The story is about a Prince who is trying to make reform to government and is meeting constant objections from the ministers who are not happy with him changing the status quo. His only option is to align himself with the Shen family and get their massive military power as his backing. Good thing for this is the previous Emperor has left an edict bestowing marriage between the 4th Prince and the daughter of the Shen family.

The FL (Li Ge) is an orphan raised by a wondering Shifu. She, her sisters, and brothers were raised and trained as assassins that go after Lords and ministers who ignore the blight of the common people and enrich themselves. To this object, their biggest target, and the worst of the of them all, the one born into privilege and power but is weak and corrupt, who only knows how to protect these ministers, is a Prince. To be more precise it is the 4th Prince Peng Cheng.
Hence the drama starts with our assassins, acting as a dance group, get themselves invited to said Prince’s place for the Consort Dowager’s birthday. Here is where my problem starts, the lead assassin Li Ge(Li Qin) is on the roof behind where the Royal family is sitting, the rest of the female assassins are on stage performing. You’d expect, for someone who has been preparing to kill this target for well over a year, would take this opportunity when they were distracted watching the dance and everyone is relaxed to jump down from the roof and shoot him straight. No- what happened was while she is up on the roof, the female dancers threw away their costumes and shot arrows toward the stage the Royal Family was sitting at. What happens when something like this happens? Obviously, everyone comes to attention, guards rushed in and surrounded the Royals, and this is when the FL decided to jump off the roof and shoot her arrow. It is so illogical, I caught myself screaming “why didn’t you shoot from the roof?!” at my unsuspecting screen. I was upset to have met such an outrageous thing in the first episode. But I will say this, if you leave common sense out the door, the entire assassination performance was eye catching. As you may have guessed, the year-long planned assassination went south real fast. We see a lot of fighting scenes here; I am a sucker for those, and they were pretty good.
Anyway, after the failed assassination a lot more story went on and I met my second problem. FL was trying to ambush and kill a minister that has killed one of her sisters in front of her in that faithful night, and while she is at it she runs into, you guessed it, 4th Prince in disguise. I should point out that said disguise is a mustache. Not a full-blown beard but a thin mustache. And FL did not recognize him. They made such a big show in the first episode about how they planned this assassination for a year and our lead assassin did not recognize her target because he had a mustache. [Sigh] May I ask how they had planned this assassination? Did they not do any recon? Were they told to shoot at the one sitting in the middle? How the bloody hell do you not know what the person you are supposed to kill looks like?
You will consistently run into illogical plots/scenes like the ones I point out above throughout the drama. Once or twice may be annoying but it’s forgivable if there are other exceptional stories to make up for it. But this drama neither had the sense to limit its flaws nor did it have the solid interesting plot to fall back on.

You might say I’m nitpicking, but I assure you I’m not. This drama, which is studded with talent, suffered from truly poor script. Honestly, it devolved fast with its regurgitated plot, the never-ending cycle of set-up, getting caught, getting free, getting set up again, crying, getting free, getting set up again. The plot became unoriginal, the dialogue unimaginative, the scenes draggy and the whole drama became riddled with clichés. I at one point even watched a few of the episodes without subtitles, since I was confident, I would not miss anything important. To add to this, one of the major antagonist was a “love rival”. Imagine writing in a harem drama in this setting. There are a million dramas with this same plot already, why would you bring such cliched story to a drama that should have focused more on the politics and the reforms and basically anything else especially since the FL was supposed to be a badass.
The top acting could not save this drama. I mean what can these actors do with such truly abysmal writing. They are actors not miracle workers - to be fair I count it as a miracle I watched it this far and it’s all credit to their performance.

Another issue is the palace design. This created a great disconnect with me. Don’t get me wrong, it was beautifully designed. It had pools in the rooms, huge sculptures, and I would have been impressed with it if it was a wuxia drama. However, for something that is supposed to be a historical, this did not have the beauty and authenticity of ancient Chinese architecture. I like the feeling of ancient palace designs, the aura, and the mood it sets - this one did not do that for me.
As for music, they had one. There was one song that played on a loop through the entire drama. Nice song, but it was just that one. They may have thrown in another one in there, but I did not notice.

As if I didn’t have my share of issues with this drama, they went a step further and added split screens (side-by-side shots) like a music video. If they had done a fade-out shot, I would have thought I transmigrated back to the early 2000s.

I had such a huge expectation for this drama and what a letdown it was.