he has to stay away for a longer time. Also, they are both remotely aware that their relationship is difficult since they are ultimately from two different worlds and Gon cannot stay in the Republic forever. There are multiple times when either one crosses over to the other’s world, voluntarily or not. When Luna crosses over to the Republic, Tae Eul finds herself drugged and kidnapped into the Kingdom, where her life is in danger either way because the police knows her face as that of a criminal’s. There were multiple scenes where I was literally on the edge of my seat, scared to bits that someone would get shot or killed – but Tae Eul is always rescued just in time, either by Gon or by someone else, luckily.

I cannot stress enough how amazingly complicated but at the same time genius the story is. After watching the first episode, I was all ‘WHAT THE FUDGE IS GOING ON’. I didn’t understand a thing. Everything from the flute to the coup to the parallel worlds is shown in such a hurry without any spoken explanation, it really felt as if I fell right in the middle of something.
However, the great thing is that everything, EVERY THING, is explained throughout the series.
Even when you would fast forward to some situation and you’re like ‘huh wait what, how are these people here’, you just had to wait a little longer and it would be shown how they got there in a flashback. It was so satisfactory to slowly but surely grasp more and more of what was going on. The way everything gradually came together was genius. The writers did an amazing job, I’m going to write their names down for any further projects they might work on because I believe they are geniuses. The whole thing, from begin to end, is wrapped up and comes full circle at the end and that is the best thing. To go from ‘What is happening’ to ‘Omg now everything makes sense!’ – they stretched everything neatly over 16 episodes and it was enough time. Honestly, it felt longer than 16 episodes, and maybe that’s what they went for: that it would also feel like a lifetime, haha. On several occasions I was so overwhelmed by the amazingness of it all I literally said to myself, ‘This series is killing me, I can’t go on’, haha. It has been a long while since a drama had this effect on me.

Because in the end, what it all comes down to, is that Gon realizes that it was him who saved himself from that coup when he was 8. He, his adult version from the future, was the one who dropped Tae Eul’s ID card with his younger self to lead himself to her. And even though that seemed to be such a obvious plot twist, it didn’t occur to me at all. Not until the point when he got the black jacket from Tae Eul and went ‘Hey, this looks familiar’ and then I was like OMG WAIT.
Also, and I’m quite proud of myself coming to this conclusion – I’m not even sure if it’s true because it’s never truly mentioned, but it has to be true: the case of the weird scars that some people would get on rainy days with thunder. We first see the scar appear on Gon’s shoulder and Lee Lim’s face, so we are led to think it has to do with crossing worlds. However, some people like Yeong/Eun Sup and Tae Eul, who also cross worlds, don’t get the scar. And then suddenly even the Prime Minister has the scar.
And at some point – literally, I had just finished an episode and was doing something else and then suddenly my mind went like ‘THAT’S IT. The scar only appears on people whose parallels/counterparts in the other world are dead.’ Because by then, they had just found the body of the Prime Minister’s counterpart.
I don’t think it was even explained in the series in the end, but it just has to be true because it was the case for every single person that got the scar. I was a bit proud of myself for figuring that out, haha.

I feel like I’m still skipping things, but you have to believe me, I’m trying to write down everything that I remember coming to my mind while watching it. I really just advise you to watch it – everything will make sense if you just watch it yourself, haha.

I’m not sure why the scars started appearing on people, except that it had to do with the Manpasikjeok. The one consistent thing was that time stood still whenever either Gon or Lim would cross worlds. And only the two of them were able to tell time stood still. So it became a constant warning of danger when there was a scene and suddenly time froze and you would be like ‘Uh oh, that means Lim crossed over again.’ What was great was that Gon figured out that each time this happened, time froze for a little while longer. As a skilled mathematician, he started cracking the code and counted the seconds of each ‘freeze’. That’s how he ultimately calculated the time when time would freeze long enough for him and Lim to come face to face: he cracked the code of the time freezes.

Let me talk a little more about Prime Minister Goo Seo Ryung. She was with reason one of the main characters, so I feel like I need to do her a little more justice. As I mentioned, she is initially kind of a ‘female second lead’ kind of character, just because she seems interested in marrying the King, but things do not go her way. As Gon discovers the other world and occasionally disappears from the Kingdom (he supposedly ‘locked himself up in his study’), she becomes more frustrated and we get to see how greedy she is. She comes from a low background, her mother sells fish at the market, and she’s paved her own way from assemblywoman to Prime Minister, dreaming of eventually becoming Queen. In her way to the top, she was even married for a while, her husband being the Chairman of KU Group, a very influential place that had access to a lot of intel on people. I’m actually not sure what exactly KU Group was, but it certainly had lots of information. Her now ex-husband is in jail, but she still visits him sometimes if she needs information since he still has contacts at KU Group (not sure how that works). Anyways, she doesn’t always play things clean, let’s keep it at that.
And then, she too is approached by Lee Lim, slowly but surely. It begins with him leaving his umbrella at her mother’s fish stall. Her mother tells her that she saw a man that looked just like Lee Lim, but of course she doesn’t believe her. Then, she starts getting strange newspapers stating the USA president Trump visited North Korea. As North Korea doesn’t exist and Trump clearly isn’t the USA president in the world of the Kingdom, Seo Ryung is puzzled by this. All the more when she spots her parallel self in one of the newspaper pictures. When she eventually meets Lim, he tells her about her other version and kind of manipulates her to take action because ‘she wouldn’t want her parallel version to take over her life, right?’ They don’t show exactly what happens or how, but at some point Tae Eul finds her parallel version in the Republic in a morgue, and we have to assume that Seo Ryung had something to do with that. But then her life starts to crumble. Her ex-husband in jail suddenly releases audio recordings of his meetings with her, in which she says things that cause her to be demoted as Prime Minister. She is suspended from her job and she doesn’t get Gon’s affection either, making her useless in even Lim’s eyes.

In the final episodes of the series, before Gon realizes he has to go back in time to revert everything, everything in the Kingdom seems to crumble down. People keep on disappearing and dying and the time is ticking: something has to be done.
First, Gon goes back in time to the coup in 1994, just to follow his own destiny of planting Tae Eul’s ID card with his younger self. Lim realizes at the same time that it had to be Gon himself back then, and he goes back to warn himself before committing the coup to kill the young Gon first, but his past self doesn’t take him seriously and even kills him #bigfail.
After Gon manages to fulfill his ‘destiny’, he still isn’t able to stop Lim from escaping and he realizes he’s stuck in 1994 as the Manpasikjeok is now with his younger self. So he has to travel through 26 years before being able to meet up with Tae Eul again. When he finally does, Tae Eul has just been stabbed by Luna and is in the hospital. They spend some wonderful time together, but then he has to go back as he’s realized nothing has changed and Lim is still able to cross and threaten people in the Republic.
Gon has to go back to even before Lim manages to get to the portal – however, this would result in a world where Lim never got to the Republic and it will therefore remove all Tae Eul’s memories of Gon, since he’ll never end up coming to the Republic either. Both aware of this, Gon has to promise Tae Eul that, when he succeeds, he will open every door in the universe to find her and come back to her again.
So the series ends with Gon succeeding in his mission – he kills Lee Lim right before he’s supposed to go through the portal for the first time and both worlds are restored to how they should’ve been without Lim’s influence. However, for some reason, Tae Eul still remembers everything. Gon travels through several parallel universes, all with their own version of Tae Eul under different names, but when he ultimately finds his way back to her he is surprised by the fact she still remembers him.
Their love story ends happily, as they meet up every weekend to visit a different world and time together (now that Gon has the Manpasikjeok in one piece) and this is how they truly live happily ever after until they’re old.

It’s time to talk about my absolute favorite character of the entire series, the man that has broken and healed my heart, and who gave me more feels about any character I’ve had in a long while: Kang Shin Jae. Shin Jae (played by Kim Kyung Nam) is Tae Eul’s friend and police colleague. He seems a bit stoic, but it’s clear from the start that he has feelings for her. But he’s so much more than just the ‘second male lead’. Shin Jae grew up in a less than desirable family, his mother gambles a lot and his father is in jail. Apparently, as a child he was in an accident and in a coma for a while before he miraculously woke up – but he doesn’t really remember anything about this.
When Gon starts frequenting Tae Eul and their work space at the police office, he starts remembering things that he can’t place. He remembers seeing Gon as a child on television crying in his royal robes. When he confronts Gon and Yeong about this, Gon quickly realizes that Shin Jae must have originally come from the Kingdom. As it is revealed later on, the person we get to know as Shin Jae throughout the series is actually the real Shin Jae’s parallel from the Kingdom, named Hyun Min. The real Shin Jae – the boy who got in a coma after an accident – was not going to wake up anytime soon and Lee Lim made a deal with the boy’s father that he would get him a replacement for his son in return for the use of a care center. So the real Shin Jae was kept hidden in a care center that was monitored by Lee Lim’s people, while Hyun Min was taken from his mother in the Kingdom (with her approval) to replace him. The real Shin Jae’s mother wasn’t even aware of this plan, she always lived under the impression that her comatose son one day magically woke up. Hyun Min’s mother in the Kingdom, also in a deal with Lee Lim, got to work as a palace worker under a different name. Lee Lim kept sending her pictures of her son in secret, but when he finally sends her poison to attempt murder on the King as her final mission, she chooses to drink the poison herself since she doesn’t want to be a part of Lim’s plans anymore. She survives, fortunately, and confesses the truth to Gon. In the end, Gon even lets her meet with Hyun Min one more time.
But honestly, Shin Jae/Hyun Min has stolen my heart. I really have never seen this actor before, but he robbed me of my heart. At some point I had it so bad that I would just start crying whenever he appeared on screen because his life was just so unfair. He literally lived another person’s life for as long as he could remember, in fact he didn’t even remember otherwise. He forgot who he used to be, his whole life turned out to be a lie. On top of that, the woman he loved didn’t love him back and he had to arrest his own mother and… ugh, do I need to keep going? His whole existence was so pitiful but he was such a good guy and it just broke my heart. Even when Lim approached him he refused to work with him, risking his own life. I was so scared that he would be killed somewhere at the end of the series, but luckily his whole life was put back together as it should have been.
Gon even ended up saving young Shin Jae from getting into that accident, even though it was by coincidence! In one of the trips Gon and Tae Eul make when they’re travelling together he meets young Shin Jae and talks with him for a minute and then suddenly that car crashes right behind him and I went ‘OMG SHIN JAE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN THAT ACCIDENT AND GON SAVED HIM’. Meine Gute, my heart.

When Gon puts the world back how it should be without Lim’s influence, we see most clearly how Lim messed up so many people’s lives. People that used to be dead are still alive and families are back together. Shin Jae never got into the accident and becomes kind of a big shot (we see him stepping into a car with his own driver). Hyun Min is back in the Kingdom where he actually seems to have a chance at romance with Tae Eul’s parallel Luna, who is now Goo Seo Kyung since she was adopted by Seo Ryung’s mom as a little girl (after she attempted to steal something at her fish market). Seo Ryung is in jail because she robbed people of taxes when she was an assemblywoman. (I liked how the guy who used to be her secretary was now still by her side as her correctional officer at the prison.) Eun Sup is married to Na Ri while Yeong in the Kingdom is having a secret relationship with Seong Ah (I forgot to mention her! Na Ri/Seong Ah (played by Kim Yong Ji) was a person that existed in both worlds, Na Ri was one of Tae Eul’s friends who ran a milk tea shop in the Republic and Seong Ah was a Public Affairs Officer at the palace in the Kingdom – Na Ri and Eun Sup & Seong Ah and Yeong are interested in each other in both worlds). People who commited crimes as a part of their allegiance to Lee Lim ended up still committing the crimes, but received proper punishment for it – Lim wasn’t there to cover their tracks or help them get away with it. Press Secretary Mo became Prime Minister – she was one of the most loyal people at the King’s side, besides the Head Court Lady.

The only thing that still remains a little bit of a mystery to me is the boy with the yo-yo. In both worlds, Lee Lim’s people had their secret hideout in a bookshop. In front of this bookshop, there was often a young boy with a yo-yo. He seemed to know a lot about what was going on. He is seen talking to several random people, from Luna to Song Jeong Hye, saying that there is only one of him and that he too travels worlds to ‘warn people and restore balance’. In the end, when all is restored, we see how his parallel is restored as well and his adult version is a guy who has appeared sporadically in the background in both worlds, both in the Republic and in the Kingdom. I still don’t really understand who he was or how this worked, because the things he said were always a little mysterious and he appeared as different people through time and world. But in some way I also like that he remains a bit of an enigma. It’s one of the reasons I liked his character, because you don’t really know who he is, he’s just ‘the boy with the yo-yo’.

I would like to make some special mentions now. First of all, for actor Woo Do Hwan, who played both Yeong and Eun Sup. The only other role I’ve seen of this actor was the male lead in The Great Seducer and in this series he played two completely different characters. It made me respect him so much as an actor, because he was also completely different from the role he played in TGS. He was amazing. I was a little surprised to Yeong’s stoicness since he was shown to be so expressive with his emotions as a child, but he pulled it off so well, especially in moments when he had to pretend to be Eun Sup or was caught off guard in some way. He was able to play Yeong pretending to be Eun Sup and vice versa and that was amazing. He gets full marks for his performance in this drama, I’m really starting to like this actor.

Grandma Kim Young Ok!!! I love how she’s still alive and kicking and her role in this drama was so beautiful. She was the grandma that everyone needed. I love how her part in the story became so important, and also when it was revealed that she too had travelled worlds: Gon’s grandfather (while using the Manpasikjeok) had saved her from the Korean War in 1950 in the Republic by taking her to the Kingdom, a place without wars. And she had devoted her whole life to serving his family after that. It was so beautiful that she seemed to be this old lady who only just worried about Gon, while in reality she knew much more of what was going on, when he started disappearing she must have known he was travelling worlds as well as his grandfather had with the Manpasikjeok. And when she came to terms with Tae Eul in the Kingdom, she even asked her what had come of the Korean War, causing Tae Eul to realize she was from there as well. Everything was just so beautifully intricate, I really loved her character.

PRINCE BUYONG. Speaking of lovable grandparent figures, Prince Buyong, or Lee Jong In (played by Jun Moo Song) was a relative of Gon whose whole family lineage was crumbled after the coup. I believe he was Gon’s uncle, but I’m not sure if he was Lim’s older brother or if he was from another branch of the family. Anyways, he ended up having to banish his whole family from having any right to the throne, except for his granddaughter who was only mentioned by name. His own son actually turns out to be a traitor, as Gon discovers he is the one who helped Lim escape on the night of the cup. But Prince Buyong always remained loyal to Gon, even when it became clear that he knew the truth about the body that was found that everyone thought to be Lee Lim’s. He realized, as a doctor, that it wasn’t actually Lim, but kept it a secret and he accepted his punishment for that.
I was so angry when Lim killed him. He was the nicest grandpa ever and he and the Head Court Lady basically raised Gon by themselves. His friendship with the Head Court Lady was also really lovely. I was so happy when, when Gon restored the world, he was the one to stop Hyun Min’s mother from committing suicide along with her son and offered to help them (in the original version Lee Lim was the one to stop them and manipulate Hyun Min’s mom into sending her son to the Republic to take Shin Jae’s place).

Apart from the interesting genre and themes of this drama that prompted me to watch it, I also really liked the fact Kim Go Eun was in it. After Cheese in the Trap and Goblin I’ve really come to like her as an actress (plus she’s gorgeous?!?!) and I also really liked her character in this series. I also liked how, when Gon visited multiple parallel universes, he kept meeting different versions of her, meaning she got to play a lot of different characters, not just two. I am definitely keeping an eye out for more of her projects, she’s a great actress. Again different from characters she played before, she showed yet another side to her and it keeps amazing me how versatile the actors in this drama were. I think it’s quite a challenge to play multiple double roles.

Honestly, and I’m probably stating an unpopular opinion here, I’m not a big fan of Lee Min Ho. I never really warmed up to him, I mean, I didn’t particularly dislike him or anything, but I just don’t have a very strong opinion about him. In Boys Before Flowers and Personal Preference, he was okay, but he was completely ruined for me in The Heirs and after that I couldn’t watch anything with him for a while. His character there was the epitome of toxic masculinity and it made me physically nauseous watching him. After that, I saw Legend of the Blue Sea, another very good drama in which he didn’t bother me as much, luckily. But the main problem I have with him is that he’s always casted in the same kind of male lead role, always excuding a kind of over-confident dominance (especially towards the female lead). And I think I was able to stomach his character in this series because of its strong female lead. Tae Eul was more than able to stand her ground and Gon didn’t have to constantly protect her, he knew she was able to take care of herself and that’s why he was also able to give her space. Within the amazingness of this drama as a whole, I really didn’t have time to be bothered by him at all, but I did realize I still sometimes had difficulty keeping my eyes fixed on him for a longer time. I don’t know, I guess I’m still not completely over my allergy of him. I just feel like I haven’t seen any real versatility of him as an actor in the several things I’ve seen with him. He’s always casted as someone from a rich background, or at least someone with a high social status, nobility even. He wouldn’t be casted a guy-next-door person, and I find that a little bit of a bummer. I would like to see him in a completely different type of character role. I understand that with his appearance, and since he’s also very tall and stuff, it would be weird for him to play a very inferior introverted character, but nonetheless I’m still waiting for the drama where I can see a different side to his acting.
It was nice to see him acting alongside Kim Young Ok again, she was also the head maid of his role in Boys Before Flowers.

By the way, on AsianWiki the list of characters and counterparts is listed very clearly, per time period and world and group, so if you’re curious to see more faces to the names and how they differed in appearance, please check it out!
It’s really helpful, haha.

All in all, this was one of the greatest dramas I’ve seen ever. And not just among K-Dramas, among series I’ve watched in general. It was great in story, plot, character development, design, cinematography, acting, dialogue, construction, build-up, balance… I can keep going. I can’t think of a single thing I disliked about it. And that’s rare because I always seem to find something, haha. But really, BRAVO. It had everything. Science fiction, parallel worlds, time travel, doppelgangers, and at the same time suspense, romance, drama, thriller. I really love how they came up with the idea of the Kingdom of Corea and how much it differed from the Republic. They thought of everything, they made political decisions as to why they moved the Royal Capital to Busan instead of Seoul, and where in history the two worlds had started to grow apart. They made up an entire fictional society with its own rules and political system. It was like a multiverse haha, showing there were even more parallel universes out there in the end. The versatility of the story and the themes was really unique.
In one of the earlier episodes, there was this really serious sequence where some Japanese military boats trespassed on Korean waters and they had to drive them back with warning shots. During that part it felt like a completely different kind of series, as the political and military sides of the Kingdom’s society were highlighted.
And at some point I even understood the intro sequence, which I never skipped. I finally saw how it wasn’t just a sequence of beautiful graphics – it actually tells the story of the Manpasikjeok and the parallel worlds in just images. They thought of everything. It’s absolutely genius. It was written exactly so that everything would fall into place at the end. It literally comes full circle.
I really enjoyed every single moment of watching this, the plot twists had me gasping for breath and clapping my hands and I cried and laughed and everything. I’m a little sad it’s over, but I’m also glad to start on a new drama, a new adventure.
This story has reminded me once again why I love watching series: you never know when you’ll come across a hidden gem like this that completely blows your mind. I’m so glad I watched it. It’s going to the top of my favorites list and I very much recommend it to everyone.

I’ll be back with a new review. Just a hint: I’m sticking to Netflix for a while 😉

See you! ^^