Love defies Time and Space...
"Hotel del Luna" and "The King: Eternal Monarch" are love stories for the ages...
I’m a sap.
I didn’t used to be. You couldn’t get a sniffle out of me over most love stories. Most of them I found contrived and dishonest. But they say that when the pupil is ready, the master will appear. So it was with me. I wanted to find stories that touched my soul, and when I stumbled upon “Hotel del Luna,” I found what my heart had been looking for.
“Hotel del Luna” is an deft mixture of fantasy, horror, comedy, drama, and romance. It tells the story of Jang Man-wol (IU), a bandit whose careless attraction to a Royal Guard captain 1300 years ago led to the betrayal and slaughter of her brother and group. Vowing revenge, she killed the captain, his bride, and any other Royal she could put her sword through.
Traveling with the effects of her people, she stops to drink with a strange old woman who vanishes. Nervous and sensing something behind her, Man-wol pivots and strikes with her sword, only to discover she’s stabbed the Moontree. It absorbs her sword, flies apart and transform into an inn for the dead, which Man-wol is now bound to.
In the present day, she spares the life of a petty thief who broke into her hotel in return of the service of his son, Goo Chan-sung (Yoo Jin-goo), when he comes of age. Coming back to Seoul after an American education, Man-wol finds him, tells him he’s going to work for her, and gives him a special birthday gift.
He doesn’t know what the gift is until he finds a pale woman wearing sunglasses at night and discovers her eyes are empty sockets when she takes them off.
Man-wol appears, helps him evade the ghost, and tell him her hotel needs a human to run it and interface with the real world. Chan-sung initially refuses but eventually becomes the 80th manager.
The hotel, he learns, is a “halfway house” for dead spirits trying to resolve unfinished business and find peace before they move onto the afterlife and reincarnation.
Chan-sung discovers most of the ghosts (but not all) aren’t scary at all, but sad souls regretful over the lost chances of their lives, and that part of his job is to try and help them find peace so they can move on.
It also turns out that his job also entails reining in his volatile, spendthrift boss who buys cars, jewelry, and clothes without regard to the hotel’s cash reserves because what else is she going to do with the life she has?
As the show progresses, Chan-sung learns Man-wol’s tragic backstory, as well as the other characters inhabiting this world, include Death and the Mages,
mysterious sisters who run this shadow world and tell him that Man-wol’s curse will never be lifted as long as she seeks revenge upon the innocent reincarnations of the people she killed long ago; with Chan-sung coming to understand he was brought to the hotel to give Man-wol a chance to redeem herself and lift her curse through the power of love, compassion, and forgiveness.
I think that if I had one series to take to the proverbial desert island, this would be the one. The series is beautifully designed and shot, the music magical, and the story a wonderful journey though pain, regret, and finally love. The cast is all outstanding, but the heart and soul of the show is Lee Je-eun aka “IU,’ who starts out as a selfish, greedy, cold, arrogant, bitchy clotheshorse who’s given up hope; to a woman who finally gives up her anger and finds a bittersweet love with Chan-sung as they realize lifting her curse also means she will move on from this world so she can be reborn into the next. I finished the show sniffling like crazy; both from the wonderful story and from the realization that I had finally found storytellers who weren’t cynical cashgrabbers and hacks, but knew how to touch my time-wounded heart. Man-wol’s journey is one for everyone who’s loved and lost and despairs of ever feeling whole again. The show became an instant sensation in Korea then an international hit when Netflix started showing it. I can’t recommend this show highly enough.
Another show that’s gained a loyal following is “The King: Eternal Monarch.”
It posits that there are parallel worlds, or in this case, two Koreas. One is the one we know, the Republic of Korea. The other is the Kingdom of Corea, a democratic monarchy where the North and South are one land. It’s a modern technology-driven land wealthy from its exports of rare earth elements but uneasy from the continuing efforts by Japan to subjugate it.
One night while riding his rare and beautiful white horse in a bamboo forest, the King (Lee Min-ho) comes across a portal which takes him into our world. The King, a physics buff, quickly realizes the hypothesis that parallel worlds exist is true and that he’s crossed into ours.
Riding a white horse in the middle of Seoul quickly gathers the attention of a feisty female police detective (Kim Go-eun) who happens to be nearby. He’s stunned because he recognises her. Twenty-five years ago, his uncle, the king’s brother, killed the King and almost killed him before he was rescued by a mysterious masked stranger who accidently dropped a police ID card. The small boy, now King of Corea, kept the ID wondering if he would ever find its owner, and now she’s standing before him.
She orders him down off the horse where he calmly explains he’s the King of Corea and that he’s somehow crossed into this world.
She thinks he’s nuts, of course, and detains him briefly before letting him go while keeping the horse at her house where she has enough of a yard to put up a makeshift stall. Even if he is nuts, she’s still intrigued by the mysterious stranger, especially when she discovers there’s no records of him, he’s wearing a coat with diamond-inset buttons, and that the money he’s carrying, though not our money, uses the same special paper, inks, and printing techniques as our money.
After disappearing with his horse and realizing she missed him, she decides to find out if his insane tale is true when he reappears and offers to take her back to his world.
She accepts, crosses the portal with him, and discovers everything he said was true. Her shock also comes with the realization that his murderous uncle is alive and has been crossing between the worlds looking for doubles desperate enough to take the uncle’s offer of a better life in the kingdom in return for helping him depose the King.
The show got a mixed reception in Korea. People loved that it was the return of Lee Min-ho after his mandatory military service and he was regarded as the perfect choice to play the smart and compassionate King.
Korean fans were also a bit picky as to whether Kim Go-eun was actually pretty enough to be a King’s crush, but Go-eun managed to win people over in the end.
One of the real treats of the show was watching the actors do double-duty in dual roles. Go-eun’s double is Luna, a dying thief the uncle tries to hire to replace her detective double.
Another, much more startling contrast is Woo Do-hwan as the king’s loyal and stoic bodyguard in his world but a complete goofball in ours.
At one point, the King leave his bodyguard behind to try and find his uncle, and takes the goofball, who now has to act like his steely bodyguard. It’s a tough assignment playing both characters at the same time but Do-hawn handles it nicely.
The story does have some problems trying to juggle so many story threads. It’s implied that Luna does live through an organ transplant, while others are explained that crossing time and space has altered both worlds. As a writer, I was well aware of the bits and pieces left floating, but it didn’t bother me. The story resolved itself quite nicely with the two lovers actually having a happy ending. (This is rare in Kdramas where someone usually dies, leaves at the end sadder but wiser, or just ends on a cliffhanger angling for a second season. Sometimes I can take this, and sometimes I just want to throw my shoe at the screen.)
So all in all, I can’t rank “The King: Eternal Monarch” over “Hotel Del Luna,” but “King” is an enjoyable time-killer with an intriguing storyline and good performances. If you’re a fan of romantic stories, give this one a try.