I have followed Jang Geun Suk since the beginning of his TV drama career. He's had some dud shows in later years before he enlisted (e.g. the Gambler) and this show nearly bordered on that but it wasn't his doing.

To be clear, it's not the story or his acting which is bad. It's the fact that the drama was artificially cut into two, ironically with the hopes of keeping the audience hooked, but it has done the exact opposite for me. The first few episodes of Part 1 were really interesting but started to taper off by epi 5 or 6, as is normal with any 16-episoder. However, in a normal 16 episoder, there is the rest of the series will carry through usually as the mid season hump passes (usually by epi 8) when they're setting up for a thrilling finale.

However, even though Part 1 was only 2 months ago, that's forever in dramaland. I have probably have watched at least 20 to 30 dramas since. And now resuming Part 2, I have forgotten whatever happened in Part 1. And I have little interest in re-watching it to remind myself of what happened (it wasn't THAT interesting the first time). I'm faced with characters who are strangers to me and we're thrust straight into the action with a recap. "Who's this? what happened last time? What was going? Who was involved in the conspiracy?"

The 2-parter also meant that the story was going around in repetitive circles. However, it got there in the end with some solid twists in the last 2 episodes, and that's the only reason I am still giving it an 8 overall. Because of the intermission between the 2 parts, I was about to drop the series during episode 7 because it was too much mental work trying to work out who was who. If I had done so, I wouldn't have seen that the show redeemed itself in the end.