They Don't Kiss Until Episode 16

11 fast-paced, well-written episodes that have you say, “Oh, no, they didn’t!”

Let’s review the plot:

Queenmaker centers on a skilled and cunning fixer named Hwang Do-hee. She is the head of Corporate Strategy at the Eunsung Corporation. Corporate Strategy really means a group of people hired to handle the family owners of Eunsung’s public image. And that is a job, let me tell you.  

The head of Eunsung, Chairwoman Son Young-sim has built a duty-free shop that is supposed to be the pinnacle of Eunsung’s achievements. The plan is to have this duty-free shop be the center of a newly developed neighborhood where the wealthy and uber-wealthy will live and play. The problem? She has done all sorts of illegal maneuvering to make sure this building gets built. Therefore, she needs political backing to ensure that her crimes are covered up and to allow for unchecked development of the rest of the land surrounding the shop.  

After Son realizes that she can no longer manipulate the current mayor of Seoul, who she helped put in that position, she decides that she needs one of her own family members in that seat for her dreams to be realized. That family member is her son-in-law Baek Jae-min. Using her wealth and power, she buries the current mayor in several scandals and forces him to resign, kicking off a by-election for the seat. 

The plot centers on three major candidates and the lengths they go to ensure they have access to one of the most powerful positions in Korea.

First, Seo Min-jung (played by Jin Kyung, Extraordinary Attorney Woo). She is a three-term politician in what I would guess is the equivalent of a local congressional seat or local committee seat (I don’t really know how South Korean politics work). Seo Min-jung is labeled as the “servant of the common people” and is beloved. She is also backed by some serious money. Her campaign manager is Hwang Do-hee’s ex-husband. Hwang Do-hee eliminates Seo Min-jung first, and Baek Jae-min sits back and watches this happen, knowing that will make his path to the mayorship smoother. 

There is Oh Kyung-sook, the civil rights attorney and activist. When we meet Oh Kyung-sook, she is on day 78 of a protest atop the Eunsung department store, a looming tower. Hwang Do-hee is determined to remove Oh Kyung-sook from the building by any means necessary until witnessing the death of her employee Han I-seul. She decides to intervene in the attack which she ordered. Despite telling the men to stand down, they do not. Forcing Hwang Do-hee to stand in between the goon and the lawyer. The intervention sends Oh Kyung-sook off the building but sky-rockets her popularity. You see, as part of her protest, she said she would throw herself off the building if demands were not met. While the move was accidental, it sets her up to be a trusted person and allows Baek Jae-min to pave his path to the mayoral seat. Let’s look at Baek Jae-min.

On the surface, Baek Jae-min seems like an excellent candidate for mayor. The public loves him. A son of a politician, news anchor, and now CEO of a do-good nonprofit, the citizens of Seoul welcome Baek Jae-min as mayor. He is a wealthy man that advocates for the poor. Moreover, he is instrumental in returning jobs at the Eunsung department store. Not only that, even though he has married into the Eunsung family, he is seen as the only saving grace of the family, who is known to use their wealth to justify the ill-treatment of employees, wanton spending, and overall poor social behavior. But there is just one problem. Baek Jae-min is a serious sex offender, and he is just as morally corrupt as the family he married into. 

Baek Jae-min wants to use his connection with Oh Kyung-sook to build a coalition for his mayoral candidacy. Oh Kyung-sook, for her part, can tell she is being used for political purposes but decides that since the women she fought so hard for have their jobs back, thanks to Baek Jae-min, she doesn’t mind. That is until Hwang Do-hee, now fired from Eunsung, shows up. 

Baek Jae-min throws a party for the rehired workers in the neighborhood where most of them live and where Oh Kyung-sook lives. Hwang Do-hee shows up and tells Oh Kyung-sook not to trust Baek Jae-min. Telling her that this party is a rouse. Soon banks will come offering loans with great offers. The neighborhood’s people will get the loans thinking that when the neighborhood is redeveloped, they will become rich. Also, there will be a ton of cameras there so that redevelopment, helping the poor, and Baek Jae-min’s name will all be put together in the headlines. 

Oh Kyung-sook thinks Do-hee is spitting nonsense until she sees it. Kyung-sook then looks at a flash-drive Do-hee gave her. On the flash drive is the entire plan of uninstalling the former mayor, and Kyung-sook realizes that what she saw play out on the news happened line by line with the document she was now reading. Though she is reluctant, Kyung-sook agrees to Do-hee’s plan of making her the mayor to bring the whole Eunsung empire down.

The show really gets going when Chairwoman Son realizes that without Oh Kyung-sook’s support and with Hwang Do-hee as her campaign manager, it will be less than easy for Baek Jae-min to become mayor. She hires nationally known and relentlessly ruthless political fixer Carl Yoon (played by Lee Kyoung-young, who always plays someone with unclear ethics, he is probably a great guy in real life). Moreover, Carl Yoon has a major secret which is why he agrees to run Baek Jae-min’s campaign, despite how problematic Baek Jae-min is. 

The rest of the show is Carl Yoon and Hwang Do-hee playing a masterful game of political chess that involves manslaughter, attempted murder, blackmail, bribery, assault, defamation, illegitimate children, yellow journalism, and good old fake news. 

Some of the decisions each character makes have you shouting at the tv, “Don’t do it; it’s not worth it.” While Ok Kyoung-sook is the “good guy,” she is never unrealistically righteous. There are moments when you see her wonder if she should detour from the high road and play super dirty. Of course, Baek Jae-min does not succeed in becoming mayor, but even his ending makes you juggle between feeling sorry for him and feeling like he got what he deserved. And the ending for our lead, Hwang Do-hee, is a shock but lines up perfectly with an early action that initially seemed inconsequential to the plot. 

All in all, Queenmaker is a wild but entertaining ride that will leave you on the edge of your seat.

RATING

To understand how I rate shows, please see the Ratings page:

ACTING: 5

The acting in this show is stellar. I only knew a few faces, but each actor played their role masterfully—big shot out to Ryu Soo-young, who played Baek Jae-min. The whole aspect of Baek Jae-min’s character is that he is a conniving user and liar. He keeps a mask on in all of his social interactions, even when at home, until backed into a corner or until he realizes that playing nice is not yielding results. I tell you, when he drops the mask, it is masterful acting. When I saw the actor do it for the first time around episode 2, I realized this would be a remarkable show.

CASTING: 5

Simply casting Ryu Soo-young to play Baek Jae-min alone would get this show 5/5, but the casting was excellent. Each character looked like the part they were playing. 

PLOT: 5

Queenmaker is a tour-du-force in suspenseful, political intrigue writing. I haven’t seen a K-drama that could master what Queenmaker did in 11 episodes without feeling rushed or having a traditional 16-20 episode drama that feels unnecessarily drawn out or with fan-based happy endings. The ending is satisfying and wraps the show, and all character plotlines up nicely. They did leave room for what looks like could be a season 2, but if a season 2 never comes you are not left with unanswered questions. 

Queenamker is written by Moon Ji-young, I have linked her credits. This is the first show she has written in 10 years, and she did not miss the mark. 

CHARACTERS: 5

Each character is written so humanistically. There are no clear good guys or bad buys in this. There is no clear right or wrong, nor do the characters don’t play a game of the lesser of two evils either. There are times in the story when you feel a twinge of sympathy for the antagonists. There are times when those antagonists are placed in situations where you root for them not to make the decision you know they will make because that is who they are, but you want them to be better. None of the characters make decisions just to move the plot.  Even if it is a poor decision, a selfish decision, or an unethical decision, the characters are so well-written that you understand their motives.

TROPES: 5

I couldn’t find a trope. No tropes are to be found. I love a good tropey show, but this is not that. There wasn’t even the typical line in a show where a more wealthy or upper-crust person tells the poor protagonist not to be greedy and to know his/her place. I will still give this five for the excellent way this show didn’t have any tropes.

OST: 5

The opening music was great. Sounded like a proud fighting woman anthem. You can almost hear the tone of the classic “I’m Woman Hear Me Roar.”

PRODUCT PLACEMENT: 5

Who does not love the Maxim Mocha Gold Mild coffee packs? Ambrosia to embattled K-drama characters who have no time or money to eat but can survive for hours off the little coffee packs that double as stirrers.

Product placement was limited in this show outside of the coffee, and honestly, I think any other product would have distracted seriously from the show’s energy. In fact, after the first three or so episodes, we don’t hear from Maxim again. Well done. 

COSTUMES: 5

The very first shot of the show is Hwang Do-hee strutting into a room and telling people what to do in four-inch Louboutin stilettos. Need I say more?

Overall: 40/40

Queenmaker is an excellent show. It allows us to look at a female-led cast of brilliantly flawed female characters. Each is just as ruthless, kind, generous, cunning, witty, and brilliant as their male counterparts, if not more. The show demonstrated how difficult it is to be a woman in politics and business. The show explored how, for women leaders, their children and spouses bear the brunt of their professional life but doesn’t paint all women to be saints just because they are women. The show is brilliant, and I hope more people watch this show.