It’s weird how time tempers disappointment. I’ll likely remember The King: Eternal Monarch fondly now that it’s over, the earlier episodes were just so inexplicably terrible and made for drastic expectation rewritting but as the episodes went on I settled into a nice rhythm with it. Each week I hoped it would make better sense and it never did but I was entertained enough because this really isn’t the worst K-drama ever (that would be Born Again hahahaha) but TKEM was the worst Kim Eun Sook written drama and probably one of the worst vis-a-vis the budget, cast, and track record.

It’s all in context and now that The King and his Lady love swanned off to their own happy ending I can say it tried but goodness was every nugget of promising possibility unable to flourish like a seedling given the wrong growth environment. The ending was fine but cribbed from two very recent hit dramas, Lee Min Ho’s own Legend of the Blue Sea and blockbuster Crash Landing on You. Kinda ironic that Kim Eun Sook needed to borrow from Park Ji Eun to find her own conclusion seeing as Park Ji Eun has just been anointed the next Kim Eun Sook.