Kokdu: Season of Deity (2023) Recap Episode 1-2

Kokdu: Season of Deity kicks off its story the same way many of its genre predecessors have: in the distant past and with a tragic love story. This particular tale of woe stars SEOL-HUI (Im Soo-hyang) as a woman about to be sold off as a concubine and OH-HYUN (Kim Jung-hyun), her secret lover who serves as part of the convoy sent to protect Seol-hui and escort her to her new husband. Together, Oh-hyun and Seol-hui conspire to run away in the night, but this wouldn’t be the epic tale of sadness upon which the rest of our story is built if they escaped unscathed and lived happily ever after. Nope!

Instead, a soldier loyal to Seol-hui’s future husband catches wind of their escape plan, and he and a bunch of his comrades corner Oh-hyun and murder him in front of Seol-hui. The bloodshed doesn’t end there, and on her wedding night, Seol-hui uses her hairpin to stab her husband in the neck, and when his guards come rushing to his aid, Seol-hui ends her own life in the same manner.

 

In the present, DOCTOR HAN GYE-JEOL (a modern day Seol-hui, also played by Im Soo-hyang) listens as one of her patients wraps up her narrative of the fable, but when Gye-jeol sympathizes with the deceased lovers, the patient is quick to remind her that many innocent lives — the soldiers? — were lost as a result of their love story. The couple was, in fact, punished after their tragically romantic demise. Seol-hui was cursed to be reborn over and over, and in each new life she lost someone special to her before committing suicide — just as she did in the past. Oh-hyun, on the other hand, became KOKDU and was tasked with escorting lives to the underworld.

Before Gye-joel can deep dive into the differences between Kokdu and a grim reaper, she is rudely interrupted and physically assaulted by the daughter of one of her former patients (cameo by Jung Young-joo). This is where the story started to lose my interest. Once again, we’ve got another drama on our hands that wants to turn hospitals into villainously corrupt organizations and doctors into equally evil henchmen who go against the Hippocratic Oath out of fear and/or greed. Thus, because the patient who assaulted Gye-jeol is wealthy and influential, Gye-joel is fired.

To add insult to literal injury, it’s raining when she makes her dejected walk of shame out of the hospital with her box of belongings, and a dog comes barreling towards her. Just as she’s about to take a painful tumble down some steps, time stops and everything around her turns magically bright. The cherry blossoms are especially pink when she looks up into the face of the handsome man (a modern day Oh-hyun, also played by Kim Jung-hyun) holding her in his arms. But before she can thank him or catch his name, he disappears — leaving behind the same ring our tragic lovers once exchanged in the past.

Gye-jeol tries to recruit her brother HAN CHEOL (Ahn Woo-yeon), a police detective, into locating her mystery man. Unfortunately, Gye-jeol’s drawing of her rescuer is not on par with the renderings of a police sketch artist, but on the bright side, she might have a backup career as a webtoon artist if she’s unable to find another job as a doctor.

 

After a series of rejections, Gye-jeol tries her luck at Pilseong Medical Center, and during her interview she is reunited with her mystery man: DOCTOR DO JIN-WOO. He’s especially direct, and his questions cut to her real reasons for applying to the prestigious Pilseong Medical Center. She responds by admitting that her educational background is lacking, and she hopes that employment at a top tier hospital, like Pilseong, will overshadow her credentials enough that her patients will no longer question her qualifications or her diagnoses.

Gye-jeol assumes that she bombed the interview with her honesty, so when Jin-woo calls her afterwards, she believes that it’s purely out of his romantic interest in her. Instead, he offers to be her parachute and get her a job at Pilseong. Gye-jeol is so over the moon — excited that she, someone with absolutely no connections, was hired out of nepotism — that she doesn’t stop to ponder why a stranger would back her. Must be love at first sight, right? Wrong!

Jin-woo has a personal reason for ensuring Gye-jeol was hired. He knows that she overheard a conversation between CHAIRMAN KIM PIL-SOO (Choi Kwang-il), a man who bares a striking resemblance to Seol-hui’s betrothed in the past, and the doctor who switched the CT scans that caused Jin-woo to misdiagnose — and inadvertently kill — a patient. But not just any patient: his birth mother who gave him up for adoption.

Gye-jeol is reluctant to risk her cushy new position at Pilseong and make an enemy out of the hospital’s chairman, but when she learns of Jin-woo’s tragic connection to the patient, she agrees to file a lawsuit against the hospital. But on the day of their scheduled court date, Jin-woo doesn’t pick up his phone. (You can probably see where this is going.) Concerned, Gye-jeol shows up at his apartment — just in time to watch him fall to his death, and it ain’t no accident.

After calling the paramedics, she performs emergency treatment, but the temperature around her drops and it begins to snow as Jin-woo dies. When the snow abruptly stops and the day becomes warm and sunny again, Jin-woo’s eyes pop open, but he is no longer Jin-woo. It’s now the season of Kokdu — which, if the drastic temperature changes are any indication, must be hell on people’s allergies.

 

Upon Kokdu’s awakening, we learn a little more about the curse placed on Oh-hyun. After his tragic death, he waited in limbo for Seol-hui to join him in the afterlife, but because she was busy being reborn and dying of suicide, Oh-hyun’s vigil over the parade of souls was a pointless, lengthy endeavor. He waited so long that he forgot who Seol-hui was and why she was important to him.

Eventually, the Creator (Kim Kang-hoon) had enough of Oh-hyun’s rebelliousness — why won’t he give up on his doomed romance, reincarnate, and meet a new, less toxic lover like a good soul? — and curses Oh-hyun to become Kokdu. Every 99 years, Kokdu appears on earth, and for 99 days he must guide souls to the afterlife. The curse will only be broken if Kokdu can find Seol-hui again and have her confess her love for him, and the ring from their past will supposedly help guide him to her.

Soooo… the Creator is mad that Oh-hyun won’t give up on his doomed, extremely destructive romance, and he punishes Oh-hyun’s rebellion by placing a curse on him. But the means of escaping his punishment is to reunite with his former lover? Seems a bit contradictory — but, whatever, I’ll roll with it.

More surprising, though, is the nature of Kokdu’s afterlife position description. When Gye-jeol’s patient (the one who regaled us with Oh-hyun’s origin story at the beginning of our drama) insisted that Kokdu shouldn’t be confused with a grim reaper, she meant it. Kokdu’s task of guiding souls to the afterlife is a little more…full-service than the traditional grim reaper. Not only does he guide the souls to where they need to be, he ensures they get there by first killing them himself.

Thankfully, he’s not killing people willy-nilly — just sinners with an overwhelming amount of people cursing and praying for their deaths. Kokdu hears these prayers, and when they become an unbearable cacophony in his head, he finds the person who has wronged the masses and kills him or her so he can find some momentary peace and quiet again.

Over the centuries, though, Kokdu’s job and experiences have turned him into a bit of a cynic with a prevalent disdain and apathy for humans. So when he wakes up in the modern era and finds Gye-jeol hovering around him, he’s on the verge of killing her solely on the basis of her close proximity. Thankfully, one of Kokdu’s loyal servants, OK SHIN ( Kim In-kwon) the god of greed, lures him away from the nearby CCTV before he does something that causes him to spend his 99 days on earth in prison.

 

This is the point in our story where our drama seems to gain some traction because Kim Jung-hyun as Kokdu is far more entertaining than Kim Jung-hyun as either Oh-hyun or Jin-woo. For starters, Kokdu actually has a distinctive personality, but we also get to see him interact with Ok Shin and GAK SHIN (Cha Chung-hwa), the god of rumors, who have been hovering around in the background, waiting for him to wake up. With his addition to their trio, there’s a lot of comedic shenanigans to fill the gaps between all the boring hospital corruption crap that I loathe.

Speaking of which, after Kokdu ran off in Jin-woo’s body, life at Pilseong Medical Center got complicated for Gye-jeol. Chairman Kim preemptively moved to discredit Jin-woo — should he show up alive somehow after the attempted murder — and Gye-jeol is formally reprimanded for “tainting the reputation” of the hospital with their joint lawsuit and “false” claims. With Jin-woo, the only one who can collaborate her story, missing in action, Gye-jeol tries to hunt him down.

 

Once again she seeks her brother’s assistance, but as a detective, he’s not much help even though he’s actively looking into Jin-woo’s case to try and determine if his fall from the top of his apartment complex was an attempted suicide or murder. Instead of using official police resources, he advises her to take to the internet, and he writes up a scandalous post that has all the ingredients (money, an affair, and in-law drama) to go viral and have the entire population of South Korea on the hunt for Jin-woo.

Sure enough, the whole country is soon cursing Jin-woo, the dastardly man who supposedly cheated and ran off with his in-law’s money, and Kokdu’s mind is flooded with curses directed at the very body he’s possessing. Unable to kill himself in order to silence the voices, he decides to dispose of the person who stirred up everyone’s ire: Gye-jeol.

Conveniently, thanks to her internet minions, Gye-jeol has already tracked Kokdu to Yeongpo, so he doesn’t have to travel far to find her, but upon reuniting, he discovers that he is unable to kill her. Not only is she tough and able to flip him over her shoulder, but when he grabs her by the neck to try and choke her, he inexplicably lets go when she demands that he release her. It’s like his body is obeying her command, and he wonders if it’s a sign that she is the woman — the one he’s forgotten and can no longer remember or recognize — that’s supposed to break his curse.

In the middle of rejoicing, though, Gak Shin and Ok Shin report that she doesn’t possess the ring that was supposed to help him identify his curse-breaker. Instead, they already found the ring among Jin-woo’s belongings. Not knowing that the ring was briefly in Gye-jeol’s possession before she returned it to Jin-woo, Team Kokdu tries to come up with another explanation for why Kokdu couldn’t kill Gye-jeol.

Amid Kokdu’s fears that he’s gone soft, they decide instead that she must be pure and devoid of sin. So what should Kokdu do in order to kill Gye-jeol and silence the voices in his head? Make Gye-jeol sin, of course.

 

Cue another amusing meeting between Gye-jeol, who believes Kokdu has amnesia because he can’t remember anything prior to Jin-woo’s death, and Kokdu, who is doing his best to try and get Gye-jeol to sin so he can kill her and silence the voices. So when Gye-jeol asks him to show up at her disciplinary hearing and corroborate her story as though he remembers Ji-woon’s support of the lawsuit, he’s gleeful that she’s asking him to lie.

But is the lie enough of a sin for him to be able to kill her? After all, he’d be admitting to doing something that actually happened — even if he wasn’t the person inhabiting the body at the time. While he ponders this, he’s presented with another option to resolve his situation: if he promises to appear at Gye-jeol’s disciplinary hearing, then she will delete the post that’s stirring up everyone’s hatred for Jin-woo.

The two strike a deal, and Kokdu shows up (fashionably late) at Gye-jeol’s hearing. He performs as Gye-jeol asked, but he stops of doing anything beyond her basic request. When the committee accuses him of using Chairman Kim to cover up his own misdeeds as a doctor, he ends the charade, betrays Gye-jeol, and tells the committee that he has amnesia. As he explains to her later in private, if word spreads that she’s a liar, then no one will continue to believe the validity of her online post smearing Jin-woo’s name. And if no one believes her, then he goes back to living peacefully.

Justifiably upset by his betrayal, Gye-jeol demands that he get on his knees and apologize, and Kokdu finds his body betraying him once again. Of their own volition, his legs move to obey her command, and as he kneels at her feet, he pulls out the ring to confirm if she recognizes it. Given his forceful tone, she’s hesitant to comply, but even though she doesn’t provide him with a clear answer, we end our premiere week with him seemingly recognizing her as his former lover — which has to be a record for this particular past-lives trope.

A lot of things moved quickly with this drama premiere, though. The pacing of Episode 1, in particular, felt like a chaotic rush to establish our hospital’s corrupt leadership and kill off Jin-woo so we could be introduced to Kokdu. Considering the story became much more enjoyable after Kokdu awoke, I’m not entirely unhappy that Jin-woo met an early demise, but at the same time, I can’t praise the sloppy and cliched writing either. I have a feeling everything pertaining to this drama’s hospital setting and villainous chairman is going to grate on my nerves, so thank goodness for Team Kokdu.

I have to hand it to Kim Jung-hyun because his comedic chops are bringing out the best in his co-stars. Even Im Soo-hyang, who initially had me a bit worried, seemed to go toe-to-toe with Jung-hyun once the story picked up, but she definitely isn’t as skilled as Jun-hyun at delivering all the tiny micro expressions that sell the humor of their bickering and squabbling.

Even so, these two were pretty fun to watch, and Episode 2 had a lot of laugh out loud moments — like her shoving the ice cream into Kokdu’s mouth and him happily sucking away on it for the rest of the scene, even while he secretly planned her demise. This may just have to be one of those dramas where I set aside my thinking cap whenever the villains are on screen so I can happily embrace the fun and humor of our OTP and their sidekicks. As of right now, I’m thinking the LOLs might be worth it.