the aggravated ayi
Vancouver, Canada
predictable story with average delivery
The premise seemed very intriguing so I had higher expectations coming into this show. It's a shorter run at 12 episodes. Yeo Hwa is a Joseon woman in the Qing era, grieving widow by day & vigilante masked crusader by night. Her crime-fighting stints soon clash with the newly hired captain of the local garrison, Park Su Ho. They then discover they both seek answers to dark pasts, with clues leading them all the way to the imperial court.
On comes a dizzying line up of characters, a total of 5 different families, all connected to the same trajedy of 15 years prior & shrouded in mystery until Yeo Hwa & Su Ho team up to uncover the truth. The storyline is just as dizzying with many characters harbouring secrets & layers of suspects are peeled away until the mastermind is revealed at the core. It's a lot to pack into only 12 eps & the story doesn't actually offer much new. Murderous backstabbings, cover ups, shadow ops & attempts to depose the sitting royalty are all familiar backdrops, but the show doesn't go very far below the surface. There are attempts at portraying hard hitting violent events but they don't draw any sympathy. The political drama outweighed the romance, likely because the sheer number of characters & complex interactions didn't allow for enough development of the relationships. The action scenes were well done but they just got lost in the mash up of everything else happening.
The details in the half life-time of deceptions & sufferings of the widow are a bit overplayed by the end. Her suffering is balanced by her plucky nature, yet somehow Yeo Hwa's character came off more as slapstick & with no edge. Lee Ha Nee was unable to portray the depth of strength such a character would've had to have cultivated by that time in her life. I found very few truly LOL moments; in fact, the writing was quite bland. There's also an 11 year age gap between the lead actors, & as Yeo Hwa has lived as a widow for 15 yrs prior to meeting the young & unmarried Su Ho, it's plausible the characters also have a similar age gap, although it's never acknowledged. I was left wondering if LHN was trying to play someone 10 yrs younger as it would've made more sense that Yeo Hwa was 30 yrs old. Thus there's an awkwardness in the leads' chemistry & it wasn't convincing. So awkward, actually, that they couldn't even muster up the courage for a kiss scene which only serves to downplay an already weakened relationship arc. None of the other characters seemed especially compelling.
Overall, this was a rather soft & mediocre drama, but watchable because of it's shorter length.
On comes a dizzying line up of characters, a total of 5 different families, all connected to the same trajedy of 15 years prior & shrouded in mystery until Yeo Hwa & Su Ho team up to uncover the truth. The storyline is just as dizzying with many characters harbouring secrets & layers of suspects are peeled away until the mastermind is revealed at the core. It's a lot to pack into only 12 eps & the story doesn't actually offer much new. Murderous backstabbings, cover ups, shadow ops & attempts to depose the sitting royalty are all familiar backdrops, but the show doesn't go very far below the surface. There are attempts at portraying hard hitting violent events but they don't draw any sympathy. The political drama outweighed the romance, likely because the sheer number of characters & complex interactions didn't allow for enough development of the relationships. The action scenes were well done but they just got lost in the mash up of everything else happening.
The details in the half life-time of deceptions & sufferings of the widow are a bit overplayed by the end. Her suffering is balanced by her plucky nature, yet somehow Yeo Hwa's character came off more as slapstick & with no edge. Lee Ha Nee was unable to portray the depth of strength such a character would've had to have cultivated by that time in her life. I found very few truly LOL moments; in fact, the writing was quite bland. There's also an 11 year age gap between the lead actors, & as Yeo Hwa has lived as a widow for 15 yrs prior to meeting the young & unmarried Su Ho, it's plausible the characters also have a similar age gap, although it's never acknowledged. I was left wondering if LHN was trying to play someone 10 yrs younger as it would've made more sense that Yeo Hwa was 30 yrs old. Thus there's an awkwardness in the leads' chemistry & it wasn't convincing. So awkward, actually, that they couldn't even muster up the courage for a kiss scene which only serves to downplay an already weakened relationship arc. None of the other characters seemed especially compelling.
Overall, this was a rather soft & mediocre drama, but watchable because of it's shorter length.
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