They Don't Kiss Until Episode 16

I love modern/urban fantasies because you can always take the fantasy at face value or look a little deeper. Regular fantasies if you will transport you to another world altogether, like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or, for a K-drama example, Alchemy of the Souls. In these fantasies, you learn about an entirely different world that may seem familiar but is very different from the world you know.

With the modern urban fantasy, the mythical world is embedded side-by-side, and you begin to question reality. You ask what my world would be like if I lived alongside demons, monsters, witches, etc. 

And the answer is, you would probably think everyone was crazy.

The best way to analyze this fantasy of the mind vs. actual fantasy is to look at where we are in the show The Judge from Hell.

As we know, Judge Kang Bit-Na is the demon judge Justitia tasked with collecting ten and now 20 murderous souls in one year or taking the souls of murders 20 people. I am not sure because she seems to think killing a murderer who has killed more than one. She has now gotten entangled with Detective Han Da-On.

Though Bit-Na has told Detective Han that she is a demon and he has seen several demonstrations up to this point that there are actual demons among him (whatever actual means in this case), he wants to stop Judge Kang’s apparent murder spree. At this point in the show, Detective Han is the main antagonist to Judge Kang.

And that is the beauty of this show so far. As an audience member, you are rooting for Bit-Na to take out these murderers. She gives them a taste of their own brutal medicine before finally ending their lives and sending their souls to Hell. You want her to win. But in the reality of the fantasy, from the outside, and from Detective Han and the police in that jurisdiction, Judge Kang looks like a serial killer; she is on her Dexter. In fact, the way Park Shin-Hye portrays Bit-Na, it seems like the character does get the same satisfaction from killing the murderers as the murderers get when they kill innocents. This is where you kind of feel weird rooting for her.

Judge Kang Bit-Na is the anti-hero protagonist. As a judge, she has purposely ruled in favor of guilty people to kill them herself. She manipulates the justice system to suit her needs, which is theoretically wrong, but by what standard of ethics? She is a demon, after all, which makes you wonder why Detective Han is fighting against her so hard.

In the most recent episodes (5 &6), Detective Han tries to prevent Judge Kang from executing a man who killed three members of his family: his wife and two kids. And you ask, to what end? Does he not really believe she is a demon? Yes, as humans in the real world, we can agree that vigilante justice is not justice, but what of the justice system? We have seen Bit-Na use her connections to move to collegiate court and use the law to the letter to give lighter punishments, and when the show first opened, we witnessed a prosecutor try to manipulate her into ruling harshly against Detective Han because the “victim” came from money. In short, the system is flawed, but it is the only system we’ve got.

Nonetheless, if this man is kept alive to go to prison, who does that help? It eases our souls because we can say we followed the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Let’s say Judge Kang was a normal judge and ruled guilty in the family murder case. She could sentence him to death. Is that not the same outcome, just a different coating?

All of these above leads to the main point of this post and the genius of this show: what makes humanity? While we’ve been watching this show, my mother (who watches all K-dramas with me) has been asking me if a demon possesses this murderer or that murderer, and the answer is no. All the genuinely horrible acts that have been committed have been committed by so-called sane and normal humans! The demons that are walking around have not harmed an innocent soul (save for Bit-Na/Justitia, who jumped the gun and killed Detective Han). Isn’t that fascinating?

I have more thoughts about this show and the human condition, but I will leave this for now. Tell me what deep thoughts The Judge from Hell is stirring inside your brain.