This Show Is in Conversation with Goblin
All creativity exists in family trees. Here's how audiences — and what they bring to a story — tie three very different shows together.
Heads up: The shows discussed this week deal with suicide, though it is only mentioned here in passing. This essay also deals with grief, illness and parental loss. Please take good care of yourself. ✶
Nine hundred years ago, a devoted general was killed by his king, who feared the people loved the general more than him. The people did love the general, so intensely and faithfully that the general was resurrected as a dokkaebi. To be immortal is half punishment, however, because the thousands he slaughtered in battle were also human, and precious. He will live to see everyone he loves die and forget him, over and over again, until the goblin’s bride is born — the only one who can remove the sword still buried in his chest.
In our time, the goblin finally meets her. The bride is 19; years ending in nine are especially fragile, luck-wise, because of how close they are to wholeness. She can see ghosts and sometimes helps them, but all she truly wants is money, a boyfriend and to be free of her abusive family. She’s radiant, moody, awkward, playful, and the goblin finds himself wanting to live. However, there is a balance to consider, imposed by heaven, and if the goblin lives, his bride cannot.
Goblin was not my first kdrama, but it may be the one I imprinted on hardest. Not only is male lead Gong Yoo (Train to Busan, Coffee Prince, that Squid Game cameo) my birthday twin, he’s perhaps the most effortlessly charming actor working anywhere in the world today. Female lead Kim Go-eun (Exhuma, Little Women, The King: Eternal Monarch) stuns me every time; it’s so easy for a high-schooler role to go off the rails, but she’s crystalline in her emotional honesty and presence. Rounding out the ticket are Yoo In-na as Sunny, a glamorous but strangely languorous chicken shop owner, and Lee Dong-wook as a grim reaper without a name, a past or a business card. It sounds like a grab-bag jumble of backstories, but I promise, it works.
There’s this meme that makes me chuckle every time: Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this… I don’t mean to be that guy, but it’s not hard to see Goblin in many of the shows created in its wake. There’s every reason for it to be influential: it made a lot of money and won a lot of awards, besides being immensely popular. More to the point, it clearly tapped into something we the audience wanted and needed to hear.
For me, that thing is grief. This essay goes live on June 3, which should be my mother’s 81st birthday. She died in 2012, at the end of the summer, of a type of brain cancer used as a plot device in more than a handful of kdramas. I had just turned 28, and I still needed her so much. Later, I learned I am the kind of person who pushes away grief by throwing myself into work. Four months after she was gone, I was in one of the nation’s top graduate programs in a totally new-to-me field; two years and change after she died, I moved to New York City, a place I didn’t really want to go. Grief kept hobbling me, even as I thought I had dealt with it.
I latched onto Goblin eight years after we lost her, in much the same way Dead Like Me was comfort TV in 2012. At the crest of COVID horror, after months of living alone with my dog in one square mile of Flatbush, this show broke me open. We should live well, one character tells us softly, in appreciation of the love that’s been given to us.
In such a hurry to be lonely one more night
Lovely Runner wrapped up last week, and I’m delighted to share that it absolutely stuck the landing. After the sudden death of her kpop fave, superfan Im Sol (Kim Hye-yoon) finds herself rocketed back to high school, where she discovers that not only was her idol Ryu Sun-jae (Byeon Woo-seok) a classmate, he was her across-the-street neighbor. Determined to change Sun-jae’s fate, Im Sol aggressively befriends him; after all, this first death of his was a death of despair. The blunt boy who tries so hard to be cool reveals himself as a sensitive and deeply darling loser, absolutely lacking in chill — and, in earnest, he’s been in love with Im Sol all along.
From this premise comes a Groundhog Day-meets-Back to the Future romance. Im Sol never gets to decide how long she stays in the past, but she has three chances to venture back. Each time, she and Sun-jae are more open and happy with each other, and each time, she loses him again, until she decides, in her heartbreak, that the only way to truly save him is to never meet at all. In our final timeline, their paths can’t help but cross again. Only Im Sol remembers all those past fates, yet something compels Sun-jae to keep coming back to her.
Lovely Runner has all the trappings of a reincarnation story. Throughout, characters around Im Sol experience flashes of deja vu, with one major exception. Im Sol’s grandmother has dementia in the present; I viscerally felt Im Sol’s joy and grief when she arrived in 2009 to the woman she grew up with. I often think about what I would do or say if I got more time with my mom from before her terminal decline. One night as Im Sol comes home late, her grandmother recognizes her. “My head may forget,” she says, sounding and smiling so much like my mom, “but my soul always remembers.”
The second leads in Goblin face a rhyming dilemma. They’re drawn inexorably to each other, though the grim reaper is severed from his past life and Sunny finds him as frustrating as he is intriguing. Every time Ryu Sun-jae’s emotions burble up as he’s reintroduced to Im Sol, I thought of Reaper, who cries on the spot when he meets Sunny and who cries when he sees a certain portrait from the Goryeo era. These recognition scenes are some of the most moving in literature; I think of Odysseus at last revealing himself to his loved ones.
I think also of those who keep the truth hidden to protect their beloved. The goblin Kim Shin can’t tell his bride that to remove the sword in his chest is to end his life. Our time traveler Im Sol must break Sun-jae’s heart to save him from a malevolence than hunts her and harms him. My parents often kept bad news from me, so I wouldn’t worry when all we could do was wait. Our grim reaper learns the truth about himself, about the grief that persisted beyond his knowledge of the facts. All he wants is to do the right thing, and to hope for something more than tragedy.
When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.
I think of myself as a huge baby about horror, which is why I haven’t yet seen Train to Busan or Kingdom. Then again, it may just be zombies I can’t handle, because Bulgasal: Immortal Souls is riveting.
The word bulgasal means “impossible to kill”; in the late Goryeo period (918–1392 CE), it was a horrifying monster that ate metal and set fires. Dan Hwal (Lee Jin-wook), who didn’t have a name for the first decade of his life, was born already cursed by the bulgasal. The monsters that stalk the countryside are drawn to him, and his own neighbors abuse him out of fear. One day, a nobleman comes across the villagers trying to murder the boy, and as a rebuke, the nobleman adopts him then and there.
Hwal is raised as a ferocious warrior who destroys monsters writ large, but he’s always after the one that killed his family. She appears as a beautiful woman in red robes, but the bulgasal drinks human blood and cannot glut its hunger. When he finally finds her, just as she’s killed his wife, his son and his adopted father, something worse happens: Hwal’s soul slithers into her body as he slays her. She will reincarnate as a human, and he will become bulgasal himself. Hwal plots for 600 years to rectify this.
If Lovely Runner parallels the emotional wayfinding of Goblin’s grim reaper, then Bulgasal confronts the most wrenching nightmares facing Kim Shin. Like the Goryeo general who became a dokkaebi, the undying Dan Hwal grapples with the horror of persistence, of self-knowledge, of actually getting revenge, of ending a cycle of karma. Amid all this lore, he must fend off the sole other bulgasal in the world: Ok Eul-tae (a mesmerizing Lee Joon), who wants little — Hwal’s aid and approval, and to kill Min Sang-un (Kwon Na-ra), the now-human monster who started all this.
If you guessed that Hwal and Min Sang-un fall in love, despite his promise to reclaim his soul and condemn her to an eternity of suffering, that’s kdramas for you! More than that, though, Bulgasal is about memory, self-narratives and the harm we cause when both are unreliable. One of the fascinating things about Ok Eul-tae is that while he withholds context, he doesn’t lie to Hwal. He’s four hundred years older, and witness to previous incarnations of the whole ensemble. Because of Ok Eul-tae’s avowals and Min Sang-un’s memories, Hwal can understand his own history to finally change what’s to come.
Better will someday, never far away
Tragedy stalks all three of these dramas. Bulgasal is relentless about its sorrow and its violence, while Lovely Runner, for all its immense charm, is shot through with fear. The first 45 minutes of Goblin are so heavy, one friend could not be persuaded to continue. Yet all of these shows end well. I wouldn’t say it’s because they’re happy (although there is fierce happiness of varying expressions in each), but because the stories commit to a future.
Every time I tell the truth, that I lost years of my life to grief, to numbness, to my mother’s cancer, it pains me, because I know how much that fact would pain her. She never wanted me to be so weighed down. I would love to talk with her about these shows. There are so many that I think she would have liked. She loved whimsy, and happy endings, and great chemistry, and period pieces, and big questions, and wonderful costumes. I don’t think she’d have sat through the mythic horror, but the brave girl who bends fate to her will would have caught her interest.
In July, I’m turning 40, somehow. Over the past few weeks, my year ending in nine has been waxing. I feel so much more like making things, like getting out in the world. It’s not fragile; it grows. Our year and every one beyond it is vibrantly possible. We should live well, in appreciation of the love that’s been given to us. ✶
How do you relate to Goblin, a genuine ~cultural reset? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
Important boilerplate for the people
Thanks for reading Excited Mark!1 If you’d like to support my work, please share, toss a few bucks at my Ko-Fi or become a paid subscriber. I’m also available for hire as a fact-checker, editor and journalist — visit my RealName.com for clips, services and more. Most appreciated!
I am truly nerdy about citing my sources, and I really want to share where each subhead came from. The last one is from the hypnotic theme song that plays over Goblin’s opening credits. The middle one is from a Tumblr-famous poem originally written about Supernatural characters. The first one… is from “It Keeps You Runnin’” by the Doobie Brothers. Sorry not sorry about the earworm.