50% of this drama is "all opposing groups meet coincidentally in a hallway and stare each other down for 5 minutes". The other 50% is split between them bragging to each other about their forthcoming actions/upper hand and political strategizing. With that sort of script, it's pretty difficult to pull off an epic drama. Still, the actors were at least marginally not terrible and the plot line is interesting enough to follow even if there are slow points where you read Buzzfeed instead of the subtitles. I rated it as a 6, but I don't know what sort of person I'd recommend it to.

The male lead is really good at looking sullen, sulky, pissed off, and occasionally sad...but most of the time he's an unreadable blank wall. That's sort of his style though, and it seems to work for him with this character. The two female leads did fairly well at their respective roles, even with not much script support. There was a heck of a lot of gloating from every one of the main players, it got a little old to watch at some point. Sometimes it made sense, they would gloat to force their opponent to take action that would create a vulnerability, but more often than not the gloating just caused their own party pain in the end. They basically shit talk at each other constantly for 16 episodes. The rapey premise for the two leads working together was a little difficult to justify, it seemed like a pretty long stretch and I think they could have found a better plot gimmick to fix the two together.

The story seems to switch back and forth between three basic groups of people, each one having the upper hand at times. They all seem pretty hell bent on mutual destruction. It bothered me a lot that they were willing to kill off people that got in their way...but not the two main leads. That made zero sense to me...like these two righteous shit heads keep messing up your plans and you...just sit back and watch it happen? Idk...if you're gonna murder anyhow why not murder the people actually in your way? I did, however, like that the male and female leads were opposed for the first many episodes, each basically forcing the other to behave as they needed, it was a fun dynamic. But then...that's what everyone in this drama does...the entire thing is people forcing other people to do shitty things. I think that made it a bit overkill...like it worked for the two main leads, but when everyone else is doing it constantly too it just loses its impact.

Overall, I don't exactly regret watching it, I managed to eek a few moments of enjoyment out of it...but it's not something I would ever be able to make it through again. It tried to be much smarter than it was capable of being. Also, I'd like to know wtf kind of fishing poles they have in Korea that you can stab a person through the middle with them.