luckz

Was caught entirely off guard with that twist.
I was entirely expecting Nok Du to become king, seeing how similar this thing is to Haechi.

Would very much have preferred scenes after the queen's island arrival instead of 75% of the stuff that makes up the final hour.

That's actually a great explanation for the "lots of things happen, but many of them really have zero plot impact" drama style.

One-sided only.
(& "joke triangle" stuff.)

The plot is somewhat copy-pasted from The Negotiator ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120768/ ), infused with higher stakes, remixed with arms dealing and a Thailand angle.

The main thing the 'original' has over this is smarter leads, whereas here more of the skillset budget went into flirting.

Both movies built their plots on shaky ground, albeit with differently shaped logical flaws.

The implication definitely was that justice was served the legal way. They probably didn't have minutes left to show them rot in jail, that is even common in 3x or 5x as long dramas.

If this is the directors cut, how is it vastly shorter? 'sup here?

I recommend Black for "hate mail towards writers" territory, but that's just me.

Well, I would argue that it was foreshadowed that someone who "understands when she is in pain" is her pre-destined OTP, and that's clearly Pil Do's special skill. So in that sense I found it fitting. But he does that for everyone, not just for her. And having him killed right there would have had the same motivational effect without them having sex, IMO.

(I'm not trying to praise the poor plot here.)

1: it's a bit of a bittersweet duality, he was still his closest friend for over a decade
2: because only the captain would know about the undercover status, and his team would not know, and having a cop on the most wanted list is perhaps not something you want to publicise.
3: see above, the police trailing her have NFI. he was not exposed by the drug gang, he was hiding from the police. he was killed only when Moo Jin found out that he had been spying on him all along.

Well, I guess since it was actually his car (left for her) he technically could be bugging it and tracking using GPS, but this is in no way shown / implied.
Without that, it makes his perfect timing of shooting him at the traffic light very makjang as well.

And let's not speak of him shooting Pil Do rather than her / both.

Throughout the entire show, Pil Do was the "Healer" of his teammates, like the conversation earlier where he talks his captain out of murdering Moo Jin, which of course also serves as a red herring for us to believe that he might have killed FL's dad.

Basically he was the best and sort of most innocent cop, so shooting him should already be 'motivation enough'.

Netflix often has poor subtitles. There's a feature to complain about a particular episode though, maybe it can be improvedo ver time.

The whole plot is like an overly long Luc Besson movie, and a random sex scene of the Main Badass and their opposite gender sidekick is pretty normal there.

The K2, The Villainess.
The two Bad Guys shows, I guess.

There's better but also vastly more brutal (= hard to watch) fight scenes in Indonesian movies.

I don't think it made any sense / had any actual explanation.
It was supposed to hint at an Infernal Affairs plot, but this was dispelled when the police captain called out Tae Joo merely as a bluff to confuse Moo Jin.

Just one more red herring that doesn't add up in hindsight.

Gun violence is sort of uncommon in Korea. The dad was killed using his own police weapon to make a point.

She was willing to surrender herself at the police station, but didn't in the end. So basically she is not caught, I suppose.

What are those 'hints and clues in every episode'?

I knew from Ep1: if Moo Jin is the main villain, the story will become a complete shit show, and exactly that happened. I really hoped it wouldn't go that way, because IMO the show had a lot of potential.

Lately those are two of my pet peeves, 1) the "mentor is actually the bad guy" twist. Usually it makes no sense whatsoever, and this show is no exception. In general Korean writers seem to have problems writing twist-heavy shows that still end up logically sound.
2) the "the villain keeps not killing the hero to make the hero become a murderous beast" plot, especially the sub-type of "the monster corrupts a good person into an even worse monster that kills the first monster to further the progress of Chaotic Evil". Just. So. Stupid.

In this case, there's a Cinderella-like focus on Ji Woo by the gang leadership, personally coming to train her to fight and such, with the absurdly lame goal of having her kill police captain Cha Gi Ho. As you can see with Tae Joo's attempt to kill the policeman, this seems absurdly easy for the gang to handle on their own, and they had fifteen+ (!) years to do this, of which they spend five years (!) prepping Ji Woo for the job. Just completely absurd levels of effort.
Later on both Pil Do has another Cinderella-like focus on making her feel better and soothing her soul after she commits murder right in front of him, whereas the gang leadership spends time looking for a nice vacation home for her rather than, you know, committing crimes.

After she finds out the truth, Moo Jin could just try to kill her at the temple, or could kill her at the hospital instead of helping her escape, most importantly could have shot her rather than Pil Do (or just both!) at the traffic light, or could kill her by trapping her in the elevator he controls, or could have shot her as she came into his office, or could have stabbed her like a hundred times when she was downed during their fight and grasping for his legs. But all of this non-killing isn't a redemption arc, it's merely an insult to the audience's intelligence.

P.S.: Having Gang Jae come back as a drug creator with an unexplained revolutionary product of his own was also far-fetched, but not as much as Gang Jae of all people knowing everything about Ji Woo's past, including her father being a police mole and such. In the gang gym he was the youngest and had to "mop the floor for two years".

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I think with the narcotics captain and/or someone allied to the lower level cop Cho, the plot could have been far better. They also hinted at a Infernal Affairs style plot of two opposing moles trying to sniff each other out, but that as well never went anywhere.

And how *did* the narcotics cops place cameras all over Moo Jin's place anyway? Surely they can't have been there for a decade?

Her father goes undercover in 2004 and dies at the end of 2016, so she was Yoon Ji Woo for 12 or rather 13 years.
I'm not sure if her exact birth date is given, or what class of school she would have been in. Assuming she was kicked out of school between the age of 16 and 18, she would have been 4-6 in 2004.