It was absolutely gorgeous to look at. Beautiful costumes, magnificent cimematography. And terrific actors, many veterans doing what they do best.

But the story? It was great at first, as Yulou wins Shaochun, and she slowly unfreezes, then has to make her way into the Sun family.

I thought this was going to be similar to Minglan, a comedy of manners, mostly focused on the women of various levels as well as the central romance. For the first half or three fifths, we got that. But then the story began sliding into more and more unlikely melodrama, beginning with the horrible Tao Yao bouncing back for yet a third invasion of the Sun family, so we had to endure the exact same emotional trauma as the first two times.

(I have to admit, I loved seeing the smackdown when the wife of First Brother went after her! And the second defeat was pretty good, too. But that third one not only hit exactly the same emotional beats, it seriously weakened the characters of both First Brother and the wife).

After that, it seems the writers did not know how to depict Yulou and Shaochun as a couple working together and sharing their problems, because we kept getting bigger and more unlikely situations piled on for Shaochun to solve alone, shutting her husband out. The situations in which Shaochun is the only one who can fix it get more and more perfunctory, as she acts as a lone agent.

Despite all their words about trust and sharing, we never saw them actually trusting and sharing when problems come up, so that his part was reduced to political infighting or being a no-show. Until the total mess of an ending, in which the viewer is dragged through unnecessary suffering and angst just to find out, in the last fifteen minutes, hey, it was fake all along! Everybody's okay, ha ha! The villain is dragged off, and we don't even see his end. Just a pointless long-ass search on Shaochun's part. And when we finally catch up with Yulou, it's like we're back to square one. I hoped the last line would be "I've given you a son," or even "Let me give you a son," as all the way through it was clear he wanted a family. No, he gets to go home and start over, only everyone is older and more tired. Whoopie.

The reason Minglan worked for seventy episodes is because we see the couple grow and change, until they are working together as a dynamic team. Why couldn't we see a similar payoff here?

I found the Dizhe/Second Brother thread absorbing and tragic and complex--I wished it would have taken over the storyline, and let Yulou and Shaochun sink into obscurity since their story was essentially done at the halfway point.