isang18

Agreed. I let it sit for a week after episode 6 and then it went in the bin. Strong concept, really poor development, and the casting very so-so. I have to feel a bit bad for Lee Yoo-young. She is an excellent dramatic actor but suffered from the poor directing of a character that had the moxie written out of it by episode 4.

So many questions! You should suffer to find out like the rest of us did.

Of course she has her design ripped off. She stands up for herself with obvious consequences and gets bailed out by a textbook deus ex machina.

The romance is a light mishmash of common tropes. The sidekicks get laid before the leads touch more than accidentally. I even hesitate to call it a noona romance because her behavior is rather childish and doesn't fit the age difference.

Not so much a pushover as much as a somewhat dense late bloomer.

I watched episode 6. Now it might take a while to shake the Smurf Village vibe for Seongsan.

It may be time to cut our losses.

I'm a bit on the fence after ep 5 and asking myself if my time wouldn't be better spent watching something else.

My main problem is that the core setup is situational but everything seems to be built around character conflicts. Instead of having to overcome situations and events, life for the leads is principally complicated by disagreeable secondary characters and their own actions.

I'm also unconvinced by the setup of the male lead. The writers seem to be cherrypicking convenient period attitudes for him and ignoring others that you'd expect to go with them. It's a marked departure from the careful research and consistency that K-drama writers tend to prize.

I'm rather amused by the incongruity of the FL working for a haute couture shop and looking like her mom dressed her for a fourth grade field trip.

Let him do his wishy-washy thing and he'll have his occasional moment. This show thrives on the women of both families anyway.

Oh yeah. This show had 99 problems but the music was definitely not one of them.

Was I the only one who got painful flashbacks of Wesley Frickin' Crusher everytime Jun-pyo appeared on the screen?

I sure hope the placed product is better now. I once test drove an Ioniq 5 and got right back in my ugly old gen2 Prius.

Yeah, this is pretty much the review I've been trying not to write for the last two years.

Arigato.

Yeah, this pretty much covers me. Really short on likeable characters and Bae Suzy, while I have liked her in other roles, did not have the skill to overcome both a crappy role and poor directing.

It's an overlong, soapy, third rate melodrama all the way. 100 K-dramas later it's still in my bottom five all time.

So far so good until episode 4, until someone embarrassed themselves with some really effing lazy writing. Not really a spoiler... more like you saw it coming and hoped that they wouldn't but oh yes they did. Really, what kind of elite morons does Korean Naval Intelligence train to blithely walk into an obvious trap like that?

I love your treatise, point by point. And everywhere you came down on one side of the fence I'd ended up on the other side, so I ended it up rating it the worst piece of trash since Flower Boys but still can't explain why I finished it. My current hypothesis is that chemo brain made me do it.

It's amusing when people interpret the same set of critiques in such contrasting ways. :)

Okay, so this top cop is consciously covering up the fact that he's been the victim of multiple serious crimes *and* got disarmed before he runs off alone to confront a drug lord. And he commits a completely new crime of his own by assaulting medical staff in order to destroy evidence. By now he kind of deserves to be fired and locked up.

That's not how to get me hooked. Brooklyn Nine-Nine did better police work than that. Should I even bother with episode 2?

Spot on. The storyline strongly reminded me of Departures. You may have been reading my Amazon review. :D

I'll accept your review of this show and skip it. It looks like we watch many similar shows with slightly different expectations. I thought Strong Woman was a potential classic that was held back by a few bad storyline choices and tbh I hated Business Proposal because it came across as some kind of male Fifty Shades fantasy.

If I may, I'll recommend Dinner Mate and Our Beloved Summer. And if you liked the autistic hero in Attorney Woo you might find yourself impressed by Move to Heaven. Thank you for your review and your attention. :)

If you started with something like Extraordinary Attorney Woo the problem is that you have set the bar too high for 95% of anything else to pass it. You learn to accept lesser series for what they are and appreciate what they do well.

Good to hear from you. In the end we were looking for different things and found different things. And that's absolutely fine. 🙂

I rated it exactly an 8. I found the casting and the acting to be absolutely top of the heap but wasn't quite as thrilled with the writing.

The eights come from people like me who score by adding from zero rather than subtracting from 10. It did not quite get up there. I didn't hold my breath. I was rarely surprised. We could predict what would happen to Detective Baek from eight episodes away. The makjang was hit-or-miss. I hate it when characters run off into danger by themselves after discovering that their odds of survival are far better in each other's company. Yes, the relationship was generally positive but it did not sweep me off feet despite the actor's brilliance. The storyline as a whole was not compelling enough to gain my full score and I felt that it thinned out towards the end.

It's very good. It's just not amazing.

Interesting take on Jeon Jong-seo, who I actually like as an actor. In my review I argued that the RBF is what gave her character any personality at all. It's all that's left over from a woman who started out mean and hustling but is doomed to slowly circle the drain like Bae Suzy's character did in "Uncontrollably Fond."

I'd have made that face myself if I'd found myself stuck in that awfully written role.

You're spot on with the rest of the critique, though.