Reviews

STORY: A short drama to watch without expectations. It features the typical clichés: FL is rich, ML is unlucky with sick family members and financial difficulties, an instant crush that FL calls "destiny," and SML is mean and jealous.
The only thing that's different from the usual is the poker game. Card games bore me to death, luckily it takes up a few minutes in the last episode (skipped).

CAST: Pleasant in appearance with decent acting. I found the romantic aspect forced, not helped by a corny/cheesy script.
The FL tried to make her more enterprising than average but for fear of exaggerating they still inserted cringe moments: don't look at me, I'm blushing... So annoying!
ML who "says he feels inferior to her" but it behaves the opposite way with playboy moments. It felt like I was watching a comic for teenagers.

I found the production to be low budget, the most annoying thing I noticed was in the external shots: they removed the natural background noise when the actors spoke and immediately put it back, so that we hear this continuous difference. Embarrassing.

MUSIC: I don't even remember it.

In conclusion, I would only recommend it to fans of the protagonists, a mediocre show that I would have preferred to avoid.

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GOOD ONE

what I like
comedy
romance
chemistry
the first half really good , there's enough romance
what I don't like
the 2nd couple issue dragged too long , their story is literally nonsense when the main leads did everything to stop divorce and then death they still get divorced?
the one who was behind this was her brother,I realised he is as soon as he mentioned Money and gambling habit
after this ends there's some 10eps left focused on FML death ? both sad crying FML wanting to breakup because she is going to die and he will be alone but don't really breakup just argue
and when her death issue is there suddenly the ml issue pops up him being transferred and the reason he shifted to her house ,they find out who did that and in process of making him confess the ml from 2022 future dies ? i disliked that ? you didn't have to kill him ? still ending is better the 2021 ml falls for her too and they just get together after that happy ending , after the 2nd couple issue ended and the ml issue started I just skipped the eps since they continuously working on finding the person who did that to ml , I skipped last few eps but I still like it , it's rare for CDRAMA to have a couple like this and romance like this

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I thought I would binge it, yet savored it instead

It's been a while since I cried so much watching a drama. For me, it had the perfect balance between heartbreaking and heartwarming. There was such a juxtaposition between ML's life and FL's life, you would think that these two could never make a relationship work. ML is from a loving and happy home, and it seemed like life was just handing him everything he wanted without effort. On the flip side, FL's home life consisted of being foisted off on one relative after another. No one wanted her, and no one loved her. I think this made her emotionally stunted, always trying to protect herself from being abused/left again.

I loved the mix of high school and current times. The writer did a good job of slowly revealing more and more of the ML and FL history. When their high school breakup is initially shown, it didn't make much sense to me, and I thought the FL was unnecessarily cold. However, as the drama went on, we saw how she was trying to protect herself when she had no one else to protect her.

I absolutely loved discovering how he loved her, in the many ways he tried to protect her, and all the efforts he took to just see her in her world, a world that he was not a part of. I thought initially he was being awfully cocky toward her, making it sound like he thought she was chasing him, but I think he thought (and rightly so) that she was very skittish and he didn't want to scare her off by coming on too strong. He always seemed to be looking only at her, yet she had difficulty making eye contact with him. It felt like self-protection.

I thought the writer making her leave him seemed out of place, but again, we saw the difference between her being in the sunlight with him and being in the dark alone.

Her entire family was a complete nightmare. It made sense that her character was emotionally withdrawn. She just wanted to keep her head down, remain unnoticed, and get through life the best way she could. Kudos to the writers for not putting in a redemption arc for her family, that would have made me mad.

I loved their scenes together, as teens and as adults. They made each other better versions of themselves. I thought their chemistry was on point. Some very good kisses.

For me, C-dramas tend to be too long and drawn out. My fast forward button got a complete rest while watching this. A lot of people might find this drama to be unrealistic in the romance department. But for the romantic in me, it ticked all the boxes.

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The Human Cost of the Signal

With Humint, Ryoo Seung-wan returns to the territory that suits him best, and it shows. The geopolitical thriller shot through with physicality, with the kind of moral pressure that settles into bodies before it ever reaches dialogue, this is his natural habitat, and the film announces it from the very first sequences. The result isn't flawless, but it possesses a quality that's become genuinely hard to find in contemporary spy cinema: it still believes in space. In the weight of environments. In the dramatic value of a door left ajar, a corridor, a face held a second too long. And above all, it believes that action isn't decoration but a form of storytelling which, in 2026, is far from a given.

The plot, on paper, is almost classical: a South Korean agent moves through Vladivostok following the trail of a criminal network that crosses drugs, human trafficking, and state intelligence. On the other side there's a North Korean agent, then an ambiguous official, then a woman trapped in the most dangerous role of all that of the informant. Around them, Vladivostok doesn't function as an exotic backdrop, it's not the Russian city dropped in for international flavor but as a moral landscape: a border place, gray, frozen, porous, where everyone watches everyone and no one is ever truly safe. This is where Humint scores its first real point. The city isn't a postcard: it's a hostile surface, full of concrete, hard spaces, corners with no cover. And it's partly from this that the film generates its sustained, almost physical sense of danger.

On the screenplay level, Humint operates on a recognizable mechanism: four main characters, four different ethical trajectories, and at the center the figure of the informant as both narrative and moral detonator. What's interesting is that Ryoo doesn't build the film as a purely strategic chess match but as an accumulation of human debts. The debt to the person who puts themselves on the line for you. The debt to the person you love and put in danger. The debt to the State, which demands obedience and gives back cynicism. In this sense, Humint is less a film about intelligence operations per se than a film about the human cost of intelligence — about that precise moment when people stop being "assets" and go back to being human beings: unmanageable, vulnerable, irreducible to protocol.

The writing, though, doesn't always match the precision of its themes. And it's worth saying so plainly. In the middle section, the film tends to thicken its web of interests, blackmail, chains of command, double-crosses, and lateral moves with a taste for complication that at times slows things down instead of intensifying them. It's not a problem of density , you can follow the threads , but of dramaturgical hierarchy: certain pieces of information arrive with the weight of a revelation, and then produce no real emotional turn; certain subplots seem more functional to keeping the mechanism running than to actually developing the characters. In other words, the film has more energy than synthesis. You feel it. It's no coincidence that part of the critical conversation has praised the film's spectacular ambition while flagging a certain weakness in dramatic substance relative to the action apparatus and that's not an entirely unfair observation.

That said, it would be unfair to stop at the flaw, because Humint constantly recovers ground in the way it stages what it has written. Ryoo Seung-wan understands something elementary and precious: every character has to have their own physical grammar. It's not enough to fight; they have to fight "like him," "like her," according to a rhythm and a posture that tell you who they are. And indeed, this bodily differentiation is one of the film's strongest elements. Manager Zo, whom Jo In-sung plays with an almost elegant restraint, always acts as if trying to keep violence inside a clean, contained line; Park Geon, by contrast, carries a more nervous tension, more intermittent, more exposed to emotional fracture; Hwang brings to the screen an administrative coldness that is itself a threat, with no need to raise his voice; Seon-hwa introduces a vulnerability that isn't passivity but the capacity to choose within the narrowest margin of survival. These aren't just characters: they're vectors of different energy. And when the film stops explaining and simply lets them move, it finally starts to breathe.

The direction is the real center of the film. Ryoo comes from a cinema that knows the pleasure of the gesture, but here he largely avoids pure choreographic display for its own sake. The action sequences land because they're legible, articulated in space, never reduced to accelerated cutting designed to simulate intensity without actually building it. You can tell where you are, who enters from where, who sees what, who risks being cornered, who has the positional advantage. It sounds obvious, but it's almost revolutionary today. Even more interesting is the way the director alternates wider shots and compressed close-ups: on one side, the hostility of the world; on the other, the face as the only real battlefield. This dynamic between geographic openness and emotional constriction gives the film a near-classical elegance. It's no surprise that more than one observer has read Humint as a natural continuation of the path begun with The Berlin File and Escape from Mogadishu: the frame changes, but the same faith in the international thriller as a moral device — not just a spectacular one — remains.

The atmosphere work is very strong as well. The cinematography pushes toward cold, metallic, matte tones without ever making the film visually monotonous .There's an intelligent use of surfaces, empty spaces, and architecture that conveys the sense of a life lived under constant surveillance. Costumes and interiors help suspend the film in a slightly displaced temporality: contemporary, yes, but never ostentatiously dependent on technology. It's a shrewd choice, because it allows Humint to sidestep the risk of becoming a thriller of screens, pings, software interfaces, and digital exposition dumps. Here, intelligence goes back to being, literally, human: bodies, sources, glances, lies, shifting loyalties. This is also why the film, when it works, generates a tension that is more tactile than cerebral.

On the acting front, Zo In-sung carries the film with remarkable presence. He doesn't work through overexpression, and rightly so: his character lives inside guilt, discipline, a reluctance to fail again, and the actor translates all of this into a controlled physicality that occasionally lets a crack show through. Park Jeong-min provides an effective counterpoint, shifting the register toward something more ambiguous and emotional. Park Hae-joon delivers the kind of administrative hardness that always works in spy cinema: evil that doesn't need to raise its voice. Shin Sae-kyeong, finally, had the most delicate task and instead manages to preserve her own opacity, her own concrete fear, her own capacity for decision-making all the way to the end.

Humint is not its director's definitive masterpiece, and anyone looking for a perfectly engineered, airtight, zero-redundancy spy mechanism will find things to complain about. The screenplay has some redundant passages and a middle section that isn't as sharp as the opening promises. But it would be foolish to write it off on those grounds, because the film possesses a concrete, muscular, almost artisanal quality that many far more "orderly" thrillers simply don't. It stumbles occasionally in its own complexity, but when it finds its footing again it hits hard in the direction of the action sequences, in the control of space, in the construction of tension, and in that idea, as beautiful as it is bitter, that behind every piece of intelligence there is always someone who pays the full price.

If a single blunt formula is called for: Humint convinces more as cinema than as screenplay. But since cinema, fortunately, is not only screenplay that's more than enough to make it a robust, adult, imperfect, and genuinely interesting thriller.

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Dedication of love: Love bonded in sacrifices.

When the main criteria is love.
Love devotion, was the main theme of this spectacular series. It tells you love don't bloom from nothingness or constant glances, It builds on actual substance before it blooms to those valley of flowers.

The main characters tale of love differ from their own building, but each of them were interesting had their serious likes and some dislikes, not all have to like the love between a particular character, because love is what causes you to defy the world.

Many seem no to like their stay in the void, but not for me, their stay in the void was about the building of their love, not really about the demonstration of their fight scenes, when they had their stay in the void, their love was constantly building on hopelessness despair, raising a child, old age, flirtness and more.
The void depicts the main origin of the story where the story gives us a highlight of what happened in the past and is affecting lives in reality, the void was the building essence of the story.

The OST was fantastic, it wasn't underwhelm scenes, it's uplifts all those romantic, fight, emotional scenes.
The fight scenes was an excellent masterpiece of all ages it was raw, well defined, and real

All the characters of the show played a significance, their wasn't one playing an insignificant role.
The guest stars was stunning, Chang Hau Sen as Han Ba was interesting an fun. We also hot Gong Zi Shang form My Journey to you and she literally brought her character of MJTY, to the show.
We also saw Xia Shi Guang as a powerful fox and his portrayal as that love driven character was touching and heartbreaking, but he played it in an amusing stance.

The villain of the story was well written but has flaws, bother he villain and the dragons.
How did the villain and the dragons exist in the thrive by and small mortal world, no reason on why the villain wants the mortal world destroyed, we had an overpowered villain which is interesting but it felt really undying and sophisticated, when the villain falls the scripts actually comes up with something that brings him back to being alive, It was great, cuz our main character has to be that exhausted fighting a villain.

Overall the drama was a well written love story, where love literally occurs with our main characters, side characters and guest roles, and the execution was nothing void of phenomenal. The beautiful fight scenes, OST, romance, supernatural elements, where converging to a common points and it was killing a typical undying villain.

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Very good drama

Love Story in the 70s is pretty good. The main leads are engaging and endearing, the second leads have an intriguing dynamic, but the third leads who had an incredibly irritating arc with wife’s parents and brother are given more screen time than the second leads. Parents of both the female lead and male lead are memorable but it was entertaining to watch the female lead’s father. Everyone has acted very well. The real scene stealer is the textile mills director Xu Hong Qi and that cup of hers that breaks into pieces on the floor. It also is Chen Feiyu’s best performance to date. Like most Asian series, everyone in this drama has a job and they have struggles related to work, ambitions, families and senior colleagues as well as love. In fact, it’s the work life of each individual that moves the story forward. Locations are realistic, as are the events. It is set in a particularly difficult time period in Chinese cultural and educational history and may feel like a propaganda piece in some instances. The only person I felt bad for is Ling Yi, the way her journey was concluded was unfair. You’ll hate Feng Lin, universally disliked individual, and good riddance.

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K-drama is back with this one!

Perfect Crown is not based on any novel but since its been a while since a K-drama has worked in the romance department, especially an old-fashioned rom-com, the kind that K-drama was so good at at one point, I thought I’d talk a bit about it. I've also posted a video review about it on my youtube channel.

FL / HEEJOO:

Centering around a constitutional monarchy system that exists within a democracy with an elected prime minister, cabinet etc. this has the right mix of everything. IU is sensational as SONG HEE-JOO, she heads a K-beauty brand and is one of the richest people in the country. She’s the ultimate no-nonsense hustler who knows how to generate buzz and sell products. The company is successful because of her but her father never liked her and favors his incompetent son because he was born from his legal wife, while Heejoo is the illegitimate daughter from a mistress who was forced on her father at 10. She has had to work really hard to get everything in life, was a brilliant student and is used to people ridiculing her or talking badly about her because of her background. She feels that she needs to marry up or someone from a noble background to fatten her chances of becoming heir to her father’s business empire, she lacks social status, and that’s how she proposes the prince, current regent of the royal family.

ML/PRINCE YI-AHN:

Prince YiAhn is regent because the current majesty, his nephew, is 8 years old. Prince’s job in this drama is to look dreamy eye-candy and if you go past the fillers on his face, he does a commendable job of looking dreamy eye-candy. And he is carrying himself with enough aloofness to look like unattainable royalty. He has a far more complicated backstory than heejoo. He suffers from his own daddy issues - I don’t know why his father was so disapproving of hi other than the fact that he was not crown prince and was no.2 and his job was to support his father and brother and that’s it. He has status but has no money of his own - being taxpayer funded and all, and has to follow rigid royal rules with no personal freedom - but he does act out every now and then. There’s a huge responsibility on his shoulders. All of the members of his immediate family have died under strange circumstances. His mom, then-queen, died in a car accident. His father, a middle-aged man died of a heart attack. His brother crown prince didn’t want to marry the woman who became his wife but felt compelled or duty-bound to do so. His wife is a real piece of work, born in a family that has produced 4 generations of queens, she believes in blue-bloodedness, pedigree, and lineage, what her manner and dialogues reveal is racism, not elitism. She believes in hereditary rights of ascent, hard work makes no difference to her, a person’s accident of birth is more important. The drama has set up an eventual showdown between her and heejoo by this comical dialogue by prince’s aide who wonders out loud ‘who will win between the two’?

BASIC MYSTERY:

The brother died in a mysterious fire (he also wanted to abdicate and was stopped by his wife/Queen). His wife is now Queen Mother and her son 8 year old cutie is His Majesty but male lead prince is the one tasked to represent monarchy and government for e.g. charity or diplomatic functions, meeting dignitaries etc. and the poor king is happier around him than around his own mother.

Queen Mother is always afraid that Prince YiAhn is going to overshadow or overtake her son. I think her father is behind all the killings in the royal family, but maybe it could be someone who wants to abolish the monarchy? At the end of Ep. 4 there was even an attempt on heejoo’s life (someone had tinkered with her car’s brakes) - there’s even a princess diana reference who of course died in a car crash- so maybe someone does not want Prince Yi-Ahn’s side of the family to have any power, other than Queen Mother?

But Queen mother’s father is extremely suspicious. And Queen mother does herself no favors by being a mean overbearing byotch. As a young widow, she is planning an arranged marriage for Prince Yi-Ahn, and I was like, why isn’t someone thinking of getting her married again? There’s also a bit of a hint of maybe she’s over-obsessed with who he ends up with, as if she at one point liked him or rejected him.

As for the royal rules, they are not that bad considering that there is a threat to monarchy, especially after that car scene where brakes failed, in which the poor 8-year old king was not supposed to be in an unsanctioned car.
Btw, this is the prime minister, who is best friends with both heejoo and Prince yi-ahn. So light-hearted fare.

ROMANCE:

As for the romance, they don’t need to 'speed it up' - a reference you’ll understand if you are watching the show [4 episodes have been aired so far]. The drama has found the nice balance of modern monarchy which still has rigid internal rules and mystic.

WHAT KIND OF ENDING WOULD BE PERFECT FOR BOTH FL & ML:

And apart from the mystery of the fire and other deaths, the drama has to come up with the right kind of ending - heejoo will never leave her company / girl boss position to be just a royal - the only reason she wanted to marry a royal is to get control of the company and prince yi-ahn needs to figure out whether he wants to remain a royal or what kind of modern royal he can be within the dyanstic system. The first 4 episodes reminded me of good old-fashioned kdramas which used to have the right mix of the main leads relationship, over-the-top family drama, a bit of comedy, a bit of tragedy, a bit of fashion and a bit of high-stakes life and death mystery and decision. Visually everything is pretty and fluff but it does have repeat value. Basically who doesN’t want to see heejoo win?

Since this has 12 episodes, it will be over before you know it. Should’ve been 16 episode drama like the good old days or broken down to 2 seasons considering all the production budget? Because it's a good fun drama. Do check out my review on youtube too.

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The most memorable line from this drama occurs in Ep. 2 or 3 early on, when Chen Feiyu’s Duan Xu says ‘I was sand, I will be sand, but for this moment I’m a sandcastle.’ Beautiful line.
Love Beyond the Grave is based on novel ‘Carrying A Lantern In Daylight,’ a 107-chapter Chinese fantasy xinxia romance written by Li Qing Ran. It is available in Chinese and English languages online. It’s actually a well-written novel with a solid story and a good epic star-crossed romance with a happy ending. [https://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=5458205 ] [https://www.novellist.co/novels/love-beyond-the-grave ] [https://www.readthedrama.com/novels/love-beyond-the-grave-bai-ri-ti-deng ] [https://nomad-translations.com/carrying-a-lantern-in-daylight-calid/ ]
The 40-episode English-subtitled adaptation stars Dilraba as the spirit queen and it’s her show all the way, she has the difficult and meatier role, a character she was probably born to play. She and Chen Feiyu are perfect for their roles. An immortal, 400-year old spirit queen Simu and a mortal 20-year old general Duan Xu have an on-off relationship which is tested across mortal and spirit realms over the span of a year. The spirit queen wants to experience life as a human by feeling the sensations of the five senses, since she has none - i.e. she can see, but cannot feel what she sees. Both realms are colorless, bland and joyless to her. The general can give her the ability. Both have their own ambitions and struggles in spirit and mortal worlds and have their work cut out for them. The story will end with the life-changing decision by the spirit queen abdicating her throne and immortal life and becoming a mortal to live with Duan Xu [in the drama, she doesn't make the decision, the decision is made for her by some fairy of Lord of Fate because DX has been killed] and though there are effective scenes, the grand romance is a hard sell. I think it is due to the way in which the drama is filmed, the way in which connection or lack-of between both leads is filmed. The spirit queen has had 22 lovers in 400 years, forgetting them all, because she couldn’t feel them with any of her senses (you know touch, taste, etc.). This is precisely why Duan Xu is memorable to her, because she can experience the totality of it all with him. And he tells her in Chapter 65 that he likes her because: ‘[Duan Xui] spoke softly, as if accusing and joking at the same time, “You lure me in.” He Simu raised her eyebrows. “With your gentleness beneath your cold exterior, the loneliness above all ghosts, and the love for the world, you lure me in. And I willingly took the bait.”’ Of course, her being a larger than life indestructible figure is part of the appeal.

Duan Xu knows her more than any entity and gambles and schemes to make her accept him, but in the drama she’s mothering his spoilt kid demeanor and the story loses its appeal around Ep. 23 or 24 - too much time is spent in the spirit world and the general’s heart is broken in more ways than one. You’ll find yourself skipping scenes and episodes.

The soundtrack’s best number is ‘Above All Spirits / Souls’ sung by Huang Xiaoyun. It's epic and enhances every scene its in.

This could have been a very sensual and romantic saga of 2 people fighting their own battles in spirit and mortal world and getting together at the end, but it is one of the coldest 'love stories' as in, there's no heat, no sizzle, no chemistry here. I've spoken more about it in my video review posted on youtube.

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Solid, but half of the time I felt that something was missing

Originally, I wanted to write a review earlier into the drama (writing this at ep 36) and I'm glad I waited because as the title suggests, I felt that the plot was missing something and I figured out what it was.
Story. The official description is slightly misleading, according to that description I thought that He Si Mu was made to exchange the senses with Duan Xu to restrain her powers. She exchanges the senses to experience the mortal world while she has them, she is completely stripped of her spiritual power. The first 9 episodes reeled me in so hard, I loved the dark atmosphere, the "broken xylophone" sound effect (this is the best I can describe it, idk what instrument it was, if someone knows, please lmk), the stern character of He Si Mu. And then from ep 10 up to 25, it just dragged on.... And here I think some or even all of this could have been written: 1. One more mortal forming a pact with an evil spirit and the spirit being annihilated. 2. The past of Duan Xu and Fang Ji should have been cleared up, because that ended up quite unclear. 3. Yan Ke's corruption could have been hinted here. Don't get me wrong, a plot is happening in these episodes, it just feels quite empty compared to what's going on from ep 25 and further. Overall, it's good, I like how the characters are written, the story is just lacking a little.
Cast. Ohhhhhhh it's exquisite. The unshaken, stern spirit sovereign fits Dilraba so much, I loved Wei Zheming as the jealous obsessive lover (I think I'm lately having a weak spot for the villains), Baron Chen could have had longer appearance of his character, I love him too. This is the first drama where I saw Chen Feiyu, I really like him and now I really want Immortality to be released some day (iykyk).
Music. It's pretty unique, I think I haven't heard an ost track sung by a choir, it gave me chills.
Rewatch value. Personally, I don't think I would ever watch this drama again some day, and non personally, i would maybe watch just to see Dilraba in all the gorgeous outfits and Wei Zheming again. Definitely not for the plot.
Overall, a nice 8/10, it's definitely a drama on the better side.

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This isn’t just a BL, it’s an emotional experience❤️

I honestly have so much to say about this series, and yet I somehow find myself out of words to describe just how beautiful it is 😭❤️‍🩹

Yes, everyone talks about how cute Duang is, how he’s the ultimate green forest and I completely agree. But this series is so much more than just that.

💔 The Emotional Depth:
Episode 11… it hit way too close to home. And I realized it wasn’t just me, so many people felt that scene deeply. That’s how real and raw the emotions were portrayed.

When Duang says, “a hug is all it takes,” it genuinely broke something inside. Because sometimes, being held matters more than any words ever could.

And Qin saying, “I can’t take it anymore” that moment carried so much weight. It quietly reminds you that unless you speak up, even the people who love you won’t know when you’re breaking. Duang was always there, watching, caring… but the moment Qin said those words, he didn’t hesitate, he ran and held him.

Sometimes, asking for help is all it takes for someone to come running for you 💚

Then that scene where Qin has to let go of his child self… it shattered me.

So many of us carry childhood wounds, and letting go of that version of ourselves is never easy. The way they showed it - everything pausing, his younger self holding his hand, crying… and then slowly letting go to hold Duang’s hand, it was heartbreakingly beautiful 🤌😭💔

I cried so much watching that scene. It felt too real.

Another thing I absolutely adored was Duang and Jamie’s friendship. That kind of constant support; no matter the time, no matter the problem is rare and precious. Jamie being there for Duang through everything was such a pure depiction of true friendship ❤️

And what this series shows so well is that one person doesn’t have to be your entire world.

For Qin, Duang was everything - his comfort, his safe space, his protector.
But for Duang, his world was beautifully balanced: he had his Family who support and encourage him for anything and everything he wanted to do, his greatest friends to cheer so loud for him that Duang didn't hear any of his haters and of course, the love of his life Qin, to take care of him, to tell him "he's great in his own unique ways".

I believe everyone deserves a “Duang” in their life, not necessarily as their fean, but as someone. A sibling, a friend, a parent, anyone… someone who holds you when you can’t take it anymore, someone who reminds you that you matter.

And maybe, this series gently teaches us to also be that person for someone else.

⭐ Final Verdict:
This isn’t just a BL, it’s an emotional experience. A soft, healing, and deeply relatable story that stays with you.

I would genuinely recommend everyone to watch it at least once.
This masterpiece truly deserves it ❤️❤️

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Great start. Average ending

I watched it without any prior knowledge about this series. The same goes for the actors.

Ngl. The first two episodes got me hooked fast. Storytelling, acting, cinematography and BGM - every facet of this drama looked good and promised a great drama experience.
The third episode even made me cut some onions.
Sadly after that the story lost its focus and transitioned at warp speed to a run of the mill college BL with all the stereotypes and never recovered from it.

Phoon as a character got introduced with some major trauma. When his backstory got revealed it made sense, that he was an emotional mess and chose the wrong side after a given ultimatum from his dad.
But after that part the story started to lose its core points and became the average college BL.
Phoon’s deep rooted trauma and grief and self blame got completely side tracked for fluff and when it came up again, it didn’t got addressed in a believable manner. A shown healing process would’ve upgraded the story in a big way.
But no.
SuperFah to the rescue and bam, the sky looks beautiful again.
Uh. That’s not, how it’s works.
The dialogues leading up to the obligatory skinship scenes were more of a turn off than turn on for me too.

So. When I look at the whole drama after finishing it:
In the end it was the usual college BL without a personality to stand out and make it unique.
Thanks to a higher production quality in a shiny look, but the interior didn’t get upgraded.
I only finished it because the start got me invested enough to sit down until the end. (And a shrivel of hope, that - perhaps - the story remembered its origin plot and qualities. It didn’t.)

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Strong, Resilient & Inspiring Growth

It’s a fantastic drama, and still a very good ending. But honestly, this drama really needs another season. It is just too good to end here. This feels like only the beginning, to be honest. There is still so much character development left, and we want to see more of these characters. There are a lot of possibilities and storylines still left to explore.

I especially loved the main characterGu Xu & Lin Shuang, was absolutely fantastic in this role. She just nailed the character completely. Her performance was so poised, calm, smart, impactful, and incredibly authentic. She had such a strong yet subtle screen presence, and every scene with her felt meaningful.

. However, I have to be honest, I think Jenny Zhang who played Jiang Xi is a completely miscast. She couldn’t portray the character very well, especially the emotional transformation and the deeper layers of the role. It just didn’t fully land the way it should have.

And about the antagonist Wei Ming, that guy really pulled off such a brilliant character. You hate him from your bones, and that shows how well the actor performed the role. He was excellent.

Overall, this is such a wholesome drama, beautifully written, with strong performances and characters that make you want another season immediately. 8

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FIRST 9 EPISODES WERE GOOD

First 9 episodes were good, every emotions catched up.............................. after that i started pressing forward button no of times...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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This drama is so addictive! It keeps a perfect pace from start to finish. The suspenseful plot twists are natural and reasonable, with extremely solid detective logic—no abrupt surprises deliberately created for attention. Every clue and every turn has a hidden meaning, as if you are piecing together the truth of the case step by step along with the characters in the drama. There is no unnecessary procrastination throughout, nor any illogical loopholes that pull you out of the story, so you won’t get distracted at all while watching.
The characters in the drama are vivid and realistic, with no stereotyped distinction between good and evil, let alone one-dimensional settings of pure black or white. Those police officers are not omnipotent perfect superheroes; they also get tired, confused, argue endlessly over the case, and are troubled by past obsessions. Even the criminals in the drama are not born evil—each of them hides unknown struggles and regrets behind them, and every choice they make is filled with helplessness. It makes you sigh involuntarily after watching, instead of just feeling disgust. What’s even more rare is the actors’ performance, which is extremely immersive. A single look or a subtle movement can convey the characters’ emotions, as if they are not acting, but really living in that foggy world.
The whole drama is very down-to-earth and close to reality, without silly and exaggerated plots or forced sensational scenes. Every plot is in line with the texture of life, and even the small details in the investigation process feel real and tangible. After watching it, that immersive viewing experience will stay deeply in your mind, making you reflect repeatedly and find more depth the more you think about it. It has no gorgeous packaging, but with the most sincere narration and solid production, it has become a rare high-quality crime drama. It is absolutely worth watching, and I sincerely recommend it to everyone who likes suspense and crime genres—you will never regret it!

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