Watchable, but Underwhelming
If you want a romance that's intimate, a bit sad, a bit dramatic, and tangled up in power and duty, this will probably do it for you. It's a slow burn between a crown prince and a palace woman, with some light flirting early on and heavier yearning later. It looks nice enough, though not as lush as people make out. The couple is genuinely charming and I get why viewers loved them.
My issue is that the show wants to be more than a charming romance. It's going for forbidden love, sacrifice, desire trapped inside a rigid system, and it's clearly building toward tragedy. It just doesn't earn any of that, because it won't take its own setting seriously.
We're supposedly in the late Joseon court. However, the characters mostly act like none of that exists. Early on, the heroine throws salt at a guy who turns out to be the crown prince, and the scene is played as cute and funny. For a court lady whose survival depends on being obedient and basically invisible, it requires suspension of disbelief to regard that as anything but reckless. The palace is supposed to feel like a cage and scenes like that just leave the door hanging open.
Which means the romance never actually feels impossible, just a little awkward. All the real danger gets sanded off so the leads stay likeable, and they end up feeling like modern people in hanbok, wanting modern things. Then the show pivots to court intrigue and sacrifice in the back half and it falls flat, because the stakes were never really there to begin with.
The side characters are a different story. They feel like they actually live in this world and understand what it costs them, and those scenes are easily the best thing in the drama. But they sit weirdly next to everything else, and honestly they mostly just made me wish I was watching another show instead.
Pretty, emotional, very watchable. If you're here for the couple you'll have a good time. If you wanted a sageuk that respects its own setting, it's pretty thin. There are some lovely moments in the love story but I never ended up believing the world around it.
My issue is that the show wants to be more than a charming romance. It's going for forbidden love, sacrifice, desire trapped inside a rigid system, and it's clearly building toward tragedy. It just doesn't earn any of that, because it won't take its own setting seriously.
We're supposedly in the late Joseon court. However, the characters mostly act like none of that exists. Early on, the heroine throws salt at a guy who turns out to be the crown prince, and the scene is played as cute and funny. For a court lady whose survival depends on being obedient and basically invisible, it requires suspension of disbelief to regard that as anything but reckless. The palace is supposed to feel like a cage and scenes like that just leave the door hanging open.
Which means the romance never actually feels impossible, just a little awkward. All the real danger gets sanded off so the leads stay likeable, and they end up feeling like modern people in hanbok, wanting modern things. Then the show pivots to court intrigue and sacrifice in the back half and it falls flat, because the stakes were never really there to begin with.
The side characters are a different story. They feel like they actually live in this world and understand what it costs them, and those scenes are easily the best thing in the drama. But they sit weirdly next to everything else, and honestly they mostly just made me wish I was watching another show instead.
Pretty, emotional, very watchable. If you're here for the couple you'll have a good time. If you wanted a sageuk that respects its own setting, it's pretty thin. There are some lovely moments in the love story but I never ended up believing the world around it.
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