MadelineMaureen

Sort of yeah. it's definitely not going to be everyone's cuppa. But for those who need a breakdown so far please continue below. marking as spoilers because long comment & not everyone wants to know things before just jumping in.

They first meet when she is married & around 28-29, & he is like 17-18ish I might be wrong but he's a teenager & she's in her mid to late twenties. There is an 11 year age gap in the show. This one meeting, I believe is the only time they see each other at that age.
They meet again when she is 30 & he is 19. Her marriage is at it's end & he missed his exam because his uncle pulled him from school to work, and is in an abusive situation with no way out. Her father is his sponsor & so she goes to figure out what to do/what is going on after getting a call from him.
We are at ep 11 or ep12 if you have express, & we have a split timeline so things happening in 2016 & 2024. So far it is very clear that he admires her in 2016 & develops a romantic crush on her. She, on the other hand, sees him as a younger brother in a very platonic way. They actual film the scenes really clearly to show his emotions/feeling & her ignorance to those feelings. His 20th birthday is coming up at the end of ep11 so im assuming he's a January baby as 2017 is about to happen.
In the 2024 timeline it's alluded to that they have a past relationship of some kind that at one point is romantic in nature. How long & when it started/ended isnt exactly shown. But he was away from China going to Penn in the US for at minimum 4 years as he spent the pandemic in the US.
He has already drunkenly kissed her twice. Once in the stairwell of her apartment & once in her apartment...he tends to find his way back at her place a lot, like a homing pigeon. She's set up some boundaries & was the one to push him away years prior & she had gone completely no contact. He, on the other hand, had stayed in touch with her parents. He's still hurt & angry about her lack of contact & though she doesn't regret what she did(yet?) she still has feelings for him...though those feelings are multilayered & slow to define themselves as of ep11.
It's giving "I pushed you away for you to have a life." "I can't have a good life without you being a part of it."
Even though the actors themselves have a 19 year age gap, you(I) really can't tell. Girl must be an unproblematic queen, because she is looking early 30s at most, imo. He is between the age of his character's two timelines. so playing younger & then slightly older. Again, not gonna be for everyone & that's okay. I personally prefer a fully formed frontal lobe for both people in a relationship so I'm looking forward to more in the 2024/2025 timeline.

wait you're hung up on the leads sharing the same wetnurse? im confused. maybe im just not understanding what you mean. they shared the same food source but dont share the same dna...am I understanding incorrectly?

He's 19 in 2016 & she's 30. So 27 & 38 are the character ages when they meet again in 2024.

I usually dont mind nonlinear, but I dont know how to phrase this without you being able to see my facial expressions...but when watching the first episode it was giving almost deja vu with all the different aspects of the production. so with my personal schedule(Nov/Dec being some of the busiest months for me where I rarely see sunlight) & the other shows im currently watching Last Summer just didnt zing...(my dyslexia is stealing all the words I want to use 🙃) so any other time of year, heck if it had started just a few weeks prior I would have gobbled it up & said thank you. but timing and vibe were just not connecting with me. I really like Jae Wook and would love to watch him in a romcom, but it's just going to be on hold for a bit.

I got one episode in, and was reminded of a lot of older kdramas I've seen. But at least in some of the older kdramas they had a liner timeline that wasn't just a montage of clips every 15 to 20 minutes where we get little to no new information.
I don't know why you would decide to air a show mainly set in the summertime in fall/winter time. I realize I probably didn't give this one enough time to settle in, but one of my biggest pet peeves is multiple scenes spliced together to make something seem more mysterious than it needs to be.
Also with that first episode I truly have to question who decided to air this in the late fall. This should have been aired between May-August at the latest. The sound of cicadas keeps throwing me off. I think this mainly stims from watching kdramas similar to this with the old filming style aka, only the first 4-5 episodes were preshot and then eventually production was only about a week ahead of airing.

When a show sets up a mystery over a misunderstanding and it doesn't peak my interest, I find other things to watch that do. I might come back to this later once it's fully aired, but I'm not feeling the chemistry that I think I should for a show based around a romance and shared history.

In Tale of Nokdu he is the bad guy.

google search her adoptive father's name.

For those joining the comments after all episodes have aired to see if it's worth watching. Let me answer the basic.
Is it worth my time watching? Yes, in my opinion, these are some of the best performances from some of these actors I've seen.
Is there good chemistry? Yes. Very good chemistry between all the characters/actors. You can tell that though the subject matter was extremely heavy, everyone on set was very comfortable with one another, and it comes across in their performances.
Is the ending any good? Depends on your preference. I will tell you what you should know going in is that this is not a happily ever after kind of story. We are dealing with a sociopathic female lead, who doesn't know when she should stop. And characters that either know full well they are being manipulated or remain clueless until it's too late. Do what you will with that information.

But please take these trigger warnings seriously.
Suicide, child abuse, spousal abuse/domestic violence, alluding to CP, alluding to trafficking, murder, phycological abuse, drugging, general violence, toxic relationships, manipulation.
If any of those subjects are going to be an issue, might want to just stick to the highlight reels on youtube and instagram and save yourself the 12 hours of trauma.

9/10 after adding together all of the scores from my usual 14 categories. But i think it's between an 8.5 and a 9, mainly for the ambiguous ending. Because I can't tell if they are trying to set up a part 2/second season or if they just didn't know how to finish it off. And although all the performances were top notch I don't see myself rewatching this one anytime soon, because of how heavy the main storylines are. They toned down a lot of what was happening/what happened to the FL for airing imo. It's a Light-R, by Korean movie standards, but I'm honestly glad they didn't put the young child actress through a lot of the things alluded to in the story.
So technical 9 out of 10. But 4/5 hearts(aka 8/10 personal vibe scale)

Heavy spoilers! if you respond to this please also check the little spoiler box before posting your reply.


So I think my final count was:
2 murders(FL's mother and father)
3 suicides(3 men that actually loved FL)
3 accidental deaths(a grandmother, a step-mother, abusive father of assistant)
1 natural death(a grandfather)
3 jail sentences directly related to her(Father, boss, CEO/manager), 1 that was not related to her(assistant who accidentally killed his father)

Honorable mention:
4 murder attempts I believe all against the FL.

maybe for a potential second season...though that rarely if ever happens in Kdramas so im not sure why they left it where they did.

that last set photo was definitely like "hey sorry about all that trauma we just gave you. Look at how cute they are!"

Did anyone else notice the continuity mistake made by production? I might be wrong, and will be looking it up, but the movie A Jin is filming in episode 10 is the same one shown at the end of episode 4. The one shown on the prison tv.
Yup, just went back and looked at it. It's 100% the same outfit and church/storyline. So post production messed up in editing....

with the family scandal it seems a lot of productions havent been sending scripts her way.

half way through ep 8....I need to sleep. I have to up in five hours. yes I realize what I am pausing in the middle of. But i need to actually be able to function when I wake and not have the sads while I sleep.

Ki Yong looks so good in all the Prada men's wear. They are covering all the tags but I know Prada when I see it. Model is going to model the clothes best.

From what I've heard from Chinese social media, they(or some) were given multiple episodes worth of scripts before signing on for the production. After they started filming they scrapped all but ONE script that the actors had previously read. Aka the entire acting team was blindsided by the changes made. But because they already signed on they couldn't get out of the contract. I believe this is Allen's last project with his previous management team as well.

I'm not sure anyone has it in the original order anymore. I'm not even sure how it was reedited, as in the exact differences between the two edits. I wasn't taking extensive notes on it at that moment in time(I usually go back and rewatch at 2x speed for synopsis notes) and by the end of the week(aka the days off work when I do my most note taking) the show had already been reworked to a different edit. I went to show someone the show and was like...what the what is this.

I never understand this. im like yall all have long hair...that doesn't prove shit.

wait did they pull a bye bye baby juice?