MLSHR honestly had a lot going for it, but it ended up devolving into a mess.

I was surprised to see how much hate it got in its earlier episodes, because that was the part I loved the most. There were funny fish-out-of-water scenes for our female lead — but she wasn't stupid, the chemistry with both male leads was building, and there was the backdrop of people willing to take extreme measures for the throne so there was always the feeling of there being high stakes.

Once things started ramping up, however, the sub-plots disappeared and even the main competition for the throne started feeling less high stakes when all the cards were pretty much already laid on the table.

The romance dwindled as well, mostly self-sabotage by the characters who were lacking development and seemed to constantly be changing their minds without good reason.

And much of this has to do with the terrible use of time skips. Time skips where nothing really changes BETWEEN characters really have no purpose, especially since we were given such little context for why things changed. To add, they started adding more characters and focusing on side ships at the halfway mark who I didn't care about.

They really underutilized the time-traveling aspect as well. Hae-soo had visions every once in a while, but her role in history was very passive and reactive.

All in all, I honestly felt everything was predictable, especially the ending. The difference was, at the start, I was emotionally invested in it and by the time it happened, the dynamics between the characters had changed so much I stopped loving them.

Also: a "gotcha, they're not actually dead!" moment for a villain simply shows me to that they didn't build up the infrastructure for a system of obstacles and needed one character to drive the whole thing. It also feels lazy to have not one, but TWO kings descend into madness — neither of which were explained very well.