Netflix released The East Palace in July 2026, and the hype was massive all through the month, so I couldn't resist to give it a shot, especially since it centres on the supernatural, but hey, it wasn't what I expected...
The series has just a season for now, with 8 episodes.
A Kingdom is terrified by demons of different categories, and the king decides to fetch a low-level life person in the village who is known to have special skills in slaying demons.
The low-level man, Gu Cheon, refuses to go with the king because he doesn't want to associate himself with demons in the palace; the king insists, forcefully captures him and brings him to the palace, making it impossible for him to leave the palace until the ghosts are slain. The king sends his daughter, Saeng Gang, who has the ability to hear from the underworld, to be his personal assistant.
What looks like a joke to both of them turns out to be a perfect combo to hunt down the ghosts in the palace.
Whenever Gu Cheon wants to go to the underworld to fight the ghosts, he'll drown himself in the lake in the palace while he instructs Sang Gang to drag him out at a certain time. This part really got me hooked when I was watching. For a living man to drown himself to go to the underworld and still come back to life whenever he likes. That's superb.
As they journey in the ghost slaying, they keep finding more dangerous ghosts and more hidden secrets in the palace that are beyond their imagination and with that, they're labelled as having known "too much", and they become a threat to the palace if they happen to reveal their findings to the world.
The storyline is a catchy one with the initial direction of hunting down some precise ghosts in the palace, but as the show goes on and with the many introductions of different names, I saw myself fall off the track because the characters got so many and looked as if the show was heading in an irrelevant direction. At one point, I got confused, and I didn't know the direction the show was heading. The Queen in the palace appears to be the villain with her evil deeds, but hell no, it got mixed up, and at the end, it looks as if they were helping the Queen Dowager. This is actually the downside of the show for me. I really got confused, and I struggled to watch till the end of the show.
The cast did excellently well. The combination of Gu Cheon and Sang Gang appears so perfect, and even before the whole thing got heated up, I knew there was going to be a bond of emotions between them. Even though I expected that, I wanted it to happen, and I enjoyed how the two of them made the magic of the bond of emotions so real.
The underworld connection with real life appears so good to me too. I love how they sync both worlds.
I would give it a 6/10.
All photos: IMDB
