That I stuck this Drama out for all 72 eps (with MUCH ff, of course) is testament to the fact that it kept surprising me by avoiding clichés in many setups throughout the Drama. Sadly, it fell into one of the worst of them at about the 60 episode mark. Noble idiocy rears it tired, ugly head, and we have to endure the male lead having a personality transplant/brain removal before it's fixed just in time. So the kindest thing I can say about this one is, I liked the leads, and the execution was better than expected in many places. I've definitely seen worse. It was also a bit jarring to see the cute youngest sister and keep thinking about what happened to the actor who played her. Very sad.

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A story of two halves

This is one of few Dramas I've dropped that I have given a score greater than zero. That's because there was a lot to like about it, or at least one half of it.

That half is the half that focused on the FL's work. The FL was shown as competent, mature and realistic in her work environment and VERY god at what she did, while also realistic about the challenges and limitations she faced in her working life. The excellence of that part of the storyline, and especially its focus on capable, competent independent female professionals. was why I endured to episode 24 of 36.

The reason I had to drop was the indefensible behaviour and attitude of the ML. Yet another in the seemingly endless line of man-child MLs that China's romance Dramas keep churning out, his petulant self-absorption was very hard to handle at the best of times. But coupled with his penchant for physical violence, dragging the FL by the wrist, and hitting or slapping his "best friend" whenever that friend told him unpleasant truths, was just inexcusable. The ML lied to and deceived the FL for more than half the entire Drama's length, but instead of genuinely realising how wrong that was and sincerely apologising, he turned up, said "I'm sorry" and LITERALLY dragged her back to his house. THAT scene was my breaking point, when I knew I had to let go.

The message conveyed by Dramas like this one and My Fated Boy is VERY toxic - it's OK for men to act like selfish children, women need to accept and adjust. No, it's not ok.

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SPOILERS: DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT TO WATCH











"Wonderfully Sweet and Entertaining" - that was how one blogger described this Drama, and it puzzled me. It STARTED that way, but by about 1/4 of the way through, the body count started to climb, and the deaths, most depicted with languid lingering attention to gory detail, kept on coming. Basically EVERYBODY dies, except the OTP, and apparently THAT makes it a "wonderfuly sweet and entertaining" romance? I started this for Ms Kim, whose work I've enjoyed for 6 years now, but the surfeit of savagery in this sageuk meant I had to bail out after making it to half way.

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Sometimes, slow is slow

The first half of this Drama was 'artfully slow'. I enjoyed its unhurried contemplative approach, a difference from the usual style of revenge Dramas. But somewhere around the halfway mark, the writer obviously decided that if "revenge is a dish best served cold", this Drama should climax just after the heat death of the Universe.

From being unhurried, it dropped to a crawl, painful and tedious and pointless. In my personal watchlist, the vast majority of slower Dramas that I've scored highly are JDramas, but there are some slower K Drama gems too, like One Day Off. This one was just EXCRUCIATING. So much of nothing happening and happening at a pace that makes tectonic shift seem dizzylingly fast.

For a truly outstanding summary of what went wrong with this Drama I recommend MinJi's review


https://mydramalist.com/profile/MinJi23/review/269917

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I started this Drama because the synopsis sounded promising, about two single parents starting again. What I got was a makjang marathon made more miserable by the awful female lead.

For the first 25 episodes I raged against the FL's unbelievably selfish son, who did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted with no regard for anyone else and NEVER apologised for any harm his actions caused. It made me think of "little emperor syndrome" What made it worse was realising he learned that behaviour from his mother's own view of herself

In the course of 57 episodes she apologised exactly ZERO times for all the times she flagrantly exploited the male lead - even before they were together. She was an adult version of her spoiled sprog, utterly self-absorbed, HER immediate wants and needs the only thing that mattered. Even in the final 10 episodes, she was prepared to break promises she made to the FL whenever she felt she knew better AND then expect him to apologise to her for daring to get upset about it.

I stuck it out hoping for character growth, but the Drama's version of "character growth" was "she's always right, he has to say sorry", a pattern that was literally carried into some of the very last scenes of the very last episode. While I can count on the thumbs of one foot how many times she apologised to him, she made him apologise countless times for failing to realise that he should always tolerate everything she did.

In the interests of fairness, I have to admit that leads like this are common in Dramas, but the "spoiled child" lead is normally a sulky chaebol boy brat, not a newly-divorced single Mum. I dislike male leads who act this way every bit as much as I disliked this female lead. Whiny, self-absorbed "aegyo" from adults is NOT cute or endearing, regardless of gender. Ms Wang did a fine job of making me dislike her character, so kudos for her acting. The love story of the FL's BFF was cute and engaging, and one more reason why I made it to the very end of this stupidly overlong wasted opportunity.

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Simply superb

I put off watching this drama when it was released because fantasy is not a genre I normally enjoy. I now regret waiting four years, this drama was outstanding.

When it was first released, the creator of the drama was reported as making comments that astounded me, and that have always stuck with me. They said that they created this drama specifically and explicitly for Ko Chia Yen. That is a remarkable tribute to her as an actor. I have heard of individual movies that were created with a particular actor in mind, films that the writer and/or director have said could not have been made without that specific person in that particular role, but I have never ever heard of a 15.5 hour runtime drama that was created specifically to give a vehicle to one particular actor. Having completed the drama, it makes perfect sense that the one particular actor was THIS actor.

Ko Chia Yen's performance was phenomenal. Not just in playing characters at different ages, but playing two completely different characters at different ages. Because of the nature of the storyline she was at times playing an unstable introverted teenager who was playing an outgoing adult who was playing as that unstable introverted teenager. Layers upon layers, and she nailed it every time.

Of course, as exceptional as her performance was, the drama would not have worked if she had been carrying substandard performances from the other leads. Hats off to all those involved in the casting of the other main roles. Greg Hsu and Patrick Shih rose to the challenge of their roles superbly. A special word of praise has to go to Patrick Shih. The layered, Inception-style nature of the storyline meant that his was a distinctive and different kind of a second male lead role, full of nuance and complexity. His delivery of the role was moving, conveying the pathos of the characters situation perfectly.

The romance at the heart of the drama also would not have worked had the casting been off. The on-screen chemistry between Ko Chia Yen and Greg was palpable. The brief little thank you BTS they hastily put together after the drama aired was a wonderful glimpse into the professionalism of all involved - Ko Chia Yen being bleeped out when she commented on having to refer to the six years younger Greg as "Li Zi Wei gege" was funny, but it was also a nice reminder that this was a performance by highly skilled and trained professionals who told a well-written story exceptionally well.

There were a couple of flaws that prevented this from getting a score of 10 from me. The first were the 'comic relief' characters featured prominently in the early episodes, especially Kun Bu. I felt sorry for the actor playing that character because the role was superfluous and tonally grating. It was interesting that her character was easier to take later in the drama when she was playing a younger version of herself, she was less clownish at 19-20 than 26-27.

The other and more significant flaw for me was the "big bad" arc. The deranged psychopath was a plot device to generate tension and danger for all four of the leads – both of Ko Chia Yen's characters, and the two male leads. However, I felt that it was unnecessary, or at the very least excessive and over-emphasised. It was obvious right from episode one that the biggest danger to Chen Run Yu was internal, not external. The stunning performance in the penultimate episode when Chen Run Yu and Huang Yu Xuang went head-to-head really demonstrated that. Their interactions showed that there was little need for a somewhat crudely cartoonish external villain to generate an existential threat, when Chen Run Yu carried the biggest threat inside herself.

The prominence given to that external villain seemed to be a nod to a tradition in Taiwanese dramas, the apparent need to include elements of Makjang. It also contributed to the drama suffering from a very common flaw with Taiwanese dramas, that of being longer than it needed to be. Reducing the prominence of the role given to the psychopathic villain and perhaps reducing or eliminating the comic relief roles could have shaved one whole episode of the drama and would have made it even better than it was.

A somewhat controversial opinion here – the ending was just a few seconds too long. At the VERY end of the Drama, the creative team made EXplicit what had been made IMplicit seconds earlier, and I thought was a bit of a shame. Ending with the child actor would have been absolutely PERFECT, imo. Less is more. A very minor niggle, though.

That it was a little longer than it needed to be made me think of the Korean remake, which is 25% shorter. It was the airing of the remake that prompted me to finally get around to watching the original. I wanted to watch the original before I watched the remake. Having been blown away by the original, I will not now be watching the remake.

I hope that all who do watch the remake enjoy it, and I'm sure that this will be especially true for those who have not seen the original, but there are two reasons why I think it is fundamentally impossible for the remake to match the original.

First, the casting. The fact that this drama was created specifically for one particular actor, who was obviously the very core of the entire drama from beginning to end, means that any remake is missing a certain something. When the remake was first announced, long before it was filmed, it got a black mark in my scorebook for the fact that they went out of their way to cast the male lead first. This was a drama that was created specifically for the FEMALE lead, she was the reason the show existed at all, the fact that the Korean production chose to prioritise the casting of the male lead said to me that they had missed the fundamental point of the show's existence.

The other reason why I don't think the remake could ever be considered as good as the original is simply that - the original was ORIGINAL. It was inventive and creative and put well used elements like time travel and love triangles and internal conflict together in ways that, at least in my 600 dramas, I've never seen. That creativity and originality is something that no remake could have. No matter how good any remake is, it's working with pre-existing material. The bulk of the really hard work has already been done. And, of course, no remake would have Ko Chia Yen in the role.

This drama reminded me why watching East Asian dramas has been a major hobby of mine for 10 years. When they are good they are very good, and few come better than this one. I hope others try it, and I really hope they try the original first.

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The Snare of Pride

Pulling your own teeth out would be more fun than watching this show, so why did I finish it? Because of pride and vanity. I was certain from episode 1 that I knew who the "big bad" was, and proceeded to suffer 16 hours of mind-numbing, brain-rotting awfulness for the cheap transient satisfaction of being proved right. IT WAS NOT WORTH IT

Anyone who has ever watched K Dramas centred on the police know that the Dramas last as long as they do because the combined IQ of all the Police in the Drama is slightly less than that of your average brain-damaged rock. This Drama was no exception to that rule, but it did throw in criminals who were just as incompetent and devoid of sentience. Learn from my mistake and find a better and more enjoyable way to spend 17 hours of your life - dumpster diving for rotten fish, for example

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Putting the "meh" in "mehdiocre"

I stuck with this one on the strength of its fantastic opening sequence. If only it had stayed like that through. At 24 episodes, it's short by contemporary C Drama standards, but it felt so much longer and was a chore to get through.

What I didn't like:

The lead as a teen was a patronising git. If I had a single yuan for every time he "affectionately" belittled the female lead, calling her ugly, stupid or variants (and combinations thereof), I could buy Beijing. That ain't romantic. And the reasons for his noble idiocy as revealed in the final episode were both stupid and mind-numbingly clichéd

The Second male lead was the worst kind of "no never means no" stalker. His antics as a teen especially were ALL about him. His love was one-sided and it was all for him. How SHE felt was basically irrelevant, and anything he did was ok because it was "love". Ai carumba (pun intended)

Why I stayed. There were intermittent flashes throughout the Drama of the sort of spark shown in the opening of episode 1. Also, REALLY loved Luo Zhi, and her story arc was a big reason I didn't drop. It caused me to add "Unrequited Love" to my watchlist, although I was disappointed that the same actor is not playing her in that Drama.

In summary, not awful, but one I shouldn't have wasted my time on.

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No apologies? Sorry, I'm done

The OTP in this Drama had real promise, and I enjoyed the first ten or so. Then they started doubling down on the tsundere. The ML got worse and worse in terms of his refusing to apologise for all the hurt he caused the FL and being angry at her all the time when he was in the wrong. SHE kept apologising, despite having done nothing wrong.

The clincher for me was in episode 21 when, instead of apologising for his behaviour, he grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her away and said "now you need to trust me" No apologies, no explanations, just the AWFUL wrist grab and "trust me, because I"M A MAN" I got so angry I just had to drop.

I don't mind tsundere in small doses, but this archaic trope of the bullying bruised rich kid who expects that "his" woma n will understand and excuse everything he does without question is not remotely romantic. When the Drama is nearly 2/3 done, there should be clear evidence of growth in the character. Blaming the FL and expecting her to be the one to say sorry for the "sin" of not having blindly trusted the ML who gave her no cause to trust is aggravating. Dragging a woman by the wrist is ugly and repellent and a trope that needs to die - NOW.

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A Sentimental Journey

I started this film expecting a sweet, feel-good story of personal triumph. It was that, but it should also have carried a trigger warning: May induce brony bawling.

Another reviewer described it as uneven and illogical, and complained about the way it switched focus from a youth romance kind of story to one with much more pathos (the bawling bit). LIFE is uneven and illogical, and sudden shifts in the emotional tone of life are very, very real. I spent much of the last 30 minutes literally bawling out loud, thanks to the powerful performances from an old favourite, and an actor I've barely seen.

The old favourite is Lee Sung Min. I've loved him every since Miss Korea (best K Drama STP EVAH, if you haven't watched it, DO!) and he shone here as the self-repressed Dad. The actor I've barely seen before was Lee Soo Kyung. I absolutely lvoed her character and her performance and was watching to see how her story turned out. The answer was not the one I'd have hoped for. But I will be looking out for her from now on, hoping to see her shine in a brighter story,

I was also really impressed with Yoona. One reviewer said that the ML actor never looked like a high schooler while praising Yoona's eternal youth. That made me smile as she's only 3 years younger than the ML actor and she too NEVER looked like a high schooler in this film. But that didn't matter because both did well. I can't comment on the quality and authenticity of her satoori, but it sounded ok to me, and that she delivered real emotion in it shows how far she's come as an actor.

Overall, I'm very glad I watched this movie, and glad I did so alone, so that my loud crying didn't disturb anyone else ?

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Minami - not JUST cute

I started this for Hamabe Minami, on the strength of finding her cute and pretty. Happily, she proved to be a competent actor in this as well. The comic elements made me think it might have been adapted from a manga, but they never overpowered the stories.

I was also impressed with the final episode. Ms Hamabe showed she could really emote, and the scenes with her and the amnesiac geko even got my eyes a bit damp - well done! It was also a pleasure to watch Okada Masaki in a VERY different role from Okitegami Kyouko. I didn't even recognise him at first, which is a tribute to his disappearing into the role.

Ooverall, a short, light and satisfying tale of a quest for justive becoming a path to personal growth.

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An adult Drama

After watching about 3 episodes of this Drama, I was getting similar vibes to one of my TW faves, My Queen. The leads have similar attitudes and behaviour, and so the end of this Drama came as no surprise to me. It fitted very well with the way My Queen ended. Learning that My Queen was made the year AFTER this one makes me onder hether it was in part inspired by or modelled on this one.

Another reviewer commentd on the lack of romantic chemistry between the ML & FL, and I would agree. They always seemed more like friends and colleagues, to the point where I think the Drama had not tried to force them together.. That said, the ultimate resolution was satisfying and in character for both of them. I gave it 9 for what it said about the challenges faced by women of that age in a society still as overtly patriarchal as Japan

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Sweet, and smart in the right places

My wife and I watched this together, and we both loved it. The story was not original, of course, but the execution was good. The leads matched, and the acting of Zhou Yu Tong in particular was very impressive. Her character was also a good example of the thoughtfulness of the writing that elevated this one above the many similar dramas out there. It was great to see her "badass CEO" persona was driven by a sense of loss and grief BUT she still had solid self-esteem.

The show's writing also showed intellligence when the plot dragged out the hoary old 'noble idiocy' trope. The supporting characters, and the ML, all called it exactly what it was, stupid. And happily, the show didn't wallow in it. After her return, it was also refreshing to see that both the ML & FL thought about how they needed to actually use their words, albeit after an amusing 'intervention' by friends.

There were plenty of very amusing scenes as well. The FL's 'uncle' at the gym had us both doubled up laughing, and the group hiding under the table toward the end was almost as funny.

There was a lot of great dialogue in the show - the FL's rant against public proposals was superb, exactly right in every detail.

There were flaws, of course. The 'bad guy' was both a bit OTT in his fixation and then let off with blnding ease and speed. That last was a reflection of the slightly over-saccharine nature of the final few episodes, quite likely a PRC requirement. It could have benefited by being 30 instead of 35, and the way the characters all moved on from the 6 year gap was a bit too hassle-free. Despite that, it was a very enjoyable watch, one of my favourite C Dramas now, with a sweet happy ending that earned extra points by NOT bringing back a character that most K Dramas almost certainly would have.

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