luckz

It gets a lot better after the first two episodes. IMO the middle ones are the best.

I would call it the most uniquely realistic drama I've watched, and the majority of characters are written as proper humans.

(Seems you still didn't finish it, right?)

The first episode is awful, the second is mildly better, and then it eventually gets really good.

It does so so often that it's almost like edutainment at times, I assume paid for with tax money or similar.

I agree that the last episodes were rather frustrating once they tried to do a "story arc" as opposed to mostly just character interaction.

For what it's worth it's *entirely* different from other K-dramas, so it won't give you an accurate impression of what they're usually like.

The first episode is one of the most unintentionally comical things I've seen in my life. Like a 4/10 at best.
I suppose the first episode or two are why people would drop it.

Very happy that I didn't stop there!
(For me the very start was worst, the middle was great, and the last episodes were weaker again as the writers try to steer towards a conclusion.)

It's completely unlike any of the 30+ other K-dramas I've watched – 90% of the characters and their relationships are very real! Only a handful of scenes have side characters that morph into whatever the writer wants in that moment, and that's so refreshing compared to how in other shows the supporting cast usually are in stasis when they're not needed by the leads.

This show also has the most open (and accepting) conversations about mental health and sexuality of anything I've watched.

Three times actually.
- grabbing a knife
- baiting serial killer 1 (at the lake)
- baiting serial killer 2 (in her home)

Honorary mention:
- goading serial killer 2 on to kill her at his childhood home

Yes

Agree with the gist, and instead of the last two episodes being "let's catch the culprit and lose him and try to catch him again and get outsmarted by him and ...", I would have much preferred an earlier closure and instead to see how FL and SML growing up together changes the future.

Also, how the tunnel thing itself functions is rather peculiar. The characters themselves express that there should be some logic to it, like needing both the ML and the killer in the tunnel together for the ML to time-travel, yet it becomes 'begging the deities' in the last episode.

Just a tiny bit. He travels back and forth once, which has immediate effects on the future, so it's the same timeline being altered.
The problem you describe is true though, that how going back to the past (after the story arc concludes) rewrites the future entirely is not shown at all.

... Black.

Well, we didn't clearly see that he caught the killer in the past, or how, probably because the writers didn't come up with a good way to show it.

But yes, essentially.

It's not as bad of a "the whole show never happened" as ...

He's a country bumpkin from the 80s and unlike his partner doesn't have a university-style police academy education. It's hard to make him not uneducated (and rude).

It's not the 10/10 never-ending bromance like in Descendants of the Sun, but there's still a good lot. It's not always overtly expressed.

You're correct in those.
re 1) we saw that him going to the past affects the future afterwards, with the future people consciously aware of 'receiving a new memory', so the only explanation here could have been "she would have chosen that name anyway", but then why show us that silly scene?

re 2), the really interesting ending wrap-up would be how the future setting is changed when suddenly FL has a functional childhood together with SML. the producers probably couldn't come up with a satisfying way to show this without even more story complaints from viewers.

This is the kind of drama where suspenseful reveals are usually obvious at least a few minutes before they happen.

He's a bit better here than in Heirs (where almost the entire cast was chosen for looks rather than acting skills) or Rugal.

I found it EXTREMELY poorly explained how the dispelling of evil spirits supposedly works, but why do you want him punished for what another entity did in control of his body? He doesn't even know anything about it. From what I understand, he hits his future wife with the car, and after that he's just on standby/snooze.

Like you said, the "let's not see each other" ending is so dumb, and even more so here considering it's two characters that need to be around each other. But then she somehow grows into an independent spirit, while he can't really live without her. Not convincing at all.

For me PBY's acting was great 90% of the time, but there were definitely sore moments where (thanks to the script?) she was basically the wrong character. Like when she first stops being timid, or when the ghost starts having feelings, it's like they're swapped.

FL has a life-long crush on ML; the ghost does the active pursuing.

No, the 'scary ghosts' only appear very rarely and aren't the focus at all. It's more like "friendly lovable ghost girl" 95% of the time.