Letter #79: Mr. Queen

Good morning, Erin.

I’ve been looking at clouds, lately. 

We very often consider only the clouds directly above us: “It looks like it might rain,” or “It’s shaped like a bunny”—that kind of thing. 

But I’ve been taking in a lot more than that. Sitting at red lights or when I’m out for a walk, I’ve been marveling at how, if you follow the trail of them, the clouds seem to go on forever into the distance, only disappearing when they finally fall behind the horizon. 

I know that the Earth is round. And I know that the sky is pretty much an illusion. But knowing it and recognizing it are two very different things. 

So, I spend a lot of time staring up at the sky, watching the clouds, feeling like we are encased in a giant, glass ball…which is wondrous. And altogether terrifying. 

…I’ve been very distracted by beauty, of late, which I’d like to think is me opening myself up spiritually to the world around me. At the same time, I can’t help but feel entirely separate from it, which I have to imagine is my self-loathing at the ready to counterbalance any grand ideas I might have. 

(Yes, yes, I know: typical Pisces.)

Anyway. You sort of recommended Mr. Queen to me, and so, after being enchanted by the lead actress in 19th Life, I thought it sounded like the best place to head next. And now we’re here. 

As always, because I don’t know that you’ve watched this one, I’ll keep it as spoiler free as I can, so…shall we get into it?

1. It did not escape my notice that I questioned how being both women and men in past lives would play out in the head of the protagonist of 19th Life and then, here, the same actress is playing a man trapped inside the body of a woman and dealing with exactly that question. 

2. Speaking of: Shin Hye-sun is an excellent actress (possibly in my top five, at the moment), and she does a great job playing the distinction between the Queen and Mr. Queen, not just in how she moves and speaks but in how she sounds. Which probably seems like a really obvious thing, on paper, but I was surprised by how natural her modulated voice sounded for both roles, so that she seemed not only to be playing two different characters but being two different characters. 

2A. That said…her time as Mr. Queen (the man in the queen’s body, that is) was probably as often dead-on as it was a silly female impression of a dude. It evens out, as the series goes on and the character finds more of a (for brevity’s sake) balance between the male and female elements, but, even then there were times when she would make a gesture or move that was very clearly just playacting a man rather than understanding why a man would do what she was imitating. 

2B. Unsurprisingly, though, she was much better at having the male side understand the female side of equivalent things. 

3. The scene where (again, for brevity’s sake) the dude’s and the Queen’s souls connect is gorgeous. 

4. Much to the show’s credit, there are a couple of times when I thought they were trying to pull a fast one on me—which, of course, you know is silly, given that I am the world’s greatest detective—or were trying to avoid a topic because of the subject matter (man in a woman’s body), but no: the show wasn’t sidestepping or ignoring certain things but waiting to deploy them. It was very clever. Not always terribly eloquent, but certainly clever. 

5. Less clever is the whole “body swap” aspect of the story—which you’d think would sort of be central to the story, but…not really. I mean, yes, it’s obviously central insofar as Mr. Queen does not act at all like anyone assumes she would/could/should and that helps move the plot from start to finish…but the mechanics of the swap (broadly, I mean—the swap itself is fine) don’t make a lot of sense. And, further, the story doesn’t change much if, rather than a body swap with a man from the future, the Queen is a peasant who looks like the Queen because they need to hide the Queen’s death or is just a defiant-minded daughter in her family’s political machinations. So, it feels more like a gimmick than a story. 

6. Equally un-clever is the overall story: it’s the most generic palace intrigue story imaginable, cast with the most boring or annoying palace intrigue characters you could design—especially the “good guys,” who were almost (not quite, but almost) 100-Day Prince levels of insufferable. They all just act like they’re in this bland, by-the-numbers palace drama—regardless of whether they’re directly addressing Mr. Queen or not. I initially found it amusing that she was sitting in the middle of a cliche story like an oblivious chaos bomb, but the smiles faded pretty quickly when I realized that this was not going to change, even as Mr. Queen found herself more and more involved in this aspect of the plot. 

6A. Or, to put a fine point on it, anything that was not specific to Mr. Queen having her own adventures or primarily involving the characters unique to her orbit (like her court ladies or the royal concubines) was an absolute slog to get through. I do not recommend this series. 

6B. THAT SAID…Mr. Queen and the characters in her orbit were delightful. If there’s a supercut of just that stuff on YouTube, I 100% recommend that. 

7. Speaking of both Mr. Queen’s orbit and being delightful, her Court Lady is #BestGirl. Adorable.

8. No, but seriously, I cannot stress enough how much I hated the “good guys” in the whole palace intrigue thing. The bad guys were corrupt as hell, and I found it hard to root against them when their downfall meant the jerks who would come out on top were intolerable dipsticks. 

9. That said, once the typical intrigue plot starts to manifest into a real “game of thrones” (about two-thirds of the way into the series), the slog becomes almost interesting—except you never believe the story will have the guts to pull the trigger on the raised stakes. But there is a window when it’s fun to pretend that it might. 

10. Perhaps not surprisingly, the character most responsible for kicking off the interesting part of the palace intrigue plot was himself the most interesting and complex character outside of Mr. Queen. I wish he’d had more focus, but I also don’t, because the intrigue storyline was just so boring that even the good things more of him would add would only take more time away from Mr. Queen and her antics, which is really all the show should ever have been about. 

11. Mr. Queen’s posse of royal concubines don’t get nearly as much screen time as I wanted them to. (Though, in a fun twist of fate, they did show up in the very next scene after I wrote that note.)

11A. And, for the record, Mr. Queen and I agreed about which of the three royal concubines was the cute one, the pure one, and the sexy one. 

11B. I really liked the cute one. Who was called…Ms. Hong! Another Ms. Hong who is my favorite. Incredible. Maybe that’s a sign. Hmmm…

12. At one point, a character offers another some late-night ramen, and, thanks to Secretary Kim, I know what that means!

13. At one point, there’s a divide where the men are watching a martial arts display as entertainment and the women are watching a flowy-sleeves dance routine, and the women complain that it’s boring—meanwhile, I’m sitting there hoping we never cut back to the men’s side of the entertainment. You know I love a flowy-sleeves dance. 

14. Speaking of things you know I like: I’m not saying I’d put my soul in a long-ago queen’s body for this, but…I really need to get a retinue of girls in poofy dresses. Oo oo oo—and one of them will be named Ms. Hong, and she will be my soulmate! We’ve cracked it, Erin. It’s taken almost two years, but we finally did it. 

15. Y’know what—let’s do the list of people I recognize, which I know is your fourth-favorite segment in all of these letters. And we’ve got some surprising reunion parties:

• Ji-eum from See You in My 19th Life as Mr. Queen

• the “niece” from See You in My 19th Life as Mr. Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting

• the best friend from A Business Proposal as the King’s Concubine

• the thug from That Winter, the Wind Blows as the Scheming Advisor

• the secretary/step-mom from That Winter, the Wind Blows as the Grand Queen Dowager

• young Nam Do-san from Start-Up as the young King

• Young-woo’s Dad from Extraordinary Attorney Woo as the Queen’s Father

• Sunny’s father-in-law from You’re the Best as a court advisor

• the slimy reporter from You’re the Best as the assassin

• the main guy’s dad from Revenant as the King’s soldier friend

15A. Can I just…the “niece” from 19th Life is 43. Why is she so often playing characters 10 to 20 years older than that? Is it because she doesn’t have the smoothest skin? I mean, she’s only a couple of years older than Sunny, and they’re trying to pass Sunny off as being maybe mid-30s. I know it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but…come on. I mean, whatever, I like seeing her in things, so I don’t mind if that means she’s getting more work. But…sheesh.

16. Mr. Queen makes a Death Note reference, which is rad.

17. Hoo-boy, when Shin Hye-sun does a kissing scene, she really goes for it. I wouldn’t say the smooching in this was steamy, exactly, but it might as well have been.

18. There are a couple of really funny gags that I absolutely loved but cannot justify having in the show. They are a total tonal anomaly and don’t make sense

18A. …that said, I think they totally get away with a dig at one of the ladies-in-waiting, saying that she’s so oblivious that she probably wouldn’t even notice being poisoned by food she was safety-tasting. 

18B. At the same time, it took 75% of the series to go by before introducing this personality trait to a character we’d had in at least two scenes every episode, so…

19. Speaking of running gags: there’s a deliberately romantic undertone to the relationship between two men, and I still don’t know if it’s meant to be serious or a joke. And I’m not sure which I would have preferred, frankly, because I hated one of the two guys but really liked the other. 

20. Speaking of running (gags and otherwise): Mr. Queen is always running from one place to the next, despite running being against the rules within the palace walls. Not caring about the palace rules is one thing, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why she runs everywhere—and I mean basically every time she’s walking somewhere, she’s doing it at a sprint. Like, the dude inside her body doesn’t strike me as the type to think running is the best way to get from place to place. Because, sure, in some cases, I totally see running as being the appropriate reaction to wanting to get somewhere as quickly as possible, but sometimes it’s just like, “Oh, and Mr. Queen’s going to run there. Because…I dunno, I think this is just something she does, right?” 

20A. And, yes, Mr. Queen running in a big royal poofy dress still looks better running than IU.

21. A couple of characters make their way into a bamboo forest, at one point, and every time I see a bamboo forest, I think of House of Flying Daggers. Just…FYI. Good movie. 

22. I am 90% sure they CGIed a piece of wheat falling from a character’s mouth as he looked on in disbelief at something. 

23. When the dude first enters the Queen’s body, they shoot the scene from Mr. Queen’s POV to keep the reveal that he’s woken up as a woman from us for as long as possible. To help keep this secret, the camera lets us see Mr. Queen’s feet. And…I’m pretty sure they shoot it in such a way as to make sure we think the feet are big and masculine. And I don’t think I ever thought they looked particularly big and they certainly didn’t strike me as masculine, so I thought it was an odd choice. I mean, they didn’t come off as dainty, I guess, but…what do I know about feet? (Plus, the audience already knows what’s going on, so why the attempt at keeping the truth from us? I get the idea of locking us into Mr. Queen’s perspective as the realization hits, but…we’re the ones seeing the feet, not her/him.)

24. There’s a fun segment where Mr. Queen is using English words but then using the meaning of the Korean syllables that make up the English pronunciation to translate the words so that they seem like new Korean words rather than gibberish. I don’t know if I’ve explained that in a way that makes sense, but just know that it was very clever, a la the Monogatari series, which is a light novel/anime series that I hold in very high regard for its soaring wordplay. 

25. And speaking of wordplay…let’s close things out with a grammar lesson (Woo-hoo!): “If anyone tries to harm the queen, I swear I will cut their heads off.” The good thing about this sentence is that their and heads are both plural! Lots of people would use the singular head, as in “their collective head,” which would be incorrect, or would treat their as the colloquial/hyper-casual singular neutral pronoun (also incorrect), so I was very pleased to see these two get matched up properly. However, the sentence begins with anyone, which is singular (thus the use of tries rather than try), but it’s being used here—at least, per the second half of the sentence—as the colloquial/hyper-casual (and incorrect) substitute for “people.” 

…and thus closeth the book on Mr. Queen. Which was…certainly something. And, if nothing else, it’s cemented the need to dig into Shin Hye-sun’s filmography, every now and then. 

Next is…up in the air. I mean, if the hosts of Heart Signal 4 aren’t sure if there are 2 or 3 more episodes left in the season, how can I be responsible for knowing what comes next in my watch list? It could be anything. It could be Dormammu. 

Ten points if you get that reference. 

—Daryl

P.S. You made an appearance in my dream, the other night. We got chased by a massive swarm of bees that was let out in a school cafeteria, possibly because they wanted everyone to leave and the school bells weren’t working (I can’t say for certain). Make of that what you will. I’m just glad you weren’t saying mean things to me like the last time.