Let me start with what's bad. Starting around episode 20 the plot & the pseudo science become rather silly. The science thing is maybe 20 times worse than in the Stargate SG1, if that helps and it takes the main stage in the later episodes. I often say that it's nigh impossible to reasonably explain time travel in a drama, so it's better to leave things to the imagination, unfortunately they tried to explain a lot & not only used terms like quantum cracks, Klein bottles, but walked into these things on their two legs. That's not all, many times in the dialog instead of timelines they use the term alternate realities, which does not fit logically & would lead to rather grizzly conclusions. (I don't think the thought process of "It's okay if people died left & right, there is nothing to feel sad about since we are not in their reality anymore" makes much sense) Though I'm increasingly confident time travel cdramas have an absolute limit on how many times the term "time travel" can be used before a show wouldn't pass censorship, so if the narrative demands more they just go with alternate realities or dimensions, even if that makes no logical sense.
The dubbed voices sound too much like studio recordings, there is no believable ambiance.
Finally the main villain's motivations are somewhat ridiculous, but censorship might have something to do with this as well, more reasonable serial killers probably cannot be shown on Chinese television. I've seen far worse than this, it's bad, but at least the writer truly tried to make his character work and it almost does.

That was the all the bad I can think of right now, moving on..


Everything is else is from good to incredible. End of review.. just kidding of course.

The romance is fantastic. Both the main couple & second couple's romances are incredibly magical, I certainly got the feels & the chills many times during the romantic & sentimental scenes that this drama had. In fact I don't think I have ever seen a cdrama with a side couple this memorable, a secondary romantic plot this touching.

The genre of this is Romance + Thriller & surprisingly enough this is probably the best Chinese Thrilling experience that I've had so far, there was even a touch of horror here and there & even a little Squid game influence in the final episodes perhaps. I tend to rant on and on how Asian drams Chinese & Korean alike almost always suck at this, not here. I saw a book on Amazon described as "utterly gripping crime thriller with edge-of-your-seat suspense " and I think that's an apt description of many of this drama's scenes. Impressive!

The plot up to episode 20 is very nice, even though I had a strong suspicion of the villain's identity from the very beginning, which is not that surprising considering that I recently watched "Meet Me @ 1006", but the plot flows very nicely & it was interesting even in the later sillier episodes. If I make an effort to ignore the horrible fake science, then the ending feels rather nice too, it's far more hopeful then what we've gotten in"Your Name", it's not nearly as open ended, you don't need to use your imagination to know what's going to happen in the future. (though checking the ending in advance without context will lead to a lack of understanding..)

The OST is absolutely incredible, right now of the top of my head I cannot think of a single cdrama where the tracks & mixing are both so great. It's not as good as Goblin's, but it's not too far off, if anything the mixing is better here.

The visuals are in my opinion very nice. I have seen a lot of people bashing the bad CG, this is hugely unfair, making a believable cruise ship in CG would have needed the budget of Avatar & even then it would have been obvious it's CG. I think this is the best CG i've seen in a -relatively speaking- low budget cdrama. The environment on the ship is extremely unrealistic, but that's hardly on the CG, but rather the production team went for a really dreamy, otherworldly vibe. I understand why this is a hit and miss for the audience, but for me it's mostly a hit. In fact I had very distinct Final Fantasy 8 vibes while watching some of the scenes on the ship.

I talked about the great visuals & OST, but the amalgamation of these things truly leads to an incredible audiovisual experience. I think the drama would be worth watching just for that, even if the rest was completely trash, which it is not, not even close.

TLDR: Go watch the drama, it's totally worth it! The 7.8 rating on MDL seems unbelievable to me.

edit: There might be an epilogue with the usual "it was just a book" shebang, fortunately I have not had the chance to watch this. The final episode of the drama I watched did not have this.