Decide what you want to do and stick to that, screenwriter?

This started off quite promisingly, as a fairly domestic historical drama - modern man transplanted into body of scholar in ancient times uses his nous to support his new wife and her family in making money. Ning Yi is usually two or three steps ahead of everyone else, which isn't all that difficult with the level of intellect from some of his family members, as well as introducing modern techniques and gadgets to the business.

Then the screenwriter took the story in a completely different direction and, at one point, the pacing was just awful and the episodes really dragged on. The main relationship literally disappeared off the screen when they ended up separated for multiple episodes. Even after Ning Yi and Su Tan'er were later reunited, that only lasted a couple of episodes before he was off doing his thing again.

I knew this was taken originally from a harem novel, where all the women fall in love with the male lead, so was pleasantly surprised at the screenwriter managing to make the male lead have good friendships with other female characters and not just have them all be smitten with him. There are, however, a couple of implied or off-screen sexual assaults on female characters and that was uncomfortable as a plot driver given how positively the rest of the relationships are written.

In general, the supporting cast were good and the main villain suitably villainous. I hadn't seen either of the leads in anything else before, being apparently one of the few people around here who hasn't seen Joy of Life (it's on my list now, promise!) and I enjoyed both their performances too.

I'm not sure I'll prioritise season 2 over anything else, though. I was looking for one thing in this drama and then was served with another, which I was already getting from other shows I'm watching - that kind of bait and switch always makes me a little annoyed.

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Good in parts - very pretty to watch but the plots aren't always coherent

It's an entertaining enough drama but there are things about it that make it difficult to suspend disbelief and just go with the flow.

The main characters are pretty enough and also engaging when together but the supporting characters vary widely in terms of both their usefulness to the series overall and acting ability. Likewise the storylines vary in how believable they are, with the last of this season being about human experimentation, with some really poor acting from guest cast. As is often the case with a lot of Chinese dramas, the supporting female characters are left with little to do and minimal character development. I'm not 100% convinced that you could tail someone without them spotting you, even in Hong Kong, driving a white Lamborghini with plates that say 'SCI'?

There's a particularly annoying sub-plot about Bai Xin Tang and Gong Sun Zhe that was both annoying (she basically stalks him) and also nauseating (to the point where I started fast forwarding through their scenes together). I was a bit confused about Xin Tang, to be honest - the show seems to suggest she's also a police officer (maybe I misunderstood this?) but we never actually see her working and she also has bodyguards?

Overall: not the worst show I've seen, it managed to keep my interest all the way through, and the overall eye candy level helps immensely when the plots start to waver.

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Just talk to each other, people!

This is one of those dramas where I really don't know where to begin when reviewing it - positives and negatives all the way, to be honest.

First of all, the storyline that it contains just didn't really have enough material to work properly for the length of the season - it's 32 episodes this season and a further 20 in season 2 and I wonder whether it would have partly worked better if the split had come at the apparent cliffhanger which happens somewhere in the mid-20s. That sees our ML and FL make a significant decision which propels the story into a whole amnesia/time travel subplot that I just wasn't expecting and would probably have made a good point to end that season. I haven't watched the 2nd season, so I don't know if it's going to get resolved early on in that season or if they're determined to milk it for everything it's got.

As for the main characters, the FL has a lot more interesting backstory and character opportunities, while poor Darren gets stuck with a lot less to work with as the ML. The secondary couple are both left to pine for people they can't have, with the secondary ML's attitude annoying the crap out of me very early on. Other than them, the supporting cast are pretty good and I particularly liked the guards.

The production quality is pretty good and the CGI isn't terrible, so it's watchable. The main drawback is that the writers seem to love unnecessary drama caused by lack of communication and so the main relationship fractures and rebuilds a couple of times. This show would have been so much shorter and more balanced if characters would actually trust and talk to each other (see Imperial Coroner for a good example of how this works!) and even that cliffhanger might have hit at least half a dozen episodes sooner.

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Good in parts but a few plot-twists you'll see coming a mile off

I'm a bit of a sucker for historical detective shows, and when you add in martial arts, this show was pretty much made for me - it's an enjoyable enough series, if a bit predictable at times. To be honest, I mainly watched this because of Dai Lu Wa, after being very impressed with her performance in Cross Fire, and this didn't really give her as much opportunity to demonstrate what a proficient actor she is.

Things I liked:
- the fight scenes were pretty well done
- female characters with actual roles (even if romance does loom a bit larger for them than I'd like)
- some good character development for a number of roles

Things I wasn't so keen on:
- way too much time spent on the romance sub-plots
- casting an actor like Zhang Yu Jian in what's supposed to be a main role but then letting his character have minimal screen time/zero character development
- Xu Ke's character is childish all the time and it gets a bit wearing

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I came to this series off the back of watching Jung Il Woo in Nightwatchman's Journal and his performance here was definitely one of the highlights of the show, transitioning well from the seemingly thoughtless prince of the first few episodes into gathering a group of like-minded individuals around him solely by sheer force of character. However, I have to say his performance was a little overshadowed by the scenery chewing of Jung Moon Sung as the repulsive Prince Milpung, which was a complete turnaround from the previous series I'd seen him in (Prison Playbook), to the point where I had to check it was the same actor.

Overall, the series looks great and pretty much maintains pace all the way through, though the writers seemed to run out of ideas for what to do with Go Ah Ra's character towards the end and the ending itself kind of fizzled out. Having said that, there were some tremendous set-piece scenes and although I had a rough idea how it was all going to play out, there were a few twists and turns I didn't anticipate. There are a couple of actors whose other work I will definitely be checking out now (Park Hoon being one of them).

One thing that disappointed me was a particular scene where everyone makes fun of Kwon Yool's character in a way that was more than a little homophobic. That seemed completely out of place given the character development up to that point and stuck out as a bit of a glaring 'no homo' moment, especially given the close relationships being fostered within the show itself by the male characters towards one another.

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Like everyone else says, what's with that ending?

Okay, so before I finished watching this show I'd heard that the ending of the series was somewhat controversial but thought to myself, 'how bad can it be?' and didn't actually read any of the reviews - the answer? Very. However, things started going wrong with the storyline long before that, in my opinion...

Let's talk about what I liked about this drama first and then I'll go on to giving certain aspects of it a good kicking. First off, the overall acting performances all round - top of the pile, of course, with all the heavy lifting duties was Shin Hye Sun who effectively ended up playing multiple characters (So Yong as an individual and the Bong Hwan-So Yong mixture at its various stages of existence). I was pretty much equally impressed with the acting by everyone involved, from the various members of the royal family through the household staff and on to the ministers. Excellent work all round. Secondly, the initial set-up for the storyline worked really well, with a real 'fish out of water' aspect to it and I particularly liked the fact that the queen's internal monologue was (for a while, at least) in Bong Hwan's voice.

Now the problems - it's all about internal logic for me. When we first hit Joseon, we've got the consciousness of a male modern day individual in the body of a woman of that time, with a male internal voice that works with that, and then suddenly that internal voice changed to a woman's. Was this meant to signify that the queen was now a mixture of both individuals, rather than a (male) consciousness with added memories? If so, that doesn't really come across in the way the scenes are written.

Likewise, in the final episode after Bong Hwan's consciousness leaves the queen's body, it's pretty clear that this is So Yong again, just with a wider vocabulary and a few less shits to give. Poor king, he might have reclaimed his throne but the woman he's come to love over the past 19 episodes doesn't actually exist any more and we don't get any on-screen recognition of this. Meanwhile, what does poor Bong Hwan get out of this? Dude has been through a sexual identity crisis and risked his life, but for what? A warm and fuzzy feeling and that's it.

The only one who's got what they wanted out of this situation is So Yong, with zero recognition of the impact of these story decisions on anyone else. Where was the 'soul' of So Yong all this time? We know Bong Hwan's body was in the hospital, his consciousness was in So Yong's body, so where was she? The story would have been much stronger (and probably less contentious) if more thought was put into how to show her 'return' and also some recognition on her part of what she (and the king) have lost by Bong Hwan's departure, as well as how they were both going to adjust to that going forward.

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