belle

Going into this drama, I was a little bit concerned at the 34 episode runtime since I find a lot of cdramas (even with less episodes) tend to drag and lose their momentum halfway through, and with this having quite a long runtime I expected it would suffer the same fate. However, I got completely sucked into the story and 34 episodes absolutely flew by without me really getting bored at all at any point.

To start, I really enjoyed the main characters of Su Wei'An and Gu Yunzheng, and I thought both actors did a great job of portraying them. As for the side characters, I think they were all well cast too, and although some of the characters are quite insufferable, since they were supposed to be very morally grey at best, it worked fine for the characters and the story. The only characters I was somewhat led down by were the second lead couple. While I liked both characters and they were fine together, I honestly didn't really feel like they brought anything to the story and there were times I kind of forgot that they were even there since a lot of the story, especially in the later episodes, doesn't focus on them at all. This wasn't a huge deal since the characters themselves were very inoffensive, but they did fall a little flat for me which was disappointing.

I also found the story engaging, despite it not really being what I expected. I didn't really know anything going into this, other than that the female lead had an incurable disease, so I was expecting it to mostly focus on that and be quite a heartbreaking drama, but it actually focused more on the medicine side of things and we don't actually see very much of her dealing firsthand with the illness at all. While I didn't necessarily expect it to go in this direction, I still really enjoyed the story and I became so invested in the main characters that it flew by for me.

My biggest criticisms of this drama are mostly to do with the production. To start, the dubbing was absolutely awful - particularly for the French parts in the earlier episodes, the lines weren't really convincing at all and they were dubbed so badly they didn't even remotely match up to the actors lips on screen. The general Chinese dubbing was also not great, and the sound design overall was really poor - some of the audio sounded completely fuzzy or almost underwater at times, or was just cut really poorly. I also found a lot of the directing and editing choices to be quite poor, and again I found that the occasional scene was cut poorly, to the point where I genuinely thought the website was glitching a couple of times but it was actually just the drama. There was also a constant issue of the lighting/colouring of the scene completely changing every time the lyrics came up on screen, which, while subtle, gave almost a flashing effect to the scenes because it would get lighter/darker every time the lyrics appeared or disappeared. While all of this didn't really impact my enjoyment of the show overall, it was pretty disappointing and I feel like the drama could have been a lot stronger with a better production team.

I also found the ending to be kind of underwhelming. While it kind of ended how I expected, it felt like a lot of stuff happened in the final few episodes after the story being pretty slow paced for the rest of the show, and the final scene just didn't really land for me. I wish that things with the main plot had started to be wrapped up a little earlier, and we'd gotten more depth to the characters' endings than we did.

All that said, most of the issues I had with this drama were very minor and overall I enjoyed watching this drama a lot, and would recommend it if you at all enjoy medical dramas, or are a fan of any of the actors in the show.