This drama is about the male lead who is a commander/court official with a secret identity, and on a mission of revenge. However, his plans get derailed when the female lead arrives at the palace, messing things up and overtly becoming the centre of it all. Amidst all that, the second male lead plays a big part in the story, using the female lead as a pawn for his own selfish reasons.

POSITIVE:
- Ruthless/Cunning male lead. One of the things that made an impression on me is that the male lead was truly ruthless, stabbing and killing everyone in his path, including the female lead and innocent people. However, his character does abruptly shift from red to kind of green flag after episode 10.
- Political/revenge focused plot.
- Romance as sub-plot.
- Morally grey characters.
- Intense emotional scenes. I definitely give this drama props for creating angsty and cry worthy scenes, thanks to the plot build up and great actor’s performance.
- Love triangle. At the start I loved the triangle here as both males felt equal in terms of being charming, smart and cunning + sharing equal screen time. But later the second male lead became a cliche which kind of ruined it for me (check negative points).
- Realistic and mature script. The struggles of ordinary people of that time period were portrayed very well as well as the court dynamics. We get to see real, greedy characters who do evil things for selfish reasons in a very broken society, as well as toxic family relationships.
- Cat and Mouse game (mostly in the first half).
- Hot male leads. I loved Ren Jia Lun’s badass demeanour with his sexy voice (although dubbed) and cool mask, as well as Jeremy Tsui (first time seeing him) charming attitude and intense stares.
- Fantastic final episode that wraps up the story well and ties up all loose ends.
- Lovely OST.

NEGATIVE:
- Romance issue. First off, the first 10 episodes show the male lead excessively harassing, abusing, stabbing, and waterboarding the female lead to the brink of death. This definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I didn’t mind it though. In fact I liked seeing true enemies into play. However my issue is the abrupt transition between the enemies to lovers part. As enemies they were brilliant. As lovers, they were cute and endearing. But the middle part was butchered. After all the horrible abuse the female lead goes through, she just tells the male lead that she understands him and puts everything behind just like that. Next episodes we see her cooking for him, tending his wounds, massaging him, admiring his handsome face etc. which was cute but totally bizarre. In fact, a viewer commented “I feel like I’m being gaslighted by the writers and the abuse never happened”, and that’s exactly how it felt like because no matter how forgiving a person is, I won’t expect them to want to take care of the man who made them suffer for so long. She tells him “you hurt me three times but also saved me three times, we are even now”. No girl, I mean no writers, it doesn’t work like that. The shift of her starting to fall for him should have been gradual. So, no matter how cute their romance was in the later episodes, in the back of my mind it always felt a bit off.

- Plot issue. I do enjoy political cdramas and this one started very strong, with realistic and dark topics portrayed. But I felt the second half was a let down as it included draggy and boring investigations and war that I didn’t care about. It would have been better if the plot only focused on the male lead’s revenge.

- Second male lead issue. He started off great, as mentioned above, he felt like a main male lead too, charming, cunning, with equal screen time. However in the second half, the writers made him the typical and boring obsessively-in-love-with-female-lead-unrequited love type. This obsession was not only the cliches of the cliches but totally butchered his alluring character and was just used as a plot device more than anything else. In the end, he does realise his obsession is wrong so I guess I’ll give the writers one point for that but still… I wish they were more creative than that.

- Female lead issues. I felt her character was quite lacking in comparison to the two males. She was sometimes smart and resourceful but other times dumb and damsel in distress. I didn’t really mind her but she never stood out to me as a powerful and charismatic female lead. Her backstory and identity was kind of boring to watch, and her relationship with her Master/shifu was extremely underwhelming.

OVERALL:
This drama started strong but lost me in the second half. The characters, the plot, the romance had a lot of potential as they felt fresh and different from other cdramas. But then the writers decided to abruptly shift things (ML from red to green flag + from toxic to cutesy romance), add cliches (SML obsessive love) and drag out unnecessary plot parts in the second half (investigations and wars instead of ML’s revenge) which lowered the value and enjoyment for me. Despite all the negative things I’ve said above, overall I still feel the production of this drama is good, the script too and the actors’ performance really brought the whole story to life. If you like politics with subtle romance + dark characters and themes, you may want to try this out.