Do You Know My Name?: Action vs. Character in Black Knight

Image of the drama’s promotional poster from the Netflix Media Center, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

It’s not hard to imagine a future like the one in Netflix’s dystopian action drama Black Knight (택배기사, 2023, based on the webtoon by Lee Yun-kyun), where the Earth is barely habitable and the portion of the population that hasn’t been wiped out has been divided into official classes which determine the quality of their lives. Although a democratic government still exists, the real power is in the hands of the corporation that controls the oxygen-generating technology that is necessary for survival. And they don’t want the situation to get better, because that would cut into their profits.

 

In the dystopian future portrayed in Black Knight, you want guys like this on your side. Photo of Kim Woo-bin from Neflix Media Center, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

 

Black Knight never explains how things got that bad. It takes us into the story world just in time for the last act, the final showdown between the greedy corporation and the people’s heroes: the delivery drivers who rose from the lowest status through skill, earning their positions as oxygen couriers. The strongest one of them all has become a legend that kids want to be like when they grow up, and when the corporation announces their next selection competition, one young recruit asks him to help him train.

 

Does he have what it takes? After an aspiring delivery driver played by Kang You-seok pesters him, the legend (played by Kim Woo-bin) agrees to help him prepare for the brutal selection competition, leading to one of the most exciting parts of any action show: the training montage! Photo from Neflix Media Center, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

 

That recruit has no memories of where he came from or who his birth family is; all he knows is his name, Yoon Sa-wol. So when he has to give it up to enter the competition (citizen competitors can be known by their names, but non-citizens like him are simply given numbers), he seems dispirited. The leader of the delivery drivers asks him, “Do you know my name?” Sa-wol answers, calling him by his assigned delivery area number, 5-8. The leader agrees: “I’m 5-8, and she’s [his assistant trainer] 4-1. And you’re Refugee 034. Is there a problem?” Sa-wol realizes that what people call him doesn’t matter, it’s what he does that counts, and he gets back to training.

 

As a child, Sa-wol was saved from a massacre of refugees by Esom’s character, a military officer who raised him as a little brother. Photo from Neflix Media Center, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

That exchange tells us how we should approach this drama. It’s not going to spend a lot of time showing us who Yoon Sa-wol and 5-8 are, what they think and feel and how they make sense of their place in the world. Their job is to do action, and our job is to watch them do it, not to get to know them as people. What it’s like to live as a nameless refugee in a stratified postapocalyptic society is a story for another drama of a different genre.

On the one hand, the focus on action vs. character development is due to the logic of the action genre. But the drama also makes choices elsewhere in its world-building to convey the idea that in this postapocalyptic world, individual identities matter much less than they do in our world. It is striking how little importance is paid to most of the common identity markers around which we construct our sense of identity; the only ones that seem to matter are class and physical ability.


For example, gender is not a factor in this series whatsoever. There are five female characters of note: the military officer who raised Sa-wol, her little sister who is approximately Sa-wol’s age, the delivery driver called 4-1 who assists 5-8 in training Sa-wol, one of Sa-wol’s fellow competitors for the delivery driver position, and the president of Korea. But all five of these women are simply people who do a job; there is no reason why their characters needed to be women, no indication of how being a woman doing their jobs is different from if they were men. Even their physical appearance is designed to minimize any feminine gender expression: they wear functional uniforms or neutral business attire. The plot doesn’t include any romantic subplots or traditional family relationships, so we don’t get to see how or if gender would play a role in those situations, either. These world-building choices reinforce the idea that gender is no longer an important category.

 

Interesting note: in the original webtoon, Sa-wol was a girl. It is unclear why the drama’s creative team changed the character’s gender, and in some ways unfortunate, because even if gender doesn’t matter in the story world, it does matter in our world, and female representation in the action genre could use a boost. Photo of the 택배기사 webtoon from Naver Comics, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

Age is not important in the story world, either. The good guys who band together to take down the bad guys are of various ages, but their contributions to the fight do not depend on their age. This isn’t a story about a group of young people overthrowing the tyranny of their seniors, or a story about listening to the wisdom of the old folks who remember when life was better. In Black Knight’s story world, as long as one is able to contribute, one’s age does not matter. 5-8’s “Do you know my name?” line takes on a greater significance when we see how little importance the story world gives to some of the main aspects that we use to form our identities.

 

Black Knight focuses mainly on how the various good guys work to take down the bad guys. If you like action and you don’t mind not knowing much about the characters, you’ll enjoy the story like I did. Photo from Neflix Media Center, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

I enjoy action shows, so I found Black Knight fun to watch, and if the producers decided to tell other stories set in the same world, like a prequel or a side story set inside the luxurious artificial habitat where the privileged class lived, I would tune in. That said, while it’s fun to watch this kind of story on screen, I never want to see it happen in real life. I hope imagining catastrophe makes us all take action to turn things around before it’s too late.