Flower of Evil starts off great, the story grabs your attention right off the bat because it’s “different” and certainly more unique than the stereotypical K-Drama. A husband who’s secretly been living a fake life and has a past marred in murder and mystery? Sign me up. But what starts off as 11 pretty good, even great, episodes ends up falling off a cliff at terminal velocity as the plot becomes marred with inconsistencies, holes, tropes, and poor characterization. The last episode was one of the most mind bogglingly bad endings I’ve ever seen.

The acting from the ML is expectedly very good, Lee Joon Gi always delivers. The FL lead I found to be quite weak, she really only had a few expressions and her acting felt stiff, honestly the weakest among the cast. I keep reading about the chemistry and wonder do people praise the chemistry for every pair cause…can we be honest it was non existent here. They spend the last entire half of the drama just crying every scene or having the most repetitive conversations. I can’t recall being moved a single time and I’ll cry to paint drying. Everyone else is okay but forgettable, largely attributed to the fact that the writing in this show as mentioned previously, completely gets shot, stabbed, burned and then reincarnated only to be shot again.

They spend the entire first 60-70 % of the show building up the story of how his wife knows about him but she’s madly in love and also trusts that he didn’t commit the murder so she works behind the scenes to figure stuff out. Then suddenly in episode 12 (?) after the couple reconcile and it feels like the drama is wrapping up they completely flip and now she wants to turn him in for murder???

Outside of this, there’s so many inconsistencies, plot holes, lack of consequences and constant convenient events. Why is the police so incompetent? Why do the ML and FL escape all consequences despite committing countless crimes? …. the FL literally lies to her coworkers the entire show puts them in dangerous positions and probably even got someone killed. Why doesn’t Baek Hee Sung know what Jiwon looks like?

I can tolerate suspending reality to a certain degree but this got ridiculous and completely lacked rationale. The ending created several different storylines instead of wrapping up those that existed. Overall the show is mediocre, it starts off strong and develops the mystery very well but then develops outlandish and ridiculous plots that make no sense, this is one of those dramas that desperately needed to only be 12 episodes and it would have been great.