In a beauty pageant, Emperor of the Sea would win hands-down. From sweeping vistas of windy cliffs to carefully composed interiors to torch-lit ships fanning out across the darkened sea, it is one of the most beautifully filmed k-dramas that I’ve watched. It also features an intriguing central triangle anchored by a break-through performance by a dynamic, dangerous Song Il-Guk. Unfortunately, the directing, acting and cinematography can’t make up for the weaknesses in the writing. As long as the screenwriters are dealing with the characters’ early lives where few historical facts are available, things clip along fairly well. The writing is solid if not exceptional, and the show’s other strengths outweigh the script’s drawbacks. However, once the characters collide with reasonably well documented historical facts in the final third of the show, things start to go awry. Character motivations change inexplicably and the narrative becomes confused and repetitive. The writers seem unable to fit the characters they’ve created to the actions that, at least according to extant sources, they actually commit. Lots of stuff, much of it bad, happens, but it often feels arbitrary, robbing the climatic scenes of the feeling of inevitability needed for maximum dramatic impact. It’s as if you’ve spent 50 hours with a set of characters only to watch them get randomly flattened by a meteor at the end. It may be spectacular but it’s not especially satisfying.