When the husband of Seo Mun-ju’s (My Love From the Star’s Jun Ji-hyun) is murdered right in front of her while he on the presidential campaign trail, the Korean diplomat will stop at nothing to discover the truth behind his assassination—including running for president herself. This might not sound like the best set-up for an epic love story between Mun-ju and another man. However, in the adept hands of master scribe Jung Seo-kyung, directors Kim Hee-won (Vincenzo, Queen of Tears) and Heo Myeong-haeng (Badland Hunters), and hallyu stars Jun Ji-hyun and Gang Dong-won (Uprising), Disney+’s Tempest is not only a sweeping political action thriller, but also one of the most romantic series of the year.
Jung, who has co-written some of Korea’s most celebrated movies alongside director Park Chan-wook (including Decision to Leave and The Handmaiden), made a move to TV production in 2018, with the drama Mother. The concept for Tempest (also known as 북극성, or Polar Star, in Korean) was formed when Jung was working together with director Kim on her second K-drama, Netflix’s Little Women. “[Kim] said that she would love to write a story about a woman with power and a man that protects that woman with power,” Jung tells TIME, referring also to Gang’s Paik San-ho, an enigmatic bodyguard who steps in to protect Mun-ju from seemingly non-stop attempts on her life. “She wanted to combine a genre element, romance, and spectacle.”
So Jung set about writing that story. When “the one and only Jun Ji-hyun” was cast in the main role, the writer knew the story had to have a scale to befit the actress. “For her to be a big draw and to attract the attention of many people around the world, she had to have heroic moments,” she says. “So I ended up coming up with this character who was kind of different from the ones that I used to write about in the past, who were really personal, kind of peculiar [characters]. I ended up picking a character that had a rather normal, ordinary personality that many people could relate to.”
While Mun-ju wavers in her aspiration to become the next president of Korea across the series’ nine episodes, Jung knew a commitment to that goal would be the character’s ending point. “At the end of her journey, what awaits is her running for office, her candidacy for the president, so I wanted her to go through a lot of challenges and pain,” Jung tells TIME. “Because I thought that the most important quality that she needed to have as a presidential candidate was not just the capabilities to perform her tasks, but her ability to understand the pain that the ordinary people were suffering from.”
Mun-ju and San-ho’s love story
Mun-ju begins the series married to Jang Ju-nik (When Life Gives You Tangerines’ Park Hae-joon). While the two love one another, their marriage is not one of passion, but of companionship. Mun-ju doesn’t plan to fall for San-ho so quickly after her husband’s death, but the heightened emotion of life-or-death situations spur a sizzling chemistry and deep connection that cannot be ignored. By series’ end, the two are willing to give up everything for one another.
“Fundamentally, [Tempest] is a romance, right?” says Jung. “So when I thought about what Mun-ju was missing in life, I thought that what she was missing the most was love for herself.
I really wanted to put someone who was so deeply in love with her next to her so that she would come to discover her love for herself.”
For Jung, the dynamic represents a reversal of some traditional gender norms. “These two characters play roles that used to be played by opposite genders,” she says. “Mun-ju, as a character, is a woman who’s really rational, reasonable, a person with power that used to conventionally be played by men and San-ho is someone who’s really delicate, caring, emotional, someone with a big heart and a lot of warmth.”
For the vital role of San-ho, Tempest cast Gang Dong-won, a feature film actor known for his roles in Temptation of Wolves, Broker, and Uprising. “Just like with some Ji-hyun, we ended up casting Gang Dong-won very early on in the process, when I was working on the first part of the scripts,” says Jung. “I think Gang Dong-won has both a face as a very young and innocent child and also a very mature man. And I also believe that, in one way he’s really strong and masculine, and another way he’s very soft and intricate and feminine.”
When Mun-ju first meets San-ho, he is a man without a nationality. Over the course of the series, we learn that he was born in North Korea before fleeing and becoming a killer for hire. He has spent much of his adult life protecting the rich for money. But Mun-ju is different. He believes in what she represents, and eventually falls in love with her. “I thought of these two characters as very lonely people,” says Jung. “They had no one to open up to, no one to understand themselves. They only had each other.”
Korean reunification as central theme
War is profitable, and, in Tempest, there are many actors across the world hoping to destabilize the longstanding truce between North and South Korea. As a politician, Mun-ju believes in working towards reunification, which makes her a target. The position is what led to Jun-ik’s assassination as well.
“I knew from the beginning that I have to think of a story that had a lot to do with politics in real life, because Mun-ju as a character was set to be a politician. I didn’t want to keep it identical to Korean politics. I wanted to keep it similar, but also different,” says Jung. “Reunification is a theme that everybody in Korea can talk about, that everybody can relate to ever since the war.”
However, for Jung, the theme goes beyond the political divisions of the Korean peninsula. “As we go until the end, it’s not just [Korean reunification] we’re talking about with the metaphor of unification. I wanted to talk about unity and integration in general, because there’s a lot of conflicts between masculinity and femininity, conflicts between generations.”
Who killed Mun-ju’s husband, Jang Ju-nik?
Ju-nik’s death was orchestrated by his own mother, Im Ok-seon (Queen of Tears’ Lee Mi-sook), who is revealed to be a powerful arms dealer. Over the last five years, Ok-seom has been building a nuclear submarine in North Korea. She sells it to Idisha, a fictional Middle Eastern country, hoping the government there will use it to attack the United States. In the world of Tempest, Idisha is occupied by American troops. They plan on using the nuclear threat to convince the U.S. government to remove the troops and to leave Idisha to its people.
As many of the best villains do, Ok-seon has a sympathetic backstory. She was abandoned by her mother, who moved to the U.S. with an American soldier, and left to fend for herself in a wartorn country. The American military tanks that rolled by her as a child were both a symbol of her mother’s abandonment and the role the U.S. government and military played in the splitting apart of Korea and the war that followed.
“What I wanted to do with the character of Ok-seon was to showcase Korea’s modern history in a condensed version,” explains Jung. “I think Koreans felt a lot of conflicted feelings looking at the United States stepping in as a savior after the Korean War. And all the negative parts of that, of those conflicted feelings, I wanted to channel it into this character, Ok-seon.” The unresolved anger she feels towards her mother further fuels that fire.
Ok-seon’s growing power is left unchecked, at least partially, because she is a wife and a mother. “I think one reason Ok-seon came to have such power is because Korea was under the shadow of the United States, and also she was under the shadow, going unnoticed and unchecked as a female and as a wife. Nobody really took her really seriously to keep her in check,” says Jung.
By the time the events of Tempest roll around, Ok-seon is one step closer to her ultimate goal of punishing the United States (and, figuratively, her mother) for the pain they have caused her. She’s even willing to kill her own son, who has become a symbol of the hope for reunification. Jun-ik’s death allows her to more easily frame him for the espionage she herself has been committing.
Though Jun-ik was not Ok-seon’s biological son, as he was the result of an affair her husband had, she raised him as her own and she loved him. She sobs alone in her room when he dies, even though she was the one who ordered his murder.
Tempest ending explained
In the final episode, Ok-seon kidnaps Mun-ju so that her daughter-in-law can bear witness to her life’s crowning achievement. Ok-seon, Mun-ju, Ok-seon’s prosecutor son Jun-sang (Good Boy’s Oh Jung-se), and a small army of mercenaries board a ship that will take them into the Pacific Ocean. From there, Ok-seon plans to ensure that America is attacked. She doubts that the King of Idisha will actually attack America, so she has a backup plan. Using a secondary nuclear code briefcase, she will fire the nuke herself.
Before Ok-seon can fire the missiles, Jun-sang moves to arrest her. Jun-sang loved his brother, and cannot believe what his mother has done. He has been gathering evidence of her espionage and plans to prosecute. A firefight breaks out, and Mun-ju and Jun-sang manage to temporarily escape Ok-seon. Jun-sang is shot and injured, and stays behind to give Mun-ju a better chance to get to a second control room. He suggests she use the phone there to call Kim Han-sang (Light Shop’s Uhm Tae-goo), the fictional ruler of North Korea, and convince him to turn the submarine around.
Mun-ju is not alone in her mission. The Korean coast guard and military have responded to the situation and, as promised, San-ho has found her, and will try to protect her one last time. Mun-ju manages to get through to Kim, relaying to him that the payment on the submarine has been frozen. She notes that, if Ok-seon manages to attack the U.S., both North Korean and Idisha will face retaliation.
Kim agrees to turn the submarine around, but notes that Ok-seon still has the power to launch the missiles herself. Meanwhile, Ok-seon is using that power. She initiates the sequence that will send a nuke to the U.S. When she is confronted by Mun-ju and San-ho, she throws the key that could abort it in the water, and then shoots herself.
While Mun-ju and San-ho may not have the code they need to stop the nukes, the King of Idisha does. They get him on the phone, and he agrees to help. San-ho enters the code, aborting the strike. However, Ok-seon has armed the primary control room with enough explosives to destroy the entire ship. Like the bomb planted on the train in Episode 3, it is both set to a timer and pressure-sensitive. Once San-ho enters the carriage where the code needs to be input, he will activate the pressure sensor. He cannot leave without triggering a massive explosion.
Mun-ju refuses to leave him. She would rather stay and try to help, even if they both end up dying. But the ship is filled with people—the Korean soldiers and now captured mercenaries. If they are not warned and the bomb goes off, dozens will die. San-ho convinces Mun-ju to go warn the commanding officer, and to ask for a bomb expert.
Of course, once she does, the officer orders an evacuation, including Mun-ju. She is physically pulled off of the ship. From a nearby lifeboat, she must watch the ship—and, presumably, the love of her life—explode.
Is Paik San-ho really dead?
“Originally, when I was almost halfway through writing the script, I didn’t consider having San-ho die as an option,” says Jung. Instead, she planned to have Mun-ju be forced to choose “between love and career, between individual and a group.” However, as the story progressed, it became obvious what Mun-ju would choose. “Since they were so deeply in love with each other, San-ho wasn’t just an extra option. He was almost Mun-ju himself. So the story ended up in a way, that San-ho becomes Mun-ju’s ‘Polar Star.’”
Jung says that when she first wrote a definitive ending with San-ho dead, the staff and crew were upset with her. “That made me revisit the ending,” she continues. “We all experience stories to experience fantasy, and the story has to continue. Should I really write the ending in a way that so many people would be disappointed?” The production team, including Jung, decided to keep San-ho’s fate ambiguous, even for the storytellers themselves.
Still, Jung teases the possibility that San-ho could live to protect Mun-ju again. “Maybe he made it out alive? Because that happened multiple times in the past. He went through so much, but he made it out alive unscathed, and was standing right behind Mun-ju in a moment, right?,” she notes. “So it could also be a case in the future, one day, when she is faced with another challenge, if she turns back, he might be there.”
Will there be a Season 2 of Tempest?
Unlike some Korean dramas that wrap up their stories in one season, Tempest feels like a story that could be continued. Though the secret behind Jun-ik’s death has been uncovered and Mun-ju’s name has been cleared, the geopolitical infrastructure and tensions that allowed the situation to escalate are still in place. Ok-seom took advantage of the situation, but she didn’t create it. No one person could.
With Mun-ju committed to running for president of South Korea, and the fate of San-ho technically unknown, there is room for another story set in this universe. Would Jung be up for writing more of this story? “Myself and the director, we’re always open, if Disney is willing.”
The post Breaking Down the Thrilling Ending of Tempest appeared first on TIME.
