Drama
The East Palace
This K-Drama invites its audience to hunt for spirits within the walls of ‘The East Palace’—an initiation that many may want to decline.
Have you ever had a friend you’d do absolutely anything for? Someone who finishes your sentences and knows you inside and out, someone who’s always there for you, someone you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can trust with anything?
For Debbie, that’s Judith. Sure, they live pretty different lives. Debbie gave up a promising law career to move to London and support her husband’s political ambitions, while Judith prefers one-night stands with no-strings attached to the prospect of family life. But that hasn’t stopped them from being best friends for 20 years. No one, maybe not even Debbie’s husband, knows Debbie like Judith does. And Debbie is certain she knows everything there is to know about Judith.
And she does, except for one little thing: Judith kills people for a living.
Professionally, Judith is known as Whiptail, an elite, highly trained assassin. Over a career spanning 29 years, she’s taken out countless arms dealers, crime lords, and other nefarious individuals, all while keeping it a total secret from her friends—namely Debbie, who she considers the most important person in her life.
All that changes when Judith arrives at a charity gala to take out the leader of a crime syndicate, and she makes two unfortunate discoveries.
The first is that there’s another assassin at the gala with a mysterious ulterior motive. The second is that their mysterious motive involves Debbie’s husband, which means it involves Debbie too.
Without a second thought, Judith abandons her mission, throws Debbie in the passenger seat of her car, and whisks her best friend away from danger.
Okay, remember the friend you were thinking of before? Now imagine if that friend told you they’re secretly an assassin, they’ve been lying to you for your entire relationship, and there are strange people trying to kill you. To say that Debbie is confused, shocked and hurt is the understatement of the century.
But then again, there are people trying to kill her, and Judith seems pretty good at staying alive in those sorts of situations. And it’s becoming clear that whoever’s on her tail has Judith in their sights, too.
It’s a good thing these two friends know everything about each other, because they’re each the only person the other can trust. The only question is if Debbie does know everything about Judith—and if their friendship is strong enough to survive a 20-year-long lie.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you crossed Thelma & Louise with Jason Bourne, wonder no more. Ride or Die is equal parts buddy comedy and globe-trotting action adventure. But in combining two genres, it also combines the worst qualities of each.
Obviously, Judith’s profession gets her into some violent situations. From sniper rifles to steak knives, there’s no weapon she’s uncomfortable using. Her kills aren’t overly graphic—she prides herself on getting a job done cleanly—but the same can’t be said for the people hunting her, who leave bloody corpses and carnage in their wake.
It isn’t just the professional murder that makes Judith’s lifestyle questionable, though. She tends to wind down after a mission by having a few (or more than a few) drinks, going home with a bartender and leaving before they learn each other’s names. We don’t see explicit nudity, but we certainly come close, and Judith’s casual approach to sex means there’s likely plenty more where that came from.
And yet, despite the minefield of content issues, there’s a beating heart at the center of Ride or Die. Judith’s double life and her casual relationship with murder aren’t shown in a positive light—far from it. Her job has made her cynical and distrustful, and while she claims to love her independence, Debbie is the only truly meaningful relationship she has. She brushes off her friend’s moral objections by saying that she only kills bad people, and Debbie corrects her: not bad people, just people.
The value that Ride or Die places on human life is certainly a redeeming quality, but don’t start making a list of those, because you’ll quickly come up short. Given the violence, sexual content and foul language (did I mention the language? Because there’s plenty of language), this action comedy has even more in common with Thelma & Louise than the creators might think. Just like that iconic duo, it drives straight off a cliff.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
When her best friend, Debbie, is targeted by a mysterious enemy, Judith, an elite assassin, is forced to reveal her double life in order to protect her.
We meet Judith in the middle of an assignment—she’s been tasked with taking out her target with a sniper rifle, but at the last minute, she decides to do it with a knife instead. She stabs her victim offscreen and we see a brief burst of blood as she pulls out the knife. Later, Judith walks into a gruesome crime scene; dead bodies are scattered around the room and blood covers the furniture. Judith also uses pots and pans to fight two assassins in a commercial kitchen, but no blood or injury is shown.
While Debbie is a committed wife of 25 years, Judith has a much more casual relationship with romance. She goes home with a bartender after a job and we see partial nudity as she undresses. She later wears a revealing gown at a charity gala.
Judith drinks at a bar, and she and Debbie drink wine at a book club. Guests drink cocktails and wine socially at the gala—except for Debbie, who gets extremely drunk on tequila shots.
A mysterious assassin leaves clues for Judith that lead her to a graveyard, and she digs up a grave to find a page from the Book of Judith instead of a body. The gravedigger asks if it’s from the Bible, and she answers that it’s from the Apocrypha.
The f-word is used 14 times, while the s-word and “h—” are used five. “D- -n” is used three times, and “a–“ is used once. God’s name is taken in vain six times.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
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