The Last Empress

I bet you thought I was done writing drama reviews.  That’s ok, I did too because I don’t really watch dramas anymore.  But yet here we are.  Last post I revealed and confessed that I was watching a drama called The Last Empress.  I also said I’d write posts per episode, yeah that was clearly a lie I was too busy being a degenerate and binge watching it episodes at a time.

I haven’t even written drama reviews in so long that I forgot my usual format for these things.  I guess I’ll start off with how I found out about this drama.

I found out about this because I saw a random clip on youtube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj572zwnY8U this one to be exact.  And I thought “this kinda looks interesting”, and one of the comments said “I love how strong she is. She was fragile like glass. But they broke her. So now she’s the sharp pieces that seem Beautiful Because the light is reflecting off of it.” and then I was done.  You can’t tell me there’s character development like that and I don’t watch.  I LIVE FOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, I LIVE FOR THE WEAK CHARACTER FINDING THEIR OWN INNER STRENGTH AND THEN CAUSING EARTHQUAKES WITH THE WRATH OF THEIR CLAPBACKS.  And so the rest was history, I begun watching it.

When the drama started it reminded me a bit of Princess Hours/Goong.  Set in a world in where the Korean monarchy did not end and continued into modern times.  However, this Korean monarchy, as it turns out, has a FEW skeletons in its closet.  With great power and influence, one must have a few…..sacrifices I guess.  We have the main female lead, Jang Nara, who becomes the Emperor’s wife out of convenience, a means to creating an alibi, as well as providing someone controllable, easily influenced, but also easily discarded as need be.  And as is necessary, when there is a female lead who plays the emperor’s wife, there must be an emperor, played by Shin Sung Rok.  An Emperor fully convinced the emperor can do no wrong, and a man you early on are conditioned to hate.  But that’s the beauty of a great drama with a great plot.  There is development, there is change, the characters you watch at the end are not nearly the people you see at the beginning.  The comment that intrigued me enough to start this drama rang true.  The “fragile like glass” female lead becomes a shard in the monarchy’s side.  You see the disgusting face of the royal family that it manages to hide, but now that she’s on the inside she sees that her fantasy happy ending will never happen and thus instead resolves to expose the family for who they are, even if it costs her own life as payment.  It shows you how much they seek to break her that it turns her this way, that she’s willing to go down with the ship, so long as the ship goes down.

But what else that gets me about this plot is that there are so many things lurking beneath the scenes,  as the plot thickens, it also reveals even more of itself.  Certain things begin to make sense, you understand why one character is this way, why another character is that way, why one character does this, or does that.  You learn everyone’s motivations, how everyone is connected to each other, why everything is happening.  And BOY IS THERE A MESSED UP ENTANGLED WEB OF CRAP HAPPENING EVERYWHERE.  And fortunately, the show is 52 episodes, so there is A LOT OF TIME, EPISODES, AND SPACE TO FIT EVERYTHING IN HERE.  There’s a lot to unpack in this plot, to many characters, so many entwined relationships, so many motivations.  But experiencing/enjoying/discovering the plot is part of the enjoyment, so I will not rob you of that, just give you a teaser snippet with this description.  But it’s definitely got an amazing plot.  Plot I’d give a solid….9/10.  It has some parts that honestly feel forced at times, the end wasn’t QUITE what I had hoped it to be, which isn’t a bad thing honestly.

As for the cast, I honestly do not religiously follow actors/actresses although if I recognize someone I am more likely to watch it than if I recognize no one.  I know Jang Nara from watching the korean remake of Fated To Love You and she’s cute, she did a great job in Fated To Love You and I REALLY think she did this part major justice.  She portrays a good naive and kind person, but also portrays the jagged empress that has been broken to the point of retaliation incredibly well as well. I also recognize Lee Elijah, not from anything she’s starred in but from watching Running Man (because i watch a lot of variety shows), so she’s got the recognition factor but definitely showed good character portrayal.  Giving a score for cast has never been my strong suit since honestly I don’t know how I’d give a proper score for it or know what defines a good score?  Is it because you got big names? Is it because whoever you picked played their parts well?    How would you know if they played their parts well? maybe they played their parts well because the story was done well, or maybe it’s the other way around and the cast carried the story to be good through their skill.  Either way though, I’d say the cast for this did really well to portray the story so if I were to assign a score I’d probably give it a 8.5/10, the .5 because i’m flipflopping in my head over whether it’s an 8 or 9.

The OST honestly I don’t think is much to write home about.  Admittedly it’s been a bit of time between the time of me writing this review and the time when I finished the drama, but even then in this time none of the songs stood out to me to really reminisce about or stick in my brain.  That being said, that does not mean the OST/backing music was bad, the opposite actually, I feel from what I remember. thinking that the music fit quite well at least for making me as the viewer feel the proper emotion, and so in that sense, the OST did really what it’s supposed to do. I’ll say 8/10.

As for overall satisfaction, I’d say I’m satisfied with my service (thank you Baymax).  If I didn’t enjoy it, I would not have binged like 5+ episodes a day.  So it’s a pretty easy 9.5/10 on the satisfaction scale, again a .5 because I’m hovering between it being really the ULTIMATE/PERFECT satisfaction (comparing to dramas like Proposal Daisakusen that are solid easily 10/10) and a really satisfying drama.

So where does that leave us on an average score? 8.75/10, which I think I’m ok with rounding up to a 9/10 honestly.  We’ll just say an additional .25 for the intangibles, because this really honestly was a very good series that I highly recommend.  Yes it’s 52 episodes compared to say….a 16 episode series like many KDramas are, but believe me, there’s A LOT that happens in the 52 episodes that you’ll appreciate that they gave a lot of room to allow everything to happen.