after finishing this drama today I'm sad to say it jut get's a shaky 6 in the end - when it was almost a 9 for the first few episodes.

Why is that?


-this drama started sooo promising, good story with some kind of a fresh twist I like -
a male lead character who is handsome, rather rich but still very unhappy and lonely in his life. As a counterpart, a female lead character who is stubborn, painfully straight forward, but rather strong willed.
This is a mix I have rarely seenin K-dramas yet, and I feel it's refreshing and realistic to show that men, also handsome, rather successful men, can be unhappy and lonely and hurt.

The story was progressing rather slowly from the beginning and I did like that pace as the main characters neeed the time to find ways to reach each other, it only makes sense in all the story context.
I found the pace and development perfect until episode 7. From episode 8 on and I was a little worried that due to the fact this has 16 episodes, it suddenly started to drag.

The lead characters both around at least 30 or even 40, first needed some very understandable time to become aware of their feelings for each other, given they are both shy people when it comes to personal emotions, and given the difficult circumstances.
But from episodes 8 on we got more and more if these dragging scenes, the characters just standing around in slo-mo forever looking sad, or walking along a street in slo-mo. looking sad etc. It felt like time fillers to me from a certain point

We had the lead characters confessing their feelings for / to each other from episodes 8 to 10, they go camping together sleeping in the same small tent and spending the night there (the writers just completely leaving out what happened there? What did they talk about? how did they say good night? how did they interact? how was the next morning waking up togther etc. etc?)
We even have them spending a real night together as lovers, the fl openly confessing her love to the ml and then? Nothing, the next day these two people, who are not teenagers but between 30 and 40 years old and very good looking both of them, act like 13- year old teeagers, awkward, cold, distanced, even like they don't know each other personally? I didn't find that convincing.

(In reality: These two lead characters have been drawn to each other for what feels like forever. They finally spend the night together. Yeah, you know what would happen after that? If you ever had that situation yourself with such a prolonged...'forepaly', you know exactly that hormones are in crazy mode after spending such first night finally, and there is no way these two people would act like strangers and all cold the next day. Normally, after all that and confessing to each other, you search the next possible time window to spend more time together and you definitely interact differently, even when it's small things, and you look at each other differently.)

After epsiode 12 the dragging gets worse. There are so many silent scenes in slow motion repeating themselves, where you see either the ml or the fl walking down any street suuuperslowly (especially the fl), looking dazed and sad, or the ml sitting somewhere (either his appartment, a noodle shop or his office) looking blank and sad.
It was just too much of that slow motion walking and looking sad for me. You can use that to accentuate important moments, or moments of real daze and sadness, but when it is used like here the effect wears off and it feels artficial and annoying.

So, the story unfolds, the ml finally hears that the fl is the daughter of his dead stepdad and one of the siblings who got thrown out of their house because of his bitchy, nasty mother. He tries everything to clear the situation, even gets them the house back.
His mother, remaining the nastiest person, gets forgiveness from everyone (which I find HIGHLY unbelievable, especially because she did not change one bit and was just a bit softer for a short moment because she felt pity for herself for having been caught.) What happens to her in the end? We don't really get to know.

I found the last two episodes even worse to be honest. Apart from lots more dragging slow-mo scenes, we suddenly see the pharmacy guy getting together with the fl's older sister - which felt forced to me. I didn't feel like that could have really happened like it did, simply because the pharmacy guy had strong feelings for the fl for years. Suddenly switching to her sister felt strange to me.

So, back to the leads; after all is cleared, surprisingly everyone forgave the ml's awful mother, the siblings get back the house etc - and our leads? - still do a supertragic ' we have to seperate, goodbye forever' - ending of their relationship at a point when it's not necessary anymore? Oo (All of it by the way with both of them having almost robotic blank and sad facial expressions all the time, even when they are alone with each other in the woods.) Ok, even if so, and although I don't get why at that point, they don't do it the way most probably would, by particularly _not_ meeting again to not make it even more hurtful, but istead send a message or talk on the phone to say goodbye, - our leads? They go the extra painful length of driving out of Seoul two hours to go to the favourite wooden trail of the ml, walking together in the sunshine at the most romantic place to then really, expresionlessly, saying goodbye in front of the fl's house? No way!

Then, a time jump all of a sudden, one year later. So for some unknown reason the leads really haven't seen each other for a full year. Then, for further unknown reasons, the older sister suddenly tells the flthat their mother kind of forgave the ml already a year ago (which makes me wonder why the mother wouldn't have told the fl herself a long time ago knowing perfectly well how much her daughter is in love with the guy), the brother sets up a meeting of the leads at a rooftop concert, they both get there, the ml has a bunch of flowers, (endless slow motion again Oo) - they smile at each other and?.....THE END?

I was just annoyed at the end, thinking like what? Why? Why didn't the mother tell her way before she forgave the ml? Why didn't they get together after it was all cleared up a year earlier and instead do this reall weird break up scene with the wooden trail? Why all of a sudden can they now meet exactly a year later, why the flowers, why now? What then?

And I just couldn't get past this unchanged behaviour of the leads after they had spent that night together, I felt like I just saw they were actors acting, and that these two people have not spent a night together. You know, when you are in love like that, when there is such longing, and after you have finally spent a night together, knowing the other person intimately, their body, their scent, etc, you just look at each other differently, you act differently etc. It was just obvious it was an artificial script with two actors who played their roles like it was written down, but these two characters didn't really exist and they were not in love or had spend a night a after a long time of longing for each other.

All in all, almost the whole second half of the episodes was rather disappointing and it got worse with every episode. If the writers would have kept the good tension and realistic vibe they had from episode 1-7, It could have been one of the best and most touching stories in a long time then.