The Great Seer

The Great Seer begins during the reign of King Gongmin. But despite being about seers, geomancers, divinators and the like, this drama is less about the fantasy and more about the political movers and shakers — people who had the power to advise, and therefore control, kings. Ji Jin-hee plays Yi Seong-gye, the general who led the overthrow of Goryeo and established the Joseon Dynasty, becoming its first king. Mok Ji-sang (Ji Sung) is a gifted seer/geomancer, born with the ability to see into people’s pasts and futures. There are those who believe falsely that he has dark supernatural powers, thinking him possessed by ghosts. When he comes of age in the late Goryeo era, he becomes a scholar of divination, and a reader of geography, faces, and the like to tell fortunes — an area with much influence at the time. He eventually becomes a “king-maker,” who holds the key to a major political shift in the overthrow of Goryeo and the rise of Joseon when he backs General Yi and effectively shapes the future of Korea as we know it.[1] Kim So-yeon plays a healer whose destiny is tied to General Yi, but she falls in love with the seer. And Song Chang-ui plays the rival advisor. Lee Yoon-ji joins the cast as Ban-ya, a woman who was sold off as a gisaeng at a young age, but becomes a concubine to King Gongmin’s advisor, and bears a son. King Gongmin takes in that son as his, and the boy becomes King Woo of Goryeo — the king that General Yi dethrones in a coup d’état.