This review may contain spoilers
Okay, I liked this drama. I honestly did. It's not exactly different from other dramas, it doesn't really bring anything new, but it's enjoyable and just overall a nice watch. However, there was one thing which was constantly grating on my nerves, and that was the character of Na Doo Rim. She was fine in the first half, relatable, kinda quirky, all that cliched stuff that you'd expect. I honestly liked the way the relationship developed in the beginning, and even though it's pretty by the mold and cookie cutter, I wasn't mad at it. However...what infuriated me was the way she acted after they had "broken up". It was the typical "I like you but I have to pretent I don't because we can't be together" which always, always gets on my nerves, but honestly, what was keeping her from simply being honest with him, and maybe apologizing? She didn't apologize to him, not even once, for what she did, and instead was at times really nasty to him, for no reason whatsoever. It is probably the way her character needed to behave so that the drama and the tension would last longer, but that doesn't mean it wasn't annoying. Also, it's not like Kang Ju is blameless in this - he keeps basically stalking her and annoying her and is being really petty and childish. I get it, you're hurt, but please, do try to keep some of your dignity.In the end, the reason why she left was just complete bogus. Again, the drama simply needed to be longer, so they had her leave for stupid, dumb, very dumb reasons. And the way she did it, too. Just infuriated me. And can we talk about how she literally kept his son from him for, like, several YEARS? I mean, if he hadn't looked for her, he would never get to know his own son, or even realize he existed. When he finally found her, her grandmother was like, thank you for finding Doo Rim, and I was like, shouldn't she have gone to HIM? Because unlike him, she knew where he'd been all this time, and was content to just stare longingly at the sky, because....why? WHY CAN'T YOU BE TOGETHER AT THIS POINT? YOU CAN!!!! THERE IS NOTHING AND NOBODY IN YOUR WAY!!!! NA DOO RIM! WHAT THE FRICK!?
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My God, Does Yoo Ah In Overact Sometimes
Hello to all the good, lucky people who know this drama exists, for it is brilliant and exciting and I love it!But my god, does Yoo Ah In overact sometimes. He's great, don't get me wrong, and he's great to listen to and to look at, but I wish he'd tone it down a few notches sometimes.
Moo Hyul's my favourite, the OST is wonderful - I actually listen to some parts of it on Spotify - and the story is great, and uplifting and sad in parts and moving and funny.
But my god, does Yoo Ah In overact sometimes.
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Refreshing
Maybe I've been watching way too many historical dramas about kings in disguise and ladies in disguise who are smart and read books and stuff, but I found this drama a genuine breath of fresh air. It is very fast-paced and there is virtually no romance and the main leads are generally likeable and they have a dog so it's all great. In all seriousness though, there are many tropes that are so often found in law dramas - the heroine is a petite boss lady who beats up gangs of cartoonish villains in her spare time and there is revenge for dead fathers and dead mothers and good always prevails against insurmountable odds - long story short, it's cliché-studded. It's almost a miracle that among all that there is a moving story with two-dimensional villans and a friendship and some truly profound moments, and yet here they are.The ending is stupidly rushed, that's true. I took half a star away for that.
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This review may contain spoilers
The thing about this drama is that it's sligtly...imbalanced. It deals with a serious subject - sexual abuse cases - in a way that could almost be called lighthearted. Not that the two can't go together, even the most serious of stories, perhaps especially those, need moments of levity to balance things out. However, the main issue of this drama is not that there is a silly moment here and there, but the lack of consequences. That is a thing that can be seen all througout the drama; characters (read: Ma Yi Dum) make mistakes and then they bounce back the same as before, not having learned a thing. Ma Yi Dum for example silently witnesses the sexual harassment of somebody and speaks out only when it becomes advantageous to her to do so. Certainly, she does undergo a certain amout of character development over the course of the drama, but it seems...like it does not come organically. She is never truly forced to examine her own actions, admit that she was wrong about something, she is never actually pushed to reevaluate her priorities or her morals.I see a lot of people here complaining about her character, that she is a horrible person and a horrible character. In my opinion, only one of these is true. She truly isn't a good person, especially towards the beginning. But I don't see a problem with that by itself. Just because she's the lead in a drama doesn't mean that she has to be a good person, she simply needs to be a good character. She can have questionable morals and make questionable decisions, there is not a problem with that. However, the problem is that in the context of this drama, she is rewarded for that sort of behaviour. Her superior scolds her, but she makes nothing of it. She loses her job, but gets it back eventually, and she is the same as ever. She waltzes in at the end of every episode with crucial evidence, she is always, in the end, the winner. And that is a problem. In my opinion, what this drama should have done was to feed Ma Yi Dum a nice big slice of humble pie, and that would have been enough.
The plot is not original (isn't it though?), everything is kind of fleeting, but I liked the cases, I liked that the drama didn't try to make some big political statement, i liked the chemistry between the two main leads, I even liked the storyline about Ma Yi Dum's mother, I actually even kind of liked the main villain. There is a lot to like about the drama, in short. Maybe give it a shot?
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This review may contain spoilers
Annoying
This show isn't very good, in my opinion, for many reasons. However, most of those reasons stem from the show being extremely, extremely main-character centric. You'll notice the same thing in many other K-dramas, where the MCs, either the ML or the FL, will become central in situations that shouldn't really involve them. For example, when a husband tries to get his wife out of a car she's stuck in, instead of doing whatever he can to break the window and get to her himself, he starts running around like a headless chicken looking for help, so that the ML can insert himself into the situation. I get that the husband needed help, he couldn't have got her out of the car just by himself. But he just stood by ineffectually. Every surgery in the hospital needs to happen with the ML present; whenever somethng needs to be done, all the other characters scream at the ML for help or - which is more annoying - they yell at him and cuss him out whenever something goes wrong, despite the fact that he was the only one who did anything.I'm not far enough in the show to know exactly what happened to the ML's family, and why his brother resents him for it, all I know is that I resent the brother now. All he seems to do is scream and yell and curse at the ML, and it gets really old really quickly. The same applies for the hospital director. The guy is so cartoonishly evil it's not even funny. He sists in his office sipping tea, in his pristine white gown, occassionally giving interviews to the press (how????), and plots to destroy the ML's life, because reasons. I get that not everybody can be so annoyingly self-sacrificing do-gooders as the ML, but the hospital director isn't a person so much as a collection of plot devices and obstacles that the leads have to contend with. The same goes for that annoying sister? of his. I understand, your son just died, but I hate you anyway. If there's one thing K-dramas do well, it's creating annoying older female characters that scream like banshees and criticize the leads unfarily, without ever doing anything themselves.
The show is unrealistic, and it gets really old really fast. I don't care about the characters, they don't seem interesting, especially the ML is extremely one-note. I'm not even sure why I'm still watching.
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This review may contain spoilers
This drama is honestly infuriating. I can guess where the creators were trying to take it, unfortunately it just falls short. The best way I can think of to describe this drama is 'agenda driven'. The message the show is trying to convey is too heavy-handed, and it doesn't feel natural.First of all, what I noticed right from the start is that the show deals too much with cases concerning sexual assault and harassment. It gets very, very repetitive and the motiff of harrassment is also brought up outside of the courtoom. Not only does it seem like every other case they deal with concerns sexual misconduct, the very first scene of the first episode is the main heroine confronting a groper on the subway. One of the earlier episodes has a scene where a female court employee is harrassed by a group of men late at night. The main protagonist, portrayed by Go Ara, has also been the victim of sexual harassment in the past, not just once, but twice. The fact that sexual misconduct seems to be a heavy focus of the show really gets tiring, especially considering the fact that the show takes a very biased approach. They seem to portray this problematic matter in a very one-sided manner, that seems extremely condescending not only to the victims, because they are allways shown as weak, frail and unable to stand up for themselves, but also for us as viewers. Go Ara's characters takes these cases very personally, and is eventually able to draw the male protagoninsts onto her side, and none of them seem to take a level-headed approach. The show seems hell-bent on portraying all men as sexual predators, and every woman as a poor victim, oppresed both by society and the men around her.
Go Ara's character is very nosy, can't seem to mind her own business and is extremely emotionally invested in the wellbeing of every single one of her female co-workers. She seems to think that they all need her help, speaks of them as "weak" and "underprivileged" and this behaviour, while it may seem like the right thing to do at first, is extremely condescending. Im Ba Reun is completely unable to confront her on any of her foolish ideas, and just goes along with them, even though he should know better. He never scolds her for being too emotionally invested, and for this extreme hero complex of hers.
In conclusion, this show clearly has an agenda, and it's making it almost unwatchable for me. However, when it takes a break from that and takes a more light-hearted approach, when it deals with cases of different nature (not concerning sexual misconduct) then it becomes very enjoyable. I'm just not sure whether the good parts weigh out the bad parts. I most certainly do not recommend it. If you're looking for a great court drama, I suggest Remember with Yoo Seung Ho. That one is much, much better.
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This review may contain spoilers
All hail Kim Young Kwang, the saviour of this mess!
Oh, man. Isn't Kim Young Kwang such a wonderful, handsome, and talented - not to mention tall - actor?That's the best thing I have to say about the show.
The plot isn't great, and while I'm not far enough into it to see exactly what the main through line is (aka what exactly happaned to Jang Do Han's father and what form his revenge is going to take etc.), the sidekick stuff sucks and the Lee Soo Ji plot line is also quite boring - which is something of a remarkable feat considering we're talking about a disgraced detective whose very young daughter was murdered, and who then embarked on a one-woman fight against seemingly the entire country of South Korea.
It takes a lot to make a character in Lee Soo Ji's position unsympathetic and boring, and yet somehow this show has achieved it. I think the blame for that could be divided equally between the stupid script and the bad acting. Honestly, Lee Soo Ji's actress is so bland she might as well be replaced by a carboard cutout or a loaf of white bread. The performance might be better that way, honestly. She's just so aggressively... empty. She's suffering, and yet kind, patient and understanding, she's strong and decisive when she needs to be, never hesitates or faces moral dilemmas. She's unfairly punished, but bears that stocially - after, of course, losing her mind just enough so that she can be fired from the police force - and overall is just a big blob of NOTHING. No personality, no quirks or anything unique, she's just good and nice and cries sometimes, but in a pretty way. When gets off her motorcycle after a high speed chase in order to confront a criminal, her shirt is still tucked artfully into her jeans, because she's just that perfect.
The other two people on her team are just as uniteresting as her - maybe blandess is contagious. My god, watching them at work was torture. The hacker hacks, he presses keys on his keyboard and English words flash on the screen, so it's working, right? Anything with computers and phones is laughably unrealistic - Bo Mi has like seven computer screens in front of her showing live camera feed at all times, and seems able to find any random street in Seoul at the drop of a hat. How did she get access to those cameras?
How is it possible that Jang Do Han knew where Detective Nam was taking Soo Ji in order to kill her? Is there like one back street in Seoul where detectives take the people they've arrested in order to fake their escape and murder them?
Sure, when two (gun-less!) prosectors arrive to a stand off between a police and a known fugitive, then stand right in the bleeding middle, so that they can get shot in the back by their own side.
Sure, if you're a prosecutor you can just take a suspect away from the interrogation room, because reasons. You can just swan INTO an interrogation room, perch your butt on the table, not introduce yourself to the detective in charge, and start spouting nonsense and nobody offers any pushback.
Thank goodness for Kim Young Kwang - his character was by far the most entertaining to watch, and I'm not sure if he was just given better lines, his storyline was better written or he's just that good of an actor (honestly I'm leaning toward the latter), but the show actually had some character and life when he was on screen. I was curious about what was going to happen to him next and how his story would develop, and everytime they'd cut away from him, I'd skip as much as I could to still somewhat follow the plot along.
All hail Kim Young Kwang, the saviour of this mess!
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Boring ML and obnoxious FL
I thought I'd give it a go but the first episode just couldn't keep my attention. Nothing about the story or the male lead made me want to keep watching. The FL, on the other hand, was obnoxious and annoying. I get that she's going through something, but with every word that came out of her mouth my desire to strangle her just kept rising. On top of that, the ML was basically a wet rag come to life, who didn't stand up for himself no matter how nasty she was to him. Say what you want but her shoving her feet on her lap for him to put her socks on like a spoiled princess while she's staring into her phone is not a great basis for a relationship. I'm sure she gets better and the writers would have certainly made sure to give her a tragic enough backstory for us all to pity her later on, but getting through that episode was - for all those reasons - an impossible task for me. The 8,0 rating this show has has convinced me that this site has lost its mind.Was this review helpful to you?
Messy Romance Alert
Don't watch if you don't like love triangles, confusing romance, or romance-driven stories. This drama indeed has all of the above. The majority of the plot is focused on the two male leads tugging at the woman between them, and everything is set up so that the annoying tug-of-war lasts as long as possible. It's not uninteresting, but these types of stories require a more romantic soul to enjoy them, I suppose. Somebody with a lot more patience, who can watch the female lead running from one man's arms into the embrace of the other, while both of the male leads proclaim to anybody who'd listen their desire to "protect her".I watched it mainly to drool over Lee Soo Hyuk, but even that wasn't enough in the end.
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