luckz

He has a non-clingy best friend role. His only story impact is giving ML a speech not to abandon FL.

The character development is very hand-waved and random (IMO), she becomes more outgoing/confident or rather more like the ghost at certain points.

Since they're not actually competing 99% of the time, it's very different from the typical 'triangle' shows.
There's other people interested in ML & FL, but it doesn't get uncomfortable.

She acquires or even surpasses her cooking skills later on.

(She already has cooking skills in the beginning as shown by her food blog etc, but no confidence to show them in public. She undergoes tons of training.)

(you might want to delete this shorter double post)

Seong Jae serves as antagonist, not "monkey".
Shin Sun Ae had feelings for him when alive, and he's married to ML's sister.

Yes, the ghost left midway through, but then the real Bong-Sun wasn't prepared / confident enough to continue it.

The last 1.5 episodes I spent more time shaking my head than not.

The music is so cray, I can't stop shaking my head erry episode.

(Like it was set in the 1920s to 1950s.)

((In some later episodes, they run out of weird music and supply regular K-drama fare.))

Okay, so a ghost can't be seen on photographs/video, but can be seen on the camera's viewfinder.
Wouldn't that only be logically possible for optical viewfinders as used with "real cameras"? In this show, they usually show electronic (smartphone) viewfinders, so it's already a digital rendition of what the lense sees, and the ghost shouldn't be visible at all.
(basically: it's already "video" even if you don't press the record button)

In one scene, they even show face recognition AI software identifying the ghost as.. a person.

Makes no sense.

What is the meaning of Yoo Jin Oh / Shin Yool becoming visible in the photograph after he apparently seals himself in the pages of the novel? The photograph is placed right on top of the paper stack, so does he use "ghost magic" to affect it? He can't just stop being a ghost.
How does the photograph enter the 'novel reality' with him?


When Ryu Soo Hyun shoots Sophia on an open street in the end (of the '30s storyline), who is her "taxi driver"? A random anonymous un-caught resistance member?


The eponymous Chicago Typewriter: It seems the resistance have at least two tommy guns with drum magazines (you only ever see one at a time, but two are used and discarded after firing). However, they don't use them before their resistance is largely crushed. For example the party assassination or subsequent getaway would be much easier, even if it's more difficult to get a big weapon to the premises. The same goes for earlier street fights. It feels almost like the writers/producers forgot to use the weapon and had to shove those scenes into the last episodes.

Some open questions / things I didn't understand / things I find illogical:

Which one?

Really not a reason to avoid it. It's not like "some other shows".
There's no long drawn out fight for affection with back-and-forth.

It's weird that the production seems to have been in three stages:

- the episodes people call boring, with mostly English-lyrics music, and not that much product placement (just the "official beer sponsor, official water sponsor, official fast food chain" crap)

- Korean-lyrics songs appear, hand in hand with over the top product placement ("DRINK THIS BEFORE ALCOHOL AND YOU WON'T HAVE A HANGOVER!", now a closeup on our official instant coffee sponsor, "THIS IS THE DOG FOOD THAT WILL MAKE YOUR SAPSALI HAPPY!", and the absolute worst: "BUY THIS POETRY BOOKY OF SAPPY PHRASES — QUOTES FOR EVERY OPPORTUNITY — SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!")

- the final episodes feel more rushed in terms of production and sometimes feature sloppy writing; the advertising is back down to a more reasonable level

I agree that the 'mystery' reveals in C.T, are usually obvious beforehand, but maybe you (and whoever tagged it as genre 'Mystery') have the wrong expectations here?

The answer to "what's a cool whodunnit that will keep me guessing until the last episode?" could never be Chicago Typewriter. It's obviously not written as that. The only real mystery element is the characters trying to pierce together their previous lives (in-universe!), but that's not really what the viewer does. There's never even any unreliable narrator, no characters put there just to mislead you, none of that.

It's not a mystery show, and thus weird to rate it based on that.

Technically she has four suitors, but it's not Boys Over Flowers KR.
So it's 90% the male lead.

If anything, I'd say the male lead should have found himself a better female lead, but Kim Won's love interest Jun Hyun Joo was the *only* female character under 40 that didn't spend at least a quarter of the screen time being a straight up terrible human being.

Can't say I understand the second lead syndrome here at all, he's just too much of a bully and general asshole.

To be fair 99.95% of English-speaking actors in K-dramas are unbelievably terrible, and about 70% of the time you can't understand a word of their "English" either — and usually there's no English subtitles for "English".
It could have been worse.
Since those actors and scenes quickly fade into irrelevance, it's not that big of a deal in the long run.

You should probably have watched any of the usual F4 (Boys Over Flowers / Meteor Garden) or Cinderella stuff before, tho.