While Queen Woo draws you in with its scope and brutal epicenes in the beginning where it promises some good political intrigue as fierce battle between tribes that make up the ruling class of Goguryeo it never truly becomes anything more than a very paint-by-numbers historical spiel with some interesting characters and fantastic cast that never really lives up to it’s potential.

It certainly feels like a historical drama that is meant for the big screen and not necessarily a tv show where it both felt stretched out to fill up its eight episodes runtime but also not deep enough and a bit too rushed with endless number of flashbacks to explain to us how the characters had arrived at this point of the story. If it had twelve episodes with three distinct arcs (the rise to power, the fall and the fight) all told from the perspective of Queen Woo it might have worked out and felt more like a complete, fully fleshed out story.

There is enough action, and you can see that a lot of effort was put into the epic which makes it seem like a very long film and the scenes are well done, but I’m not sure if the drama works too much on the epic for the narrative itself. It’s never said anything more than that this team was brutal. Most of the nuances in the story are missing. The drama seems to let the actors, and the action and violence do a lot of the dramas heavy lifting. The narrative is too standard and nothing we haven’t necessarily seen before in historical palace politics.

The excessive sex and violence often feel quite perplexing or just straight up oddly presented within the story and really doesn’t convey much about the story, the society or the characters. Often it just seems to be forced in there just because they could and it would make the story more daring, but it just feels lazy way of telling us about the characters and some of their ruthlessness. There must be a point with the things you put in your story.

You can’t just endlessly give us characters acting unhinged and deranged if it has no value or adds any nuance to the story. It’s just there for the shock. The characters must be built up, little by little. You must work for the things that happen within the narrative for it to work properly. While it’s fun for a while, and shocking, and can be brainless mayhem that’s exciting to witness, it gets tiresome after a while if it leaves nothing more. No nuance or reason.

Queen Woo certainly was one of those interesting characters on paper, but she feels a bit too much like a puppet in this whole game at times, and I am sure that angle could be compelling as we see her slowly come into her own, but the drama spends a whole of time getting there and I am unsure if the payoff was worth it. She is clever, she is calm under pressure and has a lot of prospects as a character. But she also comes off as somewhat of a girlboss female character that was too much written for modern audience to really become more than a standard female character in a historical drama.

The drama seems aware of its own flaws, as it’s so intent on covering up its lack of proper narrative with shocking scenes, flashbacks and battles, but the story itself is something that’s been told so many times before in costume dramas like this, aside from the violence and the nudity when it comes to kdramas, so it never becomes anything grand or special. It forgets that it is supposed to tell you an interesting story. This drama certainly had an idea, but an idea is not a narrative. Impressive in scope and quite entertaining once you turn your brain off and just enjoy the cast, the battles and costumes but if you peel back any of the layers of the actually storytelling you see that there isn’t too much there.