Hmmm....

Poor quality, low budget, scuffed effects, poor color grading, murky story line, half functioning cast and a handful negative IQ characters. Uninspiring and dull cases. Might be the worst "negotiation" themed piece of media I've ever seen. Still watchable, I guess.

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Disappointing...

I don't know why but for some reason I had high expectation, it turned out to be a complete flop. One of the worst chemistry for a lead couple ever. They might as well replace the male lead with a random support character and it wouldn't matter. Most of the relationship is one sided, FL who is doing most of the heavy lifting and constantly being abused meanwhile ML barely there or reacting, all talk no action, it's truly exhausting to follow their relationship, especially with the unjustified hatred from the in-laws. It turned to a pure blind hatred.

The drama had no clear direction, around mid way through they were making shit up as they go. Random plots and character appearing and disappearing. Soo Bin completely disappeared in the last 1/3 despite being a main character, they didn't even bother writing anything for her. Even though she had a heavy involvement/impact on the story early on. Yu Ri's father inclusion was the worst part about the drama. For the second half there was no story going on other than the leads' story, all side stories were dead by then.

I don't recommend this drama. Because of the amount of shit they were making up, they writers completely trapped themselves in a corner and the only option to get out is to introduce terminal illness to force some emotional investments from the viewers for the climax. Evidently, the ending turned out to be bad with how they decided to execute it.

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Out of the 4 'Endless Love' installments, this one is the worst.

The mothers giving up their daughters to one another so easily was off putting, weird and irrational. This shitty start will linger with you for the remainder of the drama. Of course with such oldies they slap you with the classic terminal illness trope to give you an ending only your grandmother would love.

Out of the 4 Endless Love installments, this one is the worst. Spring Waltz, Summer Scent and Winter Sonata were better than this. This one isn't well written, they push hard to maximize the angst and sadness while neglecting anything else. Song Hye Kyo was gorgeous and remained so 22 years later!

Don't watch it from Amazon/KOCOWA, they cut some scenes here and there, and later on from episode 9-16 they shave off 5 minutes from every episodes. Watch the TV version or even better the DVD version if you can which got extra scenes where every episodes reaches +1h and got separate deleted scenes.

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The mask

Truly inconspicuous! The drama made me mentally and physically drained and exhausted with each single episode from the ridiculous godly amount of insane lousy shouting. I went to an ENT doctor and he told me I needed a new brain transplant since the old one was incapable to perceive any type of sensory stimuli. Huh. This drama was the equivalent of a nagging little spoiled brat roaming around you non-stop for no purpose other than seeing you losing your sanity or equivalent to a fleet of mosquitos determined to penetrate you as the last human left with suckable blood. What I'm trying to say, if the director was really entranced by vibrating vocal cords then he should've brought a real man to do the job. On a small side note, I find this period and setting of Japan/Korea to be the worst to watch through any media. They "almost" don't know how to go on about it. I can count a few rare exceptions on one hand.

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Pain

The story was so soulless and shallow it made the 12 episodes runtime so damn dreadful. The whole trio main cast were lackluster from all angles, both the actors and their characters. This drama was nothing but a cheap BL bait anyway. It should have been a short drama thrown on some random streaming services instead of being a full TV broadcast.

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BAD!

I was expecting mature human drama but I got stinky rubbish. Stupid story, stupid writing, stupid demented delusional characters. How was this even approved? This drama is actually the worst of its genre. It's impressive how bad it was. At least it serves as a good example of what not to do.

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Not Much Love

The drama can be classified as one of those mid-to-low tier dramas, doing the bare minimum to keep its storyline somewhat functional. It felt strangely empty, and it was not a slow-burn as some might claim, just unjustifiably and unapologetically slow. The plot lacked proper support, and it seemed like the second male lead was added merely to fill in some space. Occasionally, the show attempted to use this emptiness for introspective reflection or a shift in perspective, but the execution felt clumsy and ineffective. The dialogue often meandered into mundane, trivial irrelevant matters. While these small details can sometimes enrich a character, their excessive repeated use became nothing more than soring background noise. Flashbacks were used a bit too often, cluttering the space even more. The entire plot could have easily been condensed down into a movie without losing any essential context. In fact, the drama even ended with a movie-like ending. The only redeeming quality was the nostalgic '90s melodrama vibes. On an unrelated note, if you casually opened files from emails in the '90s, you'd probably be the easiest victim of a cyber attack!

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Aged Way Worse Than Milk

There's an obvious case to be made around the exploration of the ups and downs of being a young adult, but this drama was an excruciating exercise in superficiality, offering nothing but a hollow shell of what could have been a worthy experience. From its cardboard characters to its cringe-worthy dialogue and moments, the drama failed to maintain an attractive hook, opting instead for a glossy, saccharine portrayal that felt more like a caricature than a digestible imitation. The stories were equally pretty shallow as well, its attempts at drama fell flat, overshadowed by its overwhelming lack of substance, conviction and commitment between most of the characters, relationships and dynamics. Its surface-level approach with everything left no room for any proper investment to be had. By every metric possible, the 2nd season was a significant downgrade to what was an already struggling piece. Yoo Eun Jae was undeniably the weakest link in season 1, recasting her actress to someone who's struggling to play it, made things 10 folds worse. The replacement was trying really hard to mimic the original while the actress facial expressions, fluency and intonations were the polar opposite. It doesn't take a blind man to be appalled by the comparison, not like the original was any better. Unfortunately, things got even worse, her continuous story, background, conflicts, motives, and character writing were a nauseating concoction of utter literary incompetence and creative bankruptcy, a slap in the face to anyone with even a modicum of taste. To be fair, both Ye Ri & Eun Bin brought a much needed improved performances into the 2nd season, their characters as well had a better fit. Overall, the drama was a disappointingly bland and forgettable entry that failed to leave any lasting positive impact. If you care, streaming services like Netflix cut off any inner songs/tunes/humming/reading-lyrics-out-loud, the first episode is +3 minutes shorter than TV.

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Maskless Behaviour

The story started with a big 'who done it' type of plot where every single person on the screen was a suspect. It kept this momentum for a few episodes before abandoning the idea and the 'masks' plot half way through to shift to something else. There was no coherency in this mess and the writer was improvising the story as the episodes went on. Instead of working on the mystery, it took the lazy way at every corner, it pushed most of the weight onto just showing the incident. It revealed the mystery through the brief snippets of the incident at the beginning of every episode. The character Kang Hoo was in particular problematic to the narrative and was handled poorly throughout. The cast was good but that's it, and the supposed sismance came off as forced more often than not, even during its high moments. The entire drama was a really big mess.

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Gradually Insulting Its Audience

Aside from the weak introduction, the first episode also had loads of exhibitions of the ML smarts through the typical genius character stereotype, however, the drama proceeded to treat the viewers like idiots for the remainder of the drama. Initially, Detective Cha Ji An, and most of the police force, were physically capable and adequate enough, however, they suddenly became as effective and incompetent as useless civilians. The mystery and thriller elements were generally bad, the drama didn't waste a second in revealing everything immediately. The romance was nothing but forced. The main story and entanglements of the brothers and the psycho man turned out to be disappointing and dumb, which led to a rubbish ending.

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A Man In The Hole

Not the first drama with time travel to chase a lost love and not the best either. The first few episodes introduced us to the concept and up to episode 3 it seemed promising. The first time travel was to the past and the second one returned to the present to see the consequences of his actions. He did something minute in the past but resulted in him turning into a gangster once returned. The drama hinted into creating these radical scenarios for every round trip which sounded like fun. Unfortunately, this was a one off thing and the subsequent events were utterly disappointing. The entire plot device of this manhole was handled poorly. There were obvious coherency problems and plot holes, pun intended. I think the writer realized this problem which is why he didn't include any traveling between episodes 11-15. Speaking of which, these episodes got significantly dumbed down and became soulless and out of touch. They made the love rival blatantly bad and psycho to open the way for the main lead to have a clear black and white cut, avoiding any moral ambiguity the viewers might run across. That was the only way for the writer to glue them together without performing mental gymnastics. There were other remarks to be said about characters' reasoning, underlying theme, chemistry, side characters, story structure, and romance, but maybe on a later time.

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Balloons For The Circus

The drama kept teasing us endlessly to what might have happened in Italy but it never revealed it. Sure, you can make some obvious assumptions but that's not as satisfying especially with the constant teasing. Makjang shows are designed to push your buttons through what's obvious from the observer perspective and this drama does exactly that but also eases the pain by making every character to have an unadjust trait or 10, including all of the leads. By doing this, it also makes it easier for the viewers to go softer on some of the wrong doings. You end up watching it to see how the car crash will end. In this case, a lot of fast and big changes happened in the last 40 minutes despite the drama having all the time in the world to approach its resolution more gracefully. Although it the drama was somewhat alright, but the harsh shift in the last 4 episodes made it really bad and unbearable. The main confrontation of the involved parties in the cafe was an example of that. The writer just wanted to amp it up as high as possible to squeeze the last dribbles of broadcast ratings. One thing I didn't like is how the drama forced every character to be connected to one another, it pushed the improbability of interconnected stories a bit too hard that it became ridiculous even for a makjang drama. If I had to pick one thing that irked me the most, it's how Da Ba's mother react differently between her daughter and Eun Gang on the suspicions of potential infidelity despite her daughter is the one doing it 10 folds harder in front of her face. A true bruh moment right there. Looking into the writer's previous projects, she's consistently decent except for a few outliers and this drama was part of these outliers.

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Wannabe Aspiring Actor

A lot of names were thrown around in the beginning with not a lot of context, so you had to make a mental note to connect them later on—a really annoying practice, to say the least. Supposedly, the male lead was in China before coming to SK, but the drama made it a running joke for a couple of episodes that he was a caveman. This made the whole family meeting and living together a bit too cringe. There were many ways to approach such a scenario, but it seems the writer took the lazy route. Some scenes were stretched really thin and became too awkward to continue, like that one scene of both leads and Sang Chul talking about the old hotel staff photo. The drama would've benefited from having more grandchildren and better interconnected stories between them. Although there were three grandchildren, the middle one was an insignificant sidekick and didn't contribute to the dynamic as much as I hoped. The ending brought a change of heart to all of the opposing characters, but some of them didn't seem genuine in the slightest.

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Better off not remembering

The first 4 episodes were dedicated entirely for their backstory and they did an outstanding poor job in that regard. These first 4 episodes were painful to sit through, unbelievably boring, lacking any interesting or gripping elements and it failed to lay the groundwork for things to look forward to in the future episodes. If that wasn't enough, the main story was mostly shelved and the subsequent episodes turned into side cases with slight relation to the bad guy until it returned to the main case in the last few episodes. Although the male lead was labeled as a genius and has super powers but his character proved to be otherwise. Namkoong Min playing a pathetic low-life chaebol playboy villain was definitely a miscast. It would more suitable for him to play a smart cunning merciless villain but the director was blind. On the other hand, Jeon Kwang Ryul playing the main victim with Alzheimer and being a good loving father was weird, another miscast and oversight from the production. The trend continues Park Min Young playing a prosecutor, it's just not it.

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