Gyeongseong Creature is loosely based on the tragic lethal experiments conducted by the Japanese imperial army on the Chinese and Koreans. Unit 731, as it was called, was a unit of the Japanese imperial army that conducted human experiments to create bio-weapons in the 1930s and 1940s. This is when the TV show moves away from reality and creates a fantastical creature that can destroy entire cities. The main question the show poses is: Who were the real monsters? Of course, the most obvious answer is the members of the imperial army, who ruthlessly conducted these experiments with no remorse. In this fictional tale, a man named Tae-Sang is sent on a mission to find a woman for a police commissioner. Slowly, he starts to discover the truth about this hospital.
Spoilers Ahead
Tae-Sang is an orphan who built his life by himself after his mother was taken away by the imperial army when he was a little child. Tae-Sang waited daily for his mother to come out of prison and met Mrs. Nawol, whom he fed and helped. This is how their relationship began. As an adult, Tae-Sang is the most popular man in Gyeongseong. He’s rich thanks to his successful pawnshop. He’s known as the most reliable man in town, and everyone comes to him for information and help. Anything that goes wrong, Tae-Sang is their guy. Yet he’s not part of the rebels, a group of patriotic citizens who are secretly trying their best to overthrow the Japanese. Tae-Sang is considered a selfish man because everything he does is for money. When Tae-Sang gets beaten up by the Japanese samurai and the police officer turns a blind eye to them, he truly feels the sting of his own people letting him down. Tae-Sang is a proud man; his prized possessions are his shop and everything else he’s established for himself. This all falters the second Ishikawa puts him on the task of finding Myeong-Ja. There’s also a moment when In-Hyeok, one of the rebels, insults Tae-Sang because all he works for is money, saying this makes him untrustworthy. In reality, Tae-Sang is the only man the whole city can trust because he has his in with the Japanese and he loves his people. The only reason he works so hard is because he made a promise to his mother to stay alive and be happy.
Tae-Sang’s journey gets more complicated when he gets intertwined with Chae-Ok. He’s immediately smitten by the sleuth, and he really cares for her after the initial banter. I suppose she influences him to care more about other people, not that he didn’t care at all before; it just intensifies. So, Tae-Sang is patriotic, but he’s also a person who helps humans. Like he says himself, it’s all about “humanism.” Tae-Sang has always been generous; after everything he’s been through, he took in Mrs. Nawol and Mr. Gu to run his shop for him and kept them safely off the streets. He built his connections to keep those close to him—those he loved—safe.
It almost seems as if Wi Ha-Joon’s Jun-Taek is simply there to elevate Tae-Sang as a human being. Jun-Taek is a rebel, and he joins Tae-Sang at the hospital to get details about some hidden weapons for the rebels. Instead of promising to free his colleagues, he asks them for answers because they’re short on time. He puts everyone’s lives at risk by doing so and then gets captured, where he spills his guts to the Japanese army. He can’t bear to be tortured, so he gives them up rather easily. Tae-Sang, on the other hand, does everything in his power to help them and comes back for them at a later stage, as promised. He takes his promises almost as seriously as Chae-Ok.
Does Tae-Sang get infected?
No, fortunately, Tae-Sang does not drink up the water with the Najin in it; Myeong-Ja does. Gyeongseong Creature surely tries to make it look as though it’s Tae-Sang because we see him stare at the glass and then later there’s the dream that Chae-Ok has of him becoming a monster too. He is the protagonist of a Korean drama, and at the end of the day, he must emerge as a hero (this is not Sweet Home). It’s probably his word to his mother that keeps Tae-Sang fighting for his life. He doesn’t give up ever, not just on himself but on anybody else he’s connected to. He makes the ultimate sacrifice when he remains in the hospital, and everyone else, whom he didn’t have to save, escapes.
At the end of Episode 7, Tae-Sang, who has learned so much about the hospital, finds himself in a ditch of human bones. Just as he’s trying to escape, Sergeant Haneda finds him. Tae-Sang kills the man and slowly makes his way out of there with all his many injuries. When he places his bloody hand on the wall, it appears like that of a monster hand, which makes us question yet again if he’s been infected. But soon after, we get to see Myeong-Ja and the Najin inside of her. Tae-Sang still has to find a way out of the hospital all by himself. All his friends have been told not to do anything, and anyway, there’s no way they could come near the hospital again. He’s also dying, so unless an inside man helps him, there’s no way he’s going to make it out alive (I may be forgetting he’s a K-drama lead). At the same time, the creature is still lurking in the hospital too, so that’s another threat for him. More importantly, will he be able to meet Chae-Ok and tell her about his feelings? We’ll learn about it in the second part of Gyeongseong Creature.
